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My entire life I’ve felt as if there’s something missing. I’ve felt as if I woke up suddenly in this life and I left something behind. Something forgotten in dreams or memories.
Maybe these dreams will help me find that.
And knowing they’re only dreams? I’ll live them. I’ll live them without fear, because no matter what happens I can always wake up, and real life will go on.
All right.
Here goes.
I close my eyes, clutch the watch tightly in my hand, and will myself back to the island. Back to Aaron McCormick.
14
I’m jerkedthrough the swirling water, a hand clutched tightly around my wrist yanking me to the surface. I break through the grasping, choppy water and drag in a painful, coughing breath. The air burns my lungs, and my throat spasms and seizes as I cough on salty ocean water.
A wave rolls over me, dunking me again. I come up gasping.
The sun berates my eyes, a bright orange ball in the sky. I blink into the tropical light, my eyes stinging from the salt water. I’m assaulted by color—turquoise sea, cobalt sky, pearl-white sand streaked with gold—and heat—pressing over me, sizzling with surf and sea salt and loamy palms and mangroves.
I’m back.
I’m back in this dreamland.
A man swears viciously. He yanks me toward him, another wave swelling over us. I swallow some of the water and come up coughing again.
“Dammit, Becca.”
I kick my legs, chopping through the water, and Aaron—it’s Aaron—yanks me to him. My hair, blonde and long, is plastered over my head, dripping water into my eyes. My dress tangles around my legs and drags through the current.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
He’s shouting at me. I don’t hear half of what he says. My ears are full of water and the world has a dizzy, dreamlike quality.
He kicks back, his legs cutting through the water, and tugs me to lie against him so we float with the waves, our heads bobbing above the water.
I’m plastered against his chest. His T-shirt is coarse and wet, lifting with the current and flashing the flat, hot plane of his abdomen. I press against the heat of him. He wraps his arms around me then, holding me between the planes of his chest and the firm strength of his biceps.
He kicks in powerful bursts, propelling us back to shore. He’s still shouting at me—something like “... foolish... can’t swim, ... riptide... die...”—and the whole while I stare up at him, bobbing in the clear blue ocean with canary-yellow and neon-blue fish darting between our legs and bumping our toes.
Aaron’s dark face has bleached of color. His full mouth is a thin white line and he’s dragging in short, sharp breaths. I press my hand to his chest and feel the heavy, startled beating of his heart.
“... can’t swim worth a damn and?—”
“I can swim,” I interrupt.
He blinks, pulled from his soliloquy. “No. You can’t.”
“I can. I just don’t like to.”
And then, because he looks so scared and so confused, I reach up and press my hand to his cheek. I scrape my fingers over his stubble. He’s warm, wet, and I drag my hand over his jaw. A wave crests and we ride it, pushed toward the shallows.
He draws in a shaky breath, and so I press my thumb to his lip, smoothing out the tight line of his mouth. He closes his eyes and waterdrops fall from the dark lines of his eyelashes.
“Thank you,” I say, floating closer to him. Then, because I want to, and because this is a dream and he’s the man who tried to rescue me, I take my thumb from his mouth and replace it with my lips.
He tastes like salt and sea, almost like tears caught at the edge of your lips, salty and sorrowful on your tongue. His mouth is hard, but as I brush my hands over his checks and tangle my fingers through his smooth, wet hair, a wave presses me closer to him and his mouth opens to mine.
He makes a low, broken noise, and then he grabs my hips and pulls me closer. I wrap my legs around his middle, grip his face, and dive into his kiss as if I’m diving into the sea.
