Butterflies in Honey (Growing Pains #3) (45 page)

She pushed that thought away and focused. She
felt great. Also a little out of her league. A surfing buddy was
probably the way to go, but there were plenty of people around, so
she was fine. She’d do a couple more waves, and then head in.

The next couple waves were just as awesome.
She did a tumble and roll, which was a bit scary, but she washed up
on the beach in one piece. She ended up sticking more waves than
she fell from, which was a huge achievement, and decided on one
more to finish out the glorious day.

It was always that one more that did it.

As Krista was sitting out past the waves,
waiting for the last golden ticket, she noticed the two surfer guys
that had been near her all day were gone. There were still a few
people around, and plenty on the beach, so she wasn’t completely
alone. If anything happened they would probably notice and get
help.

The next set of waves started coming in. It
was here that Krista got a pang of unease. They were bigger than
what she had been surfing all day. Much bigger. As in, too big. She
floated over the first and watched it break and rumble down onto
the distant beach. She stayed where she was, hoping the next set
would be back to normal—or even smaller.

No such luck. Big wave after big wave came
rolling in. The day was getting older by the minute. She needed to
find a way into the shore, and she wasn’t really keen on surfing
in. Bad news was there wasn’t anywhere else to go. It wasn’t a
pool—you couldn’t just swim over to some steps and get out. She was
either swimming into a bay in Mexico, or she had to ride a wave
in.

She steadied her resolve. If she could catch
it and hang on past the first slope down, she might make it. If she
didn’t—well, she had gotten rolled before. Surfers got rolled all
the time. Granted, she could have been a better swimmer for this
venture, she was no Olympian after all, but she could make it.

The next monster was rolling in, so Krista
started paddling hard, ignoring the tired strain of her muscles.
Her arms churned as fast as they could, trying to get her speed up.
She just barely caught it, right on the cusp, and popped up. The
free fall this time was out of this world! Past adrenaline. She was
riding on ragged fear as she plummeted down a steep cliff of
crystal blue water. She could feel the board under her feet but her
balance was all over the place. Everything seemed too slippery—like
she wasn’t glued on. It didn’t take long before she was falling
head first into the waiting blue jaws.

Like a rag doll in a washing machine, Krista
was churned head-over-heels and rolled like a tumbleweed along the
desert floor. Bubbles scraped across her body like sand paper as
she fought to remember which way was up. She forced her body limp,
allowing the tangling world of white to move her along its course,
hopefully to spit her out at the end. There was no ground to
stumble along, no sky to glimpse; she was pushed down deep, into
the belly of the wave as it rumbled toward the beach.

Finally, after years went by, Krista got
enough slack in the furious currents to kick and stroke her way to
the surface. Her head broke the plain of water just in time. She
took a gasp of the sweet breath of life and looked for the beach.
It was then she noticed a wall of white bearing down on her! The
next giant wave was crashing and she was still in the kill
zone!

She had barely enough time to take another
big gulp of air before she dived as low as she could. The violent
surge of water rolled over her, giving her a yank upward as it
thundered by. She surged upward again, stealing another gasp of
beautiful air before the next wave was baring down. Her heart sank.
It was another monster. Everything coming in was monstruous. She
was but a small fly caught in a sticky web.

She dove under the next. Then the next. She
was waiting for a break to start heading toward shore, but she
wasn’t getting one. It was merciless. One after another, the waves
came crashing down, barely giving her time to get a breath. Never
giving her body a chance to rest. One after another, she was
confronted with a beast. Then its brother. And then a larger,
meaner cousin.

After five monstrous waves, Krista’s body was
past tired, and starting to give out. She couldn’t keep going. She
couldn’t find any reserves. The waves were getting bigger, if
anything, so there would be no hope to wait it out. Being that
Krista had never been in that situation before, nor ever
remembering Sean mention it, she didn’t know if she should start
swimming, or just let the wave pull her into shore. She did know,
though, that the wrong choice would result in drowning.

No pressure.

