Chapter 19 #2
“That’s bullshit,” he says, his voice rough. Those hard edges cut straight through my walls, because I can tell through his tone, his face, his grip, that they’re for me, not against me. “You made a mistake. So did your friend. You can’t punish yourself forever.”
“Why not?”
A light flashes in his eyes, a revelation. “That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? That’s why you relive it every time you get in the water? Penance.”
“Maybe?” I wince, turning away. “I don’t know. I want to move past it. I do. But my brain just won’t let me. If I’m being honest with myself—really, truly honest—on some level, I don’t think I should be able to walk away, to leave it all behind, when she never will.”
“Come with me.”
I snap back to him with the sudden pivot. “What?”
“I’ve been going about this all wrong,” he says distractedly, his focus inward, as if he’s watching the realizations fall like dominoes across his mind.
“I’ve been trying to force you to get past it through sheer will, but that’s not going to work.
It was never going to work. Your body is stuck in this doom cycle, but… I think I have an idea.”
“What?” I’m turning into a broken record.
Nox doesn’t appear to hear me. He slides his hands up my thighs and over my hips.
My stomach flips as his large fingers settle just below my rib cage, the tips nearly touching as he grips the small of my waist. I’ve never been more grateful I’m wearing a one-piece.
The points where his bare skin grazes my back are scalding enough.
With a simple lift, as though I weigh nothing at all, he draws me slowly into the pool.
Both my hands find his shoulders now, my pulse a wild beast I’ve no hope to control.
“Nox, what—”
“We need to train the fear response out of your body, to replace that one, overwhelmingly horrible memory with so many good ones, it loses its power to control you.”
“And how do we do that?”
He reaches for a pair of goggles on the deck and slides them over my eyes, letting his fingers linger in my hair before trailing them down my neck to settle on my shoulders.
His thumbs brush over my collarbones, the intensity of his stare drawing my face up to his despite the nervous butterflies swarming through my stomach.
“When you get under the water, keep your eyes on me,” he says. Then he laughs softly, a little grin curving his lips. “And bear with me. I’ve never done this before.”
My brows draw together as my curiosity grows, but he doesn’t give me anything else.
He just slides his hands down my arms to entwine our fingers, then nods, a silent countdown in his eyes.
He squeezes gently before plunging into the water.
I follow, down, down, down, all my focus on those two spots of green as the world around me goes blue.
Shadows press at my vision but I hold on to his fingers, to his gaze, using him as my anchor to the right here, right now, his presence so commanding nothing else can intervene.
When we reach the bottom, Nox folds his legs into a crisscross applesauce position.
I mirror him, trying to keep my butt on the tiled floor, not quite as agile.
He disentangles our fingers before moving his together, as if he’s pouring something into my lap.
Then he makes a little circle with one hand, and spins his other pointer around the makeshift cup.
I recognize what he’s doing a moment before he lifts his fingers to his lips as if he’s holding a delicate handle and takes a pretend sip, pinky out.
A tea party.
Laughter creates a curtain of bubbles around my face, briefly blocking him from view, but it doesn’t matter. That image stays with me. Nox Monroe, the fastest swimmer in the entire world, is sitting at the bottom of the pool having a mermaid tea party with me.
Warmth rushes through me like a dust plume, coating everything in its wake, so comforting, so saturated, I no longer notice the cold kiss of liquid against my skin.
Nox grins and holds his hands in front of his face, pretending to take a bite of sandwich, completely unaware of the regeneration burning through me.
I feel like one of those ocean creatures I love to study so much, brimming with transformative power, a sea star growing a new limb, an axolotl remaking its own brain.
All my broken parts are laid bare, and for the first time, my cells whisper that powerful little word I haven’t had the strength to say—heal.
This moment grows roots, sews itself into my genetic makeup, stays.
A sea cucumber can reform all of its internal organs in as little as seven days. I don’t know how long it will take me to reshape myself into the girl I was before, but I know this much—it’s a start. Something I haven’t felt this palpably in a very long time.
