"Do you remember when we used to try to catch the wind?" H asks me casually, like I don't remember everything about every moment from those years ago.

Before he moved far away, and became whatever the hell you'd call him now. A force of nature.

"Yeah. I remember when we used to try to carry water too."

"Which one do you think was a bigger risk The wind or the water?" He glances up at me and his eyes are the same color as the tree he's standing under, least during the day, I have both memorized. It's too dark to really see the tree with the light behind him, from the porch of my mum's house, should make his eyes unknowable too, but it doesn't, couldn't.

"The bigger risk?" I pretend to think about it, but I know the answer. He's the wind.
"The wind, even if you capture it in a bottle, you can't see it, it's only obvious it exists when it's under pressure." I shrug and watch him blink. He's always been so attractive, even when I was too young to even really know what that word meant. When I got older, I prayed and sedated myself to ignore it. I'd been afraid, when we both started drinking, that I'd blurt it out one day. But the alcohol mostly slowed my tongue, made my libido stumble in its path.

"I dunno," he huffs and looks at me like a sailor catching the tide. "Water always seems like something that you try to catch, but really holds you."

"Only if you immerse yourself in it." He's stepped toward me, and I'd flow away, but the wave inside of me, the one drinks always sent out to low tide, it's high, and I'm not even trying to hold on.

"Sounds about right then." He's stepping closer to me, and now, the light does blur him, makes him fuzzy like we are underwater, but his eyes aren't a memory, they're right in front of me.

"What's right about drowning?" I try to laugh it off, catch a breath.

"Being around you, just always felt like being underwater. Or like I was floating."

"What did being with your wife feel like?" I bring it up as it's fact, he's married, though he asked to walk me home and looks like he'd like to dive right into me.

He closes his eye and I'm able to escape the undertow until he says, "like somebody is holding me under."

"Isn't that being underwater? Do I make you feel like you're drowning?"

He shakes his head, "being with you always felt like I was weightless."

I feel my mouth drop, and I know my feet can't touch the bottom. The feel of his fingers on my jaw, his thumbs meeting at my chin to tilt my head back to him, it's stepping into cold water on a steamy day. The cool of his lips and rush of his breath into my body anchor me to the kiss. The gush of his tongue across the shore of my lip does nothing to stem the tide.

My mouth closes against his and opens again. The opening volley just a shot across the bow, a drop in the ocean.

He May have said I made him feel like he was underwater, but his kiss drowns me. It's too deep and I can't catch my breath.

My legs go out from under me and his grip on my jaw has hauled me up against the bow of his body, crossed tight across my lower back.

"Harry," I gasp and pull away to suck in a breath. I think I've found the edge until his pink, wet mouth has found my neck and I'm all at sea again. His name breaches my lips again and Ive caught his hair in my hand and it's slipping through my fingers like water.

"Can I come in?" Breath back across my face. Another kiss before I can answer.

I want to say, you're married, long gone, and dead to me, but he's caught me, a fish on his hook.

It's not drowning, but I won't survive it anyway.