11. Nate
Nate
“The weather’s quite nice.”
Landry turned his head slowly and looked at me.
Okay, I would settle for the sea ice splitting open and swallowing the entire ship. That was fine too. I wasn’t picky.
His gaze traveled down my body and back up. “Yeah,” he said at last.
I nodded.
He stared at me. He had brown eyes. And dark angry eyebrows that were very… commanding. And attractive. He hadn’t shaved, and dark stubble covered his jaw. I wanted to start barking like a mad dog. Maybe hump his leg.
Christ alive. Let a skua swoop down and pick me up right now. Please.
Was it my turn to speak? I’d suddenly forgotten how normal people spoke. He kept staring and I kept malfunctioning. Then he turned back toward the ice and I took a ragged breath like I’d been underwater.
I studied the deep waters below the ship, the fractured sea ice, and the ship’s brightly painted hull.
Okay, that had been the worst of it. I had spoken. I had made an utter arse of myself, and yet I remained standing. It could only go up from here, right?
A memory surfaced from when I had been six, and I was visiting a marine science museum with my family.
I’d spotted another boy. He wore a shirt declaring that SCIENCE IS COOL in enormous letters, and I had wanted desperately to befriend him.
I remembered feeling hungry for anyone who might understand the way my mind attached itself to things, intensely and without moderation.
I did not merely like whales or sharks or medieval knights.
I needed to know everything about them until I had inhaled every bit of knowledge, then to share it with someone.
I had felt lonely because not many boys were as intense as me.
Mum had crouched beside me and followed my gaze.
“Find something you both have in common,” she had said in her gentle and encouraging voice. “Look at what he’s looking at. Choose something in that display, then ask him about it.”
I could work with that. Find something common with Landry. I peered sideways at him. Landry and I had already done this once, in a way. The holiday gathering’s ridiculous icebreaker cards had managed what neither of us had been willing to do on our own. His card had said:
The Three Musketeers. Swordsmanship. Prince Valiant comics.
That was the common thread, but commenting on those topics meant we would end up fighting about the fencing bout.
I looked up at the midnight-sun-lit sky. What else could I talk about?
Over the years, I had accumulated an entire catalogue of stories that could draw people into conversation.
When I visited schools, I usually brought an assortment of stuffed marine animals while telling my stories.
The Shackleton story was one of those. A story about history, adventure, and the spirit of perseverance.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Landry did not strike me as a man who would be easily won over by a stuffed animal. But… my other toys, perhaps. I nearly choked on my own breath. No, no, no. We were not thinking about those.
I dragged my mind firmly back toward history, survival, and respectable wooden vessels.
That should hit the mark.
He had been clearly afraid in the Zodiac at first, but in the end, he had overcome his fear. I respected courage like that.
I took another deep breath and cleared my throat. Second attempt. Here we go: “Can you believe there were men centuries ago who were brave enough to come down here in wooden ships?”
“Did you say wooden ships?”
“Yes. The ship was called Endurance. Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed her into the Weddell Sea in 1914.”
“Holy shit.” He turned his body towards me. “What were they doing all the way down here?”
“Shackleton intended to cross Antarctica.” I swept my hand across the horizon. “From the Weddell Sea here to the Ross Sea, passing through the South Pole.”
His eyebrows climbed. “How? On foot?”
“With sledges and dogs, yes. This was obviously before any satellite imagery. No GPS. No weather forecasting. Their charts were incomplete, and much of the continent was still unknown to the people attempting to cross it.”
“That’s fucking insane.”
A burst of joy made me smile brightly. He was into the story!
“What was the ship like in those days?”
“Well, the ship had a timber hull. And sails. It was powered by a steam engine. She was built for polar travel and reinforced for ice, but she was still a wooden ship.”
Landry shook his head slowly. At some point, he had stepped closer to me. “Fucking balls of steel.”
I laughed at that. I liked how he spoke. He glanced at me sharply, but the corner of his mouth had moved. Not quite a smile, but close enough to make something warm flutter beneath my ribs.
“So they came into the Weddell Sea on a rickety dink,” he said. “What happened?”
“They became trapped.”
“Oh Jesus.” His face paled like he could empathize with the plight of those souls from years ago. “Here?”
