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“I’m not. I just…” She swallows. “I just didn’t expect all of this, okay? I thought it was easy to choose not to fall for someone. But it’s not. It’s not something you can control. You don’t jump. You get pushed.”

“You make it sound so violent,” I say.

“They don’t call itgently cascadingfor someone. You don’tgracefully descendfor someone. You fall. Head over heels, right? And either someone catches you, or they don’t, and you don’t have any control over how badly bruised you are at the bottom of it.”

I study her, my eyebrows furrowed. She drops into the water so it’s covering her nose and watches me warily.

“Skye,” I say finally. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She resurfaces. “Neither of us knows that for sure.”

“Well…” I shrug. “You don’t know for sure your car won’t crash when you get into it. You don’t know there won’t be a tsunami when you go to the beach.”

“Almost fifty percent of marriages end in divorce!”

“I heard that’s not true anymore.”

“Well, even if it’s close. I promise you, if fifty percent of car trips ended in a crash, I’d be walking everywhere for the rest of my life.”

“So that was your plan?” I ask. “Just go through life without ever being in love with anyone, so you never get hurt?”

“I didn’t want it to be, but…” Her voice catches on the “but.”

“And now?”

She shakes her head and cups a hand over her mouth to hide it. “A part of me wonders if it’s not smarter to… panic, and back out of this, and go back to what I was doing before. I was happy alone. And it’s safer, you know?”

It sounds like the sort of thing that should hurt me to hear, but somehow it doesn’t. She doesn’t say those words like someone who wants to be left alone. She says them like someone who’s standing at the edge of everything, but needs someone to hold her hand as she crosses the threshold.

So I take her hand in mine and pull her toward me. “You can. But do you want to?”

She shoves wet tendrils of hair off her face and groans to the heavens. Then, silently, she shakes her head, defeated.

“I’m not planning on breaking your heart,” I say, stroking her hand with my thumb.

She stares at our hands for a little bit too long, lost in thought.

“Also,” I say, pulling her in even closer, “there’s one phrase about being in love you forgot.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “What?”

“You can be swept off your feet,” I say, wrapping my arms around her middle and hoisting her up as she lets out a gasp of surprise. “No bruising required.”

She looks down at me incredulously, then breaks into a grin. “You’re socorny!” she says, kicking in the water.

I walk her backward, spinning us around slowly, as she grips onto my shoulders. “Excuse you, I’m romantic!”

“So I’m finding out.”

I lower her down until she bobs in the water, then meet her lips with mine. When I finally pull away, we tread water, facing each other, our legs touching under the water.

“I trust you,” she whispers.

“Tomorrow night, then.”

“Tomorrow night.”

TWENTY-NINEMaya