She hadn't expected to find him in the water. But she had stopped expecting anything. That was the problem with being fine.
It was someone's birthday, a pool behind a house she'd never been to. She had come with a friend who was already on the other side of the yard, unreachable.
He was standing at the shallow end with a drink in his hand, and she saw him before he saw her, and she had exactly three seconds to decide what to do with that.
She walked toward the pool.
He turned. The drink went still in his hand. She had forgotten — or made herself forget — the specific quality of his attention, the way it arrived all at once, like weather.
"You're here," he said. She said she was, and sat at the pool's edge and let her feet drop in. He came and sat beside her without asking. The space between them was exact — the width of a decision not yet made.
The water was warmer than she'd expected. Or maybe that was just the night.
"You look good," he said. And then: "I'm not going to pretend I don't mean it."
"You always said it like an apology."
"I'm working on that." He shifted — not toward her, exactly, but toward something — and the water around her ankles moved.
She thought about the year after him, and the year after that. How she'd been perfectly fine. How fine was its own kind of empty.
The party continued behind them. Neither of them turned around.