“You want to try again?”
He tilts his head at her in question, eyebrows lifting as a wicked smile spreads across his face.
Warmth that has nothing to do with the sun floods her cheeks and spreads over her skin, settling low in her belly.
“Surfing,” she clarifies, but winks.
Laughing, he nods.
This is good, this in-between space they’ve found, a compromise, between where they were before and the lines they’d crossed without thinking. It’s . . . comfortable, almost natural.
Standing, she dusts the sand off her and holds out a hand for him to take, pulling him up as he groans.
“I’m going to be feeling this for days,” he mutters as he finds his feet, and they both grab their boards, head down toward the water.
“I’d say no one warned us about turning thirty, but like . . . everyone did.”
“I figured I’d be immune.”
“Of course you did,” she says, as they push through the smaller ripples on the shore, the water rising around their waists as they get up onto their boards and paddle out to wait for some decent waves to ride in.
“What you said before, about it all working out,” he says, as the water around them stays pretty calm.
“Yeah?”
“I’m not sure it would have, if I hadn’t met you.”
“What?”
“You pushed me, always, to be better, to dig deeper. I’ve . . . I’ve never not been the top of my class before and it was, shit, it was fucking humbling. You made me really try for the first time in a long time and I’m really grateful for that. I should have told you before now, should have told you years ago, really, but . . . I don’t know . . . I’m telling you now.”
“Wow, I . . .”
He’s stunned her absolutely speechless. Even his fake engagement proposal hadn’t done that. It’s maybe the best thing anyone has ever said to her before.
“You . . . you did that for me too.”
“Nah,” he denies it immediately. “You don’t have to say that just because I did.”
“I’m not. I was so sure you were going to be a massive pain in the ass when we met, and I was right, but not how I thought. I figured you were some hotshot asshole who thought that our program was a shortcut PhD and you’d just spend five years showing all of us how beneath you it was, but you proved me wrong and people rarely do that. So thank you for showing me that being wrong isn’t always a bad thing.”
“Any time, boss.”
“Xavier?”
“Yeah?”
“I got this one,” she says, lying flat on her board, arms paddling her ahead, and she feels his eyes on her as she powers through the water, catching the crest of the wave, pushing up onto her feet and riding it away from him, all the way into shore.
“You have any plans for the rest of the day?”
They’re driving up through the Santa Monica Mountains in a halfway decent effort to avoid the traffic back down into LA at this time of the morning.
“Not really.”
“What about Paolo? He’s only around for a few days, right?”
“Yeah, he’s flying back tonight, but it’s all good. In a few months I’ll be sick of his face.”
