Bloom

So Bold, Make Them Know That You're With me

"They can't have broken up. There's no way, I won't accept that," I shake my head and make the turn onto the main road.

"Maybe we can ask when you finally decide it's time to find him," she says in a condescending tone.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it, Reign," I roll my eyes. "Soon. I promise,"

She seems to take this at face value and drop it for now. "Gum?" She pulls her knees up to her chest with her feet on my seat and holds a stick of gum in my face. I take it and that's the last thing we say to each other the entire ride as she turns the music up, the Beach Boys blasting from my speakers.

*

The beach is hot, the water is bathwater warm, the sun is burning my skin. And I love it.

Reign and I are too far out in the water and are jumping the tall waves as they come at us. The salty water hits my burned face, and it stings, but only in the best ways. The seaweed tangles my feet up and fish swim around my thighs. I haven't felt this free in so long. So free and simply happy.

"Darcy, watch out!" Reign calls through a laugh.

Before I can even turn around, a huge wave crashes into my back and pulls me under. I'm twisted and flipped around under the strong current and I feel quite like a ragdoll. There's nothing I can do to stop it, so I just let it toss me around until the waters calm and I can push up from the sand under my hands and feet and surface again.

I sputter water and wipe my eyes. I look around for Reign and paddle over to her, I traveled a few meters out with the waves. Suddenly, the water is too overwhelming, and I need to break. I'm nothing but a grain of sand out here and it's a tad too much for me to take. "Lunch?" I ask.

"I'm starving," Reign starts swimming toward shore with me in tow.

Dragging myself out of the water is harder than I thought it would be. I'm more exhausted than I was feeling as we were floating. Reign and I throw on our wraps and walk up to the North Shore pier to find something for lunch. I pull her toward a food truck with sandwiches in it despite the unappealing look on her face. Personally, I love food trucks, they're fast, taste good, and usually fairly cheap for the amount of food you get. How can you lose with that?

"Did you bring the diary and albums?" Reign asks once we got our food and are back on the beach, resting on our beach towels.

"Yep," I take a big bite of my sandwich to avoid the possible talking to she would give me.

"Let's look through the pictures," she says, surprising me as she pulls the album out of my bag and lays it out in front of us, careful not to get sand on it.

I let Reign flip through the photos with a purpose so she can find the years that she's very obviously looking for. She knows something, she wants to find a specific set of photos, so I let her and wait for her to tell me what she wants.

Eventually, she lands on a few pages from 1960. I've looked at these photos a little bit when I put them away and when I looked through the album one night early on in our investigation. They're cute, and they're fun, but they're just like all the others and they give nothing away.

In one shot, H stands with the Eiffel tower above him. I think he's supposed to look like he's holding it up, but his hand is too far down, and it turned out to just be a cute, goofy photo. It's a little worn and yellowed, but it's preserved enough to see exactly how real he looks in this photo. How touristy and fun he looks. I love it.

The next photo is of H and G, the boy he's photographed so often with. I wonder if L took these photos of them, maybe that was her passion aside from H. In this photo, their backs are the focal point. They're looking at a building in front of them, it could be the Notre Dame, but I can't be sure. They look happy and excited to be in Paris. They look like they want to take in the whole city. With as much fun as they seem to be having, it does look cold, though, they're in jackets, coats, and hats trying to stay warm. But they look happy, they look relaxed. They look like Paris brought a new life.