Twelve
IT’S BARELY LIGHT OUT WHEN I SLAM MY FRONT DOOR shut the next morning, toting grand plans of running to the shitty public pool on the other side of town.
It’s closed, with summer long gone and all, but I know kids hop the fence all the time. I’ve never heard of anyone contracting some brain-eating amoeba from lapping the barely treated, murky depths; even if I had, I fear I would risk it.
Maybe they’d eat away at the exact right parts. Make me a team player. Make me less hostile.
It’s kind of funny that, as I twiddled my fucking thumbs yesterday and flitted from lecture to lecture, absorbing nothing, then lay on my living-room floor and stared at the cracks in the ceiling as I desperately tried to regulate the flood of emotions making my fucking skin hurt, it was those words that cut me the worst. Not the banishment.
If I’m being completely honest – in the rare moments I manage to beat back my frustration enough to make room for coherent thought – I get why he suspended me.
It was how Coach did it that fucks me up. I didn’t deserve to be whacked down like that, to be dismissed so carelessly. Ben should’ve copped at least a little shit too.
But no. It was just me. Because I’m me.
Blowing out a harsh breath, I shake the bad attitude right out of my head before slipping my headphones into place, pressing play on a soft rock playlist cranked to the max, and start down the street at too quick a pace, too soon, but, hey, who cares if I injure myself?
I’ve got all fucking week to recover.
I only make it halfway through a single song before honking penetrates the music.
Repeatedly. Unwavering, no matter how steadfastly I try to ignore the baby blue truck that I pretend I don’t recognize.
The lull between songs arrives, that obnoxious beeping only gets worse, and I quickly lose my grip on my flaring temper.
Roughly pushing off my headphones, I just about resist the urge to kick the Ford Bronco trying to crawling up my fucking ass. ‘What?’
Leaning out the open driver’s side window, Heath smiles innocently. ‘Good morning, my love.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘That’s my girl.’ One hand tip-tapping against the steering wheel to the rhythm of a Steely Dan song, he attempts to summon me with a crooked finger of the other. ‘Let’s go, baby.’
‘Busy. Sorry.’
‘Don’t care. Sorry.’ Clucking his tongue at me, he slaps the side of the truck. ‘Get in or I’ll get you in.’
Brows high, I scoff. ‘Try me.’
God, it’s like he expected me to say that. Like he’s prepared to launch himself onto the sidewalk, more prepared than I am to evade his grabby hands. I blink, and I’m already being plopped on the passenger seat. Strapped in. Patted on the head like a freaking dog. ‘Was that so hard?’
‘This is kidnapping.’
‘Yeah,’ my kidnapper drawls, as he slides behind the wheel. ‘You sure put up a fight.’
I huff, but I can’t exactly argue, can I? I might as well have climbed in the damn car myself with how hard I resisted. Like my subconscious was more than happy to go along with whatever Heath has planned. ‘Where are we going?’
Brows high, Heath looks at me, then at the surfboards stacked in the bed of his truck, and back to me again. ‘Where do you think, honey?’
‘I don’t surf.’
‘Yet.’
Slumping with another huff, I try another escape route. ‘I’m really not in the mood for company.’
‘As opposed to every other day, when you beg for it.’
‘Heath.’
He huffs now. Good-natured and teasing, as he so often is, but with a strain of something harsher beneath it.
Something close to frustration. As if he’s irritated he even has to elaborate on his sudden appearance, as if I should’ve expected it.
‘What kind of boyfriend would I be if I let you wallow all on your lonesome?’
‘A fake one.’
His laugh isn’t quite that. His voice, a touch deeper as he amends, ‘What kind of friend would I be?’
I look down, staring at my twiddling thumbs. ‘I have no parameters to judge that, so I guess you’re off the hook.’
Silence. A sigh. A warm hand slipping between the headrest and my neck, a thumb circling my pulse. ‘I would have to be the literal devil to let you swim in that pool. You’d catch, like, a minimum of five diseases.’
‘Yeah, well. I’m a hostile environment. Nothing would survive.’
The grip on my nape tightens. Just barely digging in. Not enough to hurt, but enough to . . . something. ‘Your coach say that?’
I neither confirm nor deny – Heath comes to his own conclusion anyway.
The noise he makes is bitter and sounds all wrong leaving him. His grip retreats, both hands curling around the steering wheel instead. ‘That fucking team is the hostile environment.’
My own hand is halfway to my tingling nape before I catch myself. ‘I don’t wanna talk about it.’
‘Okay.’ He gives up easily. Too easily. Jarringly, and I’m caught between suspicion and disappointment – is there some kind of ulterior motive here, or does he just not care enough to push? – when he says, ‘The others are meeting us at the beach.’
