I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 35: orange

            Once I'm on the wooden platform with him, I can hardly breathe. I brush the sole of each foot against the shin of the other to clean them of the forest floor, then edge to my previous spot. Miles stays standing. As do I, occupied instead with thumbing the sugar residue on my palm.

Then he speaks and I'm staring at him. 'You've not got your cell on you, do you?'

'No, it's–'

Miles has pushed me into the lake before I notice him move.

The shock of the impact and drop in temperature activate every cell in my body and for a split second, I think my skeleton might jump out of my skin. But by the time my head breaks the surface, my clothes waving like clusters of seaweed around me, I'm comfortable in the embrace of the water.

I feign a scowl nonetheless. 'Dickhead! What if I didn't know how to swim?'

'I kinda assumed from you proposing the idea that you do.'

'What'd you do that for?'

'Thought it were funny.'

'Oh, bare hilarious.'

I splash water at him. It barely dots his New Balances, which he steps out of. When Miles takes off his shoes, he unties the laces and then eases each off with his hand.

Does he care for everything with such patience? Will you be so gentle with my bones if I hand them to you?

He pulls his shirt over his head and I actually forget how to swim. I emerge spluttering from the water just in time to see him dive from the platform. Brilliant. I'm a dying cat and he's Michael Phelps.

I turn around, bobbing on the spot, and peer at the surface for signs of him. The sun has disappeared behind the hill; thankfully, I don't have to squint. Miles resurfaces some five metres from the platform.

He wipes a hand down his face, then along his shaved scalp and though it's too picturesque not to be a performance, I feel as though I'm infringing.

'It's colder than I thought.'

'Thought you were northern.'

I wade toward him, weighed down by my clothes so that when two metres remain between us, I'm out of breath. I hold it so he doesn't notice. The strategy turns out to be counterproductive.

Miles studies the opposite shore as if calculating how tiring it'll be to swim there and back.

His warm sandstone skin radiates the setting sun, the peach fuzz at his jaw bright, steel earring glinting, and at this moment, I understand why moles are called beauty marks. Remove the one from the corner of his brow and he'd be incomplete. He's so beautiful, mashallah.

I shove water at him.

His reflexes are slowed and most of it hits its mark. Face screwed up, he waits for it to drip away on its own. Then his eyes open with a glint I don't manage to analyse before he splashes me back and I have to twist away.

I choose flight. I turn around to set off toward the platform and Miles calls me a coward, boisterous laughter ringing across the lake surface. My clothes weigh me down and I'm wheezing for breath a quarter way in.

'Where're you going?' His voice is much closer than I expected and I try to swim faster but Miles appears beside me within seconds. Then he's past me, then in front of me.

I stop but the water makes me drift onward after I've attempted a standstill. Now, Miles is so close that the rivulets of water he creates by swimming tickle me.