The Shell Collector (21 page)

“Listen to me,” Ness says. I concentrate on his voice. Part of me believes I will die here, at the bottom of the sea, and that there’s something romantic about that. A good death for a rubbish life. As a staff writer, I’ll get a killer obit in the
Times
.

The other part of me is certain that Ness will save me. That he won’t let me die. And the resistance I feel around him, that I protect myself with—I let it go. I want him to save me. I don’t want this rubbish life to end so soon.

“That’s it. A deep breath. Hold it. Concentrate on me. Just look at me. Listen to my voice. Good. Now let it out.”

I don’t know how they got there, but my hands are on his cheeks. I feel two days of stubble rough against my palms. I see his lips moving, his eyes locked on mine, all in that red glow of lights meant to guard our vision.

I can breathe again, barely, but I don’t want to let go of him. And I don’t want him to let go of me. I can breathe like this. To release him would be to drown. I feel like I should warn Ness that he’ll have to hold me like this, and I’ll have to hold him, at least until we get to the surface. I feel like I should warn him to get away from me, warn him of what I’m about to do.

And it’s hard to say who moves first. There is a lightning bolt of awareness, an electrical shock as my mind rewires itself to cope with this looming fact: We are about to kiss. And then I’m pulling him into me, and I swear I feel him pulling me as well, and lips that I have damned crash into the lips that damned them. Holding his face, like one might cup a chalice, I realize how thirsty I was for this. How badly I want him right then, in that moment. I don’t care who he is, who I am, or about any story. We are at the edge of the world, in the depths of space, where the laws of biology and the rules of physics do not seem to apply.

His lips feel warm and full against mine. Through closed eyes, I see hot magma and the cool, deep blue. I feel the rush of the Atlantic as it fills the space around us, swirling, lifting us into weightlessness. Breaking free from the kiss for a moment, I manage a deep breath. A heavy sigh. Then I moan and collapse into his lips once more.

His hands feel strong on my back, on my waist. I run my hands up his arms, to his shoulders, through his hair, pulling him into me, our kiss turning into something as crushing as the depths.

“Maya—” Ness mumbles around my lips. He’s about to talk sense into us both.

“Shut up,” I whisper. I grab one side of my coveralls and pull the snaps apart, which go like cracked knuckles, popping staccato from neck to navel. I start to wiggle my arms out, and Ness says, “Are you sure?” And I say, “I’m hot. I need out of this.”

Ness pulls away from me and reaches for a knob. “I can make it cooler,” he says.

“Just help me out of this.” I wiggle and contort my back, but one of my arms is stuck. Ness laughs and helps me. Kicking off my shoes, I wiggle the coveralls down my legs until I’m free of them. The air in the submersible is blessedly cool on my feverish skin. Adjusting myself on my seat, sitting on my knees, I lean over Ness and tear the chest of his coveralls apart. He gets his arms free. I pull his white t-shirt over his head and toss that aside. Kiss him again. Our tongues touch, soft and warm. Gentle. I bite his lower lip to let him know gentle is nice, but it’s not everything.

“Mmm,” he murmurs, pulling away. Again, I fear he’s about to talk sense into the both of us. Mention Holly. Or professional codes of ethics. And I’m going to have to explain to him how what happens at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stays at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But he says, “Gotta save the battery,” and reaches around me, embracing me, and I laugh as he fumbles for switches behind me, a pump running somewhere for a moment, Ness cursing, the pump switching off, and then the red lights around us and the harsh white floodlights outside all going dark.

He leans back into his seat, and now it’s just the constellation of indicators and dials around us, the distant red glow of lava leaking from the Earth, the shadows of animals that should not exist, and this, between us, which should not be possible.

I run my hands over his chest, that swimmer’s chest. I touch the black pearl on that thin leather strap, study him for a moment, then lean in for another kiss. Ness cups my breasts through my shirt, and I arch my back with pleasure. I press myself into his hands and grab a fistful of his hair. Arching my back further, I bang my head on a pipe. We both laugh. “This thing was not built for this,” I say.

“The arms go down,” Ness tells me. He fumbles between the chairs, and the armrests slide down level with the seats. It makes a short bench. “I’ve never done this before,” Ness says, seeming to read my mind. “I promise. But I have considered the various complexities.”

