Page 167 of Offside Angle

“You’re impossible,” I gasp when he hits that spot inside me just right.

Santi bites down on my collarbone and smiles against my skin. “You love it.”

He’s right.

I really fucking do.

Later that evening, after showers and food and enough time for my legs to remember their purpose, we drive north to the stretch of beach in Miami where we grew up.

It feels different from Islamorada even though it’s still the same ocean. Less like somewhere we escaped to and more like somewhere my body remembers without permission. The sand is uneven beneath my feet in familiar ways, the shoreline curves exactly where I expect it to, and when the tide comes in, the moonlight catches on the water the same way it did when we were teenagers and thought ten years was an unimaginable amount of time.

We sit directly in the sand without bothering with a towel, knees drawn up and shoulders almost touching while the water rolls in and out ahead of us. For a while, neither of us says anything. There’s no need to fill the silence here, and after two weeks together I’ve gotten surprisingly good at letting one exist without immediately trying to murder it with sarcasm.

Unfortunately, silence also gives my brain opportunities.

“You’re thinking too loud again,” Santi says eventually.

I huff and keep my eyes on the water. “I hate that you know that.”

“You don’t.” He sounds completely unbothered. “You just hate that I’m right.”

I pick at a loose thread along the hem of my shorts while another wave reaches higher up the sand before retreating, dragging tiny shells and bits of seaweed back with it. The thought has been circling me for weeks, probably longer if I’m being generous with myself, and sitting here beside him makes avoiding it feel particularly stupid.

“I think I lost ten years because I was scared.”

Santi doesn’t answer immediately.

He keeps looking toward the water, but I see his expression change anyway. There’s no joke waiting, no easy reassurance, and when he finally speaks, his voice is quieter than it was before.

“Maybe,” he says. “But you came back.”

I turn toward him.

The moon catches the side of his face, the familiar shape of his nose and mouth, dark hair shifting whenever the breeze picks up. I’ve spent the last two weeks looking at him constantly, apparently, and somehow sitting here makes him look different.

Or maybe just older.

Not old. He’d kill me.

But not seventeen anymore either.

“You waited.”

That gets his attention.

Santi looks at me, and the smile that touches his mouth is small and a little sad before he shakes his head.

“I lived,” he corrects softly. “And then you came back.”

It hurts more than if he’d agreed with me.

Of course he lived. He had a whole life in those ten years, and so did I. People we loved, places we went, careers we built, versions of ourselves that existed without the other one anywhere nearby. He wasn’t frozen somewhere waiting for me to stop being an idiot, and I wasn’t secretly miserable every day without him.

We lived.

And then, somehow, we found our way back to the same place.

I lean sideways until my shoulder presses against his, and Santi shifts closer instead of away. We sit there watching the water we used to race each other into as teenagers, and for once I don’t try to decide whether ten years was wasted or necessary or something in between. I’m not sure there’s an answer that would change anything anyway.