Page 37 of The Last Five Yards

Reese surfaces, hair slicked back, grin wide. “Come on, Clarke!” She yells. “You’re not gonna make me do this alone!?!”

Maren laughs harder, the sound catching somewhere between disbelief and joy. “You’re insane!”

“Probably! Get in here anyway!”

Jules and Ava start chanting her name from inside the pool, and within seconds, the rest of the team joins in. The chant builds until it vibrates in her chest.

Maren. Maren. Maren.

She glances towards Hensley. He shrugs, drenched, smiling like a man who has given up trying to fight the tide.

Maren looks down at the pool. The water rolls and glitters, wild and alive. Her reflection is fractured, part light, part shadow, part something she can’t quite make out.”

She kicks off her shoes.

“Fine,” she says, mostly to herself.

The deck is slick beneath her bare feet. She takes a step, then another, until the world is nothing but light and noise.

Reese’s hand reaches up from the water, palm open, waiting.

Maren takes it.

The moment she does, balance disappears.

The pool rushes up to meet them both.

Cold wraps around her like fabric. The noise from above disappears in an instant, muffled to a low hum. It’s like the whole world has gone underwater with her.

Bubbles rise past her ears, scattering light. The blue here feels endless, shifting and alive, the surface above bending into sheets of glass.

Her hand is still in Reese’s. Warm against the water. Steady.

Maren opens her eyes. The sting hits first, then the blur fades. She can see Reese beside her, body loose, hair fanning behind her like something out of The Little Mermaid.

They move without thinking, legs kick in rhythm, bodies turning together through the water. It’s not training. Not control. It is something else entirely.

This used to be the only place I felt steady.

For a second, the moment feels exactly like the end of every relay she has ever swum. That breathless push, that silent count, the red of the lane line meaning almost there.

She can almost hear it. The whistle. The echo. Reese’s final shout before the touch.

Her lungs ache.

Maren tilts her head, watching Reese drift just ahead of her. Every detail slows. The reach of her hand, the twist of her wrist, the curve of her nail breaking through the surface above.

You always did go first, she thinks.

The light fractures again, cutting gold across the blue. For a heartbeat, the pattern looks exactly like a sunrise over the lake. The one from years ago, when everything between them was still becoming something.

She feels it pull at her, that familiar need to stay suspended here. Between inhale and exhale, between then and now.

But the ache in her chest grows sharper.

She kicks upward, breaking the surface with a rush of sound.

Air fills her lungs like it’s the first time they have worked all morning.