She would swim. Maybe she could get a few
feet closer before the wave grabbed her. She could hold her breath
for a while, so she would let the wave drag her in and hope for the
best. She didn’t have much of a choice.

The next time she came up, she put her plan
into action, frantically swimming toward the shore with everything
she had. Stroke after stroke she pushed. She felt the water pulling
her back and heard the thunder on her heels.
This was
it!

She took a mighty gulp of air just before the
wave was on her. She closed her eyes, tried to keep her directional
bearings, and let the wave squeeze her in its claws and carry her
with it.

She had the claw part right, but the
carrying—not so much. She was shoved down, down,
down
into
the dark abyss. Bubbles seethed around her, tearing at her.
Currents pulled her arms and yanked her legs. She lost sense of
herself, vaguely remembering up, and losing the direction of the
beach altogether. She held her breath, waiting for it to be over.
Wondering when it would spit her out onto the hard sand.
Waiting.

Instead, she churned, over and over, round
and round, ass-over-head, no surrender.

Her lungs burned. Her eyes stung. Her legs
and arms were wrung out of strength. She couldn’t control her body.
All she could do were some futile kicks and small hand flutters.
Darkness crowded her thoughts, blotted out her hope. Still no
surrender.

Her chest was on fire now. Her limbs were
ice. She needed to take a breath. She knew she couldn’t. She also
knew, eventually, she would anyway.

She would die.

It wasn’t a thought she had. It wasn’t like
she was capable of contemplating cause and effect; she just knew
it. She needed air. She wouldn’t get it. She would die down there,
in the blackness. Her body would probably hit the beach eventually,
but it would be long after she could hang on.

It was amazing how quickly the thoughts came.
She spun there, in a different world, years and years away from
safety, consumed by the fuming ocean, and she was filled with
unspeakable sadness. Not for herself so much—he thought Jim would
have killed her long before now—but because she never really got
that chance with Sean. She never really got to know real happiness
with him before this day came. She’d wanted to grow old with him.
She’d wanted to share her life with him; share the miracle of birth
with him. She wanted to share so much with him, and now she never
would.

Something occurred to her as she lost her
will to fight for the surface and let the craze of currents take
her where they willed. He was the second thing that mattered in her
life that she gave up. That she quit. Right then, in utter
hopelessness, she realized the only other thing she didn’t fight
for that mattered, that
really
meant something, was Sean.
The two most important things of her life, one
being
life,
and the other her future, she was now giving up.

With that thought, she gave over to the
boiling water and encroaching darkness. She allowed her body what
it craved most: a breath.

Acid reigned into her throat and burned
through her chest as air was replaced by water. She felt her body
spasm and a vice on her arm as she was tugged down into the maw of
the earth.

And then a funny thing happened. Instead of
utter darkness, her eyes were seared with blinding light. She saw a
kaleidoscope of images. A swish of piercing blue. A bronze shoulder
glistening in the sun. A powerful arm stroke cutting through white
foam. The lick of brown, grainy sand. The velvety blackness of
surrender.

She heard her name called. It echoed and
ricocheted through the void. Someone turned on a vacuum in a
freight train and the world was washed in a
whoosh
of sound
that culminated into one big POP.

“Krista! Oh God please, please KRISTA! Can
you hear me?
KRISTA?
Please Krista,
please
!”

The blinding light baked her eyes. An angelic
voice flirted with her ears and breathed on her face. She was
floating.

“KRISTA?! Krista, can you hear me?”

She wanted to answer him. Of course she could
hear him. She knew that voice better than she knew her own. But
that way meant pain. She could almost feel it. Her chest, her
throat, her stomach. Better not get too close. Better to slip
further down into the soothing darkness.

“Please Krista,
please
don’t leave me.
Oh God, not her. Please don’t take her.
Please!”

“Help is coming, man! Keep her alive. Help is
coming.”

Krista’s mind drifted away from the pain.
Floating in nothing, it was easy to get lost. She remembered how
sad she felt before she gave in. If the mother of all the world
could shed one tear, it would be for the love she lost. That
unspeakable sadness that consumed her when she realized it. That
love she let go.

