Page 66 of Hold Me Under (Water, Air, Earth, Fire 1)

“What?” he gripes when I make a face.

He catches me ogling him as he changes his shirt outside the shop. Grinning, tongue in his cheek, he arches his back and pulls his new shirt on extra slow, letting me appreciate how carelessly low his shorts are hanging off his hips. “Your turn.”

“Unlike you, I don’t strip in the middle of the street.”

We’re able to use the atlas from the glovebox to take us fifteen minutes out of town, heading steadily downhill through a bunch of tiny, picture-perfect farms. Victor’s eyes light up when we pull into a car park in front of an endless stretch of sand and sea.

Before I can even turn the car off, he’s gone. I lean back and watch him sprint across the sand, a streak of gold and blond that charges straight into the blue water and disappears.

Feeling like a grouchy old dad trying to corral his family on a day out, I change shirts and wrap our snacks up in the old one before sedately following the dirt path through scrubby grass until my feet dig into warm sand.

Aside from a few beach umbrellas and people walking their dogs, it’s quiet. I wander in the direction with the fewest people, hunting for a comfortable spot to spend the day not swimming. Maybe I’ll finish Peyton’s book, find out if the adulteress was a ghost after all.

I find a little alcove under the hills lining the beach, a big log surrounded by a snarl of driftwood someone must have cleaned off the sand and stacked here. Satisfied, I settle down in the shade, wishing Victor hadn’t stolen my sunglasses.

Taking out my phone, I check for messages from Mom. Part of me wants to call her, tell her she was right. The boy with the pretty eyes is important. He’s real. And right now, I’m having a hard time convincing myself he wasn’t meant, from the beginning of fucking time, to be right here.

My thumb is hovering over thecallbutton before I remember that all of this is a dream—the wind that smells of cypress trees, the fragile white shells catching the sun. In approximately twelve hours, we’re going to wake up and start counting down the minutes until we pretend this never happened. Until we try to forget.

So instead I open the camera and turn around to frame a photo of myself in front of the blue water. A tired grin, a thumbs up. I send it off and put my phone away.

He comes loping up the beach an hour later, dripping everywhere, holding his dry clothes in one hand. “You look like a grouchy old dad up here.”

“I even bought sunscreen.” I wave the green bottle. “For those of us without perfect tans.”

Digging in his shorts, he pulls out a cigarette and tucks it between his lips. “Here.” He claps his hands together and I toss him the sunscreen. He shakes his head at my look. “I didn’t light it today. Baby steps.”

His big, lean hands work along my shoulders and down my back, pausing occasionally so he can kiss or nip the back of my neck and squirt more sunscreen on his palm. He moves slowly, kneading at my muscles, and his fingers keep straying to places that don’t need sun protection. While he works, I open my wallet on my lap, hunting for a place to stuff my last few euro bills.

“Hey.” He leans over my shoulder, using one finger to flip through the contents of my wallet. “You still have it.” When he holds up Danny’s card, the holographic stripe flashing in the sun, I have to bite back the instinct to grab it away.

“Of course I still have it. It’s important to me.”

“Really?” He flops on his back in the sand next to me, holding it over his head and studying himself, six years younger and so much more innocent. Or so I thought; now I’m not so sure. I can see in his eyes that he doesn’t like looking at it. “Why?”

“I told you all this before, when we first met.” When he opens his mouth, I hold up my hand. “Let me guess: you don’t remember anything that doesn’t interest you.”

He waggles his eyebrows at me. “Tell me again. I like listening to you talk.”

But when I try to say the first word, there’s something thick and painful blocking my throat. I close my mouth again, confused. “Sorry, I—” My chest contracts and suddenly my eyes are threatening to fill up and it’s so strange, because this hasn’t happened for years. Something about Victor makes me raw, everything so close to the surface.

He squirms until his head is resting on my hip as he keeps turning the card around, front and back, upside down, like somewhere he’s going to find an answer that explains how we got here, what happened to us.

“My cousin was obsessed with you. He had an entire scrapbook dedicated to you.”

“Oh, boy.” He closes his eyes. “Usually they’re thirteen-year-old girls.”

“He drowned a couple of weeks before the Rio Olympics.” He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes open and find my face. “He wasn’t a strong enough swimmer. My mom had her first dementia episode and wandered away from the lake. I don’t know what happened exactly, but he was gone before anyone could get there. I almost drowned trying to save him.”

“That’s why you hate the water.” His voice sounds flat, matter-of-fact. When I look down, he’s watching the surf.

“Anyway, the last thing I promised him before he died was that I’d get this card signed. That’s why I came after you in the first place.”

The silence goes on for so long I regret bringing it up at all. Finally, he sits up and rubs the salt breeze from his eyes, pushes his hair back. “You got a pen?”

“No.”

He sighs. “Trust you to make this hard.” Before I can answer, he hops to his feet and jogs down the beach, stopping to pester every single sunbathing couple and sandcastle-building family until he comes back with a battered ballpoint pen with no cap. He scribbles it on his palm until the ink begins to flow.

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