She had felt, for the first time, what it meant to become a woman in the very specific way that required another person’s participation.

Her hands tightened on the wheel.

She focused on the island growing on the horizon.

’He’s probably not even there’, she told herself.

The telling didn’t help.

Celia looked at the sketch.

She was the only one of the three who hadn’t.

And that was the specific, particular, edge-of-a-paper-cut quality of it — she had sat three feet away from it happening, listening, becoming wet with her hand pressed to her own mouth, silently furious at her own body for caring while a man she’d barely met made her friend moan into a pillow on the other side of a blanket.

She had lain there rigid with the pheromones in the air and told herself she didn’t want him.

She had pushed him away.

She had acted like every man was the same, like he would chase her, like he would do what they always did — fall all over himself trying to get back in, text too much, say too much, make it easy to dismiss.

He had not returned.

That was the thing.

He had ’not returned’.

And that absence had sat in her chest like a sliver of glass for three weeks — not painful enough to scream about, painful enough that she noticed it every time she breathed.

She had been ’so’ stupid.

Her thumbnail dug into the corner of the sketch.

She was not going to let him see her face until she had composed it. She had prepared.

She had packed the lingerie she never wore because she always felt like she was performing something in it, and this time she had packed it anyway, because ’this time’ —

This time she was going to make absolutely sure he understood what he’d walked away from.

She had a body. She knew she had a body. Men had informed her of this fact in more or less articulate ways since she was sixteen. She had simply never ’used’ it as an argument before.

She was prepared to argue now.

"He’s not going to be there."

Nara said it again, quieter this time, more to herself than the others.

Celia pressed her lips together.

"Yeah."

Gia said nothing. Just breathed through her nose.

"Yeah." Nara leaned back against the rail with a sound of profound resignation. "I know."

All three of them shook their heads, the small, rueful synchronization of people who had come this far anyway, who had packed their bags and shaved their legs and packed the lingerie and gotten on the boat despite the voice in their heads saying ’don’t get your hopes up’ —

"How lucky I am."

The voice came from ’nowhere’.

Smooth. Dark. Warm with the specific heat of genuine amusement, the kind that reached the eyes before it reached the mouth.

"To find all three of you together."

It happened fast.

Gia’s hands spasmed on the wheel.

The bow jerked left.

The rock was there and then they had hit it — not catastrophically, not enough to split the hull, but enough to send the deck tilting, the engine screaming in protest, Celia’s sketch flying from her hands, the beach bag sliding, the whole world shifting thirty degrees with no warning.

And standing on the water —

Not on the boat.

’On the water.’

His bare feet on the surface of the sea like it was a floor, his black hair moving in the same wind as theirs, wearing nothing but loose dark trousers rolled to the knee, his chest — his ’chest’ — present and accounted for and completely unreasonable.

"Raven—"

All three of them said it at once, the word arriving with three completely different frequencies — Nara’s disbelief, Gia’s something she wasn’t naming, Celia’s the raw, unguarded register of a woman who had spent three weeks holding that name in.

The boat tilted further.

The water came up fast.

Celia grabbed the rail — missed — and had the very clear, very concrete thought: ’I am going to die before I get to say anything.’

It struck her as deeply unfair.

She closed her eyes.

Nara grabbed for the sketch instinctively, hugging it to her chest even as the world went sideways, even as the sea rose to meet them, and she had the slightly hysterical awareness that she was about to drown while clutching a drawing of the man responsible.

Gia simply closed her eyes.

Not from fear.

From the specific, tired resignation of someone who had navigated all the way here and was now going to die three hundred meters from the beach, which was, she thought, very much on brand for how the last month had gone.

Everything stopped.

Not metaphorically.

The boat stopped mid-tilt. The water stopped splashing. The air held itself.

Celia’s hair was suspended, fanned out around her face, and she opened her eyes to find herself hovering — floating — two feet above where the boat had been, her body horizontal in mid-air, weightless in the specific, impossible way of a dream.

She looked around.

Nara was floating beside her, still clutching the sketch, her mouth open in the pure shock of someone whose brain had run out of framework to process with.

Gia was upright. Arms out. Eyes wide. Her hair spread around her like she was underwater but they were in open air and there was no water and—

And his hands were stretched toward them.

Both arms extended, fingers spread, his expression showing the faintest exertion in the set of his jaw — and beneath that, nothing but calm. The calm of a man for whom this was administrative.

"What—" Nara started.

He snapped his fingers.

The boat swung.

Not fell — ’swung’, like a hand had reached down and slapped it sideways, a shockwave radiating from the point where it had been hitting the water in a widening ring, the vessel spinning free of the rock and righting itself twenty meters away, still intact, engine still running, drifting.

They were still floating.

And then the warm, invisible grip ’lowered’ them, and the three of them descended feet-first toward the water’s surface, and something passed through each of them — a brief, brushing, targeted warmth, like fingers against fabric — and they heard the sound of their outer clothes dissolving before they felt it.

Celia looked down.

Her sundress was gone.

She was standing on the water in the black lace bikini set she had packed and worn underneath — the one she had told herself was for practicality — the thin straps doing exactly as much as thin straps do, which was very little.

She looked up.

Gia stood five feet away in a white rabbit-print bra and matching bottoms, the furry trim on the cups absurdly soft-looking, her jaw set in the specific expression of a woman who had been caught prepared and was refusing to be embarrassed about it.

Nara was in the thinnest possible spaghetti-strap bikini — pale blue, the kind of fabric that doesn’t leave ambiguity about what’s beneath it — holding the sketch to her chest like a shield, and then gradually lowering it when she remembered that the sketch was of ’him’ and holding it to her chest was more information than she wanted to give.

All three of them looked at each other.

The pause.

"...What are you wearing," Celia said.

"What are ’you’ wearing," Nara said back.

Gia said nothing, because Gia was looking at him, and when Gia looked at something with that particular quality of stillness it meant she had temporarily lost the capacity for peripheral attention.