CHAPTER 25
Becker
MY LUNGS ARE screaming.
Actually, screaming is too gentle a word. They're staging a full-scale rebellion, complete with pitchforks and demands for oxygen that I'm currently not providing because I'm forty seconds into holding my breath underwater.
I surface with all the grace of a drowning walrus, gasping and coughing up what feels like half the lake.
"Forty-two seconds," Wall announces from the dock, phone in hand, looking disappointingly unsurprised. "Pathetic."
"I'd—" cough, "—like to see—" more coughing, "—you do better!"
Wall pockets his phone with the kind of casual smugness that makes me want to drown him. "I just did. Two minutes, fifteen seconds."
"He's a freak of nature," Petrov calls from where he's lounging on an inflatable flamingo that's seen better days. Possibly better decades.
I flip Wall off, which loses some of its impact when I'm still wheezing like an asthmatic accordion.
Coach surprised us this morning with a day off—an actual, honest-to-god day off where we're not running drills or watching analysis videos or pretending to enjoy protein shakes that taste like depression, so naturally here we are, acting like unsupervised children.
The lake itself is gorgeous in that postcard way that makes you wonder why anyone lives in cities.
Water so clear you can see the rocky bottom near the shore, surrounded by pine trees that smell like Christmas fucked summer and had a beautiful baby.
Mountains in the distance doing their mountain thing—being tall, looking majestic, probably judging us.
"Babe, hold still," Mateo's voice cuts through my wheezing recovery.
I turn to find him aggressively applying sunscreen to Groover's face.
"Babe, I'm fine—" Groover protests, trying to duck away.
Mateo's not having it, already slathering another handful of SPF 50 onto Groover's nose. "Melanoma is not fine."
Ace, floating nearby on a pool noodle, makes the fatal mistake of laughing. "You missed a spot."
Mateo's head whips around like a horror movie villain. "Come here, Ace."
"I'm good!"
"Get back here!"
Ace abandons his pool noodle and starts swimming for his life, Mateo in pursuit with the sunscreen bottle raised like a weapon. Petrov's filming the whole thing on his phone, cackling so hard he nearly falls off his flamingo.
"Let the man moisturize!" Coach Martin shouts from his beach chair, not looking up from his magazine. He's wearing flamingo swim trunks that match Petrov's floatie, which raises questions about their shopping habits I'm not sure I want answered.
I scan the shoreline and spot Kane sitting on the dock, fully clothed in a t-shirt and board shorts, watching the chaos with that careful expression he gets when he's trying not to look too interested in fun.
He's also watching me. A lot. Every time I glance over, his eyes are right there, tracking my movements like I'm a play he's studying.
I swim over, water warm as bathwater in the August heat. "You planning to actually get in, or just supervise?"
He looks down at me, and there's something different in his expression today. Lighter, maybe. Like someone loosened a screw that's been too tight for too long. "Assessing the situation."
"It's water, Kane." I rest my arms on the dock, tilting my head back to look up at him. "Or are you worried about your robot parts malfunctioning?"
His mouth does that thing—not quite a smile, but close enough that I'm counting it as a one. "Rust is a legitimate concern."
"ATTENTION!" Wall's voice booms across the lake. He's standing at the end of the dock, hands on his hips like a superhero about to make a terrible decision. "I'm doing a cannonball."
"You'll create a tsunami!" Petrov shouts, paddling his flamingo to safer waters.
"That's the point."
Everyone near the dock starts swimming away, yelling variations of "WALL, NO—"
Wall's already jumping.
The splash is biblical. A wall of water erupts from the lake, drenching everyone within a fifteen-foot radius. Including Coach Martin, whose magazine is now a soggy papier-maché disaster.
Wall surfaces, grinning like he just won the Stanley Cup.
Coach sets down his ruined magazine with the calm of a man who's given up on dignity. "Wallace."
"...Yes, Coach?"
"That's ten lap tomorrow."
"Worth it," Wall says, and honestly, based on the look of pure joy on his face, I believe him.
Kane's still sitting on the dock, somehow having escaped the splash zone.
But now he's pulling off his shirt, revealing a torso that has no business existing in nature.
Muscles that look like they were designed by someone who really, really likes their job.
A dusting of dark hair that trails down past his navel and disappears beneath his waistband.
My brain takes a brief vacation to a place where thoughts go to die.
