I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You're not hitchhiking to New York." Flat. Certain. The tone of a man who had decided something and was informing me of it rather than proposing it for discussion.
Something small and electric moved through me that had no business being there.
"I wasn't—I was speaking theoretically."
"Sure, you were."
"I was." I was, mostly. "And even if I wasn't, I don't believe I asked for your?—"
"A woman alone on a highway with no ID, no cash, no phone." He said it evenly, like he was reading coordinates off a map. "No."
"You've known me for approximately an hour."
"I know." His jaw had done something. "Doesn't change reality.”
I stared at him. The cold water. The March sky. This enormous, sunglasses-less, hat-less stranger who had driven me to the beach and jumped off a pier after me and was now,apparently, appointing himself to an opinion about my solo travel decisions.
The reasonable response was to point out that I was an adult woman in full possession of my faculties who had made exactly one impulsive decision today and had done so on purpose, and that I did not require a man I'd met in an alley to weigh in on my theoretical itinerary.
What I said instead was: "What does reality say?"
Something moved in those dark eyes. "Says you've been making other people happy your whole life. Says you finally did one thing for yourself and now you're—" A pause. Brief. Like he'd had to make a decision about how much to say. "You're not thinking straight yet. You need somewhere safe to land before you think about going anywhere else."
I was quiet for a moment.
"That's very—" I started.
"Presumptuous. I know."
"I was going to say perceptive." I held his gaze. "It's annoying when strangers are perceptive."
A smirk. "Noted."
A wave moved through, gentle, and it closed the distance between us—not much, a foot or so—and neither of us corrected it. I was close enough now to see the water tracking down the side of his face, the way the cold had brought color into his jaw, the dark of his eyes in the light. Close enough to feel the shift in the water when he moved. Close enough that when the next small wave came through and tilted me sideways I reached out automatically for something solid. My hand found his arm.
His forearm. Under the water, my fingers wrapped around it—just the reflex of a person catching their balance—and I felt the muscle there, the solidity of it, the living warmth of skin underwater. My whole body registered it as something significant before my brain had a chance to run interference.
I did not let go immediately.
I should have let go immediately.
He didn't move. Didn't pull back, didn't make anything of it, just let me hold on while I found my footing in the water, steady as a piling.
But I felt something go through him, barely perceptible—a shift in the stillness, the coil tightening—and I was suddenly, acutely aware of how much of both of us was underneath the surface and how little separated skin from cold water from the space between two people who had just met and were not behaving like it.
I let go. Found my own balance. Kept my face composed in the way I had extensive practice at.
"Thank you," I said, as though he'd handed me a pen.
“No worries,” he said. As though he hadn't felt it, either.
The sun had moved while we'd been in the water. Lower, more gold, the afternoon shift that happened in March like the light had somewhere to be. I became aware that we had been in the Atlantic Ocean for a while, and that I was cold in the way that crept up on you, and that I was going to need to get out of the water and deal with the fact that I had no dry clothes, no towel, and the only thing available to me on that pier was seventeen pounds of ivory silk.
"We should probably—" I started.
"Yeah." Already moving toward the pilings, toward the access ladder I could see bolted to one of the supports.