“Helping you float.”
“Sloane, I’m two hundred pounds.”
“Water doesn’t care.” She puts both hands flat against my spine. “Lie back.”
I don’t lie back. I stand there with her palms on my spine, bracing, every part of me hunting for the solid bottom right there under my feet. Because nothing we’ve done so far tonight feels the same as this — letting go, and trusting her.
“Rowan.”
“Yeah.”
“You are not going to drown in four feet of water with your girlfriend.”
I cough. “Girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Girlfriend.”
I still hesitate.
“What’s wrong?” she says, suddenly tense. “Rowan, I?—”
“I can’t swim, Sloane,” I say softly. “I never learned how.”
She looks at me, putting it together: the captain of the hockey team, the guy who carries the load for everyone, can’t do the thing every kid learns at six. But she doesn’t laugh or make it small. She tightens her arms around me and brings her face close to mine.
“Then I’ve really got you,” she says. “Do you trust me?”
And that’s the thing that undoes me, because I do.
“Yeah,” I say. “I trust you.”
“Good.” Her voice gentles. “Lie back and let me have the weight.”
I lean back. My feet want the floor, my hips drop, my core clenches, and my mind is screaming at me to get my legs under me. And as her arm slides under my shoulders, her other hand at the small of my back, I’m staring up at the lights and breathing too fast.
“You’re very tense,” she says.
“I’m aware.”
“Big breath in, then let everything else go soft.” She smiles at me. “You’re safe.”
I fill my lungs and let the rest of me go, and that’s the thing that does it. My breath slows, my shoulders drop the rest of the way, and then the water takes me. My legs come up, and there’s this weightless quiet where my ears go under and all I can hear is my own pulse.
Her arms are under me, steady.
Nobody’s held my weight in a long time.
Actually, I’m not sure anybody ever has.
“There he is,” she says. “You want to know who I actually am, since I just showed you everything else? I talk through entire movies. I cry at the dog commercials, the old-dog ones, every single time.”
“Every time?”
She nods. “I’m also so competitive at board games that my brother won’t play me. I got asked to leave a yoga class once for laughing. And I’m loud, and I take up space, and I am not getting smaller — for you or anyone — ever again.”
I’m grinning at the ceiling. “I love you.”
Her arms tighten, just slightly. “Say it again.”
