I tread water. It's easy, even with his weight. He's so light that holding him in the water barely changes my buoyancy. I kick slow and steady, keeping us upright, keeping our heads above the swells, and I talk.
"The water is so salty that it's easy to float in it. And it's warm. Actually, it's too hot. It's like bathwater and right now acold shower would feel better. Under different circumstances, this might be a perfect day."
My voice is calm. The voice I use when I'm talking to someone who needs to feel like the world isn't ending. "The sun's out. We're floating with a beautiful view in every direction. If you took away the whole nearly-drowning part, this could be romantic. Two guys, holding each other. One in pink shorts and the other in boxers. Very cinematic. Very Nicholas Sparks."
His breathing slows. Just a fraction.
"I'm scared," he mutters against my neck.
"Don't be scared, baby. I've got you. I promise I'll get you back to that sand if it's the last thing I do and trust me, it won't be. We'll be fine."
"Why is your heart beating so fast if you're not scared?" he asks.
I keep treading water slowly.
"Well, there's two reasons. One, it scared the shit out of me when I saw you in the water. I had to do my Olympic swimming performance to get out here to you. And two, I've got the most gorgeous guy in Florida wrapped around me, so there's that."
His heart rate is dropping. I can feel it against my chest, still fast but not the frantic pace from a minute ago.
"I could do this all day, you know. Just tread water out here and hold you. All day and all night if I had to. I grew up in this water. I used to swim out past the second sandbar when I was a kid and float on my back. Spend the day watching dolphins or clouds. My mama would stand on the shore and yell at me to come back to help clean the bar. I'd pretend I couldn't hear her. Which was a lie. You could hear my mamayell from three counties away. Eventually she got the bright idea to start blowing the car horn when she needed me. Three blasts of a car horn meant I'd better get my ass back to the bar."
His grip loosens by one degree. His face is still buried in my neck and his legs are still locked around my waist. He's not letting go, not even close, but the desperation is shifting. He's choosing to hold on instead of clinging.
"The water is about eighty-five degrees right now," I say. "Perfect bath temperature if it wasn't so damn hot. You picked a good day for a swim, terrible judgment aside. The visibility is probably thirty feet. If you looked down right now you could see straight to the bottom. There's probably a sea turtle down there wondering what two idiots are doing floating around in his living room. They crawl up and lay eggs on these same beaches every year. It's a miracle really. How they crawl past holes and beach chairs to find their spot. There's so many things I want to teach you about living here, Stormy. We've got so much good living left to do."
A sound against my shoulder. Small. Muffled. It might be a sob. At least he's breathing.
"You know what the sea turtle is thinking right now? He's thinking, 'That big one I understand. He's been in my water since he was a kid. But why is the little pink one out here? The small pink one does not belong here. The small pink one should be on land organizing spices.' And the sea turtle is right. This is all my fault for not telling you things you need to know."
Stormy shakes his head against me.
"The most important thing I should've told you about is the beach flags," I say. "They flipped them to double red while I was out which means the water is closed due to rip currents.You got caught in one. I'll teach you how to spot them. This won't happen again."
At the mention of rip currents, he grips me tighter again. Damn, I should've kept my mouth shut until I got him out of the water. It's a good thing I didn't mention the three bull sharks I saw from the balcony yesterday morning. If Stormy knew what was in this water, he'd never come back in.
"Can we still get back?" he chokes out.
"Sure, we can. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to swim us both back. To do that I need to touch you. I need to hold onto you while I swim, so I'm going to shift you to my side and keep one arm around you. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"
"Yes." He presses his mouth right against my neck.
"I need you to trust me even when it gets rough. We're going to swim down the beach to get out of this current and then we're going in where the big waves are breaking. It'll be wild. Waves are going to hit us hard now that the wind has picked up. We'll be doing some body surfing. Water is going to go over our heads and flip us around every which way. But where the waves break is better. The rip current that pulled you out isn't there. I'm going to get us through it. You just hold on to me."
"I'll hold on."
"I know you will. I've seen you hold onto that pocketknife of yours. This is just a bigger thing to hold onto. And significantly more handsome. I get to call myself handsome for at least twenty-four hours because I just saved your life."
I shift him to my left side, his arms around my neck, his body against my hip. My left arm wraps around his waist,holding him to me, and my right arm is free to swim. He's pressed against me from shoulder to knee and I can feel every rib through his skin, every ridge of bone.
I start swimming. Not toward shore. Parallel to it. East, away from the rip. It's slow going. I'm side-stroking with one arm while holding a hundred and forty pounds of an exhausted, shaking person with the other. The open water swells are pushing against us and my legs are doing most of the work.
But I know this water. I swim with the steady patience of a man who's been swimming out here his entire life.
The current releases us. I feel it let go, that invisible pull dropping away like someone cut a rope, and the water around us changes from that deceptive smooth pull to normal Gulf movement, swells and chop.
"Okay, it's showtime. We're heading in now."
I turn toward shore. It's far. Much further than I'd like. The rip current took us out a long way and I've been swimming parallel for maybe two hundred yards on top of that. The bar is visible but small, and the shoreline is a long swim, especially with dead weight on my hip. I put my head down and I start swimming to get us to shore.
