Chapter 16 #2
I opened my eyes and tilted my head back so that I could get a better view of Aster’s expression. His eyes sparkled in the dim lantern light, but his lips remained an expressionless line.
Don’t let anything you see fool you, said Aster. This is the best of all. The ship, the fish, our good captain over there. In all of this, you never stepped away from the keyboard.
I tensed. We weren’t dancing anymore, and the music had shifted into a minor key.
Then I saw that Aster was busy already undressing me, pulling my pants down to my ankles and then lifting my shirt over my arms. His given explanation for our unexpected field trip faded to the back recesses of my conscious thought.
This time our chemistry was different. The underwater setting enchanted me, and I acted under a compulsion and curiosity that had never infected me before.
Aster acted similarly charged, and he explored me from new angles, kissing my hips and running his arms down my ribs before teasing me with his tongue.
Maybe the change between us stemmed from the thicker aquatic atmosphere, from the ruins in decay around us.
The shipwreck. The remains of our own storm.
Every breath felt fresher and further imbued with life. Every moan spoke not only of pleasure but of being as well, of existence. I saw that I could drink in the space between us, literally drink it, endlessly drink it without fear of drowning.
The St. Marie was no match for the bed in the master bedroom of the lighthouse. Here there were no cotton sheets, no soft pillows for our heads and no mattress to cushion our weight.
The wooden planks of the floor shifted and popped when Aster pulled me down in front of the captain’s desk. But I could feel his love with every touch. And more than his love alone.
The nature of Aster’s passion always spanned beyond the stable, the predictable. It had a liquid quality to it. The quality of magma beneath the Earth’s crust, beneath the stillness of this very site.
My lips could only part in fascination when I looked at him. I had done this. I had brought forth a man of flesh and blood, one who loved me and gave back to me freely every blessing at his disposal.
Eventually he climaxed, freezing over me like a lion about to roar. He rolled off me and collapsed beside me, staring at the blackness above in thought.
I lay still beside him for a few seconds, gathering my thoughts.
If we could visit a place like this, a wreck on the ocean floor, and make it our own, then what couldn’t we do?
The entire world belonged to us. We were king and queen over this reality, over a realm that comprised of more than I could ever imagine.
Then I turned my eyes to Aster himself. He was a statue, a living, breathing work of art. The contours of his face might as well have been chiseled in marble. I hesitated to say anything to him right now because I knew that my words could only bring him down to my level.
What was he thinking as he lay beside me? The water teased at his hair and caused it to float around his ears and the the sides of his head. The movement belonged to him as much as his own breathing.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I said, breaking from my fear but not moving from my place on the wooden floor.
And here he fell, back to mortality, back to a plane where he and I could look at each other in the eyes. Comprehension.
Aster blinked and looked around as if momentarily confused about our whereabouts. We need to wake up, he said. The air has changed. Someone is coming to us.
“Wake up?” I asked.
I scolded myself for thinking this encounter could have been anything more than a good dream. My last clear memory entailed sitting behind the desk typing while Aster told me I wouldn’t need to sleep ever again, when he put his hands over my eyes. He must have lied to trick me into staying up.
He looked at me in a way that said I should have known better.
My fingers curled into the waterlogged surface of the deck, and suddenly the ragged texture of the wood turned into a rough weave of cloth, of the seat of the office chair.
There was no transition. No first-here-then-there, no wishing on fairy dust and flying away. Instead, we returned to the lighthouse the same way we left it, without my even knowing as much.
My eyes refocused on the computer screen, where I saw that I had continued to type during our fantastic odyssey even without knowing it. In fascination I skimmed the visible paragraphs, and then I looked across the room at Aster, who studied a trio of seagulls out the window in interest.
“How did we do that?” I asked dumbly. “I don’t remember typing any of this. Did you do this?”
Aster was standing on his toes. When he heard me, he turned only in reluctance. A shade of orange dusted his lower cheeks. What is it that we did, again? he asked.
My lips parted, but the response never came. It was as if our visit to the shipwreck had happened only in the blink of an eye in the far recesses of my mind. Like it wasn’t real at all, even though I so clearly remembered every detail.
Aster shooed me away with catlike ease. We’ve worked long enough. Go upstairs and refresh yourself. Your—well, your family is very close now. I regret I didn’t force you to call them off, but I’ve prepared myself for the inevitable.
“My family?” I asked. “They weren’t coming for days.”
It’s been days since you told me, he said lightly.
My back tingled when I stood, and it occurred to me that the shipwreck visit was not only real, but that it had taken a lot of time—and also that I had been sitting for much longer than it seemed.