“Wanna get out of here?” she says.

There’s something in the angle of her jaw, the way she looks at you, how her teeth glint like sea foam in the light of the lamps. Its 1 am and the party is dying out. You nod and she takes your hand.

Self-conscious suddenly—aware of the sweat in your palms, the tightness of your clothes, the serration of beer on your breath, the faint tang under your armpits, the secrets like buried treasure deep inside your chest. For a moment you watch outside of your body, a film shot following you out of the house, past the phalanxes of beer bottles, the couple horizontal on the couch like an equals sign, the dancers in the garage unwilling to stop (lest everything fall apart) just one more, one more, one more.

Her hair smells saltwater and then you’re out the front door. The welcome fit of the cold night air. Your ears adjusting to the lack of clamour.

“Which is yours?” she asks. Her eyes are blue as cold water. What is yours?

You point to your car and she dives in and you start the engine, aware of her body, the goosebumps on her skin, the way her muscles flex as she winds down the window.

“Want me to take you home?” you say.

“Home,” she echoes. “I’d like that.”

“Which way?”

“To the sea. Towards the water.”

You open your mouth to ask more but her head is down, rifling through the cassettes in the console, with a thunder roll of plastic noise. You shrug, put the car into gear.

Streets slide by and she puts one of the cassettes in the tape deck. Suburbia ebbs away as you turn onto the highway and the music begins. A dead singer’s voice slides slowly into focus over a fingerpicked electric. He sings about the sheets of a bed, of the loss of a lover’s warmth, offering to trade, for a moment, his sorrow for our youth.

To your surprise, she starts to sing too—as the chorus hits, her voice slides in and over the music, perfect and petulant. An invitation you don’t know how to refuse. You turn it up and she lets loose. The streets are so quiet but you are a vessel of noise. You turn it up, up until you can hear it in your future memory.

The song finishes. You crest the hill and can see the beach below, the water blue-black but for the moon’s brief spotlight.

“This way?” you guess. She nods.

There’s no one else in the beach parking lot. You turn off the engine and the silence rushes in but for the hum in her throat, the tick of the engine cooling.

“Come on,” she says and you follow.

She is four steps onto the beach before you’re out of the car. Its hard to see her in the dark but you can still hear her song like a hook in your spine.

“Don’t you need to get home?” you ask. Only a hum in return.

You follow and follow, the sand cool as marble underfoot and the salt high in your nose. Across the harbour, the city leaves its light on the water, irresponsible. You catch a glimpse of her as she breaks the surf and dives underneath.

“Where ...?” you ask.

The wave catches your foot. The cold makes you gasp.

You sense her more than you can see her: how the song continues under the water, a thread that ties you to her, pulls at you like waves pulled back to the ocean, another trade offered. You take another step and wonder what it would be like to learn a new song, to sing beneath the waves, to breathe beneath until—