The water was warm. Warmer than last week, warmer than the week before that. The weeks had changed the Pacific and he could feel it in the first stroke, the temperature settling against his skin instead of biting. He swam past the cove's edge, past the dark rock shelf where the waves broke white, and into the open water where the turquoise dropped to blue and the bottom disappeared.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. The Kuroshio pressed against his left side, steady as a hand, and he angled into it without thinking. His shoulders rolled loose in their sockets. The salt dried on his face each time he turned and the air hit it. Below him the color deepened. He was far enough out that the cove had shrunk to a crescent of white between dark headlands, and the low island sat ahead on the horizon, the lighthouse just a white mark against the green.
Every day after practice for weeks, same walk. Past the convenience store where the air-conditioning exhaled through the sliding doors, up the hill where the afternoon heat clung to the asphalt and his calves worked against the grade, along the headland path where the houses ended and the scrub took over, down through the gap in the coastal brush. His bag went on the rocks. His shoes went next to the bag. The water took him and he didn't think about baseball or the six weeks until the qualifier or the way his arm had felt after the practice game.
On the return, the current pushed him shoreward. He breathed right, toward the coast, the headland behind his left shoulder. His body was loose, his breathing even, his mind doing what it did best in the ocean, which was nothing. An image from practice drifted through: Ōno adjusting his grip on the radar gun, the sun on the metal. It passed. The water was enough.
Around the rock shelf and into the shallows, his hands finding sand. Water ran off him in sheets. He pushed his hair back and walked toward the flat rock at the south end where he always sat.
A towel lay folded on the rock shelf near the scrub line. It hadn't been there when he'd gone in.
Past the shelf break, a figure was swimming, arms turning over in clean rhythmic strokes toward the headland. Not splashing, not drifting. Swimming. The arms turned over in a cadence that didn't vary, each entry hitting the same spot, each recovery tracing the same arc. Whoever it was had been doing this a long time.
Kai stood in the shallows, water at his knees, and watched. At some invisible mark near the headland the swimmer turned and came back, face rolling to breathe every third stroke. The kick was narrow and barely disturbed the surface. Fast, in a way that looked nothing like how Kai swam. Smaller strokes, tighter, the body staying flat where his rolled.
Into the shallows. The swimmer stood. Yuki.
She wiped her face with both hands and pushed her hair back. Training swimsuit, dark blue, the kind swimmers wore until the fabric thinned to nothing. Her skin was flushed from the cold and the effort. She looked at him without surprise.
"How long have you been coming here?" German. No preamble, no greeting.
"Weeks."
"I've been swimming this cove since March." She walked out of the water and sat on the rock shelf, pulling her knees up. "I'm usually done before you show up. Swim club ran late today."
He sat on the other end of the rock. Enough space between them for another person. The rock was warm from the sun and his shorts were dripping salt water onto it in a spreading dark patch.
"Your stroke is fast," Yuki said. She was looking out at the water, not at him. "Sloppy, but fast."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment. Your catch slips and you cross over on every breath stroke. But the raw speed is there. You've always been quick in the water."
Wind came off the ocean and dried the salt on his arms in white traces. From out here the town was invisible, tucked behind the headland. The cove could have been anywhere on the coast.
"Club practice ends at five-thirty and the pool closes at six," Yuki said. "Not enough time for distance work after. So I come here. The current is good training."
"It pulls northeast."
"I know. I've been swimming in it longer than you."
"You got faster," he said. The words came out in German before he'd thought about them. More words than he'd used in any single exchange since arriving.
"I was always fast. You just never watched." She said it without accusation. "Westbad pool. Every Tuesday and Thursday. You and Daiki were at the Wolves' field."
Tuesday and Thursday. Same city, same afternoons. He'd been at the Wolves' field every time, throwing to Daiki, never once thinking about what she was doing in the water across town.
"I have a prefectural qualifying meet in June," Yuki said. "Two hundred free."
The information landed and sat between them on the warm rock. He didn't say he'd come. She didn't ask.
They sat. Waves came in over the shelf, collapsed in foam against the rock, pulled back, and came in again. Below them small crabs worked the tide line. The sun was lower, the light on the water shifting from white to gold. Yuki's hair was drying in stiff salt-crusted sections. She pulled at one of them absently.
"You're more talkative in German," she said.
Kai exhaled through his nose. "Japanese is hard."
"Your Japanese is fine. You're just more yourself when you don't have to think about every word."
She stood, brushed sand off the backs of her legs, and picked up her towel from where she'd left it by the scrub line. She didn't say goodbye. She walked up the path toward the headland, towel over one shoulder, and the cove was his again.
Except it wasn't, quite. The rock had two wet patches now, side by side, drying in the late sun.
Haruka was at the stove when Kai came through the door. The kitchen smelled like garlic and soy sauce and pork frying in oil. She didn't look up.
"Du riechst schon wieder nach Meer," she said. You smell like the ocean again.
He sat at the table. Salt stiffened his hair and the dried ocean tightened on his forearms, white in the creases of his elbows. Daiki was across from him, eating rice with one hand and turning pages of Baseball Monthly with the other. He didn't look up either.
Haruka set a plate in front of him. Tonkatsu, shredded cabbage, a wedge of lemon, rice steaming in its bowl. Her hand stayed on the plate's edge a beat longer than usual, then she turned back to the counter.
"Eat," she said.
The pork was hot and crisp and the lemon cut through the oil. Daiki turned a page. Haruka filled a glass of barley tea and set it next to Kai's plate without being asked. The fan in the hallway oscillated with a click at each end of its arc. Outside, the evening was warm and still, and from past the houses the ocean came through the walls, low and steady.
He'd come home later than usual. She didn't ask why.
Two days later, between second and third period, Kai walked past the pool building on his way from the third-floor science room. Through the chain-link fence he could see the pool, empty except for the lane lines bobbing in the breeze. The swim club banner hung from the overhang: blue with white text he could read most of.
Yuki was standing near the pool office, talking to a man Kai didn't recognize. PE clothes, whistle lanyard, the build of someone who'd been athletic once and hadn't entirely stopped. A stopwatch hung from his neck. A clipboard was tucked under his arm. They were too far away for Kai to hear most of it. Yuki said something and gestured toward the pool, then toward the empty lanes. The man crossed his arms. She said something else, hands moving like she was describing a stroke, one arm pulling through an invisible entry. Her voice carried on a pause in the hallway noise — "...never trained, but he's fast" — and then the man looked at the pool, then back at Yuki, and nodded once.
None of his business. Kai kept walking. The bell rang and the hallway filled with bodies shorter than him and voices he caught in fragments. Third period was English. Back-row desk, the chair creaking under him the way it always did. Outside, the pool glinted through the window, empty and blue.
That night, Yuki stopped in the hallway outside his room. His door was open. She leaned against the frame and said, in German: "The water was better today. Warmer."
"It'll be warm all summer," Kai said. He was on his futon, staring at the ceiling, one arm behind his head. The window was cracked open and the ocean sound came through, low and constant.
"Good," Yuki said. "More room for both of us."
"It was always big enough for two people."
She pushed off the doorframe. "Gute Nacht, Kai."
"Nacht."