Page 9 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

I didn’t know the pastor was going to hold me under for a full three seconds and I panicked, genuinely panicked, and came upsputtering while forty people who had just become my friends smiled and called it rebirth.

I remember thinking: Is this it? Because I just feel soggy.

This, though.

I sink back down to my shoulders, the heat wrapping all the way around me, the neon doing its slow color-shift underneath, bubbles rising up through the water and popping softly against my palms. I tilt my head back and look at the moon that’s coming out now as the last of the twilight goes, and I feeling —

Okay.

I think I might actually be okay.

Not fixed.

Jake is still in our house right now, probably, on his knees on the rug I hate. Or, more likely pouring out all his troubles to his mother. But none of it is my problem anymore.

I have a carry-on and a laptop bag and a single suitcase full of clothes and no plan past tonight.

But I’m warm. And the lights are pretty.

And I finally did the impossible thing.

I close my eyes and let the jet at my lower back do its work. I’m so deep in the sensation of justexistingin my own body without a headache for the first time in recent memory that I almost miss the sound.

Almost.

A soft displacement of water. Rhythmic. Coming from?—

My eyes shoot open.

In the pool beside the hot tub, there are ripples cutting a clean line down the center of the water. Moving fast. Like something very large and very efficient is underneath them.

I watch, confused, until the shape at the end of the lane resolves into a man—a very large man—who does a flip turn off the far wall with the ease of someone who has done thisparticular thing ten thousand times, and pushes back the other direction.

Steam is rising off the surface of the pool around him.

Not from the pool. Fromhim.

I stare at this for a moment, working out the physics. The pool is unheated. It is January in Texas, which means the water is probably somewhere around?—

Cold. Very cold. And this man is generating enough heat that his body issteamingin it, which means he has been in there long enough to?—

He reaches the shallow end and stands, and several things erupt in my brain simultaneously.

Four hours ago, I told Jake I wanted a divorce.

Now there is a massive, tattooed man swimming in the freezing pool beside the hot tub I’m in like he was summoned by a genie granting every wish I’ve never allowed myself to make.

He reaches the shallow end and stands, water pouring down a gorgeous body covered in inked gargoyles, demons, and enough muscle to make me forget every rule I’ve ever followed.

Then he looks directly at me.

I drop beneath the surface of the hot tub.

Apparently freedom is going to require a learning curve.

Hiding under the water is a completely involuntary response, pure animal, the same instinct that makes you duck when something comes at your face even when you know it’s not going to hit you.

One second I was sitting there openly staring at a stranger in the pool who exudes pure fuck-boy energy, and the next I was crouched on the floor of the hot tub with my eyes open and the neon lights going around me and the muffled underwater silence pressing in, thinking: