Page 72 of A Study in Drowning

“I can get it,” she said. And even though a part of her wished she didn’t, Effy felt quite sure of that. “I promise you I can. And then I’ll swim. I’m not afraid of drowning.”

She meant it. Well, in some primal way, maybe she would be afraid once she was under, her lungs throbbing and burning, the light slowly waning overhead. But in an abstract sense, drowning didn’t scare her.

She wasn’t afraid of dying, not really. It was the ultimate act of flight, an escape artist’s tour de force. Drowning did not seem like a particularly easy way to go, if Ianto was to be believed, but it wouldn’t matter once she’d already taken the plunge. Fear and pain could be endured if you knew that eventually, they would end.

“Stop it,” Preston snapped. “Just—just stop being so reckless. That’s the one terrible thing about you, you know. You jump out of moving cars and dive into dark water.”

He sounded as angry as he had when they’d confronted Marlowe at the party, and it shocked her. But his anger had a different edge now, something tense. Something desperate.

Effy was silent for a moment, letting his words settle over her and then slip off, as if they were that dark water itself.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You weren’t there in that car with Ianto. When I jumped out I wasn’t doing it to be reckless—I was saving myself. What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival. Sometimes it’s not very pretty. Skinned knees and a bloody nose and whatever else. You told me I don’t see myself clearly, but I do. I know what I am. I know that, deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I am—it’s just one escape act after another.”

Believing Myrddin’s stories had become an escape act, too, her greatest and most enduring one. But it had made her unstable, untrustworthy, a fragile, flighty thing. That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

Effy held Preston’s gaze, undaunted, challenging him to reply. Her chest was heaving. She heard herself swallow hard.

“You couldn’t be more wrong about that,” Preston said. His throat was pulsing. His eyes, once pale brown, had somehow turned dark. “You’re not just one thing. Survival is something you do, not something you are. You’re brave and brilliant. You’re the most real, full person I’ve ever met.”

Effy’s breath caught, and when she tried to speak, she found that no words would come. She wanted to say I don’t believe you. She wanted to say thank you. She wanted to say tell me more about who I am because I don’t know anymore.

If Myrddin had not written Angharad, if he really had just been some lecherous old man, if there was no Fairy King, then who was she? Just a mad girl, thrashing about in black water. A part of her only wanted to cry.

She didn’t do or say any of that. Instead, in one swift, decisive maneuver, she swung her leg over Preston’s hips, straddling him, and bore him down onto the chaise. She pinned him there, their faces closer than they had ever been before, noses near enough to touch. Where their chests were pressed together, she could feel their hearts pounding in frenzied tandem.

For a long, long moment, neither of them moved or spoke.

“Effy,” Preston whispered at last. His hand slid under her skirt, his fingers folding around the curve of her hip. “We can’t.”

“Don’t you want to?” Don’t you want me? she’d meant to ask, but she couldn’t quite find the courage to make that small substitution.

“Of course I do.” He shifted, and Effy felt him, hard and urgent against her thigh. “And if you were just some girl, at some party, I would. But I know you. I know what’s been done to you—”

Her stomach fluttered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

With his other hand, Preston reached up. At first Effy thought he was going to stroke her face, but instead he gathered up the golden hair that was falling over both of them, tickling his cheeks, twisted it into a knot, and tucked it over her shoulder.

It was a neat and gentle motion, the tendons on the inside of his wrist flexing. Effy let out a quivering breath.

“I know about that professor at your college,” he said softly. “What he did to you—I’m so sorry.”

She felt as if she’d been slapped. She recoiled, sitting up, now perched awkwardly in Preston’s lap.

“You never told me,” she said, voice trembling. “You never told me that you knew.”

“You never brought it up. I didn’t want to be the one to mention it.” Preston sat up, too, arms braced around her so she wouldn’t topple backward. “At first I wasn’t even sure it was you—there were just whispers about a girl in the architecture program who slept with her adviser. And then I learned you were the only girl in the architecture program . . .”

“I never slept with him.” Her stomach lurched as if she might vomit. “I’ve never even—it’s not fair. Men just say whatever they want and everyone believes them.”

“It’s not fair.” Preston’s voice was low. “I know.”

“We did other things, but not that.” The tip of her nose grew warm, the way it always did when she was going to cry. She tried desperately not to cry now. “And everyone thinks I started it but I didn’t. I never got anything from him. That’s what all the boys at my college said. But he just touched me and I let him.”

“Effy,” Preston said. “I believe you.”

She blinked, half in bewilderment, half to keep the tears from falling. “Then why won’t you . . . ?”

Preston flushed lightly. “I didn’t mean it like that at all, that you were some fallen woman and I—never mind. But I won’t be another man who uses you. I don’t want you to think of me that way, just a shag on a chaise. I don’t want to be something else that keeps you from sleeping at night.”