24. Sol
The first hit of wind is deceptive. I glance up from checking the battery I fitted with steadier hands than I’ve had since way before Jack fucked me last night.
Oscar is in the wheel house. His profile is calm. He’s pissed with me, I know, because he told me after I confessed every little thing from the past few months and he sighed a lot.
But unlike Sev, Jack, and even me, Oscar’s anger is constructive. The battery. The extra bracing around the patch I’ve welded to the cracked engine block. The kind lecture that’s lapsed into a silence that’s not sharp, just…hard.
We’re way out to sea.
Further than we meant to go.
A decision we didn’t discuss, it just happened when it became obvious we both needed clear water to think straight, and now we’re facing down an ugly squall.
Another gust rocks the Sirona, lurching her to port as the gale blasts like a moving wall.
Rain follows. Needles of wet as I force my way through it and join Oscar in the wheelhouse.
He’s wrestling with the throttle, trying to turn the bow with his insulin pen jammed between his teeth, as caught on the hop by this wicked front as I am. “This was supposed to hit south. Is why we came this way.”
“Tell that to the gods.” I take the wheel, grimacing as the ocean shifts gears. Steady chop morphs into angry froth, the sky so dark it’s like daylight was never here, and short stacked waves build around us as the wind duels the tide.
We climb a swell and slam down into the trough. Oscar grips the beam, steady on his feet, but with the next wave we heel so far the deck tilts beneath us like a landslide, and the telltale clatter and slide of loose gear haunts the air.
Oscar moves without hesitation, shoving his insulin kit in his pocket. “I’ll get it.”
I grunt a response, still battling the wheel as sheets of rain lash the boat, obscuring my view of the black seam of cloud swallowing the sea and the sky.
A wave breaks sideways, crashing over the port rail, flooding the deck. I turn in time to see Oscar dodge it with deft feet, but the impact shakes his insulin pouch free, and it skitters across the wet wood.
I shout a warning.
The wind rips the words from my mouth and blows them away, and another fearsome wave slams into us.
I face the horizon again, fighting to nose the Sirona into the wind. She groans and I grit my teeth as swell after swell batters her. As crates break loose as fast as Oscar battles to secure them.
His insulin pouch slides overboard.
Disappears into the foamy black.
There’s no time to process it. The Sirona rolls again, her engine screaming under the load. A wave hits us broadside, a high and fast wall of force, and we list over so far the world inverts, the wheel rips from my hands, and I’m thrown sideways into the console.
I smash my head. Hard. The storm fades to a dull whistle and blood seeps from my temple.
It takes me a minute to right myself. To find my feet and stagger upright. I lurch around, looking for Oscar—
But he’s gone.
Dazed panic hits me. I can’t compute the empty deck. Then I see him in the water, a flash of red against the morbid blue of the ocean, twenty feet off the stern, battling the troughs and foam tearing through the sea in opposite directions.
He’s not wearing a lifejacket.
Neither am I.
They hang in the wheelhouse and I grab one, slinging it over my arm as I throw the throttle into neutral, the Sirona already beam-on and at the mercy of the next wave, and I run.
Out of the wheelhouse and over the side before logic catches up to my split-second decision to hurl myself overboard to reach my friend.
The water hits like granite.
Annihilating cold.
I kick hard, breaking the surface to roar into the surging rain. “Oscar!”
Another flash of red answers me. An arm in the distance, a shout I barely hear. I swim for it, through a storm that doesn’t care. Through salt and fury as the waves toss me sideways and the current drags me under. I reach Oscar as the swell swallows us both.
The lifejacket rips from my arm.
Gone in an instant.
We go under, grabbing at each other. Fabric. Flesh. Wide eyes and panicked limbs. “Oscar!”
He tries to answer, but water floods us again and a loose crate slams into us.
I’m too dazed to know where it hits me. Blood coats my tongue and my ears ring. I feel myself slipping, but Oscar hauls me in, angling us towards the Sirona.
“We need to get back.”
His urgent shout breaks through.
I grip his jacket and kick for the boat, limbs heavy with cold, but it’s like swimming through clay. The Sirona looms in front of us, but we can’t reach her. And then she’s gone, eclipsed by the thickening squall, and the waves upend us so much I forget where to look.
I can’t see her.
The rain blinds me. Thunder so close it vibrates in my bones.
A wave tears us apart. I catch Oscar by sheer luck, but we’re not swimming anymore. Instead the sea carries us, deciding our fate, and I’m resigned to it until my girl reappears through a gap in the rain, swamped and listing, lights flickering.
No.
I kick again, pulling Oscar with me.
He’s dead weight and I twist around to see his eyes rolling. “Oscar?”
No answer.
I shout his name again, wrenching my body around to hold his face in my hands, the way I do when Jack has slipped away from me.
Jack.
He’s the blood in my veins. The spark that keeps my heart beating. The iron will that gives me the energy to shake Oscar back to awareness. “Stay with me. We have to keep swimming.”
Oscar fights to stay conscious. He mouths something.
I lean closer to catch it. “What?”
“High.”
My cold-shocked brain thinks he means the waves. I shake him again. “I know. But we have to swim.”
Oscar says something else, but a raging swell obliterates us and it’s all I can do to hold on. To keep him above water as his strength seems to evaporate.
Did he hit his head?
No. That was me.
And it’s starting to not matter. We’ve been in the water too long. Even if we reach the boat, if she’s not sound, we’ll be dead from hypothermia before the wind fades.
Jack.
Gods. Aras.
I wind my arm around Oscar’s chest and kick and kick and kick. By some miracle, the next few swells are kind to us. We near the Sirona and I think we’re going to make it. Then a breaker hits her stern. She buckles, she rolls, and the sea closes over her like she was never there.
My mouth falls open in a silent scream.
Rain. Wind. Thunder. Flashes of vicious lightning illuminating swaths and swathes of nothing.
The horizon is gone.
Darkness settles and it’s all we are.
There is no boat. No land. No light.
We are the vessels.
And we’re drifting alone.