How to Breathe Underwater
Page 27
“Well, you were half the reason she ran out on the last one.”
He nodded, and when he lifted his head, his eyes were glistening with tears that he was obviously trying to hold in. He reached up and tugged on his hair, ruining the time he’d obviously spent styling it.
His eyes went back to the church. “Who’s that guy you were with?”
I crossed my arms. “A friend.” I wanted to be angry with him, but there was something about the hunch of his shoulders that made him seem three inches tall, and I couldn’t bring myself to get mad at him. Every cell in my body had been so filled with hate and anger for so long, but I was too exhausted to be angry now.
I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of Michael in the parking lot, still leaning against his car, watching us. I took a deep breath and turned back to my father.
“I just wanted you to be happy,” he said, the words spoken uncertainly, completely without the arrogance I expected from him. “I woke up one day, and I realized that I’d spent most of my life being unhappy, and I didn’t want that for you and for your sister. I was trying to be a good person.”
I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath. How could he think that cheating on his wife would make him a good person? But I knew it was more than that. He meant with swimming. He had been trying to be a good dad by pressuring me to swim, by pushing me so hard.
“I guess I don’t believe in good people and bad people anymore.” After everything that had happened between Michael and me, and Michael and Patrice, and Lily and Tom, I meant that. “I just think there are people who make good decisions and people who make bad ones.”
He blinked at me like he didn’t recognize me. “I know I made bad ones.”
I nodded. “Yeah, you did.” And then I looked him in the eye. I’d been so afraid to tell him all the things I needed to, but now, with him here in front of me, shrinking, I wasn’t sure what I’d been so afraid of. That he might be disappointed in me? That he might sit around and wish he’d had a better daughter? “You pushed me too hard. You took control of everything that should have been mine. And you hurt Harris. I loved swimming, but you made me feel like it was what I had to do to earn your respect, and that wasn’t fair.”
“This might be hard to believe,” he said, his breath heavy, puffing out into the cold air. “But I never meant to hurt you.”
I shook my head. “It’s not hard to believe. It just doesn’t matter. You hurt me anyway.”
His chin wobbled, and in a weird way, it made me ashamed of him. I had done my best to be strong after he hurt me, and he wasn’t being strong for me, hadn’t been since I’d walked away from him. He just acted like a child and tore me down in hopes that it would make me need him. But all it did was make me need him less.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for what you did to Mom and for ruining everything that I worked so hard for. But I’m trying to figure things out. I just have a lot of other things to fix before I try to deal with what happened between us.”
His hand came up, like he was going to pat me on the shoulder or something. And then it fell to his side again. “Just call me when you think you’re ready to talk, okay?”
I wasn’t sure that day was ever going to come, but I nodded anyway. I could at least promise that if I was ever ready, I would reach out.
He turned and walked away, his shoulders hunched and his walk slow, like someone who’d just lost a fight.
I crossed back to Michael, relieved as soon as he was close enough for me to touch.
He raised one eyebrow. “You think he’ll be okay?”
I shrugged. “As okay as the rest of us, I suppose.”
* * *
Back at my building, once our building, Michael and I went up to the roof. It was quiet so far up above the city after the commotion of the day. We stood side by side against the wall and stared out at the pink sky between the buildings.
“So what do we do now?” I asked him.
He rubbed my back, sending shivers through every inch of surface area I possessed. “What do you mean?”
I turned and pressed my back to the wall, and his hand immediately came up, his fingertips against my chin. “I don’t want you to go back to Vancouver.”
“I don’t really have any other option. It isn’t that far. And, to be honest, it’s been good for me, being away from here.”
That stung.
He must have seen the hurt in my eyes. He pressed his thumb against my bottom lip. “Not because I’m away from you. Just because it would have been hard, being in the apartment without her.”
He stepped closer to me. I ran my hands up his warm arms and gripped his shoulders. “I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m always here. We’re going to be okay, right?”
I nodded. I believed it. Michael had never really left. I was always thinking about him, thinking about what I would say when I saw him again, how it felt to be with him and then without him, what my life would be like if we were ever where we were right now.
