‘It’s only a few waves.’
‘It’s okay foryou, Miss Former Olympian. You know what you’re doing. I’m built for land, not water.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘I swam for the county when I was fourteen,’ she clarifies, ‘which hardly makes me Rebecca Adlington.’ She’d been rake-thin back then, she recalls, with broad shoulders and a permanent smell of chlorine about her that she’d try to mask with Body Shop shower gels and cheap perfumes endorsed by the popstars of the day.
She’s yet to win another step from him. He can be so maddening. ‘Let’s not forget,’ she calls to him, ‘whose stupid idea these challenges were.Yours, remember? What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘My testicles never descend again?’
‘The way you’re carrying on, I’m doubting you had any in the first place.’ With that, she turns around, holds her breath and begins her descent towards deeper water, where a tall wave promptly catches her unawares with a cold slap across her thighs and chest, raising red pinpricks in her skin. She quietly curses.
As if in answer, Damon appears beside her, letting fly a string of expletives of his own, only he isn’t keeping anything under his breath.
And then, like Melissa, he’s up to his neck in the water.
‘How far are we going?’ he asks, and adds a theatrical gasp.
She gazes ahead, towards the circular bright yellow swim buoys arranged loosely in a box formation.
She nods at them. ‘There and back again.’
‘They’re miles away!’
‘Bah. A hundred and fifty metres at the most.’
She leads the way, choosing breaststroke over front crawl as she doesn’t want to leave him behind and offer him another excuse to complain. She turns to check he hasn’t tiptoed back to shore, just as a wave engulfs his head. ‘Fuck this!’ he yells and spits out a mouthful of the salty water. Her smirk is good-natured, though.
Onward.
Melissa assumed that once she began to swim, her body would warm up or she’d grow acclimatised to the temperature. But neither has happened. The current is challenging but she’s strong enough to persist until finally she reaches the string of buoys, each with the words ‘swim area’ painted in black lettering across the sides. Damon arrives soon after and they both tread water, hanging on to the ropes that link the buoys.
‘See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Delivered while panting, this is less than convincing. Melissa holds her hand up in the air and he reluctantly high-fives her. ‘It’s invigorating,’ she adds. ‘Ready to head back?’
‘Hell yes,’ he replies. ‘Does Uber run a jet ski service?’
They begin their return journey as they came, with her taking the lead.
This route, however, proves more challenging. The tide is against them and she’s forced to shut her eyes as she swims into the waves. ‘Not much further,’ she yells over her shoulder. She suspects Damon is silently cursing her, because she hears nothing from him. She can only begin to imagine the fresh hell he is concocting for March’s challenge.
‘I said it’s not much longer,’ she repeats, and turns her head.
Only, she can’t see him behind her.
‘Damon?’ she shouts, scanning the sea for him. She expects to spot his head emerging from a wave and for them to continue. But there is no sign of him.
Fear envelops her in the space of a heartbeat.
‘Damon?’ she shouts at the top of her lungs, then focuses her attention on the beach, in case somehow she became disorientated and he’s swum past her. But he’s not there either.
There is only one other place he can be.
Under the water.
Chapter 3
Melissa
Fear has Melissa in a chokehold as she swims back to where she thinks she last saw Damon, but it’s such a disorientating environment, she can’t be certain.
