Out of the Blue

by Kathryn Nolan

  A slight panic started to beat at the edges of my vision and Dora, being Dora, must have sensed it. She was suddenly by my side giving me one light touch on my arm before letting me go.

  “You probably never saw her do this before, did ya?”

  I shook my head, staring at the place where Serena’d just been. “I avoided it.”

  “It’s pretty scary for me still, imagining my students sitting at the bottom of that pool while holding their breath. Doesn’t feel quite right. Always makes me nervous.” She blew a short whistle and yelled, “From three.”

  Serena had already been holding her breath for sixty seconds.

  “Do you sneak a bottle of vodka in here to help with the nerves or what?” I asked. She was distracting me on purpose, and I wasn’t going to turn down the life preserver she was tossing me.

  “I’ve always been a tequila lady, and you know that, Cope.” Her smile was quick. “But no. I sit with the discomfort. Sit with it and respect it. Speaking as a surfer myself, fear is like a radio station you hate tuning into because the DJ sucks.” She cast me a sideways glance. “But that same DJ is gonna save your life when you need it.”

  I rolled my shoulders, stretched my neck, and didn’t respond.

  “I sit with it,” she continued. “And remember Serena has trained her body to do the impossible because she takes the risk of her job seriously. Will do literally anything to protect herself out there.”

  I kept staring straight ahead, remembering words my mother repeated to me often, especially when I was with Serena. Your father’s death was a tragic accident. It was not your fault. You cannot always protect the ones you love from harm, much as I wish you could.

  Dora blew her whistle, startling me. “From two, Serena.”

  She was only halfway done.

  “It doesn’t always work,” I said quietly.

  I didn’t have to explain myself.

  “I know it,” she replied. “Don’t I know it.”

  Now it was my turn to place my hand on her arm for a brief squeeze. Besides my father, she’d also lost two friends in a boating accident five years ago.

  “But you have to trust that I wouldn’t send that girl out into those waves unprepared,” she said. “And, for what it’s worth, I think she wants you to trust her too.”

  I crossed my arms. “Trusting her has never been my problem.”

  You put yourself in danger every goddamn day.

  “If you say so.” She sighed. “Let me tell you this. You haven’t been around the last four years, so you don’t know jack shit about the sacrifices she’s made to be the best. Tomorrow is only the beginning of a long career for her competing at an elite level. She’s ready.”

  Dora walked away, back to the side of the pool, and crouched down to peer into the water. She blew her whistle three short times. “One minute left. You can do it, kid.”

  I plucked my phone out of my pocket to give my hands something to do. An alert from Quentin caught my eye.

  Call me pessimistic, but I tend to think any billion-dollar company with something to hide is dangerous.

  I texted: I think you might be reading into things a little too much, buddy.

  Serena reappeared, gasping, and a significant amount of tension left my body. I rooted myself to the spot instead of doing what my instincts demanded of me. Run to her. Pull her from that water and clutch her to my chest. Never let her out of my sight again.

  Slicking her hair back, she grabbed Dora’s hand, who pulled her over to the ledge. Panting, she rested her cheek on her arms, legs kicking slowly in the water behind her. Dora was coaching her through a breathing exercise to help her regain control.

  Our eyes caught and held, and I was shocked to see the compassion there. I cleared my throat, stared back at the ground. She understood more than any person in my life how seeing her train made me feel. We’re still going ’round and ’round. The end of our relationship was already apparent after our second date, where we’d spent an entire afternoon sitting on the low wall that faced La Jolla Cove. Over coffee under bright blue skies, she had me charmed, dazzled, elated. And desperate to freeze time to escape our reality.

  I’ll always be a surfer, she’d said, biting her lip with regret in her voice. And given what happened to your dad, I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to date me.

  I understood too. God help me, I understood. I should have walked away as fast as I could. Instead, against my better judgment, against every warning, I slid my fingers into her messy, golden hair, tipped her face up toward mine, and kissed her.

