We went into separate cabana cubes to change, and I couldn’t avoid giving myself a glance in the floor-length mirrors that hung on all the walls. Obviously, I hadn’t been in a bathing suit since last summer, and the effect wasn’t great. The stretchy fabric bagged in an unfortunate way in the chest area and in the butt region, showing that I’d lost weight. I had the scars from Coral but I had others, too, like a long one down my right hip. They had been more concerned with helping me than with beauty after the accident, and a few of the doctors in follow-up appointments had suggested that I could do some scar revision stuff to help make it less noticeable. I hadn’t thought that anyone would be looking at me again in this level of undress, though, and I hadn’t cared. I still didn’t—not too much.
When I went back outside, Coral was batting at a toy that Levi had hung and he was rinsing off under a shower head that seemed to have flipped out from the side of his cabana. “I’m too nasty to jump right into the pool,” he told me over his shoulder. I watched as the water sparkled down his back, which was a lot more muscular than most backs. So were his arms, which made it easy to see how he’d carried everything so easily today. I nodded silently and found the shower on my own cabana. When I turned around, he was watching me, and I suddenly remembered his sister Ava telling me that he was definitelyinterested, and her daughter explaining that meant he liked me as a girlfriend.
“Feel better?” he asked.
Those words expressed something different, though. He had sounded the same as when he’d been checking on my cat. “I want to get submerged all the way,” I answered, and walked toward the square pool.
“You’re limping a lot.”
“I stepped down pretty hard after I emptied out the cabinet above the refrigerator. That was all full of cookbooks.”
“Really? Be careful,” he warned. “There’s a big ledge around the edge, so you have to dive far out.”
I wasn’t going to dive. Despite growing up close to Lake Huron and going in the water a lot, I was a cautious swimmer—but not Levi. After watching me climb carefully, he backed up a few feet and then propelled himself into the pool. He came up and shook back his hair, which looked darker when wet. It brought up the memory of Grant swimming in Lance and Vivienne’s pool and how I’d watched him on that last day, feeling so…I had been unhappy, that was what I’d felt. I identified the feeling now but at the time, I hadn’t known what was wrong except that I’d been anxious about how much he was drinking. He always liked beer, but that day he’d been downing bottle after bottle.
“It feels good,” Levi called, and then swam over to me. He moved through the water like he knew what he was doing, not just splashing around.
“I had to take lessons and be on a team,” he explained when I asked. “All three of us did, but Liv’s the only one who stuck with it. She could have swum in college but she followed her asshat of a boyfriend instead.”
“Is that the guy she married?”
“No, thank Jesus,” he said, and blew out a big breath of relief that splashed droplets up onto me. “Can you swim? Does it hurt your hip?”
“I can.”
“You have a bigger scar than I expected,” he noted, and I realized what he’d been looking at as I had rinsed off.
“My surgery after the accident got complicated. It was worse than my arm and my femur.”
“That was all broken?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And some ribs. But I got a new hip out of it.”
“You had to have your hip replaced?” he asked incredulously.
“There was a lot of damage, more than they could repair. But it wasn’t as bad as my head.”
“A concussion,” Levi confirmed.
“Yes, and then post-concussion syndrome. That’s it, besides the other stuff.” I pushed off the side, where I had been sitting on the smooth ledge, and paddled a lot less gracefully than he had done. I looked back to see him watching. “I won’t drown,” I promised. “I was never in danger of that, not after the first time.”
“What? What first time?”
I briefly explained what had happened when I was little, kindergarten-age. I had been invited to a pool party because all the kids in my class had gone, but I’d been much less than competent in the water at that point. “I sank but they fished me out.”
“Were you breathing?”
I thought back. “No, not at first. I don’t remember much from when I started to choke and things went black up to when the ambulance was there. I got a lot more careful in the water after that, and I got better at swimming. One way I did it was by watchingMillion Dollar Mermaid. Esther Williams is amazing. Did you know she could have competed in the Olympics, but World War—”
“I’m more interested in the fact that you’ve had two near-death experiences than in the story of some Olympian,” he interrupted. He had swum out to me and was treading water next to where I floated.
“Three.”
“What?” Levi asked.
“I’ve had three near-death experiences. In high school, I was in my first car crash.”
He took my arm and towed me back over to the side of the pool. “You haven’t mentioned any of this before.”
