Page 133 of Final Drive

“I know.”

There’s a version of this conversation where I tell her what happened at nineteen hundred. I have the duration and the rudder movement and exactly what the bond felt like, organized and ready to hand over.

She also has a semifinal at eleven-forty tomorrow.

“May I stay?”

I hear the question after I’ve said it. I don’t ask things the way the others do, and even now I need to know the terms.

Reese doesn’t tease me for it.

“Yes.”

We lie down on top of the covers with our shoes off. I’m on my back with one arm over my eyes and she’s beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, and we don’t talk for a long time.

The arithmetic doesn’t stop. I know how many hours until the semifinal, and that Jackson’s face will look worse tomorrow before it looks better, and that something happened to all eight bonds at nineteen hundred meters that I still don’t understand.

The numbers just move further off. They stop asking me to do anything about them.

Around eleven I say into the dark, “I don’t know what happens next.”

“Semifinal at eleven-forty. Lane assignment posts at eight.”

I turn my head toward her. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

There’s enough light through the gap in the curtains to see her face. I planned this conversation once, months ago. There was a walk afterward if the weather cooperated, and several sentences I’d revised until they no longer sounded like anything a person would say.

None of them are here now.

“I’ve been in love with you since the morning you split the boat into pairs and sent Cameron and me off first,” I say. “I had a plan for telling you. It involved a restaurant.”

“Eli.”

“It was a good restaurant.”

She smiles and reaches for me. “Come here.”

So I do.

Her hand settles into my hair and mine rests between her shoulder blades, and I lie there with my ear over her heart, eleven hours from a national semifinal, while everything I usually keep track of goes on happening somewhere without me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Gray

She lies to me at nine in the morning and I let her.

We’re on the dock doing nothing useful, an hour and a half out from the semifinal, and she’s got both hands wrapped around a coffee she hasn’t drunk any of.

“You slept,” I say.

“Some.”

“How much?”

“Enough.” She looks out at the course. “Ask me something else.”