My clothes turned virtually transparent, the wet cotton billowing and undulating like the fins of exotic sea creatures. One of my hands encountered the diagonal scar at the side of Joe’s chest. Hesitantly, I let my fingertips follow the slight ridge.
“This is from the boat accident?”
“Uh-huh. Surgery for a blood clot and a partially collapsed lung.” One of his hands ventured beneath the drifting hem of my tunic to find the bare skin of my waist. “You know what that whole damn experience taught me?” he asked softly.
I shook my head, staring into his eyes, seeing reflected glimmers of sunset like tiny rushlights.
“Don’t waste a minute of your life,” he said. “Look for every reason you can to be happy. Don’t hold back, thinking you’ll have more time later… none of us can ever be sure about that.”
“That’s what makes life so scary,” I said soberly.
Joe shook his head, smiling. “That’s what makes it great.” He lifted me higher, closer, and my hands crept around his neck.
Just before his lips met mine, a sound attracted his attention. He glanced over his shoulder as someone approached. “What do you want?” he asked irritably.
I started as I heard his brother Jack’s laconic reply. “Heard someone holler.”
Mortified to be caught in the pool with nowhere to hide, I shrank against Joe’s chest.
“Did Avery fall in?” I heard Jack ask.
“No, I dunked her.”
“Nice move” came the deadpan reply. “Want me to bring y’all a couple of towels?”
“Yeah, later. For now, I’d like some privacy.”
“Sure thing.”
After Jack left, I wriggled free from Joe and swam toward the shallow end. He kept pace with me, surging through the water with the ease of a dolphin. When I could stand with the water at chest level, I stopped and turned to face him with a scowl. “I don’t like to be embarrassed. And I don’t like to be pulled into swimming pools!”
“Sorry.” He tried to look and sound contrite, with only limited success. “I wanted to get your attention.”
“My attention?”
“Yeah.” He moved around me slowly, his gaze holding mine. “You’ve been ignoring me all day.”
“I was working.”
“And ignoring me.”
“All right,” I admitted, “I was ignoring you. I don’t know how we’re supposed to behave in front of people. I’m not even sure what we’re doing, and —” I broke off uneasily. “Joe, stop circling like that. I feel like I’m in the pool with a bull shark.”
He reached for me, pulling me forward until I was lifted off my feet, the momentum floating me against him. Pressing a scorching kiss to my neck, he murmured, “I’d like to take a bite out of you.”
As I tried to wriggle out of his arms, he gathered me up, deliberately keeping me off balance. “Come back here.”
“What are you doing?”
“I want to talk to you.” He took me to deeper water, where I was forced to cling to the hard slopes of his shoulders.
“About what?” I asked anxiously.
“About the problem we’re having.”
“Just because I don’t want to have a relationship with you doesn’t mean I have a problem.”
“I agree. But if you wanted to have a relationship and you couldn’t because you were afraid of something… then you would have a problem. And it’d be my problem, too.”
The skin of my face tightened until I could feel my cheeks pulsing. “I want to get out of the pool.”
“Let me say something – just give me a couple of minutes – and then I’ll let you go. Deal?”
I responded with a quick nod.
There was something spare and focused in the way he spoke. “Everyone has secrets they don’t want anyone to know. When you reckon all of it up… all those things we did or were done to us… all our sins and mistakes and guilty pleasures… those secrets are the sum of who we are. Sometimes you have to take a chance on letting someone in, because your gut tells you that person’s worth it. But then all bets are off. You have to trust them, and hope they won’t rip your heart out, and fuck it, sometimes you make the wrong call.” He paused. “But you have to keep taking chances on the wrong people till you find the right one. You quit too damn early, Avery.”
I felt suffocated and miserable. It didn’t matter that he was right; I wasn’t ready for this. For him. “I’d like to get out now.” My voice came out thin and rickety.
Joe began to tow me to the shallow end. “Have you ever looked yourself up online, honey?”
Bewildered, I shook my head. “Steven handles most of the Internet stuff —”
“I don’t mean your business. I mean your own name. The first results page is all related to your work: some blogs that mention you, a link to a Pinterest board, that kind of stuff. But on the second page, there’s a link to an older article in a New York paper… about a bride who was jilted on her wedding day.”
I felt myself turn bleach white.
Sometimes when I thought about that day, I could will myself into a state of detachment and view it as if it had happened to someone else. I tried to do that right now, but I couldn’t manage to put any distance between me and that memory. I couldn’t be detached about anything when Joe was holding me. And he was going to force me to explain how, on what should have been the happiest day of my life, I’d been rejected, abandoned, and humiliated in front of everyone whose opinion mattered to me. For a woman with normal self-esteem, that day would have been devastating. For a woman whose self-esteem hadn’t been all that robust to begin with, it had been annihilating.