Swimming? No thanks

Chapter 33

I popped my head up in the moon pool and found that Dalton beat me there. "Hey. How are you?"

"Good. Mom and I were just talking about random stuff. How was your date?"

"It was good. It was nice to see Cameron's family."

"How are they by the way?"

"Good. Jayden's back from college right now, and Gabbie's thirteen now. Did you know that? Because I didn't."

"I didn't realize that her birthday was so close. Time is flying by so fast. Pretty soon we're going to be graduating from high school and headed to college."

"Nope, stop, Dalton, stop. I don't want to think about that yet. That's still three years away." My mom and brother chuckled as I freaked out about the future.

"Speaking of college, please tell me you two are planning on going somewhere near here?"

"I don't see how we can leave. Don't we have to stay near the ocean to survive?"

"And not puke on a daily basis."

"I wasn't sure if I had made that clear, but yeah, you do. Plus, I still want to see you guys a lot, so I want you close enough to visit."

"We'll visit all the time, Mom. I promise." I smiled at her.

"I know you will. I'll just miss you."

"That's still a few years away, so stop worrying," Dalton assured her.

"I know. I just wanted to make sure. I don't want to lose my babies." She wrapped an arm around both of us, pulling us in.

"You won't."

"We'll always be here when you need us." I hugged her back before remembering that we were going to meet up with the guys at ten. "Well, Mom, we love you, but we agreed to meet our friends in a bit, so we need to go."

"I understand. Go on and hang out with your friends, make memories." She let go and Dalton and I went to leave.

"Bye, Mom, love you," we said in unison before swimming off.

Hey, I want to talk to you about something serious when we get back to land, I told Dalton through mind messaging.

What is it?

Something I don't want to say through mind messaging while we're speeding back to land. I glanced over and noticed he wasn't beside me anymore. Where'd you go?

I stopped when you had something serious to talk to me about.

Dalton, I'm not going to talk about this until we get back to land. So just come on. Our friends are waiting on us.

Fine. He caught up to me and we swam to land together.

As we steam dried ourselves, Dalton looked over at me. "So what did you want to talk about?"

"I just wanted to ask about how you were doing with everything that's going on with us." Our legs reappeared and we stood up, now facing each other.

He shrugged. "I'm fine. How are you doing with all of this?"

"Better. It's just taking me a while to process."

He nodded. "Me too. Is that all you wanted to ask?"

"Yeah. Are you sure you're totally fine with everything? I mean, I know that you've had your tail longer, but it's still a shock."

"I'm fine." Something flashed behind his eyes.