Chapter 4 #3
I keep comparing it to home without meaning to.
Concrete sidewalks instead of the weathered boardwalk.
Palms trading shade for the sway of pines.
A sky that commits to blue with no caveat, where mine usually negotiates in gray.
Not better and not worse, just different, which is what now looks like for me.
On a whim, I cut toward a quieter stretch of beach.
Diamond Head, which the girls call Lē‘ahi, lifts to my left, reminding me this is all basalt and history, and the glassy stack of Waikīkī high-rises lines my right like a second coastline.
I sit in the sand and peel off my shirt because yes, I had the sense to wear a suit under my clothes.
The bikini top is emerald and a little too ambitious by Nova Scotia standards, but here it disappears into the crowd and gives my ghost-pale skin a chance to remember sunlight.
I pull a book from my tote—the kind Kai likes to roast, when I go for coffee during his shifts, for being unrealistic and full of morally gray people who fall in love far too fast. Some people get their romance from watching movies with ballrooms and corsets; I prefer grumpy/sunshine tropes with sharp dialogue and a statistically significant number of pining scenes.
Let me have my serotonin delivery system, will you?
The sun keeps to its arc and my book hits the inevitable third-act breakup I never enjoy, which is exactly when I notice a rack of small surfboards and a teenager guarding them with the resigned air of someone on hour three of a slow shift. Against all available evidence, I stand up and walk over.
“Hi. Can I rent one of these?”
He looks me over, assessing whether he wants a stranger’s poor choices on his conscience, then shrugs. “They’re free. Write your name. Bring it back in an hour.”
So I do. I can’t offer a rigorous reason. Maybe I want to try once without my very competent friends watching. Maybe it’s the rare feeling of being dressed for this climate on purpose. Maybe I’m in the place I’ve been daydreaming about for years and my body finally decided to be a part of it.
Back at my towel, I tuck my phone inside the book, slide both under the tote, and shimmy out of my skirt.
The board is comically small—shorter than I am, clearly built for children and their unbreakable cartilage—so I adjust my metric for success.
If I can sit on it without capsizing, I’ll count it. Today’s rubric is generous by design.
I stand where the wash curls over my feet, cool and teasing.
The ocean at home wears gray and a hint of meanness; it keeps its distance and makes sure you know who’s in charge.
This one shows off, little trade-wind sets braiding together and collapsing on the sand with more enthusiasm than physics strictly requires, blue sliding into turquoise until my brain trips over it.
I’m not confused about what lives three meters out—ankle-tickles convert to real force past the break and bathymetry does not care about optimism—yet the pull feels steady rather than hostile, and for once the part of me that measures risk for a living decides I can meet it without embarrassing myself.
I wade in and let the cold climb my shins, then my knees, then the soft edge of my nerves—blessed relief from the heat.
By the time the water settles at my waist, tiny silver fish ribbon past in tight formation, a hundred little mirrors.
Silversides? Atherinids? I mentally apologize to my ichthyology professor for not being able to do better than “sparkly and fast.”
Once my breathing matches the small sets rolling through, I plant my palms on the board and try to sit.
It flips; so do I. A quick scan—no witnesses, thank God.
Second attempt: elbows locked, center low, one leg over and then the other.
I end up perched on the child-sized board like a very determined flamingo, and it works.
The water holds. For a moment it’s just green bikini, salt on my tongue, sun on my shoulders, and the lazy lift and fall of the Pacific like a hand under my spine.
I wish my parents could see this part—the part where the homesick knot loosens. I’ve been telling them I’m okay, that moving here was right; I believed it in theory. Floating here, I mean it.
I start to paddle, inching farther from shore—not to catch anything, absolutely not—just to make the board earn its keep.
It’s pleasant until a short, punchy bump lifts the nose higher than seems necessary.
I shift forward, grip the rails, manage to stay put long enough to feel smug, and that is when the second wave in the set sneaks behind the first and tips me straight off the back.
No bottom under my feet now. The water goes white-green and loud, the board pops free and drifts out of reach—no leash, of course—and the aerated chop turns my stroke to nothing.
I blink salt from my eyes and get the geography of up and down briefly wrong; the trick is to exhale and follow the bubbles, so I do, small silver strings rising where my brain failed to.
Fish ribbon past with clean efficiency and judgemental googly eyes while I pinwheel in their corridor like a misplaced file.
This is not panic. Not yet. I can swim, I can hold my breath, I know sets come in threes. I tuck my chin, angle toward the brightest patch above, and wait for the water to loosen its grip long enough to let me surface.
Just when I think I finally know which way is up, I’m hit again—only this isn’t a wave, it’s warm and unyielding, an arm clamping across my waist and hauling me out of the constant roll until my head breaks the surface and air rakes down my throat; it can’t have been more than a minute, but my lungs file a complaint anyway.
The hold slides from my waist to my back, a solid palm braced under my ribs, and I’m pressed against another body while we move, slow and sure, until my toes find sand on the very tips.
“Whoa there,” says the voice that’s been both my dreams and my nightmare for a month. “I thought you were a goner for a second.”
This time he sounds amused; a low chuckle vibrates through my spine. I look down at the forearm cinched around my middle—salt-slick, iron-steady—while I get my balance and the nerve to turn.
When I do, I run straight into an indecent amount of him. Abs I’ve only seen implied by shirts are now incontrovertible evidence; water beads track over a chest that has been threatening cotton for weeks. In retrospect, drowning might have been the less complicated choice.
My gaze travels up—broad shoulder, corded neck—until it lands on his face.
Holden Wilkes is smiling. It’s the full thing: bright teeth framed by a generous mouth, small lines at the corners of his eyes, dark hair wet and pushed across his forehead.
