My eyes lift to hers. “The point of a bucket list is that it’s all your wildest dreams, right? Even the ones you know are probably never going to happen?”
At my words, her gaze goes far away and unfocused. It’s as if her eyes open a window into her soul and I fall right into it. “Wildest dreams…” she repeats. But then she blinks and I feel my invitation into her soul revoked as she seems to find herself. She lowers her gaze and clears her throat. “Do you even sail?”
“Learn to sail,” I say slowly as I type it into my phone.
I look up at her when I’m done and she’s smiling down at her feet. Something stirs in my gut—a sudden, intense rush, like the first drop of a roller coaster.
That’s why it’s called falling.
Christ. I am falling for her.
“That’s a double from me,” I say, trying to shake the thought from my head. But now that I’ve thought it, it’s stuck in my brain like a burr. “Your turn.”
She chews her lip for a moment and her eyes go far away. “Finish Mom’s book.”
I look a question at her.
She leans her elbows onto her knees and looks out over the pool. “Did I tell you Mom was a writer?”
“No.”
Her fingers lace and unlace in front of her. “I’ve never read anything she wrote, but she was in the middle of a new manuscript when…”
“You’ve read it?” I ask when she trails off.
She pulls one knee up and hugs it to her chest. “I’m trying. It’s really hard, you know?”
“Ah,” I say when it dawns on me what she means. “I thought you meant you wanted to finish writing it. You mean you want to read it.”
She nods. “Part of it is set on a trip we took to Europe a few months before the accident. It was the most amazing two weeks of my life. But…” Her face clouds. “My parents already knew they were getting divorced then. They just waited to tell me until we were home.” There’s a quiver to her bottom lip as she adds, “She never really even finished telling me.”
Oh shit. Is that what happened? “She told you that day…of the accident?”
She nods against her knee. “Or, at least, she was working her way up to it.”
I wait for more, but she’s done talking, apparently. After a minute, she gets up and goes back to the pool. I watch as she gives the team a new sub rotation and they go back to work.
But I can’t help wondering what happened in that car.
We wrap up practice and she jumps in the pool as all the others head to the locker room. I watch her float on her back and move her arms slowly through the water as if caressing it, reintroducing herself to an old lover.
I wait until everyone else has cleared out before I jump into the lane next to hers.
She stands in the waist-deep water and looks at me, a spark of excitement in her eyes. “This feels really good.”
“It’s where you belong,” I tell her because it’s true. In all my years in the pool, I’ve never seen someone so free in the water, as if it’s not just moving around her, but through her.
She moves to the end of the lane. “I was thinking about starting with maybe ten laps.”
“Just take it slow and stop if you’re feeling anything,” I say, pointing at my head. “I’ll go at your pace.”
She nods. “’Kay.”
“Ready?” I ask with a sweep of my hand at her lane.
In answer, she puts her head down and pushes off the wall with her legs. I watch as she cuts so smoothly through the water there’s barely a ripple, then follow. I swim on her heels and she does what I asked, taking her laps at an easy pace and stopping at the edge after ten.
The sun is just setting over the gym when I come up next her and stand. “So?”
She treads over to the rope between us and crosses her arms over it, resting her chin on her forearms. “My body was screaming at me to keep going. I think it misses the endorphin rush.”
“But you stopped. Smart.”
“Yeah, well…” She taps a finger on her temple. “This is still in charge, however much my body would love to override it.”
I wish I could say the same for myself. My head knows that everything I want from this girl is wrong, but my body isn’t listening.
She’s both tough and vulnerable. She’s got strength I never could have dreamed of having at her age. She’s self-aware and not afraid of who she is. But as much as I know it’s not a fa?ade, I feel there’s more than I know that’s made her this way. I want to know everything about her.
I press my back against the pool wall next to her to keep from doing anything stupid. “Did the doctor say when you’d be cleared to play?”
“He said it depends on how I feel. I’m supposed to increase my exertion level a little at a time over the next week, and if I feel okay, he’ll clear me.”
I press myself up to sit on the edge. “Then we’re definitely not going to push it. I need your head on straight.”