He kissed me, his lips cold from the evening air and his skin smelling like winter. Even as the rest of me got cold in the wind, our mouths were hot, full degrees hotter than the rest of my body.
The concrete wall dug into my back, but I could barely feel it as my nerve endings were screaming everyplace Michael touched me. His fingers had found their way to my ribs, and it felt like CPR. It felt like oxygen after holding my breath for so long.
My brain had been so clouded with all the doubt and hurt and fear that I might never feel like myself again, but when I had him here, holding me like he wasn’t going to let go even if the world ended, I remembered who I was and who I’d been since he’d left, and the two seemed to come together perfectly.
After a long moment, I pulled away to catch my breath. “What’s that flavor?”
He laughed against my mouth, his full lips wet, and his dark eyes shining out at me. “The peppermints made me sad. So I started eating fruit candies instead.” He pulled a crinkling package out of his pocket, ripped it open, and popped the candy in my half-ajar mouth. It tasted like grapefruit. He produced another and put it in his mouth. “They help. After I moved up to Vancouver, I started smoking again. A lot. Kicked the cigarettes a little over a week ago.”
I reached out and squeezed his arm. “You’re going to do great.”
He slid his hand along my arm until his fingers wrapped around mine, and he clasped my fingers so tight that I thought he might never let go. He reached up and stripped my coat off, letting it fall at our feet and then did the same to his.
Before I had a second to ask him what he was doing or feel the cold wind across my bare arms, he grabbed my hand and we ran, jumping into the pool, our fingers still tangled.
We collided beneath the water, wrapping around each other like eels, until we were one creature coming back up to the surface. I held him close as we shivered in our wet clothes and closed my eyes, letting the smell of chlorine and grapefruit mix in my senses.
He pressed his forehead to mine. “I’ve been practicing,” he said, his lips almost close enough to kiss. His legs were kicking, and I wasn’t holding him up under the water. He was holding himself up.
“You’re a natural.” I smiled against his mouth, and then we slipped back beneath the surface, the world going silent against our ears.
Acknowledgments
I have to thank, first and foremost, my Father, King, and Savior, who blesses me with things I could never deserve.
Special thanks to Jean Feiwel, for taking a chance on this book and making my dream come true, and to Kat Brzozowski and Lauren Scobell for helping me make this the story I always wanted it to be. A huge thank-you to the team at Macmillan and Swoon Reads for the many ways you’ve made this experience amazing for me.
Thank you to the amazing people that make up the Swoon Squad, the kindest and most welcoming group of people out there. So happy to be in this with you guys. And, of course, the bi
ggest of thank-yous to all the Swoon Readers. This book wouldn’t exist without you, and all your comments meant so much to me.
Thank you to my writer friends who supported me through this process, especially Kathy Berla, my beta reader and guardian angel. Thanks to Mom and Meghan for listening to me complain week after week. Also, the YA Forum at writing.com, for teaching me everything I know. Thank you, Yoon and Christina, for being my first readers and my first fans.
It wouldn’t be right not to thank Michael Phelps. You weren’t the Michael in this story, but you were an important one nonetheless. Thank you for being passionate about swimming and being my hero since I was thirteen.
I have to thank all the people who inspired this story: Matt, for going away and making me miss you so much that I wrote a book about you coming home; Kristina, for taking me on an ice-cream adventure during the worst summer of my life; Christy, for not ditching your wedding; and Jeremy, for being one half of the greatest love story I’ve ever known.
About the Author
Vicky Skinner was born and raised in Texas. She doesn’t like country music or horseback-riding, but she does like her motorcycle-riding husband and her two adorable Labs. Everyone told her not to get a degree in Literature, but she did it anyway. She works as a full-time homemaker and a part-time nanny, and if she’s not at home in her office/library, she’s probably hanging out with her church group or eating at the nearest pizza place. How to Drown is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Vicky Skinner
A SWOON READS BOOK
An imprint of Feiwel and Friends
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
swoonreads.com
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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First hardcover edition 2018
eBook edition August 2018
eISBN 9781250136114