“Man,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s just so sad.”
“Which part exactly…?” you say.
Her face comes into focus, her hair dripping around her.
“That’s not what love should feel like, Case. You know that, right? It’s not supposed to be a curse.”
“I know,” you say.
Only you’re not sure if you do.
You’ve only been in love once, and that’s exactly how it felt. Feels. Unrequited and impossible and dangerous. You reach a hand up to touch the canoe, and it still burns the tips of your fingers. The roar of the fire is dying, but it’s hard to say if it’s safe to open the lid yet. The fact that you can no longer truly feel the lower half of your body seems like a bad thing. Up until minutes ago, you thought you were going to be burned to death in a wildfire. Now you’re starting to wonder about hypothermia.
“I haven’t even felt like a person,” you say.
She grabs your hand again and squeezes hard.
“Since it happened,” you continue. “I haven’t felt human. Like, when I think about myself, I see myself from really high up, like I’m not even totally in my body. My therapist called it disassociation, but I think it’s something even more than that.”
“Like you’re just visiting,” she says.
“Yes!” you say. “Like I don’t live here anymore.”
Diana dips slightly below the surface and comes up spitting out water. She takes a second to recalibrate.
“Hey, listen,” she says. “Listen to me. Sean loved you more than anyone in the world. That doesn’t just go away in an instant.He would have forgiven you. He wasn’t going to hate you forever. Maybe for a little while. But not for good.”
She swims closer.
“Maybe,” you say. “It was hard to tell what he felt.”
“He never let you see who he really was. That’s not your fault. He didn’t do that with anyone.”
“Not even you?” you ask.
“Not even me,” she says. “I caught glimpses like you did, I think. But he kept a lot of the pain in. And then it came out in weird and dangerous ways. I don’t know what we could have done about that.”
You can see her eyes now, and they are right in front of yours.
“We didn’t kill him, Case.”
She closes her eyes.
“In some ways, we barely knew him.”
She puts an arm around you then, and you see as she gets closer that her teeth are chattering uncontrollably. You press your head against hers. Her skin is freezing, and you’re sure yours is too. When you kiss, your lips are cold. She kisses you back, and her breath is warm, but it only lasts a moment before the world around you comes rushing back in and you become certain of one thing: If you stay in this water much longer, there are going to be serious consequences for both of you. You don’t have to be an outdoors expert to understand that.
“Shore,” you say. “We have to swim for it.”
“I think the canoe is too hot to move,” she says. “We’ll have to go underneath it.”
“On three?” you ask.
She points to the water and counts you off.
