Eight months later

I looked at my watch. I had about twenty minutes till my next lecture. I put my head down and picked up my pace. The courtyard looked beautiful this time of year – a few of the trees were just changing color and things felt cozier somehow. I hoisted my backpack higher up on my shoulder and got lost in the rhythm my feet found on the paving bricks underfoot.

When I had first put in my official withdrawal of my application to train as a SEAL, my supporting commanders took it as a sign of temporary insanity. After everything that had happened, they kindly told me they’d keep my spot available till I was ready. But I never became ready. They asked me why. Everyone asked me why. But it was hard to put my finger on what exactly made me change my mind so abruptly.

I had dreamt of being a SEAL for longer than I could remember. It felt so natural a choice that I had never even imagined another path for myself. And yet, all of that seemed to evaporate completely in the days after we made it back to California and I could start piecing my life back together. It was something I couldn’t tell anyone, but as the months rolled by, I began to think of the entire wreck as a blessing. I had only been sleepwalking before, going along with a life path that I had never had the guts to question, caught in the momentum of something that felt big and inevitable …right up until it just didn’t anymore.

Sometimes, the only way to move forward in life is to completely destroy everything you’ve done till that point.

I went back to school. My minor celebrity probably helped a little given my less than stellar grades. People never had questions for me exactly, instead they only found it necessary to tell me at length what they would have done in my situation. “Oh, I would have gone absolutely crazy!” they’d say when they realized I was the guy they’d seen on the news, or “If I were you, I would have just stayed out there, huh? Your own little island paradise? Ha ha!”

I didn’t mind. I’m not particularly good with words so I soon gave up trying to explain to people exactly what it had been like for me out there. The media forgot about the whole incident in a month. It was a freak hurricane that no weather models had been able to predict or track, and it was over so quickly people could scarcely believe that yes, an entire luxury cruise ship had gone down into the Atlantic and yes, only a few survivors remained bobbing in the ocean.

There had been events. There were charity benefits and memorial services for those who didn’t survive. But I didn’t go to any of them. Again, I couldn’t explain why. My tragedy felt smaller, and more personal. Like it was only running parallel to this great national disaster that had caught everyone’s imagination, and it felt weird to go out in public and mourn mutually for a thing I felt had nothing to do with any of them.

My feet moved swiftly over the courtyard. Today was my favorite module, and we were doing my favorite topic: genetic mutations and how they play out in that epic dance of life called natural selection. I had always held an amateur interest in ideas like this, but something about the shipwreck made it feel all the more real for me: tiny ‘mistakes’, or accidents, in the DNA can occasionally prove to be so beneficial to the organism that instead of it being a drawback, it becomes a great gift, something that allows the creature to thrive where everyone else can’t. Sometimes, you have to completely break something in order to see what new and interesting possibilities lie just ahead. The shipwreck was a total, unmitigated disaster. But somehow, it was the one mistake that allowed me to thrive in a new idea, a new life I had never even dreamt of for myself up until that moment.

I hadn’t heard again from the others.

That was mostly on purpose.

Carl and Livvy stayed in touch for a while but they lived in another state and had their own busy lives. Last I heard Carl had written a book about it but I decided to leave well alone enough and not read it. I had tried to reach out to Charlie a few times, but she had been reluctant. She gave me a letter she had and wanted me to pass it on to Ellie. But Ellie was the last person I wanted to see. Yet another thing I couldn’t explain, what can I say.

Once I had delivered her safely to the hospital, I was no longer needed. And when I later heard that Anthony hadn’t made it out alive, the remorse I felt was so intense I couldn’t bear to seek out Ellie again. I wanted to speak to her again more than anything, no mistake. To just share a moment again with the one person who I felt truly understood, who would listen to me and not feel the need to say anything in return. I was so hungry for that connection again, for that ease I had found with her and yes, for that that touch. That sweet way that our bodies had fit so well together…

But that was just selfishness. Just dreaming.

Ellie had lost her fiancé. And while he lay hurt and fading on the island, we were thoughtlessly distracted with our own needs. I strongly suspected that she would never want to see me again; that back then she had temporarily lost her mind and that now we were back in the real world, she’d be mortified to see me, to face me again after what we had done together. In truth, a part of me was too afraid to meet her just because I couldn’t bear having her say all of this directly to my face.

I was nearly at the lecture hall when someone called out my name. I must have been hallucinating. I spun around, thinking how dumb it was that I had been daydreaming about Ellie so hard I was starting to actually hear her voice, when I saw her. In the flesh, standing there in the sunshine of the courtyard with her hair loose and a green satchel slung over her torso. It was really her. She looked as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

“Ellie…?”

