“Keep going.”
“You’re out of your mind.” But she’s gripping my arm tighter, not pulling away.
“Probably. Keep going.”
Waist deep now, the water surging against us, her teeth chattering so hard I can hear them.
But she’s smiling. The kind where her whole face scrunches up and she looks about ten years younger, like a carefree kid.
I pull her deeper and she wraps her arms around my neck because the waves keep knocking her off balance. Her skin is freezing where it presses against mine, but neither of us lets go. The ocean lifts us, sets us down, lifts us again. Salt spray catches on her eyelashes and the late afternoon sun turns everything around us warm and gold.
I want to stay in this moment until the tide pulls us both under.
“You’re in the ocean, Nat.”
She laughs, breathless and half-disbelieving. “I’m in the ocean.”
She sounds so startled by her own happiness that I can’t help smiling.
I tighten my arms around her waist. “One down. Long list to go.”
She looks at me then, and there’s nothing guarded about it. Her face is wide open and maybe a little scared of how good this feels. Her fingers curl tighter against the back of my neck, her pulse hammering where her wrist presses against my skin, and she opens her mouth like she’s about to say something but doesn’t. Just holds on.
I don’t ask. I just hold on too.
We stay until we can’t feel our feet.
Then we stumble back to shore, soaked and shaking, sand sticking to every inch of exposed skin, and jog up the beach toward the house.
My arm is around her shoulders, and she’s pressed into my side, and we’re both laughing at nothing, at everything, at the fact that we just threw ourselves into the Atlantic in November like two people with absolutely no common sense.
At the back door, Natalia digs through her bag with numb fingers while I bounce on my heels trying to generate heat. She pulls out her phone, a hair tie, a lip balm, but no house key.
“You’re kidding me.” She digs again, more frantic this time, then presses her face to the glass and lets out a groan. “The key’s on the coffee table. I can see it sitting right there.”
“Want me to break a window?”
“On a rental? No.” She’s already crouching in front of the door lock, pulling two bobby pins from her hair.
She bends one into an L-shape with her teeth, slides it into the bottom of the keyhole, and works the second one in above it with a kind of practiced steadiness that tells me she’s done this before. Maybe more than once.
Thirty seconds. Maybe less.
Click.
She pushes the door open and stands up, brushing off her knees. I stare at her with my jaw hanging open.
“Where the hell did you learn to do that?”
She shrugs, but she doesn’t look at me. “My father used to lock my bedroom door from the outside. You learn things.”
The sentence lands between us, heavy and wrong.
I file it away and don’t push, because her jaw is set in a way that tells me the topic is closed. But I won’t forget it. I’m building a picture of the man who raised her, and every new detail makes me want to put my fist through something with his name on it.
“Shower,” she announces, already hurrying through the house with her arms wrapped around herself. “I can’t feel my toes.”
I follow her inside, both of us leaving a trail of saltwater and sand across the tile. She disappears into the bathroom, and a second later I hear the shower kick on.