He dives in—clean, precise, barely a splash—and surfaces a few feet away, water streaming down his face.
I'm staring. I'm definitely staring. I should stop staring.
I don't stop staring.
Petrov, apparently having a death wish, swims up behind Kane and sends a massive splash directly into his face.
Kane sputters, whipping around. "What the—"
"Initiation!" Petrov's already swimming away, cackling.
"That's not a thing," Kane calls after him.
"Is now!"
What follows is possibly the most entertaining chase I've witnessed all summer.
Kane cuts through the water like a torpedo, closing the distance with the kind of speed that reminds me he's a professional athlete who takes his cardio seriously.
Petrov's shrieking, flamingo abandoned, and when Kane finally catches him, he dunks him underwater with the efficiency of a mob enforcer.
Petrov comes up sputtering. "Betrayal!"
"You started it," Wall observes from where he's floating on his back.
"Whose side are you on?"
"Chaos."
I'm laughing so hard my stomach hurts, and when I look over, Kane's laughing too. His whole face transforms when he laughs. Less robot, more human. More like someone I want to know everything about.
The afternoon dissolves into that perfect kind of lazy chaos where time stops feeling linear.
The sun climbs higher, turning the lake into a sheet of hammered gold.
Someone finds a volleyball, and a game breaks out that has rules no one can agree on.
Ace executes a dive that's more belly flop than anything else.
Groover, having somehow escaped Mateo's sunscreen tyranny, gets immediately burned, prooving Mateo right.
Eventually, the energy mellows. The volleyball gets abandoned. People drift into smaller clusters, floating in the sun-warmed water, talking shit in that easy way that only happens when everyone's too relaxed to maintain their usual personas.
I end up on my back, floating, eyes closed, letting the sun bake into my skin. The water laps gently around me, and I can hear the distant sounds of my teammates—Petrov arguing with Wall about something, Groover's laugh, Coach's occasional commentary from the shore.
I feel someone float up beside me. I don't need to open my eyes to know who it is—I've developed this stupid sixth sense where I can tell when Kane's nearby, like my body's installed some kind of Kane-detection radar without asking my permission first.
I open my eyes anyway, and he's right there, floating on his back next to me, close enough that our arms almost touch.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
The word hangs between us, soft as the water sounds.
"This is nice," he says after a moment, so quiet I almost miss it.
"The lake?"
"This." He gestures vaguely with one hand, sending ripples across the surface. "All of it."
I turn my head to look at him. He's already looking at me, water beading on his eyelashes.
"You're doing it again," I say.
"What?"
"The staring thing."
His mouth curves just slightly. "Am I?"
The moment stretches, suspended between us like the water holding us up. Everything else fades—the team noise, the splash sounds, the world beyond this small pocket of space where it's just us, floating, existing.
Then, there’s Wall.
"Are you two making out or just thinking about it?" His voice shatters the moment like a rock through glass.
"Fuck off, Wall!" we yell in unison.
But I'm filing this away—this version of Kane who laughs easily and dunks teammates and floats next to me in the sun. This version that feels less like the tightly wound defensive transfer and more like someone I might be completely fucked over.
***
THE SUN'S STARTING its descent when we finally drag ourselves out of the lake, everyone waterlogged and pruney and moving with the sluggish contentment of people who've spent too long in the sun.
"Best day off ever," Ace announces to no one in particular, toweling off his hair.
"You say that every time we don't have practice," Wall points out.
"Because it's true every time."
We gather our scattered belongings—towels, sunscreen, Petrov's deflated flamingo, Coach's destroyed magazine—and start the trek back to camp. The path winds through the pine trees, dappled sunlight filtering through the branches, the air smelling like warm resin and lake water.
I'm walking with Groover and Mateo, half-listening to them debate whether the volleyball game counted as cardio, when Kane drops back from the main group and falls into step beside me.
"Good day?" I ask.
"Yeah."
We walk in silence for a few steps, pine needles crunching under our feet. The rest of the team's ahead of us, their voices carrying back through the trees.
"Riley?"
Something in his tone makes me look over. He's stopped walking, standing in the middle of the path, and there's an expression on his face I can't quite read.
"Yeah?"
"Come with me."
I blink. "We're literally walking together—"
His hand wraps around my wrist, warm and slightly damp from the lake. "Now."