But it’s also fucking cold. The Pacific in late afternoon is approximately the temperature of a cold shoulder from an ex.
Piper makes a sound that is half-shriek, half-laugh, and dives. I follow her because the alternative is standing at the waterline like a coward.
“Oh my God,” she says, surfacing waist-deep. “It’s freezing.”
“I mentioned this.”
She splashes me before she goes under in one clean dive, disappearing into the white water and coming up ten feet out, hair flat against her face, eyes bright.
Stop it,I tell myself.
She’s laughing, treading water. “Come on!”
I go under. The cold creates the kind of shock that removes every thought and replaces it with a single instruction:be here, right now.I come up, shaking the water off my face. We’re chest-deep now, the swells lifting and dropping us gently.
She surfaces from a duck-dive closer to me than before.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m good. Really good,” she says, and she sounds like she means it.
A swell brings her against my side. She steadies herself with a hand on my arm. The cold water should be dealing with my biological reality problems, but it’s failing. She’s looking up at me, water on her face, eyes turning that specific shade of green they get in this light.
“Griffin,” she breathes.
My name in her mouth has been messing with my heart rate all week.
“Hmm?”
She looks at me with that unguarded expression. “Thank you for following the water.”
I push her hair back from her face because it’s a face that should never be covered. “You’re welcome, Pipes.”
I tell myself I’m doing fine. I’m a grown man with a functioning capacity for restraint. I’m standing in my boxers in the ocean with Piper a week after her almost-wedding, and I’m doing absolutely fine, dammit.
She dives back under and comes up laughing.
Okay, I’m not doing fine.
“Race you to that rock,” she says.
“You can’t race in open water.”
“Scared?”
She knows I love a challenge.
I let her win by a length and a half, and she celebrates like she just won Olympic gold, shouting something at the sky that isn’t a word so much as a release. It’s the sound of someone who finally found some air.
I hang onto the rock and watch her. A week ago, she was pacing in a gas station restroom. Now, she’s here. The light is turning amber, the ocean is indifferent, and I think, quietly, in the part of myself I keep locked away…
Yeah. There she is.
We finally trek back to the car when the cold becomes too much. I grab the blanket from the trunk and wrap it around her.
She pulls it tight, grinning. “Good swim.”
She tips her face up to the last of the sun, the waves crashing behind her. Gerald watches us from the back window, looking judgmental, as usual.
