“I haven’t been since I was a kid,” Michael murmurs, smiling back in the dark. The beach and boardwalk were never Morris’s scene, and Michael had no one else to go with. He remembers the endless ocean and the hypnotic tide, the way it would suck the sand out from underneath his feet as he stood and watched. The salt water had burned his nose and eyes as he tried to learn how to swim. Everything had been almost too bright to look at.
He slides his fingers out of her hair to stroke her cheek with his thumb. “Yeah. I’ll take you.”