Page 32 of Heartbeat

“We can, if you want to,” I said.

“I think I want to,” he said softly.

We were silent for a few moments. It was as if Ethan was choosing his wording with care, deciding what to ask and what not to get into.

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

“No, not really.”

Please, don’t ask why. Please, don’t ask why.

“Why?”

Fuck me.

I considered lying, maybe even embellishing it, to not sound too sad, but decided against it when I thought about how much I didn’t want to lie—not to him.

So, I didn’t.

“It wasn’t the pain I was focusing on, to be honest,” I said, vague enough so it could be interpreted in a different way, but still remaining truthful.

“Which pain were you focusing on?”

He hadn’t interpreted it in a less sad way.

Shit.

“We have this lake house we used to go to almost every weekend,” I said. “Once, Liam and I drove up with Summer and Emma—his girlfriend.”

I adjusted myself on his chest and started mindlessly drawing shapes on it, over his shirt. “We took some Molly, smoked, and drank all weekend. On our last night, we decided to go swimming—Liam was a swimmer too.” I looked up at Ethan, who smiled.

He never once stopped stroking my hair.

“There was this tournament that week that had us competing against each other, and Liam spent the whole weekend trying to get inside my head. For some reason, he thought it was necessary for him to show off, so he started swimming out, deeper into the lake—”

“Jesus,” Ethan quietly said.

This was the first time I was telling the story to anyone who didn’t have some sort of degree in medicine. It was also the first time I was doing it voluntarily. One thing I did notice was that, no matter how long it took for me to speak, no matter how long I went silent in between sentences or thoughts, he never once rushed me. Not once. And just like his running his fingers through my hair as I spoke meant something, whether he was aware of it or not, him not rushing me did too.

“Eventually, he disappeared from view, and Emma called out to him, asking him to turn back.” I shook my head. “He didn’t.” I frowned, and my voice cracked a bit.

Ethan grabbed my wrist and held it close to his chest, just above his heart.

“Then I heard him say my name. He started calling out, yelling that he was cramping. I swam out as fast as I could, but by the time I reached the spot he’d been calling me from…he’d gone under.”

Ethan squeezed my wrist.

“I dunno why it didn’t occur to me that it might’ve been a joke. He was prone to pulling shit like that all the time, except—”

I didn’t even notice I’d stopped talking. It was so weird; it felt as though I was back in the water, somehow, watching it back like some sort of evil replay. Except it didn’t feel the same. I didn’t feel as hopeless as before. And the sadness, as much as it was as present as ever, didn’t seem unbearable.

“I knew,” I confessed so quietly I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, “I’d taken too long, I—I—I was too high—” I shook my head.

It was then that Ethan stopped stroking my hair. Instead, he ran his hand down my back and held my arm closer to him, as if wanting to show me he was still there—which felt so lovely.

“I don’t know how many times I dove. I just know I did it long enough for the sun to come out and stopped only when a speedboat approached me with the sheriff and my parents on board.”

I took a long pause before continuing. “Two days later, they found him.”

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