  She tasted like sunshine.

  Quentin texted again. Oh ye of little faith! I’m hooked in now, so I’m going to keep reading too much into everything. But only ’cause you’re my best friend. Keep a close eye on Serena. Just a gut feeling.

  My fingers tightened around the phone. Just a gut feeling. Quentin was many things, including an ace investigator who took shit like this seriously. He wouldn’t have said those words if he didn’t want me to read into what he was implying.

  Happy you’ve got my back, I replied.

  And then I looked up just in time to see my wife’s head slip beneath the water.

  9

  Serena

  As soon as I hit three minutes beneath the water, I thought of my parents. The helpless rage I felt as a child—the fear, the confusion, the hunger—acted as a golden light in the crushing, cold darkness. As the heavy weight pressed down on my shoulders and the top of my head, I clung to that light with every fiber of my being.

  There was a smug satisfaction in using them as motivation when I needed to monitor my breathing. They had, after all, introduced me to the discomfort of keeping my mouth shut, forcing me to access quiet parts of my inner self at a young age. My father’s strict style of parenting meant careful movements to not incite his sporadic temper. It meant being sent to my room with the door locked when I did anything my parents did not believe girls should do: speak my mind, share an opinion, scrape my knees, or raise my voice. When I was especially bad, the door was locked all night long—no food, no water, no bathroom.

  I had, give or take, twenty seconds left now. This was my third four-minute stretch, and I was this close to hitting my own limit, which Dora understood. I needed my lungs warm and oxygenated for tomorrow—but not sore or tired.

  Fifteen seconds now. Ten. The burn in my muscles was hot as a forest fire, so I hung on to my anger and counted down the final seconds.

  It didn’t matter how often Caleb and I would turn to our mother for comfort or safety. In the end, she was as bad as our father. And while I often bore the brunt of his frustration, Caleb bore the brunt of hers. Don’t cry, don’t be soft, don’t be emotional, girls won’t like you.

  Slowly, deliberately, I moved toward the surface, pushing the weighted ball ahead of me. I emerged, finally, sputtering. My lungs seized up. I wiped the water from my eyes and grabbed Dora’s hand. She hauled me out of the water a second later onto a towel where I lay on my back and forced my lungs to take in smooth, steady gulps of the most exquisite air imaginable.

  She still held my hand, tethering me back to dry land. “That’s it,” she said. “You did it. The final four minutes, like the champion you are.”

  I nodded that I heard her, still unable to speak. Coughed, gasped in a breath.

  “Thumbs up if you’re okay?”

  I gave her two while managing a weak smile. “Need a sec,” I whispered.

  “Take your time,” she replied. “I’ll grab your water, how about that?”

  I closed my eyes. My lungs gradually filled all the way up, feeling bigger, broader. Even my ribcage buzzed with a sense of expansion.

  Smiling to myself, I opened my eyes and found Cope standing over me. He looked deeply worried before smoothing it away. I knew why and felt like shit about it. Having to be around me all day meant seeing all the risks and intimacies of what I did, maybe even more than when we were together. As my bodyguard there was
no haze of love or passion obscuring how my job and Cope’s loss intersected at all the most painful angles.

  “You okay?” he asked, a little hoarse.

  “Yeah.” I pushed up on my elbows. “Yeah, I am.” I held out my hand, and he took it without hesitation. I was gently lifted to standing, although our fingers disengaged after only a second. “I’m sorry about…” I waved at the pool, still out of breath. “I should have told you. I know it’s not easy to see.”

  His eyebrows knit together. “It’s really fine. Just doing my job.” His mouth twisted into a tiny Cope-like smile. “If you think this is hard, you should try being personal security for Arnold Sheffield. The guy grossly underpays his staff while forcing them to skip their kids’ birthday parties. Then uses a company helicopter to go commit, I don’t know, crimes against humanity while playing tennis.”

  I leaned to the side to wring out my hair. “Wow. So am I still a bigger pain in the ass than him or…?”

