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"YOU KNOW, I STILL DON'T TRUST YOU," Violet says, raising her voice over the static roar of the sea plugging her ears.
In the distance, a bird squalls. It is answered by the rush of current crashing against the rocks, the waves whispering in hisses up the shore, dragging along flotsam and pieces of driftwood. Where the overcast sky meets the ocean, the barely distinguishable horizon looms, like a watercolour one drop away from dissolving, something pulled out of a dream. Under her toes, the wet sand sinks with her footprints. There are about a few hundred of them by now, tracking back beyond black rocks and little pools and stretching up the beach. Beside them, Paul's tracks in the sand are a steady rhythm. Except a few feet back where she'd shoved him off course for trying to dump a hermit crab down her shirt.
Paul scoffs. "Why? Scared I'm gonna push you into the water? Or because you're a slow sprinter?"
Before they'd left the house, Violet had forced Paul to put on a shirt, to which he'd complied, though begrudgingly and not without a fight. Then, they'd left everything—including their shoes—back in Paul's house, and walked barefoot down the street to the beach. Somewhere, at some point, they'd passed a 'Stop' sign, and exploded off the mark in a race down to the beach for fun and bragging rights. Paul had won. Since then, they'd been arguing about cheating while Violet struggled to keep up with his long strides, only stopping to roll up the bottoms of her jeans when they neared the waves hugging the shore.
Scowling, she whacks the back of her hand across his chiselled arm. Regret floods her gut when bone-breaking agony explodes in her knuckles and they bounce off without doing any damage, as though Paul was made of stone.
"Fuck!" Violet hisses, shaking out her throbbing hand. "Did you flex or something?"
Rolling his eyes, Paul rounds in on her and seizes her aching hand, walking backwards until they slow to a stop. "If you'd stop staring at my muscles for a few seconds—" he smirks when Violet slants him an incendiary glare— "okay, okay, lemme see."
"I'm fine," Violet grunts, and her heart stutters in panic, guttering like a candle flame, when her sleeve slips down her wrist a little, exposing only the tips of the first tally marks encircling her forearm. She tries tugging her hand out of his grip but he only holds on a little firmer. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to anchor her in place. Warmth sears into her skin as the rough callouses on his palm dig into her fingers, like they're holding a wildfire between their hands. "Paul, I'm serious."
"Yeah? So am I. Stop squirming, I'm trying to see if you broke anything." His fingers press into the bones of her hand as he speaks. Willing her sleeve to stay put, Violet winces as he presses down onto a particularly sore spot on her third knuckle.
