Chapter 1: Midnight Swim, Midnight Confession
The water held her like a secret.
Sloane floated on her back, ears submerged, the world reduced to a muffled thrum—the distant bass of the rehearsal dinner playlist, the hollow clink of glass against concrete somewhere above her, the steady percussion of her own heartbeat. The infinity pool stretched toward the horizon until it simply stopped being water and started being sky, a seamless black mirror reflecting the moon in pieces.
She'd escaped twenty minutes ago. Or maybe thirty. Time moved differently when you were avoiding your own feelings.
Her hair fanned out around her like seaweed, and she watched the stars wheel slowly overhead, tracing constellations she'd learned in a different lifetime—back when she still believed in things like fate and timing and the universe conspiring in her favor. Now she knew better. The universe didn't conspire. It just sat back and watched you make an ass of yourself, year after year.
The wedding wasn't even hers.
That was the truly pathetic part. Her younger sister was getting married on Saturday to a man she'd met eight months ago, and Sloane had spent the entire rehearsal dinner making small talk with relatives who kept asking when it would be her turn, as if marriage were a bus she'd simply missed. She'd smiled and deflected and excused herself to the bathroom approximately seventeen times.
And then she'd found the pool.
The water was bath-warm, heated to that perfect temperature where you couldn't tell where your skin ended and the sea began. She'd stripped down to her underwear—a practical black bra and matching briefs that she'd silently thanked herself for choosing this morning—and slipped into the darkness like it was a second skin.
She hadn't expected company.
She definitely hadn't expected Kai.
But there he was, materialized on the pool's edge like some kind of tropical hallucination. His tuxedo jacket was gone, discarded somewhere in the darkness, and his bow tie hung loose around his collar. The top two buttons of his white shirt were undone, revealing the tan line at his throat that she'd memorized years ago without meaning to.
He held a bottle of tequila by the neck, dangling it between his knees.
"You know," he said, his voice carrying across the water with that easy, unhurried cadence that had haunted her for a decade, "when you disappeared, I figured you'd been cornered by Aunt Margie again. Or maybe hiding in the bathroom."
"I was hiding in the bathroom."
"For three hours?"
"I'm very thorough."
He laughed. That laugh. Low and warm and entirely too familiar, like a song she'd heard so many times she could hum it in her sleep. He'd been laughing like that since freshman year, since the first time he'd sat next to her in a lecture hall and whispered that the professor looked like a disappointed walrus.
She'd fallen in love with him approximately four minutes later.
A decade of unrequited pining. A decade of watching him fall for other women—Alexis with the perfect teeth, then Rachel who cried at commercials, then that yoga instructor whose name Sloane had deliberately forgotten. A decade of being the friend, the confidante, the one he called at 2 AM when his heart got broken, never realizing he was breaking hers in the process.
She'd made a decision three months ago.
No more.
She was done being everyone's second choice. Done waiting for him to see her. Done.
And then her sister had to go and get married in Tulum, and Kai had to be invited because he was practically family, and the resort had to overbook, and somehow—somehow—they'd ended up sharing a room.
One room.
One bed, actually, though she'd immediately claimed the couch and threatened violence if he argued.
The universe wasn't conspiring. The universe was fucking with her.
"You're going to prune," Kai said now, nodding toward her fingers, which were indeed starting to look like raisins. "And then you'll be no use to anyone at the wedding photos. What kind of sister would you be?"
"The kind who's been drinking."
"Are you drunk?"
She considered the question. "Not enough."
He lifted the tequila bottle in a mock toast. "I can help with that."
She should say no. She should stay in the water until he got bored and left, until the moon set and the sun rose and she could pretend this entire night hadn't happened.
Instead, she paddled toward him.
The water resisted, thick and warm, and she moved slowly, deliberately, keeping her head above the surface now. The moon gleamed off her wet shoulders, off the collarbones that she'd never quite learned to love, off the freckles that had multiplied over the years like tiny constellations on her skin.
Kai watched her approach.
Not the casual, glancing way he usually looked at her—the way you looked at a friend, a familiar piece of furniture, a person you'd seen a thousand times and stopped really seeing at all.
This was different.
His eyes tracked her like she was something he'd never encountered before, something that needed studying. Cataloging. Understanding.
It made her stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with the tequila she'd had earlier.
She reached the edge of the pool and folded her arms on the warm concrete, resting her chin on her forearms. Close enough to see the stubble along his jaw, the way the moonlight caught the gray in his dark curls. Close enough to smell him—salt and sandalwood and something underneath that was just Kai, just him, just the smell she'd know in a dark room, in another life, in any version of reality.
