“I love you.”
“Once more, a whole sentence, with my name.”
“I love you, Sloane Avery.”
“Okay,” she says, and presses her lips to my temple. “Good.”
We leave it at that for a while, and I float with her. My mind starts to drift, thinking about how my dad’s had a finish line picked out for me since I was six — pro hockey — but now, floating here, with her, I don’t know if I want it.
I wantthis. I wanther.
I want the slow version of a life, with a girl I love, without having to solve the problems of a whole world and a whole hockey team. But I’m not sure I can choose that, because it would be the first thing I ever chose because I wanted it, and not because somebody needed me to.
I don’t say it.
Not yet.
It’s mine to sit with for now, and this time I do.
But there’s another thing, and it isn’t only mine to sit with. It’s older than the corridor, and uglier, and I’ve been carrying it around like something I could get away with never handing over. Floating here, with her holding every pound of me, I can’t.
“When you went quiet,” I say, up at the lights, because that’s easier than her eyes. “Those weeks before everything came out. I thought you’d gone back to Mason.” I make myself say the rest of it. “And I never asked you. I decided it by myself, and I pulled back, and I let you feel me do it.”
Her hands stay exactly where they are against my spine. She doesn’t tell me it’s okay, or that she understands, or reach for any of the things that would file the edge off it. She just holds my weight and lets the words sit on the water between us, and I make myself lie there in them and not reach to fix a single one.
“You really believed that,” she says.
It isn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.” A breath. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are,” she says. “If I don’t want to be with you, I’ll tell you, okay?”
I nod.
And that’s all of it — no absolution, but also no blade.
We float, her arms steady under my back, long enough that the water stops feeling like something that could take me. And eventually, I get my feet under me and stand, water sheeting off me, and she wipes her face with the back of her hand, treading close.
The want is so total I don’t know where to put my hands first, and I?—
She splashes me.
It’s just a quick flick that catches me across the face, and the shock of it is so stupid that I laugh, and the sound comes out lighter and dumber than anything has in months. Then she splashes me again, and I catch her wrist and pull, and her mouth is right there, grinning.
I kiss her.
She tastes like chlorine, and I groan with want as I lean into her, but a second later my foot slides on the tile and we both lurch and start to fall. But then her arm whips around my back and holds me up, because she’s watching the water for me now.
She laughs into my mouth, sharp and helpless. “Graceful.”
“Division One athlete.”
“You almost drowned kissing me.”
“Worth it.”
She puts her hands flat on my chest — then I back her to the wall and brace my hands on the tile on either side of her, and she hooks her legs around my waist, the water taking most of her weight so she’s almost weightless against me, arms looped behind my neck.
