Page 119 of Ghosted

“Comforting.”

I hold the door open for her, and for a second, she looks at me like she might turn around and leave me standing here with my stupid fucking idea and all the things I don’t know how to say. Then she steps inside.

The pool room opens around us, wide and blue and still. The water throws light across the ceiling in soft, moving strips, and the bleachers sit empty in the shadows. The lane ropes are dragged off to one side. Everything echoes too much in here: our footsteps, the door clicking shut behind us, the sound of Alice breathing as she takes it all in.

“This is your big secret hideout?” she asks.

“Something like that.”

“Very subtle. Nothing says emotionally well-adjusted like breaking into a university pool at night.”

“I didn’t break in.”

“You jimmied the fucking door.”

“No.” His mouth curves. “I knew how to open it.”

Alice lifts a brow. “Did you have a key?”

The look on my face must answer for me, because hers goes flat.

“Exactly,” she says. “That’s called breaking and entering.”

Her voice is dry, but it’s there. A little piece of her pushing back through whatever Johnny did. I hate how badly I need to hear it.

I walk toward the edge of the pool and stop, shoving my hands into my pockets before they do something stupid. “Water makes sense to me,” I say, because apparently tonight is the night I start saying shit out loud. “It doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t care if I’m pissed off or losing my mind. I get in, go under, and for a while everything shuts the fuck up.”

Alice looks at me. “That’s weirdly honest.”

“Yeah. Don’t get used to it.”

“Cancer thing?”

I glance at her. “What?”

She lifts one shoulder. “The water. The hiding. The pretending emotions are manageable if you drown them hard enough.”

My mouth twitches even though nothing about tonight is funny. “You calling me out with astrology right now?”

“You brought me to a pool after dark, Jagger. I’m working with the evidence provided.”

Fair.

She sits near the edge, boots planted on the tile, arms still wrapped tight around herself. I sit beside her, leaving enough space that she doesn’t have to decide whether to move away from me. I hate that the distance matters, but it does. It means I’ve given her reasons to measure it.

For a while, neither of us speaks. The water barely moves, but the room makes sound out of it anyway, tiny ripples licking tile, vents humming above us, pipes settling somewhere deep in the walls.

Alice stares into the pool like it might tell her something useful if she waits long enough.

“I don’t know how to stop wanting to kill him,” I say.

The words come out rough and too fucking honest, leaving a bad taste in my mouth the second they’re out, but Alice doesn’t flinch. She just looks back at the water, arms tight around herself, face turned toward the blue glow like it’s easier than looking at me.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m not saying that to scare you.”

Her mouth pulls into something too tired to be a smile. “You don’t have to try very hard.”