Annaleise
Iheard it before I saw it.
A whoosh cutting through the tree line, high and bright, and then a splash that echoed off the water. I twisted in my seat and looked back at Cade.
“What was that?”
“Rope swing.” He nodded toward the bend ahead. “Local spot. We can stop if you want.”
He said it like it didn’t matter either way. Like he’d already tucked it under things he’d offered and forgotten about before I answered. That should have annoyed me. Somehow, it didn’t.
I turned back around and faced forward. The bend came around, and there it was—a wide, still pool tucked back from the main channel where the river fattened out and went quiet.
A rope hung from a massive oak that leaned out over the water, thick-trunked and ancient, its roots gripping the bank like they’d been doing the job for a hundred years and had no plans to stop.
The branch it hung from was a good twenty feet up. The pool beneath it was deep and green and completely still.
A teenager was hauling himself out of the water on the far bank, laughing at something his friend was saying.
I looked up at the rope. Then down at the water. Then back up.
I used to have fun. I knew that about myself the way you know things that have been true for so long they stop feeling remarkable—and then one day you can’t remember the last time they were true at all.
Somewhere between middle school and boards, fun had gotten crowded out by necessary.
By productive. By things that looked good and mattered and moved the needle.
The rope swing did not move any needle.
Slow had been the plan. This wasn’t slow.
“Stop,” I said.
Cade angled us toward the bank without comment. The canoe nosed into the shallows, and he stepped out first, bare feet on the gravel. He held us steady while I climbed out after him.
The water was cold around my ankles and then my calves as I waded to the bank. I stood there for a second with the sun hitting my shoulders and the pool spread out in front of me.
The teenagers were moving downstream. We had the spot to ourselves.
I dropped my tote on the bank and pulled my cover-up over my head. I heard Cade go quiet behind me in a way that was different from the quiet he’d been carrying all morning. I didn’t turn around.
The oak’s roots made a natural ladder up the bank, and someone had hammered in two wooden footholds above them where the trunk started to lean.
I got my hands on the bark and started climbing.
The rope was knotted at the bottom for grip and again higher up, and I grabbed it with both hands when I reached the upper foothold. Then I looked down.
That was a mistake.
The pool was a long way below me. The water looked darker from up here, and smaller, and the drop between me and it felt very real all of a sudden. My heart was pounding. My palms were damp against the rope.
I looked out instead of down. The river bent away through the trees, and the light came through the canopy in pieces, and the air up here smelled like pine.
I hadn’t stopped to smell anything in years.
Don’t think about it.
I pushed off.
The rope swung wide and fast, and the air rushed past me hard. The tree line tilted, and for one suspended second, I was nothing but motion—no boards, no inbox, no house I hadn’t chosen in a city I wasn’t sure I wanted. Just the arc and the height and the green water coming up fast.
I let go.
The drop lasted long enough to matter.
The cold hit me all at once, and I went under deep, the sound of everything cutting out.
Nothing but dark water and pressure and cold.
It was the best I’d felt in years. I tucked and turned and pushed off the bottom and came up gasping, laughing before I even had my breath back.
I pushed my hair out of my face and turned in the water to find the bank.
Cade was already climbing.
He’d shed his shirt at some point, and now he went up the trunk fast and easy, like a man who’d grown up doing this.
He grabbed the rope at the top without stopping to look down.
He didn’t hesitate the way I had. He swung out and dropped and hit the water clean, close enough that the wake rolled over me when he surfaced.
He came up a few feet away, water running down his face, and he looked at me the way he had on the dock that morning—like I’d surprised him. Like he hadn’t expected this particular version of me, and he was glad I’d shown up.
The pool was calm with no current, but I felt myself drifting toward him anyway, just slightly. And then his hands were there, easy and certain at my waist, and everything in me went quiet.
He didn’t let go.
The water moved around us and the sun came down through the trees in long, slanted beams. Somewhere downstream, the teenagers were still laughing.
But all of that faded away. I could only focus on one thing. Everything else had gone soft and distant.
His hands were warm even in the cold water. I could feel every point of contact. I looked up at him to find he was looking at me in that same steady, open way. Except we were close now, and the air between us felt like something that could be crossed.
“You jumped without thinking about it,” he said. His voice was low. “That’s still you.”
The words landed somewhere under my sternum and stayed there.
The water moved. Neither of us did.
His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up, and I felt it like a current of its own. My hands found the water between us, then they found him instead. The distance closed, and I stopped thinking about what came next entirely.
I’d spent four years making careful decisions. Every single one of them had been the right one. I looked at him and made one more.