Deep End

I COME TO WITHOUT TRANSITIONS—SEAMLESS, ASLEEP TO awake, lost to lucid, burning with a very specific need.

“Lukas,” I immediately whisper.

He’s unresponsive, heavy biceps folding me into him. A hand cups the back of my head. The thick denim of his jeans is rough between my bare legs.

“Lukas.” He’s an annoyingly deep sleeper. I jostle in his arms, hoping the commotion will do the trick. All it accomplishes is a small frown, and him pulling me closer.

“Lukas!”

Nothing.

I roll my eyes, contemplate the lengths that I will go to wake him up, and decide that they are very long: I tilt my head, open my mouth, and bite into his triceps like it’s an Iowa State Fair corn dog.

I expect him to yelp. Instead he slowly opens his eyes, buries a yawn into the bottom of my throat, kisses the very same spot, and asks, “Is it morning already?” Bleary lidded and confused, he’s just . . . adorable.

Whatever. I’m allowed to think that the guy with whom I’m having power-exchange sex is cute. It’s fully within my rights. “I want to go to the aquatic center.”

He frowns. Lets me go long enough to retrieve his phone from his pocket, which lights up with more unread notifications than I’ve had all month. He ignores them, unalarmed, and instead squints at the numbers.

“It’s one twenty-three a.m.”

“Oh.” I deflate—then reinflate when I remember: “You have keys, though. Right?”

His skeptical “Yes” is more question than reply.

“Can you let me in?”

He slow blinks at me. “Scarlett—”

“I never get to—you’re right. It’s for other people. It’s always for others—Coach Sima, all the trainers I’ve had since I was a child, Pen. I feel guilty about disappointing them when I fail a dive. And it’s hard to shut them out, because they’re always around when I’m practicing.” They have to be—it’s regulation. Unsupervised training is forbidden. The risk of injury and drowning is too high. “What you said about doing it for yourself, about having to prove something—”

“I’m not going to let you dive alone, Scarlett.”

“You can be there.”

“I’m serious. If we get to Avery and you decide you don’t want me around, I’m not leaving.”

“It’s fine. You can stay, because you don’t count.”

“I don’t count,” he repeats. Stony faced.

“No, because you don’t care.”

“I don’t care.” He sounds like the word displeased was invented for him and only him, and I don’t understand why—until it occurs to me how he’s interpreting my words.

“Not because—not in that sense!” I’m hot with frustration and embarrassment. “What I meant is, you care about me being well more than about me being good at something—anything. And when you’re around I don’t feel as anxious or scrutinized as I do with—”

He interrupts me with a hard, quick, somehow encompassing kiss. When he pulls back, his mouth twitches into that little smile that makes my heart gallop, and orders, “Grab your parka. Nights can get cold.”

Lukas wraps an arm around my shoulder, and even wearing a jacket, I still freeze my ass off as we walk through campus, shocked by thermal excursion following a perfectly nice fall day. In a T-shirt, he shakes his head in his most Swedish I just caught you setting fire to a children’s hospital disappointment, and says, “Americans are so weak,” before pulling me even closer.

Avery is well lit throughout the night (good), but when I dip my toe into the water, I find it so chilly, it belongs to Lukas’s BDSM list (bad). I forgot to put on a swimsuit, but my sports bra will do. I take my clothes off and prep with a shower, setting the temperature several degrees hotter than usual to warm my muscles. I turn on the pool sprayers. I stretch a little, but I’m not stalling, or trying to put distance between me and the dive. I’m eager to climb the steps of the tower, and keep my surprise to myself when I realize that Lukas has taken off his shoes and is coming up with me, a tall, reassuring presence at my side.

“Springboard or platform?”

“Platform,” I reply. It’s how it started. First love, first heartbreak.

“Don’t you have to put that thing on your body before diving?”

“The what?”

“That stuff you guys are always putting on your legs?”

“You mean, the stripper pole wax?”

He stops to give me a wide-eyed look. “You put stripper pole wax on your shins?”

“It’s a grip aid. Divers use it to hold on to their legs, strippers use it to hold on to their poles. Have you ever seen strippers do their thing?”

“This feels like a trick question.”

“They’re elite athletes. In great shape.” I plant my hands on my waist. “Did you really not know what it was?”

“Pen uses tape spray.”

“Right. Well, I prefer the stripper stuff.”

“You prefer the stripper stuff,” he repeats, toneless.

My eyebrow quirks. “Are you surprised?”

He puffs out a small laugh, and mouths something that sounds more admiring than weirded out (was it troll again?), but I’m too busy hauling my ass ten meters high to investigate.

I’m a little more wet than I like to be when I dive, but I forgot to bring a shammy. I take my position at the edge, savoring the familiar ruggedness of the floor, letting my heels poke past the rim. “Any last words?” I ask Lukas.

It’s nice that inward dives start facing toward the diving tower. Nice that his face can be the last thing I see. His amused frown. The way he crosses his arms. “Is there something I don’t know about this pool?”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “Does it have its own Loch Ness Monster? Piranhas? That Amazon River fish that swim up your pee hole to raise their babies in your genitalia?”

“I . . . do they actually exist?”

“Two out of three.”

“I sure hope you have scientific evidence on the Loch Ness Monster.” I sigh again. “So, no last words?”

“Scarlett, I’ll talk to you in five seconds. What ‘last words’ are you going on about?”

I smile, because he’s right. I’m going to try an inward dive, and if it works, great. If it doesn’t . . . nothing hangs on this specific dive, does it? Actually, nothing hangs on most dives. If I’m honest, nothing hangs on my overall ability to dive, either.

It’s true. Whether I manage to do this or not, when I get out of the pool, I’m still going to be me. And Lukas . . . Lukas is still going to be here. And admitting it to myself is such an odd relief, I find myself laughing.

And laughing more.

And some more.

It’s not a hysterical cackle. I’m not deranged. But for the first time in what feels like a century, with Lukas standing in front of me, with the water ten meters underneath and the cold biting into my skin, diving seems fun again—and lifting my arms, bending my knees, taking off just high enough to manage a pike . . .

It just works.

Second nature.

Like it used to be.

And I’m almost sure . . .

It’s a bit of a blur, but I think . . .

I may be wrong . . .

I punch out of the bitter chill of the water to meet the bitter chill of the night air, fluttering my legs to keep afloat. “Lukas?” I scream, sputtering, dragging locks of untied hair out of my eyes, fixing the bra riding half off my tits. I tilt my head up, and he’s already there, peeping from the edge of the platform. “When I entered the water, was I facing the tower?”

He presses his lips together. “Hmm.”

“Or the other way?”

“Let me think.”

Oh, for fuck’s—“Remember when I entered the water!”

“Hmm.”

“Was my face looking at you?”

“Your face?”

“Lukas, I swear to god—”

“Scarlett,” he says, in that tone that’s final, that makes me feel like he’s hearing me and he’s got me and he’s there. That tone that makes me go silent. “I learned what an inward dive is after the first time you mentioned them to me. And I know one when I see it.”

I blink up at him, my lashes clumped with water and chlorine and something else.

“You mean . . .”

“I mean.” He smiles, lopsided. “You did it.”