She had a crooked smile on her lips as she walked over to me. I hadn’t seen her in the better part of a year.

“How did you find me here?” she said with a shocked laugh.

“Find you? I study here.”

Her eyes widened.

“But I study here!” she said.

We both laughed nervously. God, she looked good.

“This is… this is quite a surprise,” I said. I couldn’t help but grin. The sight of her face just did that to me, even still. She smiled back.

The drama from the months before seemed smaller, and more manageable, now that she was just a girl with wavy hair and a satchel standing in front of me.

“You …I thought you’d be out there doing something heroic on a battleship or something,” she said.

Had she always been this pretty? In all my memories, Ellie was unkempt. Her wild, sandy silvery hair was all windswept, and her bare feet dusted on the bottom with beach sand. Now it almost felt like meeting a strange new family member of hers, one who wore crisp new clothing and had her hair styled and colored.

“Well, that was in another life,” I said. “I’m studying now. Biomedicine. Cool, huh?”

Her face was so bright and alive.

“Biomedicine? Ooh, fancy. I’m studying too. Obviously,” she gestured to the books she had perched on her hip. “I’m finally doing my teacher’s diploma… of finishing it, I should say. Luckily they let me transfer a bunch of credits so it wasn’t a total cold start for me.”

My eyes fixed on her small pink fingernails clasped round her books. I didn’t know what else to say. It was all the small talk I could muster. Was this really the woman I had spilled my guts to on that boat a million years ago?

“Hey, Ellie, isn’t it weird how this is so much more awkward than anything that happened on the island?”

She laughed instantly and easily.

“You’re so right! Actually, I think about that kind of stuff all the time. How life was almost less scary for those few days, you know? Just easier somehow. That’s probably going to sound really bad…”

“No, no I understand exactly what you mean. Like, we’ll never starve again, or have to worry about where to sleep for the night, but I almost feel like that was a better kind of stress than, well… you know,” I said and held up my own books.

She giggled again.

She had a rich, soft laugh that felt like a warm breeze in mid-summer. Hearing it again like that I realized that all this time I had been missing it.

“You too, huh? I feel you. A few rounds in the ring with my new tutor group isn’t exactly life-threatening, but it sure feels like it!”

We let the smiles fade from our faces slowly, and then we were there together, again, and it felt very much like something should happen.

“I thought about you a lot, after everything,” I said quietly. She looked away and then back into my eyes.

“Me too.”

“You never got in touch though,” I added.

She frowned.

“Neither did you,” she said simply.

I shifted my weight. To hell with the lecture.

“But …I didn’t feel it was right to contact you. It wasn’t my place,” I said. Her frown softened and she sighed.

“I don’t know what to say. I thought about it. I thought about finding you and calling you up. I saw you gave that interview as well but then I thought, you’re probably moving on, probably continuing with your training…”

“I thought about you every moment,” I blurted. She looked at me quickly. In those eyes was all the same gentleness and openness that had drawn me in that first night I had literally run into her on the deck of the ship. But she looked pained.

“I never got in touch because of …well, you know. Because of Anthony. It still weighs on me, Ellie.”

“Me too,” she said quietly. “But Todd, please don’t blame yourself…”

“I do blame myself. I had no right. Say what you want about him, you were his fiancée… and that’s not the sort of man I want to be.”

She sighed loudly and looked away again.

“Todd, Anthony killed himself.”

I was taken aback. What an odd thing to say.

“What? But the cut Charlie gave him…”

“Charlie had nothing to do with anything. Anthony had a history with alcohol. It doesn’t make anything any easier, but I understand a little better now why it happened. He poisoned himself. The doctors chalked it up to a big mistake, that he was delirious from the heat, or dehydrated, or he just didn’t realize how much he drank. But I know Anthony. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about any of this. I’ve spent months in therapy, and I’m finally getting out of it now, you know? And a lot can change in six months…”

“Eight months.”

“What?”

“It’s been eight months since we last saw each other.”

She gave me a slow, loaded look.

“Hey, Todd?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you wanna just start over again?”

“What …do you mean?”

“I mean… I’ve only just bumped into you and already everything is so serious. I’m too young to carry around ghosts, Todd. I’m done mourning and moping. Can we just…” here she screwed her eyes as she stared towards the sun and thought for a moment. “Can we just pretend that none of it ever happened?”

I was surprised.

“Let’s just imagine that you and I have never even met before, and see what happens?” she said cautiously.

I smiled at her, a little unsure. But the look on her face was so light and welcoming I couldn’t help but nod.

“Yeah, OK. Why not? Like, we just pretend this is the first time we’re meeting?”

The look on her freckled face was so deliciously mischievous.

