Page 26 of Coming Home

I dove.

The cold went straight to my bones. The heavy blue closed over my head, and for one terrifying, suffocating second, I was back in the nightmare—sinking into the black, the light above me shrinking into a pinpoint. Then my arms moved.

Muscle memory doesn't care about fear. My synapses fired in a rush. I pulled. I kicked. The water resisted for a heartbeat, and then it recognized me. It yielded. I cut through the surface like a knife, covering the distance faster than I thought I could still move.

I reached him in seconds. My arms slid beneath his armpits, my fingers locking across his massive, wet chest, and I hauled his bulk toward the concrete lip with every ounce of adrenaline in my veins. I leveraged my weight, hoisting his upper body onto the wet deck before scrambling out behind him, rolling him onto his back. His eyes were tightly shut. His chest was still.

"Ralph, look at me. Breathe," I sobbed, my hands trembling as I tilted his jaw back, pinching his nose shut. I leaned down, my mouth less than an inch from his cold lips, prepared to force life back into his lungs.

His eyes snapped open.

Open. Clear.

And the bastard was smirking.

I froze, my face hovering directly over his, wet strands of my hair dripping onto his cheeks, my fingers still cupping the bone of his jaw. His eyes held mine with pure, wicked amusement.

He was fine. Hypoxic drill. He'd been holding his breath the whole time, and I had just launched myself into an Olympic pool fully clothed to perform mouth-to-mouth on a man who was currently grinning at me from a distance of one inch.

I scrambled backward so fast my hands skidded on the wet tile, nearly slipping back into the gutter. My soaked clothes weighed forty pounds, clinging to my skin, my pulse deafening.

"You—" I couldn't even find the nouns. I was shaking from head to toe, drenched, humiliated, and furious on a level that turned my vision white at the edges.

He sat up with an easy, fluid grace, water cascading off his golden shoulders like a fountain. "I should probably mention, Carrow... I hired you as a driver, but if you're moonlighting as a lifeguard, I'm definitely not going to dock your pay."

"That is not funny!" My voice echoed off the high rafters, raw and shaking. "That is not funny, Ralph!"

"The density of your response says otherwise."

"I thought you were dead! I thought you were drowning!"

"Clearly." He tilted his head, the sharp, mocking edge of his smirk going soft at the corners, the joke draining out of his eyes until what looked back at me was almost tender. "Clearly you cared enough to come get me. Which is a lot more than you were willing to admit over toast this morning."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to weep. I wanted to wrap a lane line around his throat and pull until he turned purple. My entire frame was vibrating with leftover terror, with the cold, with the unforgivable audacity of his existence.

I snatched my soaked flat off the concrete and hurled it directly at his face.

He caught it, of course. Olympic reflexes. He held the dripping shoe in his large palm, his grin widening. "Your aim never did improve."

Behind me, I heard Coach Vance's dry, unimpressed voice ring out over the water: "Brandt, if you're done with the romantic theater, lane four is still waiting on your pacing set."

CHAPTER 10

Ralph

She was ignoring me.

She held that silence like a swimmer on the blocks, coiled and refusing to break early, and if they handed out medals for freezing a man out, Emma Carrow would sweep the entire podium before the anthem finished playing.

I'd offered roughly eleven variations of I'm sorry on the four-mile stretch from Glendale Boulevard. She sat in the driver's seat, buried in a spare dry-fit training shirt and a pair of gray gym shorts I'd snatched from my locker.

Her waterlogged jeans were stuffed into a black plastic trash bag. Her wet hair left a dark, widening shadow against my leather headrest. She stared clean through the windshield, through the traffic, through the horizon.

I apologized while she parked. Nothing. Apologized while turning the deadbolt on the front door. She blew past my shoulder like I was a piece of staging furniture left inconveniently in the foyer. I delivered apology number eleven to the grain of the guest bathroom door, and the sharp, definitive click of that lock was the most articulate piece of communication she'd given me in twenty minutes.

I climbed onto the kitchen island and sat there with my heels hooked on the lower rung of a barstool, biting into an apple I couldn't taste, rehearsing number twelve in my head and wondering if there was a syntax in the English language she wouldn't treat like background static.

I wasn't going to pretend I hadn't earned the frost. But I also wasn't going to pretend it was some calculated stunt.