“Show me what you’ve considered,” I say, kissing him. In this moment, I don’t care if I’m a one-night stand. I don’t care if this is the last time we touch. I don’t care if being in the same room together is awkward later. I want this, whatever the costs. Something about being so close to death, about this inhospitable place, makes me want to feel
alive
. And something about being trapped with Ness, about the last three days spent in each other’s company, has me craving what I know I’ll soon regret.

Ness places a hand on the top of my head, an odd gesture, but when he lifts me up, I realize it’s to keep me from banging into anything. I hold his arms, can feel his muscles flex. To be lifted and moved so easily feels exhilarating. My desire to be in control of every situation is gone. I am floating. Bobbing on the sea. Ness lays me down on my back. He pushes my shirt up, slowly, as if asking permission. I lift my arms up over my head in assent. Starting at my neck, he kisses his way across the smooth hollow of my collarbone, sending trills of electricity through me, then works down to my breasts, kissing them, cupping them with his hands, and I place mine on top of his and make him squeeze harder. My nipples ache with pleasure. I pull my bra down and guide Ness’s head. His tongue circles my nipple before taking me between his lips.

Ness slowly kisses his way up my chest, up my neck, finds my lips again. He brushes loose strands of hair from my face. The frenetic energy is gone, replaced by a comfortable caressing, a writhing embrace, a pleasurable squirming. I wrap my arms around him and squeeze. I kiss his neck.

“Maya,” Ness whispers in my ear. If there is more, it is lost as he buries his head in my shoulder. The steel shell around us groans. We are the torus inside. There is no space nor time. No concept of being. Just a floating feeling, a sense of escape and flying, another Icarus kiss, completely free, the empty cosmos around us, exploring each other there at the bottom of the sea.

“Shit, I think the mics were on,” Ness says. He finds one of the headsets and places it back on its rack. I’m pretty sure I knocked it off trying to get my arm out of my coveralls. “The operators on the ship must’ve heard everything.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” I say.

Ness hesitates.

“I’m joking,” he says.

“Come lie back down,” I tell him. “And by lie back down, I mean curl up in an awkward ball on top of me while the edge of this armrest gouges into my spine.”

“I have to get us surfacing,” he says. “We’ve almost stayed down as long as we can.”

I groan in complaint. I’m as scared to leave this place as I was to come here. I don’t want to go back to the old rules. I like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rules. “Have them send the other sub,” I say.

Ness laughs. “It’s a two-hour ride back to the top if we start now. You’ll be sick of me by the time we get there.”

“I doubt that,” I tell him.

The sub rocks slightly as it leaves the sea floor. A small motor whirs somewhere behind us. Ness checks one more gauge, then asks me to get up. He arranges himself on the small bench and motions for me to get on top of him. I curl up across his chest and lap, my head on his shoulder, my lips brushing his neck, and he smooths my hair, which has largely come loose from my braid.

“That was amazing,” I say. I feel like a teenager, where kissing and fondling are as extreme and satisfying as sex. More satisfying. It’s like we both knew to dance along that last line, not wanting to cross it, not wanting to mess up the moment.

Ness kisses my forehead. “I forgot to ask if this was going to be off the record or not.”

“Definitely off the record,” I say, laughing. “And look, I won’t make this hard for you—”

“Don’t,” he tells me. “Please don’t break up with me at the bottom of the ocean. It’ll make the next two hours really awkward.”

I laugh.

“Besides,” he says, “I like you. I have since the moment you stormed out of my house and called me a sociopath. So you’re the one who’s gonna have to decide what comes next, not me.”

“The story,” I say. “My job.” I think of all the complications that would’ve been ridiculous to ponder an hour ago but which now swirl all around me, the myriad reasons this is a dumb idea. I think of the five-hour drive back and forth, how much a pain in the ass dating would be, how everyone in the office will think the wrong things but will be partly correct. How they’ll say the wrong things, which will be partly true. What my sister will say if I tell her I’m dating Ness Wilde. What Henry will do. His mustache will spin if I tell him about this. Agent Cooper will flip. I think about the rest of my story and my responsibility to our readers, and how hard it’ll be to write that last piece. All this and more haunts me in the space of a heartbeat.