“Yeah! Let’s leave all of that in the past. No guilt, no memories and dredging up stuff that’s already over. Just you, me, and whatever happens today, right here,” she said, and swooped her hand to gesture across the courtyard.

“No pressure?” I said, and gave her a naughty wink.

“No pressure,” she said with smile.

I exhaled and looked around at the courtyard. The students had filtered off to the surrounding lecture halls. But making that class was the last thing on my mind right now.

I extended my hand to her.

“Well, in that case, Todd McGregor,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

She grinned.

“Elinor King,” she said and nodded cordially.

“Can I call you Ellie?”

“Sure.”

I leant forward and lowered my voice. She leant forward to hear me.

“Before we start, though, there is just one thing I’d like to dredge up from the past,” I said, suddenly serious.

“What’s that?”

“Well, I still owe you that second cigarette,” I said with a grin.

She laughed.

“Fair’s fair! Pay up then so we can start with our clean slate,” she said and held out her hand.

“Trouble is… I don’t smoke anymore,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Really? Hm, I’m impressed.”

“Yes, well, as you said, a lot can change in six months!”

“Eight,” she said and winked back at me.

When we decided to ditch classes for the rest of the day and head over to my apartment, it felt like we had both been washed away by a deluge of stories and jokes and questions and anecdotes. I had never spoken so much with anyone. We had spent at least three hours that afternoon chatting away and I still felt like I hadn’t said enough. She was the same Ellie I remembered, but with so many other, different facets to her it was like seeing a 3D version of something you had only till then known from flat pictures.

There was no topic we didn’t jump into and yack away at. It felt so easy and wonderful and happy. And after some time it really did feel like we had started anew. She slowly started to become a new person to me, and I realized in talking to her how different I myself was. There was a comfortable familiarity that was set off just there, off on the horizon, where we could come and find it later. I already knew, in my own small, unacknowledged way, that I loved her. I already knew that my body understood and adored hers. I already knew that should we look closely enough, we could find depths of passion between us …after all, we’d already done it.

And yet it felt easy to merely put that aside for a moment and just… talk. Like we could take our time wading back up to that far point again, assured of its existence, guaranteed of what delicious things were waiting there for us when we were ready for them. It was like we had jumbled all the usual milestones of a typical relationship. We had ticked off the gut-wrenching parts, the steamy sex parts, the soft, tender parts. What we hadn’t done was be silly. We hadn’t goofed around and talked nonsense and relaxed on a sofa with one another. But we were sure as hell catching up on that front.

“You know what I think?” she said suddenly, putting her coffee cup off to the side. We were already on our third pot and the sun had just set.

“What?” I said.

“I think you and I should go on a date.”

“A date? Then what the hell have we been doing all this time?” I said laughing. She playfully slapped my forearm.

“I’m serious! Consider yourself vetted for a real, proper, genuine date.” I looked down at her hand touching my arm, right where she had left it.

“Vetted, huh? Awesome. Glad it only took…” I checked my watch. “Five and a half hours!”

“God, has it really been that long?” she said.

I nodded.

“I shudder to think what a big, long, serious, genuine date would look like with you,” I said. She laughed.

“Well, first of all you’re going to meet me at that little pizza place on fourth, you know the one? The one that has all those pot plants on the wall?”

“Carlucci’s or something?”

“I don’t know. But there. We meet at 6pm, to give us lots of time.”

“Time for…?”

“Wooing. You’re going to woo me, you see,” she said.

“Uh huh. I see. How am I going to do that?”

“Well, you’re going to pitch up with some random little gift. I’ll say how you shouldn’t have, but really I’ll love it. Then you’ll say something sweet, and you’ll ask if you can kiss me.”

“Damn. I sound charming.”

“You are charming,” she said and flashed me sparkly eyes. “I mean, will be charming, on our date…”

She couldn’t help but giggle.

“What happens next?” I said, putting my chin in my hands.

“Well… after a lovely meal and amazing conversation, we head out for a walk over the commons, to see if we can spot the moon. By that point, you’ll probably be wanting to hold my hand.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Then, I’ll suggest we come back to my place, for a coffee, only, I won’t be really asking you for a coffee,” I said.

I gave a phony gasp.

“What! You don’t mean to say…”

“Oh yes. By that point I’ll be seducing you.”

“You minx, you.”

“I know. Thing is, you’ll be a little reluctant. You’ll say, are you sure?”

“And…?”

“I’ll understand that it’s too soon. We agree to reach a friendly compromise.”

“A compromise?”

“We settle on a long, sexy kiss against a tree on the commons, and bid each other adieu,” she said with a nod of her head.

“Oh god, do I get another date?” I asked.

She laughed loudly.

“Depends on how the kiss goes, I guess.”