Page 120 of Pierce Me

“Yeah,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Lean back against my arm,” I tell her. I support her weight as she floats on her back, and she closes her eyes, trusting me. “You’re a natural, well done.”

She tips up her head to the blue sky, her hair fanning around her, dark with water. There are droplets on her eyelashes, her lips.

She looks happy.

And it’s worth me going through hell to make her so.

“Hey!” Jude yells as soon as he sees her, “Ed is here!”

He treads water with swift strokes until he reaches us, his face radiant with true joy as he faces Eden. He rarely smiles so fully. His thin face is stretched over his teeth as if it’s not used to being happy. I guess I’m wearing a similar expression. Eden does that to people.

“Get over here, Ed!” Skye joins in, and she swims to him, leaving me behind. Well, this is getting worse by the second.

Skye does a long dive under her and she giggles as he emerges next to her, shaking his yellow hair like an unruly dog. He sprinkles water all over her cheeks and she laughs.

“I didn’t know you were a swimmer,” he tells her. “That was a wicked jump you did. That deck is high! I almost peed myself I was so scared when I jumped.”

“Hey!” I yell at him. “Don’t fill the sea with your disgusting bodily fluids.”

“What if I do? This is not a pool,” he says, laughing.

Eden showers him with a splash of her hand and he bursts laughing, splashing her back. I move closer to her, worried that she might swallow water, but she’s too busy playing with him to notice that it’s getting in her mouth.

She dunks Jude and he comes up laughing so hard he nearly drowns.

“Sorry,” Eden says to him, looking panicked, and a murderous frenzy seizes me for no reason at all. “Sorry, are you ok? Did I do that too hard?”

She’s never dunked anyone before, has she?

Why does that make me so sad, all of a sudden? And so incredibly jealous of my best friend?

Help!I want to scream.Someone help me. I am drowning inside my own head.

“I am totally fine, but how are you not freezing your ass off, Ed?” Jude asks her, spitting water.

“It’s Eden,” I correct him, suddenly annoyed that he calls her ‘Ed’. When did that happen? When did they give her a special nickname already?She is mine, a possessive, childish voice screams in my head. I duck underwater to escape it. It comes with me.

It will not drown.

When I resurface, which, by the way, makes zero difference in my ability to breathe, Jude and Eden are chatting while treading water.

“My sisters call me En,” she says to him and I stop moving. Sisters? She’s never mentioned having sisters to me, not even once. And they call her ‘En’? And she’s sharing this with Jude and not me?

She never even told me about her sisters. Not once, and we were together for two years.

What the f—?

“Hey, you ok?” Jude’s sharp question to Eden jolts me out of my murderous thoughts.

“I’m tired,” Eden whispers and, with no warning at all, she starts to sink.

Jude acts with the speed of lightning. Few people realize how quickly drowning can occur. It can happen in a heartbeat when you've hit your limit. Exhaustion seeps into your arms, which are weary from battling the cold and the current, until they give out. Then gravity takes over.

I start swimming towards her like a madman, my arms pounding the water as if I’m trying to cut through concrete, my heart pounding in my ears. I see her head go under and my breath stops; I won’t reach her in time, there’s no way, even though I’m swimming faster than I’ve ever done before.

“Eden!” I scream, but her name gets swallowed by the sea.

---