She emerged from the surface. Stared him straight in the eyes and her mouth took over before her brain could process what she was about to say.
“If I run. You can always try to catch me.” She’d said it and it was out there. She couldn’t shove it back in her mouth, so she made wide eyes at him and said as coyly as she could. “If you can.”
She fell backward into the depths and backstroked away.
Tanner took the bait, though he didn’t cannonball into the water. He sat on the edge, pushed off with his arms, and slipped into the water.
Then he breaststroked toward her, making excellent time, swimming faster than she could, and catching her around the waist.
Time stilled when his fingers pressed against her bare back, holding her body against his. The slippery skin of their stomachs pressed together and only wet cloth separated his hard length from her flesh.
“Tanner?” she said his name as a question.
He dropped his forehead to hers. “Yeah?”
“Sometimes running is the answer.” Carefully, she pushed off from him and backstroked away once more. This time she made it a touch harder for him to catch up.
But he was faster than she was. He caught her, pulled her to him—her back against his front this time. “I spent a long time running. From everything. I know all about it.”
Her body begged her to relax against him. To let him tell her all about it. But—
“You don’t need to do this,” she said, softly.
Make it his personal goal to get her to stop being who she had to be to survive.
His hot breath played against her ear; the strength of his arms cinched around her waist.
“You mean explain why I understand?” he asked.
Well, no, that hadn’t precisely been her reasoning.
“I mean, say things you don’t want to say,” she said, since that sounded way better than a deep dive into heavy emotions.
They should reserve heavy emotions for like the tenth date. Or even the eleventh. Or even the third… since they wouldn’t be making it that far.
He turned her in his arms, so they treaded water face to face again. This time he left space between their bodies. A few inches that somehow sparked the desire she’d been nursing even further.
“My parents. They’re criminals,” he said, wiping out any trace of that desire with a cold bucket of reality.
“They went to prison. I went into the system,” he continued.
The warm water seemed to genuinely get colder as they both treaded water inches from each other.
“First, when they got caught? They ran… without me,” he said, his voice scratchy like sandpaper.
She reached for his jaw, ran her thumb there down along the curve of his neck.
“They left me,” he continued. “Then I ran… a lot. I used to think that if I ran, then the past wouldn’t catch me.” He closed his eyes. Paused. Opened them. “I was wrong. I ran from a past that wasn’t even chasing me.”
She pushed away again. Swam to the edge, holding herself up on the ledge with an arm, turning to him.
“Why’d you stop running?” She didn’t really want to ask, and yet, she really, really did.
“I realized the thing I was running from wasn’t a pair of crappy parents, or a history of bouncing around. The thing I ran from was me.” He met her at the wall of the pool. Seemed to think hard about what came next. “That’s the funny thing about running from yourself. You can’t ever really get away. It’s like playing keep away with a shadow. The light will dim, and the shadow will fall into the dark, but then it’s there again. Usually when you don’t expect it. You know?”
Oh boy, did she.
And what the hell was going on with her? Her situation was nothing like his. It wasn’t like her parents left her—they were always there for her. A steady presence when she needed a place to rest from all the running.
