its way onto my lips. “Terroristic, even. Normally, I wouldn’t dare negotiate with a hostile, but in the name of saving my eardrums, I’ll concede.” An air of victory engulfs her, and just like that, every negative factor of her energy has been removed. I don’t bother telling her that going in the water was never really in my plans from the start. I carry her back up the beach and set her gently on her feet and then plop down in the sand beside her.
She looks down at me and then back at the truck, and I know there’s something else on her mind.
“Yes?” I ask, cutting to the chase. “What is it?”
She scrunches up her nose in the cutest way. “It really doesn’t bother you to just…sit in the sand without a towel?”
I lean back my head and groan, but it’s mixed with a laugh. Nobody amuses me like she does. “It’s just sand, Holl. I know it’s a real bitch when it gets inside your complicated-as-hell sandals, but it’s not going to kill you.”
She huffs then and sinks to the ground, pulling her bag off her shoulder and setting it down beside her.
I glance at it briefly and then look her directly in the eyes. She’s waiting for an apology. Apparently, she’s learned me well enough to know it’s coming.
“I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t put you in the water with your bag, huh?”
“Yep,” she agrees, “Good thing.”
I chuckle and watch the profile of her face as she turns to look at the ocean with a sigh.
“Why did you want to come here so badly anyway?”
My answer doesn’t take any consideration. It’s a simple fact. “It’s my happy place.”
She looks from the ocean back to me, but with the only light being that from a teeny sliver of moon, it’s hard to really see her clearly. I wonder if she can tell I haven’t taken my eyes off her.
“It’s also one of the best places to see the stars around here,” I add. “And I felt like you and I needed to see them tonight.”
“Why?” she challenges immediately, surprising me with the intensity of the question.
I search my mind for the right words, but I’m not sure they’ll ever come. There are a million and one tiny fragments that make up the complex reason I do anything I do when it comes to Holley, and yet, I can’t put concrete words of validation to any of them. They’re locked up, trapped in the feelings I’ve yet to figure out how to emote. Instead, I settle for a cop-out. “Because, why not?”
Holley considers me closely, trying to read between the lines I’ve done such a poor job of drawing. I don’t dare speak, for fear it’ll shift the way she’s looking at me like an earthquake would tectonic plates, but she finally puts words to her thoughts with a whisper.
“What are your tattoos?” She pauses as I pull up my arm between us and roll up my sleeve. “I…just realized I’ve never asked about them.”
Starting at the top, I work my way down slowly, telling her about each of them in the order I received them. “This is the SEAL trident. I got it when I graduated BUD/S. A whole group of us went together to commemorate making it through hell.”
She smiles softly, reaching out to run a finger along the edges of the design, leaving a trail of heat in its wake.
“This—” I run my fingers around the bright sunflower below the trident “—was Wendy’s favorite flower.” Holley nods in the low light, pulling her hand back and away from my arm, and without thinking, I reach out and pull it back, using her fingers to trace the rest of the designs. “This one is for Chloe, a sunrise over a turquoise sky, because she was the light beyond the clouds, and she was born in December.” I can feel the buzz of Holley’s heart in her fingers, the blood zinging wildly enough to make them pulse. “The astronaut with the flag is a really more of an inside joke with myself—a milestone tattoo for planting my flag in new territory by starting my own business—and the spilling ink at the bottom is a canvas, just waiting for the rest of the story to be written.”
Holley’s quiet, but the volume of her emotions is dialed up loud enough for me to feel.
Sitting there, together, with nobody and nothing around us, the sky starts to feel