Vicarious (27 page)

“You want me to move?”

“No.”

He lifts up on one arm, brushes my hair back from my face, and gives me a gentle kiss on the forehead. “Go to sleep, Winter. I'll keep the bad dreams away.”

 

CHAPTER 29

Jesse's
still sleeping when I wake a few hours later. Surprisingly, I feel rested. No more nightmares with him beside me. His arm is heavy across my middle. I slide out from his loose embrace and head for the bathroom.

The scalding water of the shower brings the real world into focus. All I can think about is Jesse. His naked chest. The twining scents of sweat and evergreen deodorant. The part of me that so easily replaced a nightmare about my sister with desire for something else.

I dry off and wriggle into my swimsuit, a one-piece navy racing suit I bought for a previous job. The bruises on my neck have gone from purple to an ugly greenish color. Maybe I can put on my wet suit without the dive operators noticing. In the meantime, I layer a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of warm-up pants on top of my suit. I know it's warm outside, but I've been on boats before and the wind can get chilly, especially after the dives when I'm wet. I peek at myself in the mirror and add my standard smudges of black eyeliner.

When I finish in the bathroom, Jesse is sitting at the foot of his bed, a small leather case of toiletries dangling from his right hand.

I can't quite meet his eyes. “The shower is all yours,” I say.

When he's finished getting ready, we head downstairs and order a quick hotel breakfast of cereal and fruit. I cut my pineapple into smaller and smaller bites while Jesse eats and makes small talk. I'm still finding it hard to look at him.

Finally he touches my shoulder. “Did you sleep better—”

After you got in bed with me?
“Yes,” I say quickly.

“Glad I could help,” he says. Then he continues, “I played all the remaining ViSEs after you crashed out—one cage dancing, one as an extra in a music video, one swimming with dolphins, the rest with Andy Lynch.” He rolls his eyes. “I think that dude might have a drinking problem, but other than that, nothing really stood out to me.” He crunches a big spoonful of cereal. “And nothing on the overdose or Phantasm one either. I mean, obviously they changed their door code, and that's the only private info we recorded. What if the ViSEs are a dead end? Maybe we should concentrate on identifying the man from your dreams. You could ask Gideon if he's someone from your past. Maybe if you know who he is, then he'll stop haunting you.”

He's right. Gideon will be angry that we disobeyed him and went snooping around Phantasm, but if he can give me answers that help me sleep, it will be worth it. I never expected the one-eyed man to be real—I need to know who he is. “Good idea,” I say. “Thanks for helping.”

A Jeep Cherokee pulls up outside. A tall guy gets out and heads toward the front door of the hotel.

“I think that's our ride.” Jesse pats his pocket and frowns. “I've got to run back to the room for a second. Tell them I'll be right there.”

“All right.” Blotting my mouth with a napkin, I grab my gear bag and intercept the tall guy in the hotel lobby. “I'm Winter,” I say. “Jesse will be right down.”

The guy reaches out to shake my hand, and I resist the urge to pull it away. His grip is tight but his smile is friendly. “I'm Eli,” he says. “Sam is outside.”

Sam and Eli are brothers whom Gideon has hired for other diving ViSEs. They have experience taking tourists out to watch dolphins and to cage dive with different species of sharks.

I loiter in the parking lot of the hotel until I can see Jesse making his way through the lobby. Then I step up into the vehicle and slide my way along the wide bench seat.

Jesse exits out into the sun with his folded recorder headset dangling from his hand. He slides into the back of the Jeep next to me.

I poke him in the ribs. “Kind of an important thing to forget.”

He leans in close so only I can hear him. “I spent the night with this hot chick,” he says. “Sorry if I'm a little distracted.”

I blush. “As long as you focus when we start playing with sharks.”

Jesse grins. “You really are scared, aren't you?”

“Maybe a little.”

He slips his hand around mine and squeezes my fingers. “I won't let anything happen to you—I promise.”

Eli looks back over his shoulder and smiles at us. “Ah. Young love.”

I swallow back a lengthy explanation about how it isn't what it looks like, how Jesse and I are just friends. I don't even understand what's happening between us. I definitely don't know how to explain it to anyone else.

