Coming Up For Air | ✓

15 | undertow

Lighthearted laughter echoes through the room, bouncing against the wide windows facing the boardwalk: loud and short in its amusement as it blends with the soft murmur of voices, clinking of glasses and silverware scraping against plates.

The rest of their table is watching Luke as he stabs his finger down against the dark wooden tabletop, lips in smiles as he attempts to state the point he's making, but Stella's busy watching Jake.

Chin resting in her palm as she lazily twirls some pasta around her fork, small upward tilt to her mouth, her gaze flits over his features. Over the twitch in his cheeks as his lips split into a grin, deepening the smile marks etched around his mouth. Over his cheekbones lifting as he laughs, all the way to the glimmer in his eye. Over the slow beat of his fingers as they tap against the foot of his glass.

Letting a faint chortle fall from his tongue, Jake shifts in his seat—gaze flickering to Stella. Fork in hand, he reaches across the table and spears it into one of the red cocktail tomatoes on her plate.

Stella's mouth falls open with a small breath of mock-disbelief. With a small laugh, she raises her brows and knocks his fork away with her own. "Excuse you?"

Innocence dances over Jake's lips as he pops the tomato into his mouth. "What?"

Their friends' conversation melts into soft background noise as he holds her gaze, the amused smile tugging at the corners of his lips mirroring the one rounding Stella's cheeks.

In an attempt to tune back into whatever the rest of their table's up to, Stella reaches for her glass of iced tea and flits her eyes away. She lets them roam over the room, internally reprimanding herself for her ever-growing smile and the warmth lingering on her cheeks as she listens with half-an-ear to the ongoing conversation.

Then, fingers wrapped around the glass of iced tea, she freezes—the steady rhythm of her heartbeat exchanged for one alike that of a stampeding horse. Her focus falters and fades. As does her smile.

A coldness settles over the restaurant. There, at the corner table—behind a gigantic yarn-ball of a hanging ceiling lamp—is the last person Stella thought she'd see here. On a Friday night in sunny Acebridge, on the coast of North Carolina, of all places.

The one person she had hoped she would never have to lay eyes on ever again.

The one person she least wants to lay eyes on ever again.

He's yet to see her, seeing as he's busy pulling a foolish face at his three children who—as expected—throw their heads back in delighted laughter. And though Stella wants to do nothing but look away, to go back to laughing with her friends, continue eating of her deliciously creamy pasta, she cannot tear her gaze away.

As always, he emits the kind of loud presence that has everyone in his orbit looking twice. Strong build, those years as a swimmer honed into his every feature. Handsome, in an old-fashioned way: shirt ironed and piercing steel gray eyes—if one were to look up close—with the ability to drain you of your breath. His shampoo commercial worthy hair falls a little longer than usual, giving off the impression of a relaxed vacation vibe.

It's the kind of presence eager parents and grandparents alike would love to capture on camera.

But beneath the pretty surface there's an ugliness neither of them—or anyone else it seems, for that matter—could ever imagine.

No; one would have to be at its hands to even glimpse a fraction of it.

Clammy palm tightening around her drinking glass, Stella swallows hard as her airways begin to close in on her. Skin prickling, her chest constricts: the rise and fall of it heavier with her every breath, drowning her out until nothing but tension consumes her body.