If he notices the dubious side-eye I throw him, he doesn’t acknowledge it. ‘Okay.’
‘Wanna run drills?’
I picture frolicking through dark, frigid oceanic waters, and I suppress a shiver. ‘Pass.’
‘You?’ He gasps dramatically. ‘Pass on swimming?’
Silently, I plead for the sudden ability to turn back time. I would much rather discuss my shitty team, my shitty coach, anything else shitty in my life, than my disdain for large, tidal bodies of seawater. ‘I don’t like the ocean.’
‘Okay. Well. We have to break up.’
Despite the sudden pulse of anxiety behind my sternum, I manage a snort.
‘Are you scared?’ he asks.
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not,’ he repeats, half-smiling. ‘Then what is it?’
The term lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice comes to mind as I consider side-stepping the subject.
Call it gut instinct or common sense or, hey, maybe I just actually know Heath as well as he claims to know me, but something tells me he isn’t going to let me get away with two dropped subjects in one car ride.
So, as if it isn’t any big deal at all, with a shrug and so much forced nonchalance it makes my head hurt – or maybe that’s just from recalling the horrid incident – I casually admit, ‘I almost drowned once. Got caught in a rip.’
‘Jesus, Dani,’ he says, like it is a big deal, not shrugging, definitely not nonchalant, and definitely not smiling anymore. ‘I’m sorry that happened.’
‘Wasn’t your fault.’ I state the obvious.
No, that blame lies with a different man entirely.
One I can’t actually blame, because he’s nothing but bones in the ground now.
But I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t want to talk about this, so I move on and I fucking pray he comes with me.
‘Would you really break up with a girl if she didn’t like the ocean? ’
Heath is silent for so long, I almost think he isn’t going to let me get away with it. That he won’t push. And then, eventually, ‘Would you date someone who didn’t like swimming?’
‘I don’t really wanna date someone, full stop.’
Silence. Assessment. Disappointment, if I were brave enough to recognize it.
‘So?’ I prompt after a while. ‘Are we broken up now?’
Heath laughs. Loud and amused in a way that doesn’t match the soft, honest smile he wears.
Nor an even softer, ‘For you, I’ll make an exception.’
The second we pull into a sand-dusted parking lot, a salty gust of wind carries over not only the scent of the ocean, but also the holler of a familiar voice.
‘Oh my God,’ Kai screeches like a fucking gull as he leaps off the car hood he’s sitting on and peels toward us. ‘Is that my hero?’
Heath mutters his friend’s name in warning, but it’s no use. And it’s not just Kai that needs fending off; the truck has barely stopped before my door is ripped open, and my arm just about detached from my body with how intently Imani yanks it toward her so she can peer at my knuckles.
‘Shit,’ she whistles, elbowing Matilda as she comes up behind her, showing the redhead and her twin brother the mottled skin – lingering proof of my vicious attack. ‘You actually did it.’
Nudging Brendan out of the way so he can get a better look, Kai whistles too, low and impressed – he smirks, freaking devious. ‘Check her teeth.’
I wrench my hand away from their scrutiny just so I can thwap it against the bare chest that’s revealed by a half-on wetsuit. Shaking off Imani, I hop out of the truck, shutting the door behind me with a loud slam that emphasizes a snapped, ‘I did not bite him.’
‘But you did punch him.’
Not a single word passes my lips as I elbow through the group to join Heath where he’s hoisting a couple of boards out of the truck bed – not a single word, yet Kai reacts as if I whipped out my phone and played a high-definition video of the whole thing.
‘Oh my God,’ he hoots again, and the next thing I know, he’s wrapped himself around me from behind. He’s hugging me. He’s jumping up and fucking down, and consequently, so the fuck am I. ‘Your bar tab is on me for the rest of your life.’
‘That’s hardly a reward,’ Matilda snickers, as she yanks Kai off of me, smirking at an unusually stoney-faced Heath as she does. ‘Means she’s stuck with you for the rest of her life.’
Feigning dry laughter, Kai shifts his affections to his be-freckled friend instead, and I spend a moment being grateful that I wasn’t subjected to a freaking head-lock, like Matilda is, before a brush against my arm draws my attention sideways.
Voice low and her face a sympathetic scrunch, Imani pats my shoulder gently. ‘Heard about the suspension.’
I stiffen, even though I’m not surprised. The news had completely circulated HCU before I even finished my first class of the day. For God’s sake, I swear even a few of my professors were looking at me funny. ‘That skywriter Ben hired wasn’t exactly subtle, was it?’
‘He’s a dick. Your coach is a dick. Your entire team is a whole bag of dicks.’
‘It’s fine.’
She doesn’t look like she agrees, but she lets it go. ‘Are you going to the meet on Saturday?’
‘Course I am.’