I pointed at the ice around us. “You see that ice? It closed around the ship. They could not sail forward, and they could not turn back. Our modern ship is an icebreaker. I’m not sure you’ve been on one. Look down at the hull. See how it’s not pointed but round?”
He leaned and studied. “Yeah.”
“That’s so this ship can glide up on the ice sheets.
Like how the rounded part of a spoon would do?
” I tried to mime the action to him. “Once the ship is on top of the ice, it cracks due to the tons of weight on it. That’s how this channel of water we are in was created.
But even just a few decades ago, ships didn’t have this technology.
Mostly ships tried to plough through ice. ”
“Like a bull.”
I laughed. “Close enough. I don’t think I’ve seen a bull up close. I guess you have… I heard you’re a cow… I mean from Texas?”
“Yep. Bred and reared on a ranch,” he said in an exaggerated drawl.
Damn. Why was that so hot? Corny but hot.
“So what happened then?”
“The ship fractured and sank.”
“Damn. All those fuckers died?”
“No.”
“No?”
“The entire company—twenty-eight men—spent five months camped on the ice.” I lifted a hand and pointed out to the ice.
His eyes opened wide. “No way.”
I took a step towards him until we were both standing close to each other.
“What did they fucking eat?”
“Rations salvaged from the ship. Seals and penguins when necessary. They had dogs too.”
His expression shifted. I did not need to explain what eventually happened to the dogs.
Landry blinked several times and kept looking around the scenery.
Of all the people I’d narrated this story to, his reaction instantly became my new favorite.
He stared at the Weddell Sea, and I could see him imagining himself in that situation.
I could clearly picture him as one of those mad lads.
He would have been strong and brave. Landry would have found a way to survive.
I didn’t know why, but I just had a strong conviction about that.
I, on the other hand, would definitely have perished.
Our shoulders were touching slightly.
Eventually, he asked in a quiet voice, “Did they survive?”
“Yes. The ice began breaking apart beneath them. They could not remain on it, so they launched the three boats they had left.”
“Boats? That is even worse.”
“They had no good choices left. They spent days at sea before reaching an island called Elephant Island. From there, it took another few months, but they were rescued.”
His forearm shifted against the railing. The sleeve of his parka brushed mine.
“Not one man died?”
“Not one.”
He exhaled, and then laughed, a sound of disbelief and wonder.
I looked at him. I hadn’t seen him smiling much.
We had been scowling at each other so much all the time.
He was such a handsome man. Little crinkles around his eyes made him even more attractive.
I’d seen how he behaved with his brother.
There was a different side to him. Or maybe it was my heart hoping uselessly.
That boy from the museum hadn’t become my friend after all. He had made a face at me and called me a ‘nerd’ before running away. Apparently, I hadn’t learned my lesson.
And yet I couldn’t stop staring at him. He seemed to be thinking something intense. His eyes were locked onto the sea, but I didn’t think he was really seeing anything. He was holding onto the railing with such a strong grip that the corded muscles of his arms stood out.
He must have felt my gaze because when he turned to look at me, his brown eyes were burning with something fierce.
He leaned forward until his lips hovered over mine.
I shuddered.
“Why did you—”
Landry’s words were cut off brutally as my feet suddenly vanished out from under me.
For a bewildered instant, my mind simply refused to make sense of what my body was doing.
One moment I was standing, the next I was skidding helplessly across the deck, boots scraping uselessly against the steel as I fought for purchase that wasn’t there.
I threw out an arm, instinctively reaching for anything I could grab, but my fingers closed on empty air.
The rail rushed toward me at unbelievable speed.
I hit it hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs.
Pain exploded through my hip and ribs as I folded awkwardly against the cold metal, my body twisting with the force of the impact.
As I hung there, pinned by unseen forces with my upper body leaning downward, the sea below began to rise. A mammoth wave was forming.
I stared uncomprehendingly.
An eerie groan sounded all around me and from the very belly of my ship. I turned my head in pure, primal fear, and my eyes widened impossibly at what I saw. The entire back section of the ship, the one we weren’t on, was rising.
That was when I noticed the sheet of water beneath my feet and all over the deck. Where did all this water come from? Were we sinking? But that was impossible.
The ship tilted further, and the next moment the steel rail disappeared beneath me, replaced by open air, as I toppled and fell several feet down into a blur of the ship’s bright red paint and dark blue of the ocean below.