“Stop!” I put my hands over both sides of my neck as he came toward it with puckered lips. I squealed as he managed to pull my hand away and plant another kiss on my neck.

“Noooo.” I raced to the other side of the room, Jake hot on my heels, but when he caught up to me, he didn’t kiss my neck again.

“Come with me.” He extended his hand and I looked down at it suspiciously.

“Are you just trying to get me to take your hand so I remove it from my neck?”

“No more neck kisses, I swear,” he said seriously. I let my neck go and slipped my hand through his. I’d done this a million times before, but I still couldn’t get over how perfectly they fit together. They seemed to have been designed for each other. Like a long-lost key to a treasure chest. What were we going to find inside? Or had we already found it? Jake and I were the treasure. The most rare and precious and beautiful thing in the world. The thing that everyone wanted, that shone so brightly it was blinding. We walked through the house onto the deck outside, and that was when I saw what he’d done. A million glowing candles. Orange and flickery and beautiful, laid around the pool and some even floating in it.

“What is this?” I asked, my voice a soft whisper.

“When those assholes pushed you in the pool all those years ago, they deprived you of something. They deprived you of that feeling of slipping into cool water on a hot day. The feeling of weightlessness when you float on your back, that feeling of cutting through the water like a fish, and I want to give that back to you before you go.” He took a step toward the pool. I looked at the water, panic rising inside me again.

“We’ll take it slow.” He held his hand out once more.

I looked into his eyes. They were the sky and the sea and tanzanite and topaz.

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

And then another kind of smile swept across his face. One I hadn’t seen before. Sexy. Naughty. “Who says you need a bathing suit?” And with that, he peeled his clothes off, dropping them onto the deck until he was standing there in nothing but his underwear. My eyes swept over him and I almost forgot my panic for a moment as I looked at his ridiculous perfection. He looked at me in a way that urged me to do the same. To take my clothes off.