Page 165 of The Love Haters

“My cell phone?”

I wrinkled my nose. “No—sorry. That went down with the ship.”

Upside: so did all the crazy texts I’d sent him.

“But I did save,” I went on, patting my jeans pocket, “your mom’s pennies.”

Hutch checked the sight of my bulging pocket, and then turned to look down at the spot where the houseboat had gone down, then back at my pocket again. “All of them?”

I shrugged. “I figured, if I really started drowning, I could empty my pockets. But I’d hold on to them for you until then.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

“To apologize?”

“And to thank you for kissing me on the tarmac—even if you didn’t want to.”

“You think I didn’t want to?”

“I thought you might hate me—for real.”

Now Hutch shook his head. “Did you think that kiss yesterday was ahatekiss?”

“I’m not sure?” I said. “I’m not even a hundred percent sure right now that you aren’t a hallucination.”

“It wasn’t a hate kiss,” Hutch said.

“No?” I asked.

“No,” Hutch said. “Want to know what kind of kiss it was?”

“What kind?”

“This kind,” he said. And then, right there, the two of us harnessed all alone together on a cable in the middle of the sky, during a peaceful miracle of an interlude between everything that had just happened and everything that was yet to come, in front of an entire flight crew of Coastieswho would certainly tease him about it for the rest of his life—he pulled me close and kissed me.

In a way that left no doubt about what he wanted.

Or who we had become to each other.

Or how he really felt about love.

And then Hutch pulled away to say, “It wasn’t a hate kiss. It was alovekiss. In case you couldn’t tell.”

And then he dove back in for another one.

Epilogue

HOW DID THEpromo turn out?

Better than I ever hoped for, honestly.Chef’s kiss.

All those things Cole had wanted me to capture? I captured them and more. The excitement. The adrenaline. The beauty. The stakes. The courage and self-sacrifice.

It’s all there and then some.

Read between the shots, and you can also tell that the videographer was falling madly in love with the subject. But, as with everything else, all that love just makes it better.

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