  “Like, fifty times more a pain in my ass.”

  I laughed before I realized what I was doing. I jumped back in surprise. Cope’s eyes went wide.

  “Anyway,” I said, voice flat. “I’m not, you know, apologizing for what I said out front. Because I still mean it, and I’m still pissed about it.”

  He brightened. “When I saved your life from that surfboard of doom?”

  I strutted past him and toward the locker room. “Still could have handled it myself.” I checked the clock on the wall. “I’ve got the—”

  “Interview in two hours,” he said. “I have your schedule and will drive you there and back and anywhere else you need to go today. Oh, and to be clear, I’m also not apologizing.”

  “Amazing. Can’t wait to be locked in a car with you.”

  His answering smirk was almost flirtatious. “The dread is mutual, Ms. Swift.”

  I shouldered open the door to the locker room and changed back into my running clothes. When I glanced in the mirror to braid my hair, the dreamy smile on my face startled me.

  I recognized the source of that smile, so I scrubbed my hands down my face and removed it.

  “Do not give in to him,” I whispered beneath my breath. “You know where this goes.”

  Confident that I had my emotions—and hormones—under control, I marched out into the humid pool air, breezed past Cope, and found Dora in the lobby.

  “Thanks for today,” I said. She held up both hands, as usual, and I high-fived them both. Then she pulled me in for a swaying, side-to-side hug that had me giggling. “I’m excited to make you proud tomorrow.”

  “I’m already proud, duh,” she said. “But I’ll be extra proud regardless of what happens.”

  “Well, I’m definitely going to win,” I said, scooping up my bag and cinching it over my shoulders. “You’ll be watching from here, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She walked over and punched Cope in the arm.

  “Easy. Damn, Dora, I use this arm.” He winced, but his eyes were sparkling. This—this feeling like no time had passed, like this was a typical Saturday for us, laughing with Dora—was the most confusing déjà vu sensation of my life.

  She pointed at him. “You keep an eye on her.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, gaze finding mine. I didn’t like that either. As frustrating as his overprotective nature could be, it was hard to deny the swarm of butterflies it used to give me.

  You think I won’t protect you forever, sunshine? Because I will, and happily, for the rest of our lives.

  My cheeks flushed. I fiddled with the straps of my bag before heading towards the door. “I’m running home if you can handle it.”

  “Handle it?”

  But I was already outside, the sky brightening with the dawn, and starting to run.

  Cope—dammit—appeared next to me, stride matching my easy, cool-down pace. “For the record, I can always fucking handle it.”

  The coarse scrape of his voice had me shivering. “If you say so.”

  “You’ve got an event tomorrow, so I’m not going to challenge you to a race,” he said. “I’ll just allow both of us to remember who the faster runner is.”

  Sheer force of will kept me at this cool-down speed instead of sprinting ahead like I wanted to. We ran in silence most of the way—part awkward, part companionable. I was much too tired, and my brain was fuzzy from holding my breath. Speaking right now made me nervous I’d say something I’d regret, like How come you left me without saying goodbye? or How come you never filed for divorce?

  Or the question currently floating around in my head: Were your shoulders always this lickable?

  “Can I ask you a work question? As your protection agent, I mean?”

  I gaped at him. “Am I in some kind of danger right now?”

  He shook his head, brow creased. “I told Quent about being posted at Aerial.”

  We rounded onto the street that led to our house. My house. “You talked to Quentin?”

  “Yeah.” He slowed to a stop on a patch of my neighbor’s grass.

  I followed his lead, confused. “What’s going on?”

  He peeked over his shoulder again. Then he took a step closer.

  He smelled delicious.

  “You know how he is,” Cope said in a low tone. “He looked into Aerial, just curious about their reputation, seeing if anything weird came up.”

  I felt the first pinprick of alarm. “And?”

  A shrug of those broad, lickable shoulders. “I don’t know. He said they were tied up in some… private lawsuits. Had been for years. It struck him as odd. ‘Fishy’ was the word he used. He wanted me to be extra cautious.”