I hold my breath for as long as I can, wanting time to stretch.
When my lungs start burning to the point of pain, I finally press my toes to the floor and push.
I burst from the water with a smile on my lips.
Nox follows a moment later, whipping his hair to the side while I rub the droplets from my eyes.
“How’d I do?” he asks, voice practically fizzing with glee.
That same effervescence fills me up inside. I cover it with a shrug, the uptick of my mouth still giving me away. “Passable.”
Nox snorts. “You just can’t give me the win, can you?”
“Never.” A full grin pulls at my cheeks. “What would be the fun in that?”
“Okay, then. Show me how it’s done,” he challenges, crossing his arms over his broad chest and arching his brow. We’ve slipped back into our comfortable roles, but there’s something different under the surface, something deeper.
I dip back into the water to escape that simmering heat.
We have three more tea parties before we call it quits for the day.
At the next lesson, we play underwater charades.
His version of the worm makes me snort so hard I accidentally inhale water and nearly drown.
When I come up sputtering, he grabs me by the shoulders, fear a living thing in his eyes, until he realizes I’m still laughing.
The next time we meet up, he brings props.
We start with noodle races around the pool, until I get sick of always losing and eventually try splashing him to throw him off his game.
He responds by calling me a cheat and kicks my ass even more handily, the jerk.
I can’t help but smile, though, as I watch from the shallows while he goes red in the face inflating two rainbow unicorn floaties.
“I’m surprised it’s taking this long when you’re so full of hot air,” I shout playfully.
He gives me the finger, then thoroughly destroys me at unicorn jousting. The week after that, he brings rubber duckies and we have races to see who can push theirs across the pool first without using our hands. By the end, I can barely stand my abs ache so hard.
My favorite, though, is when he comes with a bag of little plastic marine animals and a jar of wasabi.
When he asked me the week before what prize would actually get me to put my head under the water, kick my feet, and swim, I told him good luck, thinking he would never find the proper motivation.
Unfortunately, he knows me too well. He throws six little critters into the pool with a challenge in his eyes as he explains the rules.
I have to start from the steps and swim underwater without taking a breath.
But if I do that, for every species I recover and name correctly, he’ll eat a spoonful of the spicy green mush.
Turns out my desire to make him suffer outweighs my fear.
With the first bite, his eyes bulge. With the second, his cheeks enflame.
By the third, he’s starting to sweat. When I recover the fourth toy, he gets a lucky break.
“King crab,” I say with a grin, holding the burnt-orange critter up to the light.
“Wrong!” He jumps to his feet, a sudden glee wiping the discomfort from his face. “Snow crab!”
“What?” I snap and race across the pool. “No way!”
“It says it right here.” He holds out the little paper that came with the figurines, pointing with annoying enthusiasm to the picture second from the bottom. “Snow crab.”
“That’s bullshit! It’s a king crab. The legs are way too spiky to be a snow crab. And look at the size of the claw! It’s all wrong.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” He shrugs triumphantly. “Rules are rules.”
“I’m writing a very angry letter to their customer service department.”
His smile widens. “You do that.”
“Snow crab,” I mutter under my breath, ignoring the chuckle that echoes across the water as I dive down for my next swim.
But Nox comes out on top again. In my annoyance, I don’t take a deep enough breath and I need to come up for air before I reach critter number five, which is a blue whale, so freaking easy.
I’m pissed at myself.
The sixth figure is all the way across the pool near the ropes to the deep end.
I’m not sure I could have made it there in one breath even before the accident, but I have to try.
Halfway across, my lungs already start to burn.
I push through it, ignoring the pain, my eyes on the little orange spot growing larger by the second.
I kick and paddle, twisting my torso for extra power as my vision starts to spot.
Dark thoughts press in, hard to evade as I’m forced to recall another time when the water closed in, when my chest felt on fire, when my surroundings grew hazy. But I’m al—most—
There!