“But I think I’ll go out for a bit,” I said. “Leave you to your morning rituals.”
“Okay,” he breathed out. “You mind if I join you in a bit, or do you want to be alone?”
Dreamily, I glanced up at him. “Please join me. We can make the cinnamon rolls later.”
After I washed and dressed, I slipped into Kai’s spare rain boots and made my way to the beach. It was still quite early, and a thin fog had settled over the gray-blue slate of the sea.
Behind me the reeds whistled with high wind, and before me the saltwater worked the coastline sleek, nearly translucent. When I stepped closer, the sea spray dampened my clothes, the water lapping over my boots, rinsing them clean of particles of sand.
For several moments I stood alone and still, breathing in and out and listening to the hissing of the waves and the wail of the albatrosses lifting themselves higher in the sky. Then Kai emerged next to me, looking refreshed and fully awake, dressed in dark wash jeans and the same sweater from earlier.
“Here,” he said, extending a cup of coffee toward me. “Some warmth.”
I accepted the cup gratefully, my frozen palms throbbing hot against it. “Thank you.”
He took his cigarette pack out of the pocket of his jeans and offered me one. In companionable silence we smoked, drank our coffees, and watched the horizon clear, long, golden sunbeams piercing through the blanket of clouds to paint the water glitter-yellow.
Inexpressibly moved by the beauty of this place, the splendor of the sky, and the grandness of the sea, I threw my cigarette in the portable ashtray Kai had brought for us, set it down on the wet sand along with my cup, and announced, “I want to go swimming.”
Kai raised his brows, surprised. “It’s going to be awfully cold.”
“I don’t care,” I claimed, already slipping out of the boots and my socks.
“Wait,” he laughed, touching his fingers to the crook of my elbow. “Now?”
I shrugged as I continued with unbuttoning my jeans. “I don’t have a swimsuit anyway.”
In my tank top and underwear, the air felt razor-sharp, the sea spray brutal. The water slid over my bare feet and crawled up to my ankles, so aggressively cold that I began to shiver, my heart striking shocked in my temples.
“Oh fuck,” I heard myself gasp.
Kai chuckled, pulling the clothes off his body—sweater and undershirt and jeans. In his plain blue boxer shorts, he looked significantly more bare than I felt, the muscles of his chest and abdomen glistening as he pranced in without a second thought, used to the feeling of it. He submerged his thighs and stomach and arms until finally the water closed around his neck.
“Come on,” he called out to me, his breath labored and his face flushed from the cold.
Little by little, I let the tide drag me in, my nerve endings shrilling from the sting. Panting, with my nose streaming already, I pushed through until my tiptoes were barely able to touch the seabed.
Then a terrible fear came over me:Do I know how to swim?
Keeping my eyes wide open, I immersed my head fully. Clear, black nothingness encased me. There was only the faint refracted outline of Kai’s body and the muted hum of the sea, its pressure building inside my ears.
Fossilized in saltwater, I tried moving my legs and arms to circulate my blood and keep myself afloat, but they’d become too stiff, too uncoordinated, like they didn’t entirely belong to me anymore.
For a pain-stunned second, I imagined that this was exactly how the lost version of myself felt inside my head without an exit to the world. You would think her numb from the brutal cold and the pure physical exhaustion of trying to rise to the surface. But she wasn’t numb. She was in quiet, slow agony.
Horrible,horriblefeeling to think of her—of me—like that. Trapped, alone, desperate for something I couldn’t articulate even in the privacy of my thoughts.
I could feel a scream pushing up the siphon of my throat, but then something sleek brushed against my stomach. Kai’s hands, I realized, and surrendered to them completely.
The top of my head broke the surface, just to have another, fresher rush of wind lash over me. I heaved for breath, salt stinging in my ears and burning in my sinuses. With the little movement I had left in my limbs, I reached for him, touching my fingers to the tightened skin below his navel.
“You okay?” he asked, brushing the wet hair from my eyes.
His face, almost pearlescent in the sun, was floating a mere grain of sand from mine, his lips purple, his dark lashes dripping seawater down his cheeks.
“I can’t feel my limbs,” I panted, not only hearing the chatter of my teeth but also feeling my skull grinding under the fragile skin of my face.
“Give it a moment,” exhaled Kai, his hands beneath the surface skimming up my sides.