Jesse doesn't say anything either. He just squeezes my hand again and smiles to himself.

Sam navigates the traffic with surprising ease and in about ten minutes we pull up at the Miami Beach training facility. Eli spends a few minutes going over all of the safety contingencies related to both diving and sharks while Sam fetches gear for all four of us. He returns with a cart of air tanks, harnesses, wet suits, fins, and even neoprene booties that he says will keep our feet warm if we're in the water for an extended period. I feel a burst of relief when he hands Jesse and me each a titanium diver's knife, but then he makes a point of saying the knives are useless against the sharks. They're more for cutting ourselves free of netting or kelp if we get tangled.

Sam starts to explain the bigger pieces of scuba equipment and I ask if there's any way for me to get decent recordings without going through the whole multiday scuba training first. Sam and Eli offer to teach me to SNUBA, which is like a cross between snorkeling and scuba diving but takes only a couple of hours to learn.

Jesse already has his diving certification, so he observes as I go through all of the basic SNUBA training in a pool. The regulator is similar to a scuba-diving apparatus, but instead of breathing air from a tank on my back, I breathe it through a hose that links to a tank in a raft on the surface of the water. I can't go as deep as a diver, but I can go deep enough that Gideon will never know the difference.

After I'm finished, we gear up and board Sam and Eli's boat. Jesse stands next to me at the railing, the wind whipping our hair back from our faces. Above our heads, the sky is a mass of thick storm clouds, its deep gray color disturbed only by the flight of an occasional seagull.

“Sunny Florida,” I grumble.

“At least it's not snowing.” He rests a hand on my lower back.

We're heading for a spot only a few hundred yards offshore that Sam and Eli claim is a good place to find hammerhead sharks. The graceful creatures often travel in large groups that will look impressive on a ViSE but according to Eli are generally not dangerous.

Generally not?
As I stand at the edge of the boat, I feel like I'm swallowing my own heart. The water is clear enough that I can see the sharks waiting for me. Lured by a mix of chum, the hammerheads have come right up to the side of the boat. They're only about six to eight feet long, but there's something so lethal about the sinuous way they cut through the water, their T-shaped heads tracking the movement around them.

Jesse falls gracefully backward off the edge of the boat in full scuba gear and then accepts a metallic prod from Eli. His main job is going to be to protect me, should I need it, but he's also recording a ViSE.

Not wanting to be outdone, I make a big show of sliding backward into the ocean and then doing a quick check of the SNUBA gear. I'm ready … except for the sharks.

Luckily, they've backed away from the boat because of the splashing we made entering the water. I sink slowly beneath the surface, focusing on the lightness of my body. At first it's just me, Jesse, and the clear turquoise ocean. Then a flash of silver—a bright school of fish. Curious. Hungry. Their mouths snap up bits of chum residue. I forget to breathe and the pressure builds up around my head. As I exhale slowly through my mouth, the hammerheads begin to return. One of them swims close enough to bump me, but he's not interested in trying to eat something that's almost as large as he is. Still, his sleek body hits me with a surprising amount of force.

Jesse pokes at the shark with his prod and it swims off. My fear starts to wane. The shark seemed more curious than menacing. I drift deeper in the water, exploring the far reaches of my breathing tether. Below me the ocean fades into blackness.

I explore the various angles the buoyancy of the water affords my body. I float, swim, sink, circle. The sharks grow used to my presence and accept me as part of the ocean. I chase after a bright red-and-blue fish and have a couple close encounters with an impressive tuna who comes to investigate us.

Off in the distance a dark shape rockets past like a torpedo—a bigger shark, a tiger or maybe a bull shark. Both species have been known to attack humans. My heart punches against my breastbone. Embracing my fear, for the sake of the ViSE, I stay submerged for another minute, scanning the water methodically for the bigger shark. Then I slowly float to the surface and signal that I'm ready to reboard the boat.

Jesse rises alongside me. He hauls himself up the boat's ladder and then helps me back onto the deck. Water streams from his wet hair. “What did you think?”

“It was amazing,” I say. “Did you see the bigger shark go by?”

