Bad Boy Blues(87)

I love you, Zach.

Abruptly, he stops in the middle of the pool with his back to me as if he heard me.

“You gonna stare at me all night?” he asks, plowing his fingers through his wet, slick hair.

With a pounding, bleeding heart, I walk closer to the edge. “You’re not sleeping.”

Zach turns around to face me. Water’s running down his lashes, sluicing down the hard features of his face, and he scrubs a hand over it.

“Neither are you.”

He looks tense, agitated, water lapping at his defined pecs. Probably like me but I don’t know his reason. He’s not in love, is he?

“So what did she tell you?” he asks.

“Who?”

“The fortune teller.”

Oh.

I lick my lips. “She told me that everything happens for a reason. And that something is going to happen to me.”

Zach frowns and drifts closer. “Something like what?”

The pool is illuminated by underwater lights, making it look like a soothing blue. A tempting blue. A blue I’d like to dip into someday. Tonight, maybe.

I take a few steps back and Zach tracks my every movement. I pull off the hood and unzip it. “Something like life.”

“What?”

“Something with too many heartbeats and too much air. Something red hot and passionate.”

I shrug off my hoodie and toe off my boots.

He looks like he wants to say something, but I cut him off. “Zach?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m scared.”

His frown gets even bigger. “Of what?”

Of you.

I grab the hem of my t-shirt and pull it off my body, leaving me in a navy-blue bra. “Of the water.”

“Why?”

Because you make my heart bleed.

My hands go to the buttons of my shorts. “Because I don’t know how to swim. I never learned. My dad tried to teach me when I was a kid but I just got so scared. I thought I’d drown. I couldn’t stop crying so he brought me back home.”

Zach’s all alert now. He looks like he’s going to come out of the pool. “Blue. Stop whatever fucked up, crazy thing you’re thinking.”

Bending, I shove down my shorts and step out of them. His eyes run up and down my barely-clothed body and I say, “My dad’s dead, Zach. My mom too.” At this, he comes to a pause, watching me carefully. “They’re not here anymore. I don’t have anyone in my life that I could turn to.”

“Blue –”

“If I jumped into this water, they won’t come and save me. They can’t. Because I’m alone.”

I probably look insane to him. Suicidal.

I’m not.

I’m just in love with him. And I know that if I tell him that, he’ll break up with me. He’ll probably call me pathetic or something and this secret affair will be over.

I know it in my stupid, fucking heart.

“You’re not jumping in the water. I swear to fucking God, Blue –”

I cut him off again. “Will you save me?”

“Don’t –”

“Tell me. If I jump in the water, will you save me?”

If I fall in love with you, will you catch me?

Again, a little too late to ask questions, right?

I’ve already fallen.

His shoulders move up and down in jerky breaths. His eyes are burning, scorching my body with his intensity, attention. It feels like he knows what I’m asking. The real question. Not the bullshit one I just made up.

It feels like he’s going to say no.

“Yes.”

Relief spreads through my limbs. Relief that I can do this. I can jump and he won’t let anything happen to me.

Maybe this is my way of falling in love. Literally. Maybe this is my way of telling him. And by asking him to save me, I’m pretending that he’d say I love you too.

He calls out my name again but I don’t heed it.

I just run and jump.

The splash that echoes, sounds like it’s coming from inside a tunnel. The water punches me right in the chest and I feel a second of panic before his strong arms wrap around me. His big, strong, life-saving body collides with mine and I hold on to him, gasping for breath.

I don’t think I was submerged for more than two seconds. Still, it feels like my lungs are full of water and starving.

Zach hugs me to him, smashes me, his arms wrapped around me like tight steel bands. Actually, his embrace is making it harder for me to breathe than what I felt when I jumped into the pool.

“Can’t… b-breathe,” I gasp, hanging on to him like a spider monkey.

At my warbled request, he loosens his hold, but then his hand is free to get tangled up in my wet hair and he pulls my head back.

I burn with his fury as he looks down at me. “Are you fucking crazy? What the fuck are you doing?”

His growled words settle in the vicinity of my heart and curl themselves like fingers around my lovesick organ.

“I wanted to find out.”

He almost shakes my head by my hair. “Find out what?”

“What it feels like. Falling, I mean.”

My answer doesn’t please him. Not in the least. He squeezes my waist roughly. “You will never – not ever – do this again. Do you understand?”