Page 14 of The Beast
"Thank you." She straightened up and looked at me, and the laugh was still in her face but under it, she'd gone earnest. "For the laugh. For the ride. For—being wherever you were, at exactly the moment I needed somebody to be there. I don't know what I'd have done, if you hadn't been there."
And I went and said the thing.
"No place I'd rather be."
It came out of my mouth before I'd cleared it through anything, and I'd have given a year of pay to reel it back, becausethat is not a thing I say. I don't talk like that. I don't pine, don't reach, don't waste words dressing up a feeling—I've never had the time or the use for it, and the women who've passed through the edges of my life could tell you I'm about as romantic as a tire iron. Flowery talk is for men with something to sell. And here, I'd handed this stranger a line straight off a greeting card and, worse, meant every syllable of it.
She held my eyes a beat. Didn't make anything of it, mercy of mercies. But something flickered there.
Then, it changed—a slow, dangerous shine coming up in her face that I didn't have a category for yet.
"Can you swim?" she asked.
I looked at her. "...Come again?"
"Can you swim?" She nodded at the water like it was the most reasonable follow-up in the world.
"Yeah. Of course."
"And you're not afraid of heights?"
"No."
"Good." She turned to face me square, that shine going to a full grin now, reckless and bright and lit from somewhere I'd have bet the church had spent years trying to put out. "Unzip me."
Every coherent thought in my head went out like a snuffed match.The hell?
"The dress," she said, already turning her back, gathering the loose hair off her neck and holding it up out of the way. "I can't get it myself. It took two people this morning. Come on."
I'm a man who has defused devices with steadier hands than the ones I put to the back of that dress.
The zipper was small and hid under a flap of silk and a row of little covered buttons I had to work through one at a time. My fingers—my big, scarred, good-for-killing fingers—fumbled every one of them like I'd never undone a thing in my life. Thedress came open down her spine. I kept my eyes high and my breathing level and reminded a certain part of me, again, with feeling, to stay in its lane.
She stepped away the second it gave. Shrugged and twisted and worked herself loose of all that silk, and I turned my head and gave her the privacy of the horizon while she did it. When I looked back, she'd folded the whole heavy thing over the rail in a neat ivory drape. She smoothed it once, flat, almost gentle. One pat. A goodbye, maybe. To what, I couldn't have said.
Then, she looked me dead in the eye, down to whatever she'd had on under it, salt wind whipping her hair across her face, fearless as anything I have ever seen.
"Last one in the water buys dinner," she said.
And before my brain could so much as file an objection, she was up on the rail and over it—gone, with a scream coming up out of her that was pure roller coaster, pure terror and joy welded together, the sound a person makes the first time in their life they've jumped instead of being pushed.
I looked at the dress. I looked at the long drop and the gray Atlantic chewing at the pilings below.
There was no version of this where I let her hit that water alone.
I went over the rail after her.
7
MARY CATHERINE
The Atlantic in March was cold enough to be a decision.
I hit it feet-first and went under. The cold closed over my head like a fist. For one suspended, timeless second, I was nothing but sensation—the shock of it, the roar of the water in my ears, the total erasure of everything that had happened in the last four hours. Then, I came up gasping, hair plastered flat, and I was laughing before I'd even gotten a full breath in.
I heard the splash behind me. Large. Decisive.
He surfaced about six feet away, shaking water off his face, baseball cap and glasses gone to the current, and I got my first real look at him.