“Stop stressing,” Ness says. He runs a finger across the worried furrow in my brow. “Let’s take it one day at a time, see if we can even get through this week.”

“Is that how long this usually lasts?” I ask him.

Ness kisses my temple and doesn’t respond. I choose not to press him, not to mess this up. Instead, I nestle into his arms and tell my worrying brain to take a vacation, to think on these things later. I allow myself to enjoy this moment, me and Ness in a sphere of twinkling lights, the black world outside fading to a dull crimson, and then a deep, rich blue, as we rise toward the surface and I fall in and out of sleep.

Ness wakes me and says we’re fifteen minutes away. So begins the strangest search-for-clothes-after-making-out that I’ve ever encountered. I get my bra arranged and my shirt back on, then wiggle into my coveralls, trying not to hit any switches with my elbows. As Ness puts on his headset and takes over control of the sub, I comb out my hair with my fingers and then put in a new braid.

“Okay,” Ness says into the mic. “I’ve got you now. Not sure what that was all about. Comms acting glitchy. No—no, I don’t think we need to tear anything apart to sort it out. Everything else is online. Yup. See you in five.”

He smiles at me. I push his microphone out of the way and kiss him quietly. I want to see if the rules of the deep still apply this close to the surface, and they seem to.

“Holly will be so proud of us,” I say.

Ness laughs. He covers the mic with his hand. “I’ve got her next weekend if we want to plan something. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

“I’d like that,” I say. I feel a shiver from having crossed some new line, some thermal barrier.

“Maybe together, the two of you can explain how the cover to my Shelby ended up in the guest house bathtub.”

“Is a Shelby a car?” I ask.

Ness shakes his head. “You were so much sexier fifteen thousand feet ago.”

“Thanks. How do I look? Is it obvious we made out? It’s obvious, isn’t it.”

“No. You look like you had a claustrophobic fit.”

“Excellent.”

“And then somehow ripped off your jumpsuit and put it back on with the buttons snapped all wrong.”

I look down and see that the top snaps don’t line up, that all of the snaps are off by one. I start redoing them. “You better have that mic off,” I say.

“Whoops,” Ness says, but I can tell he’s joking. I’m beginning to be able to read him. He takes a bit more getting used to than even Melville.

Outside, the water brightens, like the sun is rising. But we’re the ones coming up. We’re in a golden sphere, approaching the horizon. Ness takes the controls again and guides us toward the underbelly of the ship. Along with the great hull of the craft, and its massive propellers, I see the fins of a diver treading water. We break the surface just a few feet from him; the diver gives a thumbs-up through a porthole, has a cable in his hand. Ness arranges the arms of the sub to provide a ladder to the top. There’s the clanging of metal on metal, and then the slap of a hand on the hull.

“Locked in,” Ness says into his headset. And up we go, softly spinning again, water sheeting across the portholes, the sea falling away beneath us until the railing of the great ship swings below our feet once more.

We touch down with a clang, and Ness pops the hatch, water dripping down in a veil. As I crawl out of the sub, I feel like I’m in possession of some incredible secret. Like a kid sneaking kisses behind my parents’ backs. All the questions the deck crew has for Ness are about the sub, not about what happened between us. I marvel that no one suspects anything, that such an incredible moment—making out with someone for the first time at the bottom of the sea—could be contained by the two people involved. Part of me is dying to get on my phone and tell someone; the other part wants to keep this selfishly for myself and never tell another living soul.

The next hour is a blur, my head still swimming, my hormones coursing and adrenaline raging. I barely have time for a shower and a quick lunch before Ness is saying we need to leave. After I grab my bag from my room, I track down Ness’s room with the help of a crew member. He startles when I walk in, was just in the act of stuffing the last of his things into his bag. As we navigate the tight corridors of the ship together, I brush his hand with mine. He turns as he ducks through a doorway and is grinning from ear to ear.

The helicopter ride back to the island is smoother this time, the rain having slowed to a trickle, the sky clearing. We land on that small island about as far from civilization as one can be, and get back on the plane. I look forward to the flight. The time to think. To relax. Ness stows our bags and then walks to the rear of the plane, past the eight leather recliners, beyond the bathroom, and to the door at the very back.