Where You Breathe
Pip & Dawn, Book 6
by A.J.Sharpe
© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. No licence is granted for any use beyond the terms. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms

The sea stood at its full height and held still, which seas do not do.
Off the point, the sandbar stood dry to its shoulders.
*Now?* said Pip, from the stone.
*Breathe out first,* said Dawn.

He had brought the folded leaf, the bell from the old days, out from among his kept things.
Dawn looked at it a long time.
*You will not need it,* she said. He brought it anyway.

She lowered her nose to the stone and he stepped aboard, as he had a hundred mornings before.
This time she turned toward the deep water.
The white pebbles watched them go.

The sea took them the way a door takes a guest.
Light came down around him in pieces, the pieces he had only ever seen from above.
He reached for the number of them, out of habit, and there was no number.
Not withheld, not forgotten: her world did not have numbers, the way it did not have dry.

Her world was one enormous room.
She moved through it like the light: without edges, without weight, without any of the care she wore at the shore.
He had never seen her whole before.

It sounded the way the shell had always said.
Everywhere, and unhurried, and under everything.
He put out one hand and let it pass.

The water opens, and holds, and asks nothing of him.
Pip breathes.
The sea goes through him like morning through a door.
Where you breathe, he thinks. Where you breathe.

Dawn swam the whole of herself around him once, slowly, with nothing folded away.
She turned once more, for nothing but the turning.

She set him back on the stone with the morning barely older.
He was laughing and could not stop and did not try.
She watched him from the water, very still, learning it.

She went out with the tide, the way she always did.
He watched from the stone, the way he always did.
Neither of them said anything they had not said a hundred times.

The tide kept going.
What had stood up for a morning was going out for good: by dark it had gone further than the reed had ever recorded.
The pool lay open to the sky.

The proud morning came, and the sea did not come with it.
Sand stood where water had stood.
Pip waited on the stone with the folded leaf in both arms until the light was high, and ordinary.

© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms