Page 34 of Undertow

Free.

“Tell me a memory,” she says when I don’t respond.

I huff a short laugh. “Like what?”

A smile flickers over her inviting lips. “Anything.”

I pull my gaze away, focusing on the far wall like I’m thinking. Maybe I am, but not about memories. There is nothing in that graveyard appropriate for the living. No, I’m thinking about the mess I’m making with this girl. How terrified I am that I won’t be able to dig myself out of it if she keeps looking at me like I matter, touching me like it means something. Treating me like… I’m a person.

Her affection might not even be real, but the effect certainly is.

“There was this lake by my house growing up. One of those mossy, mystical ones, you know?”

She smiles in encouragement when I pause, which means she’s buying my act so far.

Clearing my throat, I study the wall again. “Everyone used to say it was haunted by the ghost of a woman who drowned back in the eighteen hundreds.” I shake my head like I’m lost in a fond memory. “All the other kids were afraid to go near it. If they did, it was on a dare or some kind of punishment for losing a bet.”

“Not you, though,” she says confidently when I stop again.

I send her a weak smile. “No. Not me. I loved it there. It had a story separate from our time and reality. It had its own soul, which meant when I was there, mine could rest.”

You could hide.

Be.

Breathe… underwater.

If only that was the whole story of that lake.

“Did you go there to write?”

“All the time.”

“Damn,” she mutters. “Why do you have to be so interesting?”

She smacks my chest in playful irritation, and I trap her hand against me. “I’m not. Maybe it just takes the right person to see it.”

Her amusement fades into something more intimate. We thread our fingers, and she flips our hands to trace my favorite tattoo.

“This one is so beautiful,” she says softly.

Beautiful? No one else has ever thought so.

“Most people find it disturbing.”

She runs her finger over the outline of the eye, across each exposed bone and ligament. “That’s what makes it beautiful. The graphic pain of it. Its heartbreaking honesty. Such a potent glimpse of what tortures you. What is it saying? What’s trapped inside that intricate soul of yours?”

An ache lodges in my chest. A strange desire to confess.

If I did, she’d be the first to hear it outside of the only person who’s ever truly loved me.

“Isee you, son.Iknow you.” Frail arms crushing my resistance. Making me believe, for a fraction of a second, I wouldn’t have to be what I’ve become.

The truth rests on my tongue. What’s the image saying? It’s the reason I can never tell her.

I offer a casual shrug instead. “Nothing really. I saw it on a website and thought it was cool.”

Her disappointment is palpable, and I swallow a twinge at the lie.

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