"I want to go for a swim," she said.
And before Max could fully process that sentence, she was walking to the stern with a kind of loose, easy purpose, and she was taking off her dress.
Max's brain stopped.
Not paused. Stopped.
She stepped out of her sandals, took her cloths of, cared about none of it, and stood at the rail in her underwear, ivory cotton, deeply unremarkable, somehow the most distracting thing Max had ever seen in his forty-three years on earth, and she jumped.
The yacht had already slowed to a drift.
The splash rose white and clean, and then the sea swallowed her, and for one suspended second there was nothing. Just water.
Then she surfaced, twenty feet out, and started to swim.
Max gripped the railing.
It came back to him the way things come back when the body remembers what the mind has been politely trying to manage all at once, and without asking permission.
