9. Emma #2
I kept my eyes glued to the plastic of my phone. I refused to look up. I would rather die on this bench than give his ego the satisfaction of an audience.
But the rhythm of elite swimming is a hypnotic, visceral thing when you have the sport in your blood, and despite every defense I'd built, my eyes eventually drifted back to the water.
I tracked his stroke. The elegance of his hip rotation.
The way his shoulders rolled over the surface, working in flawless, fluid harmony with the water rather than fighting it.
"Nice swim, little mermaid."
I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing the memory back into the dark, pressing my thumb into the glass.
Then the music stopped.
The rhythmic splashing, the breathing, the consistent, heavy beat of his stroke—the entire facility went hauntingly silent. I blinked, my gaze flying to lane four.
He was at the far wall, deep in the twelve-foot end, face down on the surface of the water, his long arms floating limply at his sides. He wasn't moving. Not an inch.
My phone slipped from my fingers, clattering on the concrete.
"Ralph?" I whispered.
Nothing. His broad back drifted with the residual current of his own lane, his body rotating with a sickening, slow-motion inertia. His face remained submerged.
"RALPH!"
I was on my feet before the scream had even cleared my teeth.
Iris was at the opposite end of the complex, her back turned as she barked instructions at a backstroker.
The other swimmers had their heads down, locked in their own private hells.
Ralph was floating like a corpse in the deep end, the water was swallowing him, and my lungs seized—I couldn't think, I couldn't see, I couldn't breathe—
I kicked off my flats.
The fear was a wall of iron between me and the edge—a monster built from every failure, every night in James's shower, every morning the water rejected me.
I had sworn I would never touch a pool again.
I had built a fortress out of my absence.
And right there, right across the blue lane lines, was the thing that had destroyed my life.
But Ralph was in it. Ralph was face down, and the terror of a world without Ralph Brandt in it was suddenly so much larger than the terror of the water that the wall simply shattered into dust.
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."