"Give me that," she said.
He handed her the bottle.
She drank.
The tequila burned going down, but she welcomed it. Welcomed anything that might dull the edges of this moment, the strange electricity crackling between them like the air before a storm.
"Your sister looked happy," Kai said after a moment.
"She should. She's getting everything she wants."
"And what about you?"
The question landed somewhere between casual and careful. As if he'd been thinking about it for a while. As if he might actually want an answer.
Sloane took another drink. "What about me?"
"What do you want?"
It was the kind of question that should have been easy. She was twenty-eight years old. She had a career. An apartment. Twenty-six plants that she'd somehow kept alive for over a year. She had friends and hobbies and a 401(k) that was doing respectably well.
She had everything she was supposed to want.
"To not have to share a bed with you next week," she said instead.
Kai laughed, but it sounded wrong. Forced. "I offered to take the floor."
"And I told you to shut up."
"You know I don't sleep well without..."
He trailed off.
Without her.
The words hung in the air, unsaid but understood. Because they'd shared beds before—platonic, innocent, back in college when they were broke and crashing on couches, later on trips when money was tight and they'd both insisted it meant nothing. She'd never complained, and neither had he, and neither of them had ever acknowledged that for someone who claimed to sleep poorly alone, he slept exceptionally well next to her.
She took another drink and passed the bottle back.
"We should go back up," she said. "They're probably wondering—"
"I've been looking at you for ten years."
The words came out fast, almost tripping over each other, as if he'd been holding them back so long they'd gotten tangled on the way out. He didn't look at her when he said it. He looked at the water, at the reflection of the moon, at the bottle in his hands.
Sloane's heart stopped.
Then started again, too fast, too loud, a drumroll that he could probably hear from where he sat.
"What?" she said. The word came out breathless. Stupid.
"I've been looking at you for ten years," he repeated, slower this time. Each word deliberate. Measured. As if he was testing how they sounded out loud. "And I've been an idiot for every single one of them."
The water between them was perfectly still.
She couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't do anything but stare at him, at the way his hands tightened around the tequila bottle, at the way his jaw clenched like he was bracing for impact.
"Kai," she started, but she didn't know where the sentence was going. Didn't know what to say. A decade of feelings swirled in her chest, a hurricane of hope and fear and fury and something that felt terrifyingly like relief.
"You're wet," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"Your eyes. There's water on your face." He reached toward her, and she could see his hand trembling slightly—Kai, who never trembled, who was always steady and sure and infuriatingly calm. His thumb brushed beneath her eye, catching a drop of pool water or a tear she hadn't noticed, and the touch was so gentle, so impossibly tender, that she felt something crack open inside her chest.
She pulled back.
Not far—just an inch, just enough to break the contact—but she saw the hurt flash across his face before he masked it.
"Why now?" she asked, and her voice was harder than she meant it to be. Angrier. "Why are you saying this now?"
"Because I'm drunk."
The answer was so unexpected, so honest, that she laughed despite herself. A sharp, bitter sound that echoed across the water.
"Great. That's great." She pushed back from the edge, treading water, putting distance between them. "So tomorrow you'll forget this happened, and I'll have to pretend—"
"I won't forget."
"You forget everything."
"I forget names. Faces. Where I put my keys." He set the bottle down and slid into the water, still wearing his dress pants, his shirt, his socks, for god's sake. He didn't seem to care. He moved toward her with the same easy confidence he did everything, cutting through the water like it was nothing, like it couldn't possibly have the power to drown him.
He stopped inches away.
The water between them was the only thing keeping her from either kissing him or drowning him. She wasn't sure which option she preferred.
"I don't forget you," he said. "I could never forget you."
The waves crashed somewhere in the distance. The music from the terrace pulsed faintly, a wedding song for a wedding that wasn't theirs. The moon hung overhead like a question mark.
Sloane could feel his breath on her face. Could see the water droplets clinging to his curls, the way his shirt was plastered to his chest, the way his eyes—those impossible eyes—held hers and refused to let go.
"Say something," he whispered.
She should tell him to go to hell. Should tell him that coming to her three drinks too late, on the eve of her sister's wedding, with ten years of silence behind him and nothing but a bottle of tequila as courage—that wasn't good enough. That she wasn't a consolation prize. That she deserved better.
She should say all of that.
Instead, she said nothing.
The silence stretched between them, taut as a wire, until it felt like the entire universe was holding its breath and waiting and waiting and waiting.
Not yet. She swallowed hard. Not yet.