Zach squeezes me to him again and kisses my forehead.
“And there’s another thing, I think,” I continue.
“What?”
“I think if I don’t want it back, then I have no reason to stay here,” I confess. “Before my parents died, I wanted to leave town and go on a cross-country trip in my blue car. But when the time of it got closer, I started to feel panicked. I felt like, if I left this place, then no one in this entire world would know who I was. You know what I mean? Like, no one in this world would know what my name was. I’d be so, so alone. And then, they died and I was like, I can’t go now. If something happened to me, they wouldn’t know who to call.”
I nod as if confirming my own words. “Yeah, so this is it. Maggie told me to quit my job and leave. Even Tina. But I’ve been using it as an excuse to just hide out here because no one in the world would know my name outside of this town, if I left.”
His Adam’s apple bobs with his swallow. I watch it happen and for some reason, it’s so fascinating to me. It’s so fascinating that the water is cool but the heat of his body is so thick that I’m sweating with it.
“I would know,” he says gruffly.
“What?”
“I’d know your name. I’d be out there and I’d know who you were.”
I smile, even though another tear leaks out. And something flashes across my brain.
A thought.
Such a fanciful thought: what if we’re together? Him and me?
What if when he leaves, I leave with him?
What if he puts me on the back of his bike and we ride out into the sunset?
I move away from his chest and look up at him. His eyes are intense and sad and I realize, it’s for me. He’s sad for me.
His lips part as we stare at each other under the night sky, studded with a million stars.
“Someone could see you with me,” he murmurs.
“I don’t care.”
“You need to be more careful,” he insists.
“I don’t. Not when I have you. You’d protect me,” I reply confidently. “You’ve been protecting me all this time, right? Keeping us a secret. You don’t want people talking about me. You don’t want them to paint me as a slut, right?”
He’s silent but his jaw flexes.
“This is another one of your ways to make up for what you did. Back at St. Patrick’s. You never came to my rescue then, so you’re making up for that now.”
“You talk too much,” he says roughly.
How can I not love him? This guy who repents in the sweetest and most caring of ways.
I wonder if I can ask him to take me along.
“I’ll miss you when you leave,” I whisper instead.
He stiffens against me. “I don’t want you to.”
“It’s not up to you.”
His answer is a hard clench of his jaw.
“Will you miss me?”
Zach’s never given me any indication that he wants more than what we have right now. We’ve always had an expiration date on us.
But more than that, I wonder if he’d even want to take anything along from his old life when he leaves to rejoin his new one?
No matter what that thing might be. No matter if that thing is me.
“I don’t want to.”
I thought his denial – and I knew it would be a denial long before he uttered those words – would feel like an explosion.
But maybe some souls shatter in silence. They don’t make a noise or even a rattle. They die quietly. Silently.
“I want you to do something for me,” I say those words again.
The ones he spoke to me the night he told me to run, and then, I used them a day later because I wanted him to out our secret.
“What?”
I flex my hold around his body. It’s weird being in water. I feel untethered. Lighter and heavier at the same time. At my flex, he squeezes me in his hold too.
“I want you to kiss me.” I smile slightly. “Right here in the water. Under all the stars in the sky.”
His thumb caresses my cheek for a beat before he bends down and kisses me.
It’s hard at first. A forceful press of his mouth on mine, and then he begins moving his lips. And the kiss comes alive.
Wet and hot and burning.
In the background, I feel Zach moving. I cling to his body as I drown in his kiss. We drift across the water, and then I feel something on my ass. A cement step.
Zach has floated us to the end of the pool and he’s sat me down safely on one of the steps, flanked by a silver railing that leads into the water.
Now that I’m on steady ground, Zach breaks the kiss to stare down at me. He’s blocking all the light, casting a shadow over me in the shape of his big body. “You’ll never do something like this again, yeah?”