Beside her Grant sat quietly in a tongue of moonlight watching her. After a while, after a long silence, she told him about her father and about the dream, how strange it made her feel to wake up from a dream about a lake and then find herself sitting on the shore of just such a lake only a few hours later.
Grant said, “What do you believe?”
Avery slid away from him. “What do you mean?”
“I’m asking what you believe. Spiritually.”
“Spiritually,” she said, working to grasp the question. She looked into the woods, as if the answer might be waiting for her there. She tried to think about the question seriously, but nothing came to her. She said, “My family is Episcopalian,” though she knew that was no answer. “I don’t know. We never really talked much about that stuff growing up. We never went to services or any of that either, so . . . I guess I don’t know what I believe.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Grant. “Why?” she said. “What do you believe? Spiritually?”
“I don’t know either,” he said, “but I can’t believe it’s a coincidence you’d dream about a lake exactly like this lake and then find yourself here.”
“Then what?” she asked. “If it’s not a coincidence?”
Grant bent over and undid his laces, and he seemed to be thinking in the process. “Then it’s a mystery,” he said, and he kicked off his shoes.
“What are you doing?” Avery leaned back and stretched.
Grant undid the buckle and zipper of his chinos and pulled them off. Beneath them he was wearing a pair of white briefs. “I have an urge to get in the water.”
“You’re shy,” she said.
He looked down at his briefs. “More modest than some bathing suits.”
“I suppose.” Her thoughts flashed back to Zach a few hours earlier, showing himself off in front of her.
Grant went down to the water and stepped in, gingerly at first. “Huh,” he said, “the water’s warmer than the air.” He walked in all the way up to his waist and looked toward the wooded tree line across the lake. “It’s beautiful out here.” He took off his shirt, threw it to the shore, and dove into the water.
Avery thought he was beautiful. Unlike Zach’s freakishly huge body, Grant’s was sleek and compact and beautifully muscled. Michelangelo’s David came to mind, the gracefulness of the musculature, Grant’s skin looking as hard and flawless as the statue’s marble. While she watched, he surfaced, took a deep breath, arched his body, and dove again, this time going deeper, she could tell by the breath he took and the way he dove. She went to the edge of the water, her bare toes sinking down into mossy silt. The surface had closed over Grant’s dive, and the lake looked unchanged, peaceful and dark. If she hadn’t seen him disappear, there’d be no way to know anyone was in the water. When he came up again, he was only a few feet away from her. He exploded out of the lake, shaking off water, and the spray caught her in the face and chest. She jumped back, startled, and then laughed.
Grant took a moment to catch his breath. “It’s like being in a deprivation chamber down there,” he said. “You can’t see or hear anything and the water’s so warm—”
Avery picked up his shirt, which was caught on a bush beside her. She wiped her face with it. “You got me wet.”
“What I was thinking, down there,” he said, “is that it feels like you and I are supposed to be here. I mean,” he said, “the way I felt when I saw you. Your dream. Some things, they feel—” He looked at the sky and placed one hand flat over his heart, as if he were about to pledge something. “They feel as if somehow they had already happened.” He looked back to Avery, his hand sliding down to his belly.
“Is that what you were thinking,” Avery said, “that we were destined to meet?” She had a slight, wry smile on her face, and she meant to sound at least a little dismissive, but she wasn’t sure it had come out that way.
“There are people who believe,” he said, “that we’re all spirits, and that the ones you connect with in this life, the ones you love or have deep friendships with, they’re from previous lives. You’re meeting them again, and it’s like seeing someone you’ve missed for a very long time.”
Avery was acutely aware of the distance between her and Grant. It was strange. She could tell he was trying to say something meaningful, but it was as if he needed the barrier of the water between them to do it. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but the gist of it was that he felt a special connection to her—and she realized that was what he had meant all along. That was what he had meant when he’d said there was something special about her. She was flattered, but also wary.
Grant watched her, waiting for some response. Finally he said, “What are you thinking?”
Avery stripped out of her clothes down to her bra and panties and waded into the water. When she reached Grant, he took her hand in his and then stepped closer and put his arms around her. She let him hold her for a moment without returning the embrace, as if she were thinking about something else. Then he took her head in his hands and kissed her, and again she let him. When his hands slid down the small of her back to grasp her and pull her into him, she didn’t resist. She felt him stiff and warm pressing against the bare skin of her stomach. “Hey,” she whispered, meaning to turn down the heat of the moment, but no other words came, and when he lifted her up and carried her back to the shore, she laughed, partly like a child laughing at being lifted and carried and partly in amazement at the power in his arms and chest and thighs. She recognized both excitement and fear at the strength in him as he carried her out of the water and onto the shore, where he pushed her back against a tree, the rough bark scraping the soft skin between her shoulders. She tried to speak, meaning to ask him with humor just what he thought he was doing, but he kissed her again, hard, and she kissed him back in a daze of sensation and movement and heat—and then, in an instant, his foot hit the inside of her ankle and pushed her leg aside as his hand simultaneously reached between her legs, and then he was inside her with a single movement that made her gasp, partly in shock at the ease of the entry and partly out of simple surprise and unreadiness.
She said his name aloud, sure the urgency in her voice would make him stop, and when he didn’t, she said it again, louder, a command—but instead of stopping, he brought his right hand up around her neck, his thumb and forefinger digging into either side of her jaw, and pressed her head back against the tree as he pushed harder and deeper. His hand around her neck terrified her, and her body went slack with surrender. There was, then, the briefest of moments that felt like a hinge, an instant in which things might swing one way or another: in one direction, screams, scratching and fighting; in the other, abandon, immersion in movement and feeling. Even though the moment was so fleeting it barely happened, she recognized it with an out-of-body clarity, that hinge moment, a point of turn. She made her choice by grabbing his ears as if she might rip them off and locking her calves around his thighs as she pushed back against his push with equal power. His hand came away from her neck and he was thrown backward as he spun around, holding her in the air a moment before kneeling and laying her down in the bed of moss, cool and wet against her skin. Under him, on her back, she grasped his ears tightly, her fingernails digging into them while he continued pushing as if he were desperate to reach up into her belly. When she yanked his head up to see his face, she found a turbulent mix of pain and pleasure there. Inside her she felt the familiar build of heat and sensation, and she willed herself into it until, finally, it released and washed over her, accompanied by a long guttural note, half growl, half moan.
On top of her, inside her, Grant kept at it until he was done. When he got up and walked away, Avery closed her eyes, turned on her side, and curled up into herself. Outside the blind circle she identified as her body, she could hear