People gave up on life all the time. What was
life anyway? Nothing but a bunch of memories stacked together. If
there was a heaven, Krista had plenty to remember while she sat on
a bench somewhere, feeding the birds. Actually, probably
kicking
the birds because she hated seagulls.

She let herself keep drifting, the pain
receding from her awareness.

Except…wait…she was missing some memories,
wasn’t she? That sadness… Hearing her child cry for the first time
with Sean holding her hand. She didn’t have that one. What about
her wedding day? She didn’t have that one, either. What about
waking up to Sean’s smiling face, his eyes turned gold by the early
morning sun, as he looked at her, dripping with love. No, she had
that one. She had a few of those, actually. But Sean always looked
the same. She didn’t have one with his hair salted and his laugh
lines etched deep in his face. She didn’t even have one in his new
house, their life spread around them in pictures and memorabilia.
If she gave up now, she wouldn’t have half her life to take with
her.

She heard the begging again. She heard sirens
behind it. Her chest was rising and falling by foreign wind pushed
into her lungs. Her mind was a murky black swamp. She distantly
felt the pain.

“Krista, please come back to me.
Please
Krissy
.”

It was calling her Krissy that did it. She’d
always loved that special name that no one else but the love of her
life used. It reminded her of slow mornings with soft sunlight,
making love, feeling skin on skin, breathing in his smell, basking
in his love.

This was going to hurt something awful.

“Look! Her eyes fluttered!”

“Krista?
Krista!”

She coughed and sputtered, acid spilling over
her mouth and nose. She was tilted to the side as her stomach
emptied. By the look of it, not for the first time. She blinked a
few more times, but everything was foggy.

That was when the world exploded. She heard
people shouting, sirens blaring, the never ending crash of those
vile ocean waves, and behind it all, Sean’s voice saying her name
over and over again as he hugged her so tight her ribs felt like
they were going to crack. She surrendered to the blackness again.
This time just for a little while. Just for safe keeping.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Sean watched, helpless, as Krista was rushed
into the emergency room. There was nothing he could do now but
wait. Wait and hope. But she had coughed. She had coughed before
she’d passed out at the beach. She moved of her own accord for that
brief second. That had to be a good sign. It had to mean there was
hope.

Sean sat down heavily and put his head in his
hands. He needed to call her friends. They needed to know what
happened. He needed someone to lean on.

He took out his phone stiffly, grief much too
close to the surface. Blinking away the moisture in his eyes, he
made the hardest call first.

“Hello?”

“Kate?” Sean said with a thick tongue.

“What do you want, ass? And don’t start that
shit about you being my boss because it’s Sat—“

“It’s Krista,” Sean croaked, barely holding
it together.

“What? Are you okay? What do you mean
it’s—
what’s
Krista, Sean? What’s happened?”

“Krista got caught in a wave.” Sean’s voice
sounded foreign, even to him. “She got caught—I think I made it in
time—”

“
What?
Sean, what the fuck are you
saying?
Is she okay?
”

Sean told the story, breaking down halfway
through. He had to walk outside, away from people, unable to stop
sobbing like a baby. Kate barely listened to the whole story before
she was demanding which hospital it was and making plans. The last
thing she said was, “Call Cassie, Sean. You need to get this out so
you can stay strong when Krista wakes up, because she
will
wake up, okay? If she made it through Jim, she can make it through
anything, okay?”

Sean wiped his face and dipped his head. It
didn’t matter that he hadn’t spoken an affirmative, Kate had
already hung up. He did call Cassie next. And sobbed again while
she stayed strong to talk him through it. He just didn’t know what
would become of him if he lost Krista. There would never be
another. Not like her. She had everything he wanted in a woman, and
what’s more, everything he
needed.
She kept him grounded at
the same time as lifting him up. She leveled his head at the same
time as helping him accomplish his dreams. He saw a wife in her, a
mother to his children, a future. Everything around him could fall
down, but if he had her, he would be okay.