Page 67 of Cruel Lies

Not tonight.

Not in this blue.

By the time Ronan turns back around with a glass in each hand, my dress is on the lounge chair and I'm naked in the water.

It's warm. It holds me. The city drops away under the glass beneath my feet and I tread there in the middle of all of it, weightless, free.

Ronan stands where he stopped. His jaw hasn't quite dropped, but I can sense that, for once,I'mthe one surprisinghim.

"Are you getting in, Mr. Akov?" I taunt. "Or are you scared?"

18

RONAN

There are moments a man remembers on his death bed.

This is one of them, and I know it while it's happening, which is rare.

She's in the water, weightless and unafraid, the city pouring away beneath her through the glass floor and the whole black glitter of the ocean flung out past the edge of the world. The blue light shimmers on the wet planes of her shoulders. Her dark hair is slicked back off her face, and her eyes are bright and daring.

She jumped. She looked at all this and decided it belonged to her, too.

Are you getting in, Mr. Akov?

Or are you scared?

"Scared," I answer. I set both glasses down on the bar without looking at them, because I've stopped being able to look at anything but her. "Terrified, as a matter of fact."

I strip off my jacket. Then the shirt.

When my bare torso is revealed, Cali stiffens. I know exactly what she's seeing. A man does not do the work I do and come away smooth. There's the pale seam under my left collarbone, old and knotted where a surgeon in a hurry did his best in a room with no name.

The two on my side, close together, matched.

The one across my forearm that I don't tell people the truth about, because the truth is boring and involves a rusted, jagged length of pipe.

She doesn't gasp. Nor does she look away and pretend not to see. She looks. And then she lifts one eyebrow at me and asks the question without saying a word.

What gave you those scars?

"Occupational hazards," I tell her, stepping down into the water, "of Brooklyn real estate."

"Is that so?"

"I'm afraid it is. It's a brutal market."

She narrows her eyes at me. But she lets it go. She's learned that some things I'll share on my own time or not at all, and she's decided—for tonight—to let me keep them to myself. That's a date-six story. If we make it that far.

The water is luxuriously warm when I sink in, wearing only my pants. I step toward her until it laps at my chest, and then she's close, closer than we've been, near enough that the small waves she's making crest against my sternum. Her toes don't reach the bottom, so she clings to my shoulders. We tread there together in the last tank in the building, suspended over Coney Island and the whole dark sea.

I have never in my life wanted to keep a thing safe the way I want to keep this.

"You're staring," she says.

"Caught red-handed."

"That's rude, Mr. Akov."