Fragile, I think.
But he doesn’t feel that way beneath my hand. Not at all. Through all the layers between us—his shirt, the scar that it hides, and the solid curve of his chest— I can almost feel the steady, unmistakable beat of his heart.
My own skips, and a pull, sudden and gravitational, draws me a step closer, into him. We stand there in the doorway like that for a long moment that feels fragile itself. He glances down at my hand on his chest, and though I want to keep it there, to keep feeling this, I let it fall, and I step past him into the hallway, leaving the ships, and that closeness, and the rhythms of both of our heartbeats swirling in the air behind me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides”
—Dylan Thomas
AT FIRST I think the reddish color of the water is a trick of the light. We slip the kayak in just as the sun pulls the last bit of itself below the horizon, leaving behind a deep-orange sky that quickly fades to blue around the edges. The air is still and warm, and the surface of the water is so calm it looks more like a lake than the ocean.
“Wow,” I whisper as I help Colton push the kayak into knee-deep water. “It’s so pretty out here tonight.”
Colton keeps his eyes on the horizon. “I could watch that every day, and it would never get old.”
“Me too,” I say. Like this, I think. Here with my toes digging into the sand, water swirling cool and soft around my legs . . . with you.
“Ready?” Colton says, holding the kayak steady for me to get in.
I step in, and he follows a second behind me, and after we’re settled, we dip our paddles into the dark water. We make it easily over one little wave and then another. I look down at my paddle as it pulls through the surface, leaving tiny, rust-colored eddies behind. “Why does the water look like this?” I ask over my shoulder.
“It’s a red tide,” Colton answers.
“A red tide?” I look down again, not liking the sound of it, especially after I let him convince me to paddle from our little cove to the pier in the dark to watch the fireworks from the water. I glance back at him. “I’m scared to ask what that is.”
“It’s nothing to be scared of,” he says. “It’s because of a special type of algae that blooms all of a sudden, all up and down the coast. It’s pretty amazing when it happens.”
“Really?” I keep my eyes on the water as we glide slowly over it. It looks more dirty than amazing.
“Yeah. It’s just this random thing—nobody can really predict or control it, I guess because nobody really even knows what causes it, but at night . . .”
He trails off, and when I turn around, his face is all lit up in a way that’s become familiar to me. It makes me smile. “At night, what?” I ask.
He looks out over the water like he’s debating whether or not he should answer, then shoots me a dimpled grin. “Just wait. You’ll see.”
“Now I’m really scared to ask.”
Colton laughs. “It’s nothing to be scared of, promise.” He points with his paddle at the silhouette of the pier in the distance. “C’mon. We’re gonna have to move faster than this if we wanna make it down there in time for the fireworks to start.”
I look at the pier jutting out into the ocean against a quickly dimming sky. “It looks kind of far. . . . Are you sure we’ll make it back? We won’t get lost at sea? Or eaten by the nighttime red tide or anything?”
“I can’t make any promises,” Colton says with a shrug. “Those are all risks I’m willing to take tonight.” He smiles, calm and confident, completely at home on the water and in the moment, and I can feel that buzz in the air between us again.
“Risks you’re willing to take, huh?”
He nods slowly and tries to look serious. “For your benefit, of course.”
“Well then,” I say, unable to keep a smile from my face. “In that case, I guess I’m willing too.”
“Good,” Colton says, and I’m pretty sure that this time it’s the answer he was both hoping for and expecting. He doesn’t take his eyes from mine as the smile sneaks back over his face. “You won’t regret it.”
The sky goes indigo and the first stars emerge, tiny and bright above the ocean as we move smoothly over its surface. My strokes are strong, so full of nervous energy at first that I’m sure I could paddle to the horizon and back without feeling a thing. But after few quiet moments, we slip into our familiar, wordless rhythm, and I relax and find my way back into that place that makes everything disappear except for the ocean, and the sky, and us—gliding together through that invisible place where one ends and the other begins.
My eyes adjust by degrees to the darkness, at almost the same rate it falls around us. I close them for a moment to let the air and water and night sink in. Everything feels electric. Vibrant, and alive, and charged with possibility. Sailing over the water, through the dark, I do too. It’s a feeling that starts deep in my chest and spreads out, wide and expansive. Almost too much to contain. I flash to the picture on my dresser, the red glass heart encased safely in its bottle, and then to all of Colton’s ships in theirs, and that’s when I realize the truth in the words scrawled over the wall above them: A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are meant for.
This is what they’re meant for, this feeling right here. And maybe . . . maybe it’s what hearts are meant for too.