“What?” He points at his ear. He must have taken his hearing aid out to dive. “Sorry. I'm half-deaf today.”

I decide there's no point in worrying him now that I'm safely back on board. “I said it was amazing!” A smile spreads across my face.

He wraps me in a wet hug, lifting me off the deck for a moment. “You did great. I knew you would rock.”

I cling to him for a couple of extra seconds, thinking about how the worst is yet to come. Our next dive is farther offshore, where we're going to actually seek out bigger sharks. But Jesse's right. I can survive this. He brushes his lips against my forehead when I finally pull back, and I hang on to him long enough to go in for a kiss on the cheek. He's not expecting it so he turns at the last second and I end up getting a mouthful of beard stubble.

Looking down at me, he says, “Let's try that again.” He turns his head so that his cheek is facing me, but when I lean in to kiss him, he turns back so our lips touch. Quick. Painless. So fast I might have imagined it. But then he presses me against the boat's railing. One hand cradles my face while the other caresses the back of my neck.

“Jess—” I start to say. But his lips swallow up my words, and this kiss is not quick. Jesse's mouth is warm, wanting. I wrap my arms around his neck and feel our bodies fold against each other as I lean into the embrace. His tongue tastes my bottom lip and my knees start to buckle. He reaches out to steady me.

And then a seagull caws, reminding us of where we are. Jesse releases his grip on me. He glances toward the boat's cabin, where Sam is studying the controls and Eli is looking off into the distance. “Sorry. I guess we shouldn't do this at work.”

He looks anything but sorry.

I flash him a shaky smile and turn away into the wind. My insides are spinning and twisting like runaway carnival rides, but once again, guilt brings them to a screeching halt. I shouldn't be feeling this way when my sister is dead.

*   *   *

After
we eat a light lunch, Sam and Eli take the boat farther out from the shore, trailing turtle decoys and looking for tiger sharks as they head toward the Gulf of Mexico. People have swum with tiger sharks outside of a cage, but neither Jesse nor I have any wish to die today, so we will be recording our ViSEs from behind bars.

There's a reef area a few miles offshore that draws lots of diverse wildlife. As we approach them, I see a fin slicing across the water's surface. Once again my heart lodges neatly in my throat. Unlike the smaller hammerheads, these sharks can weigh more than a car and have been known to attack everything in their paths.

Jesse wraps an arm around my shoulder as I stand at the boat's railing staring out at the ocean. “I'll be right there with you,” he reminds me.

“I know. I'm fine.”

Sam and Eli drop a cage and secure the SNUBA set-up to the top of it. Then Jesse and I enter the cage together. The water is cooler out here, the wind nipping at the exposed skin on my face as I sink beneath the surface. When I open my eyes, I see that a pair of tiger sharks have come to investigate the cage. Their monstrous bodies, the length of Cadillacs, cut through the water like huge circling torpedoes. I won't need to do any neural amplifying. The rows of serrated teeth, the dead black eyes—there is nothing scarier than a giant shark.

On cue, the larger of the two sharks rockets up toward the surface. Sand swirls in the turbulent water. When it clears, tendrils of red curl before me. Looking up I see the blood spreading out on the surface. Pieces of … something fall through the cage bars. A turtle maybe, or a big fish.

A third shark appears, a mako, smaller but no less deadly. A few brave fish venture close to nibble on the leftover scraps of food. The largest shark swims by, dragging a fin against the cage. The bars rattle sharply. The sharks disappear as quickly as they arrived, and for a few moments Jesse and I float in the water alone.

Or are we?

Shadows fade in and out in the distance. Slow. Fast. Waves? Sharks? I can't tell. I glance over at Jesse. He's spinning lazy circles in the water around me, seemingly unconcerned by the sharks' behavior.

We float upward, away from the bottom of the cage. The metal groans under the weight of the water. The smaller tiger shark is back. I can tell them all apart. The bigger tiger is a monster, fifteen feet long at least. It's the stuff of nightmares and horror movies. The other one is maybe ten feet and has a fin that flops to the side as it swims. And then there's the mako, its giant black eyes receding into its head as it slices through the water. Floppy Fin races directly at the cage but then swerves away from the collision at the last moment.