Page 74 of Fated

McCormick sobers. “I know exactly how they felt.”

“Did you stop?”

“No.” He shakes his head and his eyes glint in the moonlight. “I couldn’t stop. I was addicted to the thrill of it. My parents decided to stop fighting it. I started training for long-distance marathon swims. At fourteen I swam South Eleuthera to Nassau, Bahamas. It took more than forty hours of straight swimming. At fifteen I crossed the English Channel four times in a row, swimming unassisted for more than fifty hours. Any record, any long-distance swim, I wanted to be the one to do it. I swam from Ibiza to Mallorca. I circumnavigated Barbados. Current neutral ocean swims were where I was at my best. I wanted to swim the world. I wanted to beat all the records.”

“My word,” I say, staring at this man who raced around the world. Does it make it less impressive if it isn’t real?

Yes. I suppose so.

But in this dream world it’s real.

Which is why no one was concerned when he spent two hours in the swells and the strong currents searching for his daughter. If he’d spent fifty hours cutting through the ocean, what was two?

“You don’t have to pretend you don’t know this,” he says, and there isn’t pride in his eyes but a quiet sadness. A carefully hidden grief that pinches my chest.

“I want to hear it in your words,” I say quietly.

He takes in a deep breath, his chest rising beneath me.

Something happened. Otherwise he wouldn’t be on this island. He’d be out in the world. Breaking records. Living the life he was made for.

He nods then and tugs me close. My nightdress is damp from the sea mist and the humidity in the air, and it sticks to my skin. When I move against him the fabric drags a damp heat across me.

I smell a hint of lavender, and when I do, my heart quickens. Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up. Not yet.

“What about us?” I ask, urging him to hurry, to tell me everything before I wake and my dream-self leaves him again.

“You were in Miami. Waitressing at a beach bar, the ...” He furrows his brow and looks down at me.

I shake my head. I don’t know the name of this fictional bar.

“The Sand Bar,” he says, nodding. “I was in Miami for a swim. You called me, an old friend saying hello. We met up. We drank. We had sex.”

The way he says, “We had sex,” low and rumbly, like sand scraping over my bare legs, makes a warmth pool inside me. A hot sensation steals over me and I resist the urge to turn my face up to the moonlight and take McCormick’s mouth in mine.

“A month later we married. Two months later I had my Gulf Stream swim and ...” His voice trails off, and then he says, “And then we came back to the island.”

“To stay?”

“To stay.”

“You didn’t swim again?”

He hesitates. Stares down at me, his brow wrinkled. “No.”

Something happened there. Between Miami and his last swim. “You married me because I was pregnant.”

“I married you because I was in love.”

Thinking back on that wedding picture hanging on the bedroom wall, I think he was.

“Did I love you?”

He smiles. “You married me because you were pregnant.”

“And?”

He shakes his head. “And you knew I’d keep you off the island. I was your ticket.”

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