“Hey, hey, Chase … relax,” I hear Jack say. His arms wrap around me, and his legs kick to keep us both afloat.

I cough every ounce of water out of my lungs. My tense body relaxes into him.

“Can I let you go? Or will you drown on me?”

Part of me wants to tell him I’ll sink without him to hold me up. Then I realize his body is pressed up against mine, and I immediately slip out from under his grip to prevent him from noticing how hard I am. Shrinkage in cold water is no match against Jack’s appeal.

“I swear I can swim!” I say. “I just touched … something.”

Jack arches his eyebrow then laughs as I dog-paddle away. With a sick backstroke, he propels himself backward and away from me.

His laugh is hearty, and I have to go underwater and swim away a bit to prevent him from seeing the goofy-ass smile plastered across my face. But of course, I’m thinking too hard, because I slip back under and inhale another mouthful.

I try to stifle my sputtering, but, yeah, I’m a failure.

“Not much of a swimmer?”

“I love swimming,” I say. “Though I can see how this might look like my first time ever experiencing the majesty of water.”

“Majesty. I like that word.” He dips beneath the water and thrusts like a rocket toward me, emerging just short of my flailing arms. “You ever hear a word, and then it lodges in your brain, so you’re mulling it over and over again until it either sounds like a completely made-up word or takes on a new meaning entirely? Majesty feels like one of those words,” he says.

I love that. Too bad the moment only lasts a second.

“Chase!” Benny shouts. “Helloooooooo, where are you?! Are you dead? Is this going to turn into an episode of Unsolved Mysteries?”

“Who is that?” Jack asks.

“Roommate, Benny,” I say. “I guess they’re looking for us.”

“Speak for yourself.” Jack smirks this sort of half grin, and his blueish-gray eyes look sinister, but the kind of sinister that could convert the purest of boys to the dark side.

“I just want to do this for the rest of the day,” I confess.

He swims by me, cutting through the water with ease. “I know what you mean.” His stroke is so wide that his fingertips graze my chest. “But we should probably get out.” He points up, and the sun is no longer visible, the sky turning that late-afternoon hazy gold.

Back to reality, where people other than the two of us exist.

“You first,” Jack commands. “Y’know, in case you fall, and I have to save you again.”

“Good call.” I laugh awkwardly like old-school Goofy. I want to die. In Jack’s arms, preferably. As I grab hold of a tree root that juts out of the earth, he places his hand on my back, and I instinctively lean into him for just a second, which is long enough for me to imagine our engagement—an elaborate proposal wherein he organizes a flash mob—followed by our lavish wedding at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom (because he seems like the outdoorsy type, from Vermont and whatnot), and then our 2.5 children, whom we will adopt domestically.