Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Griffin
The coast appears around a bend, and I hear her reaction before I see it.
I glance over, and she’s already turned toward the window, chin lifted, watching the Pacific come into view below the headland. She looks like she’s been waiting for it.
It is, I’ll admit, a view.
The highway winds along the ridge here. The land drops away on the left to a coastline with blue water and white surf. The afternoon sun is low. There’s a reason people drive this road.
“God,” she says softly, leaning toward the open window. The wind takes her hair, but she doesn’t fix it. Tipping her head back, she closes her eyes and breathes it in. At the sight of it, I have to force my eyes back on the road because looking at her feels like a toxic trait I’m developing.
She keeps her face to the window. “When I was little, whenever something was bad or loud or too much, Dad would take me down to the beach. Just the two of us. We’d just sit on the wall and watch the water.”
I hold the image for a second, then I take the next exit and follow the signs toward the water.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Following the water.”
The beach is down a track I nearly miss, marked by a wooden sign. It’s a gap in the headland where the land gives way to a small horseshoe-shaped stretch of sand, hidden from the road.
I park at the top of the trail. The beach below is empty, and the water is rolling in large swells. Piper is already out of the car before I’ve even taken the key out of the ignition.
“Can we go in?” she calls back, already walking toward the sand.
I chuckle. “No bathing suits,” I remind her.
She turns, still moving backward. “So?”
“Piper—”
She’s already pulling her shirt over her head.
Jesus Christ.
I scrub a hand down my face, close my eyes, and pray for strength. This day is testing me in ways I never prepared for.
I should just stay in the car, let her have a swim, and wait here until she’s done.
But I’m a fucking glutton for punishment because I get out.
She’s at the waterline by the time I hit the sand, jeans gone, standing in a white cotton bra and underwear set. She appears to have exactly zero feelings about it.
“It looks cold,” I say, stopping a safe distance away.
“It looks incredible,” she counters.
Yeah, so do you.
She looks over her shoulder. There’s sand on her feet, and her hair is a mess, but she looks like she’s returning to something she belongs to.
“Are you going in with me or not?”
I pull my shirt off. Something happens in her expression that she quickly rearranges. I note it, file it under ‘Things that will keep me up at night,’ and wade in.
She’s right about one thing: it’s incredible.
But it’s also fucking cold. The Pacific in late afternoon is approximately the temperature of a cold shoulder from an ex.
Piper makes a sound that is half-shriek, half-laugh, and dives. I follow her because the alternative is standing at the waterline like a coward.
“Oh my God,” she says, surfacing waist-deep. “It’s freezing.”
“I mentioned this.”
She splashes me before she goes under in one clean dive, disappearing into the white water and coming up ten feet out, hair flat against her face, eyes bright.
Stop it, I tell myself.
She’s laughing, treading water. “Come on!”
I go under. The cold creates the kind of shock that removes every thought and replaces it with a single instruction: be here, right now. I come up, shaking the water off my face. We’re chest-deep now, the swells lifting and dropping us gently.
She surfaces from a duck-dive closer to me than before.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m good. Really good,” she says, and she sounds like she means it.
A swell brings her against my side. She steadies herself with a hand on my arm. The cold water should be dealing with my biological reality problems, but it’s failing. She’s looking up at me, water on her face, eyes turning that specific shade of green they get in this light.
“Griffin,” she breathes.
My name in her mouth has been messing with my heart rate all week.
“Hmm?”
She looks at me with that unguarded expression. “Thank you for following the water.”
I push her hair back from her face because it’s a face that should never be covered. “You’re welcome, Pipes.”
I tell myself I’m doing fine. I’m a grown man with a functioning capacity for restraint. I’m standing in my boxers in the ocean with Piper a week after her almost-wedding, and I’m doing absolutely fine, dammit.
She dives back under and comes up laughing.
Okay, I’m not doing fine.
“Race you to that rock,” she says.
“You can’t race in open water.”
“Scared?”
She knows I love a challenge.
I let her win by a length and a half, and she celebrates like she just won Olympic gold, shouting something at the sky that isn’t a word so much as a release. It’s the sound of someone who finally found some air.
I hang onto the rock and watch her. A week ago, she was pacing in a gas station restroom. Now, she’s here. The light is turning amber, the ocean is indifferent, and I think, quietly, in the part of myself I keep locked away…
Yeah. There she is.
We finally trek back to the car when the cold becomes too much. I grab the blanket from the trunk and wrap it around her.
She pulls it tight, grinning. “Good swim.”
She tips her face up to the last of the sun, the waves crashing behind her. Gerald watches us from the back window, looking judgmental, as usual.
“Okay,” she says when we’ve both dressed at a safe distance from each other. “I’m ready to get back in the car.”
I’m just relieved she’s got her clothes back on. “Let’s go.”
She looks at me over the roof of the car. “I’m picking the music.”
“You’ve been picking the music for the past week.”
“And it’s been good music for the past week.”
She picks Fleetwood Mac.
Obviously.