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When I try to settle back into our position from before, he moves me to lay across his front entirely, head resting on his chest, one leg settled over his thighs. His hand brushes through my hair, massaging the base of my scalp every few minutes, then trailing down my back.

I’m asleep far sooner than I mean to be.

The slight, quiet closing of the door wakes me hours later.

Next to me, there’s a piece of notebook paper; on it, a poem: “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings, one of my favorites. I know Bennett knows that. I know he picked the poem with the same gentle intentionality that he does everything.

Not to mention, it’s handwritten from memory and annotated.

At the bottom, the last stanza is fully underlined with the word “You” written in his perfect script.

And beneath the entire thing is a simple note:

Words don’t come easily for me but

I care very deeply for you.

-Bennett

Part of me wants to tuck it into the soft worn shoebox where I’ve kept every poem and note he’s gifted me. But I can’t bear not to see it, so I lay it on my bedside table, putting my new candle atop it to straighten the folded edges.

I drift back to sleep just looking at it.

Chapter 33

NOW

Paloma

I stare blankly at the folded notebook paper that’s fallen out of my bag through a new hole I’ll have to patch soon. My stomach somersaults again over how easily I might not have seen it slip from its usual spot of refuge.

Now it stares at me from the passenger seat, taunting me with the corner upturned where I can just make out the beginnings of “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” haunting and taunting me in equal measure.

Adjusting in my seat again, I try to talk myself out of this ridiculous, inane idea. But my desperation just to see him is too intense to ignore.

We haven’t talked since that night in the hotel room. I sat next to Coach Harris to talk over notes, too afraid to look Bennett in the eyes when I saw him board. But I’d felt his stare. Since then, I haven’t seen him in passing or at a practice—having spent the week with the pairs team.

Until today, when the anxious wary feeling of not seeing him threatened to eat me alive.

Staying in the wet swimsuit was a stupid move. Even beneath long sleeves and sweatpants, the February wind threatens to freeze me as I jump out of my car. But I don’t like showering in public.

I don’t like the memories the pool locker room brings, either. My wet swimsuit stuck to every curve of my body; legs spread across the mass of his sweatpants-covered thigh. “Move like you did in the water,” whispered into my neck. Teeth in my shoulder as a low groan echoed against the tiles. “I need you to keep going for me. I need to see you come like this.”

“I want to keep you like this. Do you trust me?”

“Let me hold you. Just like that, love. So good for me—”

Shaking away the warm, deep voice that’s heating up my body, I duck my head into the hood of my open jacket.

I try knocking, hesitant at first, then insistently after gaining some bravery. It’s a long length of silence, so long I step back to leave—before a dog barks and the door opens to Bennett Reiner, half slumped into the frame.

Broad and muscular, but with a softness that the other boys on the team don’t have. Bennett is immensely tall, thick across his middle and chest, as well as his arms. Brunette curls more unruly than usual fall forward into his face as he takes me in sleepily.

He’s so beautiful it hurts.

“You’re swimming again,” he says, eyes darting to my wet braid and the dark outline of my damp suit beneath the shirt I’m wearing. The cracks messily patched together in my heart yawn back open at his words.

“I—um, yeah.” I nod. “It’s been good for me.”