  I propped my hands on my hips. “Much as I appreciate Quent looking out for me, I think this might be one time he’s actually barking up the wrong tree.” I pushed the sweaty hair off my forehead. “They’ve got the best reputation. The best environmental practices. Tons of corporate philanthropy. No scandals.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I did my research,” I said. “I have to represent them for the next three years. I didn’t want my name to be tied to some skeevy corporation. I wanted Aerial because I’ll be in the perfect position to work on real issues within the surfing industry. Issues they care about too.”

  Cope sighed and linked his hands over his head. His biceps bulged with the motion. “I think you’re probably right. Anything give you bad vibes?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. Rolled his shoulders. “Then I’m probably taking a cue from Quent and reading into things.”

  He started running again, and I joined him. “It’s your job though, reading into things. So. Thanks, I guess.”

  We reached the house, slowing again.

  “Thanks?”

  I grabbed the key from my bag and jogged up the steps. The door was still painted a light, dusky pink we’d done ourselves. I slid the key into the lock or attempted to. It was his body heat, his scent, his closeness that made my fingers clumsy.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” I said, teeth gritted. The key finally slid home, and I shoved the door open as wide as I could, putting quick distance between the two of us.

  “Well, look at you respecting the agent-client relationship.” He folded his arms across his chest with an amused expression.

  I gripped the door. “Speaking of. I’m going inside to shower, and you’re…?”

  He cleared his throat. “Checking inside to make sure you’re safe.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s for real protocol.”

  “Not the other fake protocols you’ve been telling me?”

  I was stalling. Not much in the house had changed since we’d broken up, and him wandering around in it was not a smart idea.

  “May I?” His tone had grown as somber as his expression.

  Swallowing around a sudden lump in my throat, I opened the door all the way and let him inside. The short hallway felt overly confined and filled with
memories. Especially since, more often than not, we’d come in post-workout—sweaty, happy, full of endorphins—and the man standing in front of me would have his palm on my chest and my back against the door immediately. He’d even taken me on the small end table once, which usually held keys and sunglasses, spare change and ticket stubs.

  They’d been knocked to the floor to make room for me.

  The first deep stroke of his cock already had me moaning, fingers clutched in his shirt, our foreheads pressed together. The table smacked against the wall—smack, smack, smack—and I didn’t even mind that we’d probably have to patch it. It was worth it for this.

  I didn’t dare make eye contact. I walked into the wide-open kitchen and living room. Desperate for water, I turned on my heel to head to the fridge. Cope stopped me with a hand wrapped around my wrist. His throat worked as his fingers tightened on my skin.

  It would be so easy to give in to him here, without anyone watching. In this home we’d filled with as much lust as love, as much ecstasy as romance.

  He let me go. “Sorry. Let me check first.”

  I dropped my bag on the floor. Toed off my shoes. He moved effortlessly through this space he’d once lived in, fingers dragging down the island in the center of the kitchen.

  “Can you believe we live together?” Cope said, dipping fries into a little cup of ketchup. We’d moved that morning and still had no furniture. So we sat on top of the island, cross-legged and exhausted, eating our first meal of cheeseburgers in our new house.

  He checked the windows there and the lock on the patio door. He walked into the living room with a clenched jaw. Examined the windows, pulled open the coat closet. He noted our yellow couch before turning towards the stairs.

  The rug was soft beneath my knees. Cope’s cock was the exact opposite—ridged, hard, magnificent. His hand held the back of my neck as I gripped his shaft, taking him between my lips, swirling my tongue just the way he liked it.

  “I love how horny you get when we watch movies together,” he gasped, head tilting back.

  I followed him from a safe distance. There was another bathroom up here, a lofted sitting area, and our bedroom. A deck opened up from the sliding glass windows, overlooking my neighborhood. Past the trees was the sweetest glimpse of the ocean on the horizon.