Chapter 3 #2
"They filed on a map with a hole in it and they don't know there's a hole in it, because they don't know it's a hole, they think it's the edge — "
"Uh huh."
"— which means if there's anything diagnostic in there, anything with a name on it, it's ours — " I turned around. "Why aren't you excited."
"I am excited."
"You're standing there like a bollard."
"This is what it looks like."
"That's a tragedy, is what that is."
And he almost smiled.
Not all the way. It got about a third of the way up one side of his face and then he shut it down like a man closing a door on a dog.
And I thought: oh no.
I thought it very clearly and very calmly, the way I'd think oh no about a pressure gauge.
"Torren."
"Yeah."
"How long have you been doing this? Diving."
"Since I was nineteen."
"And you're — "
"Thirty-eight."
"So nineteen years."
He looked at the chart. "Seventeen," he said.
He said it flat and small and he did not explain it, and I am a person who fills silences professionally, and I did not fill that one.
I put my hand on his forearm instead.
That's all. Just the flat of my hand on his forearm, on the rail-scarred part above the wrist, the way you'd steady somebody on a ladder.
He went absolutely still.
Not like a man who didn't want to be touched. Like a man who had spent two years assuming nobody would.
The radio changed songs. Then changed back, because Havana is not a serious institution.
"Nerissa," he said.
"Yeah."
"You should move your hand."
"Okay." I did not move my hand. "Is that a preference or a warning?"
"It's a — " He exhaled through his nose. "It's information."
"See, that's the trouble with information," I said. "It's morally neutral. You've given me a data point and no instruction, which frankly, as a professional, I find sloppy — "
He kissed me.
I'd love to report that I stopped talking.
I did not stop talking. I got about four more words out against his mouth, and they were okay so that's — and then his hand came up under my jaw, careful, like the whole thing might be load-bearing, and the rest of the sentence went somewhere else permanently.
The boat rocked. It rocks constantly; that's what boats do; but it chose that moment to remind us, and I came off my feet an inch and he caught me against the console with an arm around my back like it cost him nothing, and the wrench and the lime went off the chart table and onto the deck.
"The lime," I said.
"Leave the lime."
"That was the last lime."
"Nerissa."
"I'm just saying, provisioning-wise — "
"You narrate," he said, into my neck, "constantly."
"It's a coping strategy and it's kept me alive."
"Stop narrating."
"That's not going to happen," I said, and got my hands under his shirt.
He made a sound I felt in my sternum.
Here's the thing about a hundred and ten square feet.
There is nowhere to go. There is a wheel, a console, a bench that is more of a rumor, a bulkhead, and a doorway with a strip of vinyl over it. Everything you do, you do standing up, braced, with somebody's elbow against a throttle lever.
So you laugh. There is no way not to laugh.
He backed into the horn button and set it off and we both froze like teenagers and there was nobody within two miles to hear it, and then I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on his chest, and he stood there with both hands on my back and his heart going like a compressor, and I felt him laugh, which I would later learn is a nearly geological event.
"There's a chart," he said, at some point.
"There's a chart under your hand, yes."
"It's a good chart."
"It's a very good chart, I made it, get it off the — "
He got it off the table one-handed and put it in the rack, which was, honestly, the most attractive thing anyone had ever done in my presence up to that point in my life.
Sunburn is a real factor. I want that in the record too.
Two people who have been on the water for six weeks with insufficient shade discover each other's shoulders very carefully, with a lot of sorry and is that—no, higher and okay that's — yep, that's a — that's a strap line, don't worry about it.
His hands were the same as they'd been on the line. Three moves ahead, not looking, entirely certain.
Mine were not certain at all, and I told him so, in detail, running commentary, the whole logistics of it — this is the last dry towel, I'm telling you now so it's not a surprise later — and he stopped once, with his mouth just off mine, breathing hard, and said, "Do you ever stop?"
"No."
"Okay," he said.
And then, later, much later, when the light had gone orange and then gray and the radio had played its one song eleven more times:
"Don't stop," he said.
Which nobody had ever said to me before about talking, and which I have never gotten over.
Afterward we sat on the deck with our backs against the wheelhouse and split a can of something warm, and the water did that thing it does at dusk out there where it stops being blue and starts being nothing at all, just a surface, a lid.
"Junho gets back at nine," I said.
"Uh huh."
"So we've got two hours to look like professionals."
"That's plenty."
"For you. You look like a professional constantly. It's your resting state. I look like a woman who's been in a wheelhouse."
"You look fine."
"I look like a lime got stepped on."
He laughed. Second time in one day. I was going to run out of ways to make that happen and I had already started rationing.
Then he was quiet for a while.
"Saturday," he said. "The dive."
"Yeah."
"I want you on the line."
"Junho tends. Junho's tended two hundred dives — "
"I want you on the line," he said.
He said it looking straight out at the water, and there was something underneath it, way down, and I could feel it the way you feel a shape under a hull.
I didn't ask.
That was the only smart thing I did that whole week.
"Okay," I said. "I'm on the line."
"Okay."
"But I'm going to talk the entire time."
"I know," Torren said. "That's why."