Page 53 of The Love Haters

“Two down, infinity to go,” I agreed.

“We’ll get there,” Beanie said then, her voice warm. “You’re definitely getting the hang of it.”

BUT WAS I?

After we hung up, I blissfully admired my ankles for about three more seconds before remembering with horror that today was a swim-lesson day. Hutch—I checked the time—would be arriving here in under an hour, and I hadn’t prepared emotionally in any way. Much less brushed my teeth, or had breakfast, or showered.

Wait—didyou shower right before getting into a pool?

A quick search turned up anotdefinitiveyes and no. Depending on how you felt about showering. And pools.

You might think that the prospect of hanging out in a swimsuit with Hutch might seem less appalling to me now that I knew him better. Or now that we’d formed a fragile alliance at the air station and agreed to carpool. Or possibly now that I’d met my humiliation deductible with that splinter-removal situation.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

It wasn’tlessmortifying to see Hutch now. It wasmore.

Plus, we were meeting back at the same place—the Starlite pool. We were revisiting the scene of the crime. We wouldn’t bemoving awayfrom the memory of what he’d been forced to do to me, we’d berevivingit.

Add to that: now he was my subject. Officially. I’d spent a whole day with him—following him around, arguing with him, psychoanalyzing him, studying him, filming him, and noting his surprisingly charming habit of humming “Heart and Soul” to himself all the time.

Now I was a hundred times more aware of his shoulders, and the length of his stride when he kept a few paces ahead of me, and the exact spot on his nose where his aviators rested. Now I had noticed the dimple in his chin—more of a groove than a dot—and couldn’t un-notice it. Now I knew how much everyone seemed to admire him, how he chewed on his lower lip when he was thinking, and how, even when he was smiling, he never fully erased that serious darkness in his eyes.

Now I liked him more, I guess.

Which made me want to prance around in front of him in a bathing suitso much less.

Though, at this point, what I did or didn’t want had kind of ceased to matter.

Because Lieutenant JG Carlos Alonso had just emailed me yesterday with the date of the scheduled SWET training required by my company’s insurance.

So, of course, I googled SWET training—and realized it was the upside-down-helicopter, escape-hell training that Cole had mentioned back at the start. Training I’d been hoping he’d made up to scare me. But nope. It was real. SWET stood for Shallow Water Egress Training—aka seat-belting people into a fake helicopter seat welded inside a metal frame and thenturning it upside down underwater.

Oh—no. No, no, no.

They couldn’t really be making me do that.

I rifled through my file folder on Hutch and found his number, making a new contact for him so that I could send the text:SWET training??????????????

To which he replied:You’ll be fine

To which I replied:Or DIE IN A WATERY GRAVE

And that’s when my phone rang. And it was Hutch.

And I didn’t even say hello. I just answered with, “Don’t make me do this.”

“I’mnot making you do anything. Your company is.”

I shook my head. “I’m dead. This is the end.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Hutch said.

“How, exactly?” I demanded. “I can’t evendog-paddle! You want to turn me upside down like Houdini?”

“We’ll work on some tricks.”

“Okay, look, I didn’t mean to,” I confessed then, my voice starting to tremble, “but after I googled SWET training, I accidentally wound up watching a few videos of exactly how it works… and I don’t think…” I took a deep breath. “I’m really not sure that I can actually do it. I suspect I’m going to have a genuine panic attack. And then I’ll cry and confess everything, and then I’ll get fired for being a totally unqualified liar—and rightly so,because I am—and then that’s it for the rest of my life: I’ll be a bitter, unemployable outcast who never reached her potential because she couldn’t swim.”

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