14. Chloe
14
CHLOE
He leaves me. Right after sex. If it were anyone but Ian leaving me high and dry… or wet. Whatever the saying translates to when he walks out when I want sex. If it were anyone else, I may have exploded into tiny particles and insisted that they were rejecting me.
Not Ian, though.
He really thinks that I need time to think. To process my emotions after telling him the truth about why I gave him back the ring. When he walks out, I see the look on his face. The one announcing to the world that he thinks he knows what is best for me. Again.
I throw my pillow at the door and grimace when it lands three feet away without any noise to announce my irritation.
Then I wait for the sound of his door to open and shut, and I do the mature thing.
“Asshole,” I call out through the vent that separates our two rooms.
He leaves me lying there in my feelings, feelings he is responsible for putting me through, and goes to his own room.
Like a coward.
I’m not even tired.
How the hell can he do that?
“Not an asshole,” he finally calls back through the vent. “I don’t want you to use sex with me as a way to avoid your own complicated feelings about Kevin.”
“I’m a grown-up,” I snap. “I’m capable of processing my emotions and feelings about my guilt surrounding his death and be turned on by the naked man in my bed at the same time. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. So I repeat my sentiment. Asshole .” I add the insult on at the end in an attempt to get him to come back into my room. Maybe he can actually help me finish the mess that he started.
“I know that.” His voice sounds like it is coming from right next to the vent. “Trust me when I say that I know you’re capable of complicated thoughts, Chloe. But when I’m balls deep inside you, when I break you down completely, I want to know that there’s nothing else possibly on your mind but the things I can do to your body and the way I make your heart race in anticipation of what comes next.”
Damn, he really does have a way with words. Especially when they are sweet and dirty at the exact same time.
“So get some rest. Like I told you to. Unless you’re ready to go on a ride in the kayak with me, to work out the frustration of having my dick right next to you and not being able to have you.”
I fall off the bed so fast that I slam into the floor with a loud thud.
“Yup,” I call out. “I’m putting my suit back on. Let’s go.”
The sooner we are out there, the sooner I can think and row, and then we can get back to the fun and sexy times that we are missing out on because he is too busy being noble about everything.
And I refuse to think about the fact that as much as I want to slap him, he’s right. I don’t want anything between us to be poisoned by intrusive thoughts.
I need him too much to let that happen.
His laugh is the only thing I hear in the two minutes flat it takes me to put my bathing suit back on, along with a t-shirt and shorts, because it is getting dark out, which means the water will start to get cold.
“I’m ready,” I huff when I slide into the hallway a second later and he is leaning against the wall like he’s been waiting there the entire time. “Shut your perfect face.”
Ian takes my hand, interlacing our fingers, and walks through the house and outside without anyone seeing us. Idly, I wonder if he bribed everyone to stay out of his way, but Ian wouldn’t do something like that. Chances are, we get lucky while everyone else is busy doing the dirty deed like we were.
“Do you want to go back all the way across the lake?” Ian lifts the kayak and turns it around so that we don’t have to back into the water. When I take my seat, he follows, and then we use our oars to dig into the shore and push out.
“No,” I tell him when we get through the first few strokes. “I just want to relax.”
“I brought bug spray.” Ian pulls the aerosol can from somewhere and hands it to me. “I know you hate the mosquitos at night.”
“You’re amazing,” I tell him honestly.
How did I walk away from him?
“I try.”
I lift my paddle out of the water and lay it across my lap so that I can spray my entire body without worrying about dropping it into the water.
Once I have an even coating of spray, I turn around and hand it back to Ian with a smile.
“Thank you, Ian.”
He cocks an eyebrow and takes the bug spray while staring at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“What?” I croak.
While he watches me, he pulls the oar up and over his lap like I did, and then he leans as far forward as he can without tipping the kayak over.
“Something is awkward between us.” He calls out the weirdness in one sentence and drops it like a bomb. “I don’t like it. I know you better than anyone else. You know me better than anyone too. And I don’t want it to be weird between us while we’re trying to figure things out.”
Such blatant emotion and truth catch me off guard and would have dropped me to my ass if I’d been standing up.
“Oh.” I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know how to keep it from being weird. The awkwardness is my fault. Everything is my fault, and I have absolutely no clue how to fix it.
“Start with the truth, Chloe.” Ian reads my mind. “Start there, and we’ll dig our way out of whatever emotional hole you’re in. Together. You just have to tell me.”
I’m half-turned around in the kayak, and he is leaning forward, but I want to be facing him, so I do my best. I grab the side of the kayak with one hand and slide my oar into the netting that covers the front, before sliding around so that I’m on my knees in the seat.
“You didn’t give me back the ring,” I finally tell him. Devoid of any emotion. Devoid of any of the pain that I felt when I told him I made a mistake and he didn’t want me that way anymore. Instead of keeping it to myself, I tell him. Everything. “I told you that I made a mistake. That I loved you. The night of Kevin’s funeral, you told me that if I needed anything from you, you’d be there. I want you. Forever. And I know that’s stupid. And I know I’m petty. But you said it’s awkward. How am I supposed to act?”
There. Breathing heavily after I say all that without taking a breath, I watch him warily. Even from a foot away, I can see all the different emotions and thoughts cross his face. I just can’t tell what it is that he is trying to tell me.
He opens his mouth, but a massive splash nearby startles both of us. Enough that we tip over and the kayak flips.
