Page 1 of Beach Bodies

Prologue

I blink slowly, watching the world fuzz in and out in the clear honey light falling on us through your apartment window. The window is dirty; you’re not very good at housekeeping, but I don’t care, and after last night I’ve found out how good you are at other things.

Even though we just had our first night together, I’ve already planned in my head that after we get married, you’ll be in charge of the cooking and I’ll be in charge of the cleaning. We’ll play to our strengths. If you always leave your laundry strewn around, I’ll think it’s cute. Promise. Each imperfection will be one more reason to love you, and we will never, ever resent each other.

I’m only half awake. The scene is like a dream–you’rea dream, one I never even dared have. But last night, you changed that.

The jut of your hip under white sheets, the drape of your arm, the tremble of your breath fluttering the edge of the coverlet. All so easy, and I never thought love would be easy.

Your voice is deep in these early, tender hours as your eyes take me in and you murmur, ‘Beautiful.’

You say it like it moves you. Like there’s something sacred about the mathematics that wove my proportions togetherwhen I was nothing but a blob of cells. When you speak that single word with all the certainty of an officiant blessing a sacrament, some old, broken place in my heart begins to mend. All my life, beauty has felt like a liability, but at that word from you (and I know it sounds crazy, but…), I heal.

Do you believe that healing can happen in a single moment? I do. I experienced it with you that morning in your Cincinnati apartment above the bakery, with the smell of yeast and sugar in the air around us and the muted grumble of city traffic leaking through the window panes.

‘Want coffee?’ you murmur.

‘In a minute,’ I murmur back, because I don’t want either of us to move yet. I want to live in this moment for ever.

Your fingers trail slowly over the line of my jaw, sending shivers like currents of wordless music into my bones. This morning, your touch is as delicate as smoke, but I remember your touch last night. The ferocious urgency that drove us together, tumbling backwards on to your unmade bed as you whispered,Are we doing this?and I groaned,Yes, and our beings cracked open in each other’s arms.

That was before.

But of course, there’s another scene after.

A darker scene to bookend the light, the sheets now washed in shadows in the hush of a hospital. Still, the jut of a hip. The drape of an arm. The flutter of breath on sheets. A beepingmonitor and quiet, muffled sobs that wrench and yank as they come out– my own.

Then, later, me alone in the apartment, with the smell of the bakery in the air and the muted traffic and the sunlight slanting, sitting on the unmade bed alone, not wanting to move. Not because I want this moment to last for ever, but because I’m afraid of what the next moment will bring, and the next after that, and maybe if I stay still enough, I won’t have to face a future without you.

It’ll get easier, my friends tell me.Just be patient with yourself.

But they never held that kind of love in their hands, or felt its perfection and fragility.

They never felt the slick, viscous slide of an entire future slipping away through the cracked shell of a life. In that single moment, I shattered.

I’ve always hated that old children’s rhyme. You know the one– Humpty Dumpty. But it’s true, isn’t it?

That there are some breakages that go beyond healing.

That sometimes, a single fall can break you for ever.

Chapter One

‘A beverage, ma’am?’ Like a fish hook, the flight attendant’s whisper yanks me out of the meditative zone I’d just achieved, back into the chilly, dry atmosphere of the airplane.

‘Tomato juice, please.’ My nerves are fizzing like live wires, but I force what I believe to be a calm smile and close my book.Crime and Punishment. Ambitious, isn’t it? I have yet to read a word. As Mom always said, go big or go home. God love her, she had no patience for mediocrity of any kind.

The flight attendant rummages in the depths of her cart for a can of V8, and I glance at my seatmate, passed out with an action thriller movie still playing on his seatback screen. Light flickers over his slack face. The plane is full of sleepers. It’s a lonely feeling to be the only passenger awake, and more than once since boarding, I’ve wished I wasn’t making this trip. Any minute now, we should see the sunrise burning red on the horizon. The beginning of a day I’ve been anticipating and dreading for a year.

‘Ice with that?’

‘Yes, please.’

As the flight attendant scoops a noisy volley of ice into a small clear plastic cup, I resettle my restless legs, angled towards the window to avoid my sleeping seatmate’s truly heroic case of manspreading.

‘Thanks,’ I tell the flight attendant, as she reaches over him with my can and the cup of ice. He twitches, then his eyes blink awake and he lowers his Bose headphones so they encircle his neck.

‘You don’t want some vodka in that?’ he says as he eyes my drink selection, stretching his muscled arms behind his head in a V shape and giving me an engaging half-grin. ‘Make it a Bloody Mary? My treat, since I was probably snoring or drooling.’

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