Please don’t let it be him.
Please let it be him.
Wow, I was all over the place.
“Hey, Miller.”
“Hi!” I squeaked. So much for getting him out of my brain.
“How is it that you’re managing to levitate in the water without any apparent effort? Is this part of your crone training? Witches don’t drown, right?”
“Ha. No.” I dismounted from my kickboard and showed him my trick.
“Ah.” He had a board, too. He pressed it down and let it pop up dramatically. When I didn’t react, he said, “Am I interrupting?”
“No, no.” I gestured to the water next to me. “Have a seat.” Once he got himself settled, I, apparently deciding to state the obvious, said, “You have a lot of tattoos.”
I knew that, of course, having had three occasions now to see him shirtless. But the first had been dark—he’d been illuminated only by the light of his own phone as I spied on him.The second had been that early-morning swim, and he hadn’t been close enough to see. And of course there’d been yesterday. What can I say about yesterday? I guess I’d been too distracted for tattoo inspection.
And really, it wasn’t that I hadn’tseenthem; it was that I wanted to know what theymeant.
“Yeah,” he said. “The ink got a bit addictive for a while there.”
“What’s this one?” I probably shouldn’t touch him, given that our hurrah was over, but I reached a hand out and grazed a pair of letters—AK—near his collarbone.
“My sister’s initials—Auden Knight.”
That was sweet, but I suspected he wouldn’t want to hear that. “She’s named after a poet, too.”
“Yep. Our mom was… a real piece of work.”
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a surprise given what he’d said about his childhood, but I wasn’t sure if I should pry. So I moved my hand over his shoulder and down his upper arm, where there was another tattoo. He shivered. I wanted to flatter myself that it was my touch, but it was probably the cold of the deep lake. “This one is waves?”
“It’s meant to represent this pool my sister and I spent a lot of time in when we were kids.” He paused and tilted his face to the sky. “It was more than a pool. It was… a refuge. Also a place to shower.”
“Ah.” I understood, and when he said, “Yep,” I knew that he knew I understood.
It was an interesting sensation, having this kind of shorthand with someone about our deprived childhoods—to be so easy about something that generally made me feel vulnerable and defensive.
He twisted and showed me, unprompted, a tattoo on his other arm.
“That looks like an intersection in New York?” I asked.
“It’s the location of my bandmate Scott’s parents’ apartment. Ex-bandmate. They… they were good to me at a time in my life when I didn’t have any adults I could rely on.”
Well. The Scott plot thickened. “Are you still in touch with them?”
“That’s a good question. I guess I’m not. My interactions with them were always via Scott, so…”
“They’re your ex-in-laws, basically.”
He huffed a bitter laugh. “I guess your divorce analogy wasn’t so far off.”
“And this?” I pointed to some music notes.
“A bar from the first song we wrote that got radio airplay. But also just music generally.”
“Are these all…” The idea had just popped into my head, but I didn’t know if I should verbalize it. I was probably reading too much into a bunch of tattoos. But hell, Teddy and I had told each other a lot of personal shit, to my ongoing surprise. “Are these the things that saved you?”