Spluttering, we hit the water with our own splash, and I kick out from under the kayak and break the surface. “That’s your fault,” I snap irately when Ian pops back up too. “I can’t believe you tipped us.”
“I didn’t tip us.” He rolls his eyes and grabs the back end of the kayak. I swim to the front, and we work together to flip it back right side up. “What was that splash, by the way?”
“I don’t know.” I almost forgot about the reason the kayak flipped in the first place. “It was big, though.”
We’ve had plenty of experience with other kayakers flipping their rigs and not being able to right them. “Pull the waterproof light from the net,” Ian orders when he helps me up into my seat.
I grab the net and hold tightly while he climbs up behind me and takes his seat.
“Up.” His terse statement tells me what I need to know. I grab the light that he attached to the net in the morning, along with the same first aid kit we always take with us, and I glance back over my shoulder. “I didn’t even notice the kit up here. You’re good.”
He winks in the fading light. “You’re just used to me doing the right thing. Tell me what you find.”
The light clicks on, and I start aiming it around, checking the area where it sounded like the noise came from.
“Do you think it was a dog?” My question falls flat, though, when I see a black shape in the water. A black shape with bright-red hair.
I keep my cool, or at least pretend to, as I drop into my seat and grab the oar.
“Three o’clock, Ian. It looks like a woman.” My words are broken and breathless, but he trusts me to know what I’m talking about.
I also know from our survival training that it will be a hell of a lot easier for us to reach her by kayak than by jumping back into the water.
In less than ten full strokes, we are pulling up beside her, and my heart stops. A woman with neon-red hair, face down in the water, not moving.
“Grab her,” Ian barks. “Chloe.” He says my name when I don’t move. When I can’t move. “Chloe, grab her so we can get to shore.” When I still can’t move, he taps me gently with his oar, and that breaks the fog and insecurity in that moment that has taken over.
“I got her,” I gasp. “I got her.”
And I do.
I grab her by her arms and lift her out of the water, leveraging my feet to make sure that I can get a solid grip on her shoulders, and drag her onto the kayak so that Ian can get us to shore.
“Thank God we took that water rescue class for when we go out.” Ian starts moving while I concentrate on the woman in my arms.
“She’s not breathing,” I whisper. Then I take my oar and join Ian in paddling back to the lake house.
No longer are our strokes in sync and patterned after the months and months that we’ve spent in the water together. They’re frantic, racing, and broken, like the woman on the kayak with us.
The tension in the air, the heartbreak for the woman hurt, it fuels both of us to push harder. Neither of us has to say it, but I know that Ian’s thoughts have drifted toward Kevin, the same way mine are.
Thinking about the loss that brought us to the lake, and the potential loss that we’re dealing with now, hurts in a way I’ve never encountered before.
We are almost to shore when Ian jumps out, grabs the woman off the boat, and carries her the rest of the way like she weighs nothing. I follow, dragging the kayak with us up onto the beach.
“Call 9-1-1, Chloe. Get help here now.”
He lays her on her back and starts CPR, while I sprint up the stairs to the deck to grab my phone.
“ Logan !” I scream at the top of my lungs when I see Poppy’s red hair next to his in the kitchen. “A woman was drowning. Go help Ian.”
He’s gone in a flash, practically flying off the porch and down to Ian. Poppy has her phone off the table, dialing before I even say a word about needing rescue.
“I don’t know the actual address,” Poppy is answering the dispatcher. “I’m going to need you to ping my location from my phone. We’re at a large white lake house on Sebago Lake.” She goes on to give the dispatcher the streets that we took to get here.
Instead of staying and doing nothing, I turn and follow Logan back down to the shore, to the woman, to the redhead. And I watch the way it hits Logan with a battering ram.
“Not her,” he mutters. “It’s not her.”
“It’s not Poppy,” I agree with him. “Poppy’s inside, remember? Calling 9-1-1. And this woman has colored hair. Poppy’s is natural. Remember that.”
“It’s not her,” he repeats.
Then he takes over compressions for Ian. The three of us work in tandem. Both Logan and Ian take turns with compressions, while I monitor the woman for a pulse. For ten minutes, they work on her, until I take over as they are both heaving and out of breath.
“Let me do it,” I insist when Ian gives me a stern look. “We’re all CPR certified. I can do this.”
Her chest plate is already cracked, happening sometime during Ian’s first round of compressions, and with every single pump of my arms, I feel the two pieces of bone sliding together.
Sirens in the distance are the first sign of relief, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. When Ian tries to take over, I shove him away because I know he’s still exhausted from doing it for so long.
“No,” I whisper, barely able to get my breath. “She’s not dying. We heard her go into the water. Less than three minutes,” I huff. “It was less than three minutes before we got her on the board. She’s not dying.”
“She’s not dying,” Ian agrees.
The sirens are right on top of us now, and I still don’t stop.
“Please,” I cry out. “Please don’t die.”
Like the gods above are watching out for me, the redhead under my hands gasps for air, her eyes opening while water comes gushing out of her mouth and onto the ground around her.
Ian is there, right there at her side, taking her hand in his.
“You’re alive,” he tells her. “You’re alive.”
I sit back, crying, while the paramedics take over.
When they carry her away, we follow them to the hospital.
“You saved her life,” I tell Ian when he takes my hand.
“No.” Ian squeezes my fingers. “ We saved her life.”