Page 90

It didn’t make me brave and it didn’t make the cave wider. But I now had enough room to think about what came next.

The water was over my ankles now. My feet were half numb, half screaming cold. The sea was coming back to claim the cave. I could have stayed there and cried and sobbed and called Damian’s name until he came in after me, and he would have.

At some point, while all that worked its way through my mind, my breath had steadied. My thoughts had stopped colliding with me. They were landing almost in order.

All my life, I’d thought courage felt like heat in my blood, rising bold and bright and golden to burn the fear away. Now I knew better. It felt like standing ankle-deep in freezing water in the throat of the earth, shaking so hard I could barely stay upright, and understanding that the fear could scream as loud as it liked and I didn’t have to obey it. So I put one foot in front of the other and I retraced my steps in the dark. I hit the wall three times. I put my hand into a knot of wet seaweed, but I kept moving. And then the air thinned enough to slide into my lungs, and the sound of the tide grew louder than my own breath, then louder still, and then I was out.

Damian had me before I was all the way through, his arm around me, guiding me back to the beach.

“You stayed,” he said.

“I wanted to run.”

“I know. But you didn’t.”

He pulled me in, and I let him, shaking against his chest. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it. You were afraid and you stayed anyway. Nobody could’ve taught you that. You had to find it yourself.”

He took off his jacket and placed it over my shoulders. It was warm, far too big, and smelled like him.

We hiked up the path, a flashlight from his pocket now lighting the way. The flashlight made the trail look narrower, a pale, uneven ribbon cut between gorse and wet grass. The cliff dropped away to our left. I couldn’t see the bottom, only hear the waves below, smashing and withdrawing, smashing and withdrawing, as if the sea were trying to erase our footprints before we reached the truck.

By the time we got to the top, I was breathing hard enough that each inhale burned.

Damian dug blankets out of the trunk. I clutched them, shivering and clammy, my hands and feet numb.

He turned on the engine and blasted the heat, but it wouldn’t reach my fingers or my soaking feet. I buried myself under the blankets.

The drive back was quiet. When I closed my eyes, I still felt the surf around my ankles. I still heard the steady drip of water in the dark.

When he pulled up to my apartment, the last thing I wanted was to be alone. He opened the door for me, and we walked to the porch.

Inside, I flipped on the two lamps because I had a strict policy against the glaring overhead light. I pulled the blankets and his jacket from my shoulders.

“You need to get warm,” he said.

I showered. When I came back into the living room, wearing pajamas, two mugs of tea were on the coffee table. Damian sat on the sofa. It was the most appealing my sofa had ever looked.

“Thank you.”

“It’s the least I can do,” he said. His gaze moved once over me, registering the thin layer of cotton I was wearing, then snapped back to my eyes as if he’d told himself off.

I was still a little shaky, but the hot water had thawed my fingers and toes. I sat down next to him and picked up the mug. It was hot and comforting in my hands.

I drank, set the mug down, and looked at him.

He understood.

He took me in his arms, and I lay there, against his chest, until the rhythm of his breathing was louder in my mind than the rhythm of water dripping against stone.

“I’m so mortified,” I said, muffled against him.

He looked at me like I’d baffled him. “Why?”

“Because I fell apart.”

“That was the whole point. You put yourself back together again.”

That made me laugh, and the laugh felt warm and balmy and golden.