For a beat I genuinely wonder if I did drown back there.
Reality snaps back when his eyes move over my face and recognition sparks; the smile drops faster than the wave that flipped me, leaving confusion and surprise in his eyes and his mouth pulled down, unhappy.
“Coralie?”
“Hello.” Goody. My vocabulary abandons me where this man is concerned.
“What were you doing out there?”
I glance at the waves, then at my board, bobbing treacherously in shin-deep water. “Surfing?”
He scoffs. “You shouldn’t be in the water alone, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Heat crawls up my cheeks, fighting the cool water at my shoulders, and only then do I register that his arm is still firm around my waist. Of course I had to be saved by the one asshole in O?ahu who would probably have preferred not to share oxygen with me; I have precisely this much luck.
I peel his hand away and start past him—dramatic exits being notably less dramatic at wading speed. “Thanks for helping me.”
His expression flashes to stunned—behold, a human—before he follows in three easy strides. I snag the board as we go, drop it at the stand, and head for my towel. He stays a step behind the whole way.
I spin, primed to give him hell if he thinks he can deliver another lecture on inadequacy, and the sight of him strips the words clean out of my mouth.
Sunlight catches the hard set of his jaw and throws off his watch in a quick, bright flash; every line of him is cut and precise, those dark eyes sharp and assessing, his whole body somehow both tense and at ease, which should not be possible.
Holden might be an unfeeling robot with a superiority complex, but he is hot; no, that doesn’t even begin to cover it—he is very likely what the Greeks were trying to sculpt, all angles and control and heat, and there is too much to take in at once.
Okay, so I am not immune to the male body—sue me. His gaze, however, is fixed on my feet and nowhere else, like anything north of my ankles requires ethics clearance.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”
A scoff leaves my mouth—new, unfamiliar, a sound that startles even me. “Or what, you would’ve let me drown?”
His eyes snap to mine, his head lifting so fast I worry for his C3; white rims the brown in a clean ring of shock. The reason for it is beyond me.
“Why would you say something like that?”
“Why would I… okay. You know what? Leave it.” If he wants distance, I can match distance.
Fine—yes, I find him good-looking and infuriating and he rents a small apartment in my brain—but he has been dismissive since day one.
Any sudden concern reads as standard-issue decency plus the fact that he didn’t realize it was me until after the rescue.
I start packing, sliding my skirt over a wet bikini bottom and shoving my shirt into my bag, because the last thing I need is two damp circles announcing themselves while I try to hold my ground. Sand sticks to my calves; my hands won’t stop shaking.
“Have a good day, Holden.” I shoulder the tote and head for the sidewalk—the wet-sand version of storming, slower and grittier—and file this mortifying scene under experiences I will never think about again.
Or so I thought.
Because right there, on my left, Holden falls into step—street side, between me and the traffic—matching my pace like it’s a rule he follows without thinking. I’m determined to stay quiet and grumpy. Unfortunately, my face, my shoulders, my mouth all subscribe to full disclosure.
“What do you want?” I keep my eyes forward. “And where is your stuff? Do you always abandon your belongings at the beach? There are thieves everywhere, Holden. Everywhere. Your phone is probably eloping as we speak.”
“Coralie.”
“And without your phone, your girlfriend can’t yell at you from the lab.”
He stops. So do I, because did I just say that out loud?
When I turn, he’s smirking—barely—brows knit like he’s not sure which part to address first. It feels wrong to see him here, in broad daylight, nothing but black swim trunks and attention set on me, when my brain expects him in dark pants and a grey shirt, sleeves pushed back, scowling from the front of a room or carving up a paper with “Really? This is your best work?” in the margins.
“About that—”
“How did you know it was me?” Politeness evaporates. Hello, delinquent version of Coralie who interrupts her TA. Aloha.
“You heard the whole thing?”
“No. But Damon and I couldn’t not listen when the call was on speaker in an empty lab.”
“Damon?”
“The octopus.”
He blinks once. Then again. He doesn’t recoil the way Summer did.
“How did you know, Holden?”
He sighs and rubs the back of his neck, gaze sliding off to the water; I look away too, because I have reached my muscle-quota for the day. “Coralie, I don’t know many students who would spend a Friday afternoon in the lab this early in the semester. Fewer who talk to an octopus.”
“She said fish.”
“We don’t have fish in the lab.”
“She could’ve meant the clams.”
“You’re probably the only one who would befriend bivalves, too.” The corner of his mouth tips up. I count to three in my head and, right on time, it levels out.
I reach for an answer and come up empty, because I don’t even know what this is.
I can coach an octopus through LEGO, and I’m steadily climbing the Top Science Boss Ladies list. Yes, I made that up.
But this—figuring out what Holden wants from me, and what he feels, if his kind even does—seems impossible.
I risk a look back and regret it immediately.
I thought I hated the cool dismissal I’ve been getting for weeks, but the curiosity easing across his face now—head tipped, brows drawn, mouth almost soft—is worse.
Worse, because it makes it hard to stay mad, to slap the “jerk” label on and file him under discard.
“Thank you for helping me back there, Holden. And sorry for upsetting your girlfriend today.”
“My girl—” he starts, then blinks. “Wait, where are you going?”
I edge backward. He doesn’t follow this time. “I’ll see you around campus, maybe.” Which is a definite, obviously—he’s my TA, I’m his student, and we seem constitutionally incapable of missing each other.
He watches me for a beat, like he’s weighing whether to chase the conversation or let it sink, and I take the out—round the corner and all but jog to the bus stop, heart doing unruly things.
Holden Wilkes is not Malcolm Harrington, but he doesn’t outrun the Barnacle rule.
Being near him—shirt or no shirt, rescue or no rescue—scrambles my brain. Therefore: back burner.