Chapter 10 #2
“Wonderful!” Harry exclaims, clapping his hands together in his trademark shuffle of excitement.
But I’m anything but thrilled. After yesterday’s lecture, I’m sure Caleb would rather be just about anywhere than stuck on a kayak with a professional dumpster fire like me. And the feeling is definitely mutual.
Golden boy saunters down the stairs and grabs a spare snorkel kit from the deck.
Before stepping into the boat, he strips off his button-down with suspicious ease and hands it to Jim.
Now I really need to stare at my knees. Caleb’s body is even more beautiful than I remember.
You could practically wash clothes with those abs.
We make brief, cringe-inducing eye contact before I dart my gaze away.
“Ready?” he asks curtly, gesturing for me to move to the front of the kayak. But I stay right where I am. Caleb’s not the boss of me, and I’m not giving him more of an upper hand than he already has.
He reluctantly lowers into the front, flexing the defined muscles of his arms and back, and I realize my mistake. If he’s going to be such a dick, couldn’t he at least be harder to look at?
“Don’t you have any guests you should be yelling at?” I ask as we push off from the swim platform. “Maybe some puppies to drown?”
“Not a one. Funny enough, without you on board things actually run rather smoothly.”
I bristle. I thought New Zealanders were supposed to be friendly. How did I end up with the one bad egg as a snorkel partner?
I lean to the side to get a good look at him, his jaw set resolutely like a GI Joe doll.
I try to remember the Caleb I met on the beach—laughing, flirting, charming his way through a makeshift surgery like he’d done it a hundred times.
Was all that just a persona he uses to lure in potential one-night stands?
“You’re sending us in circles,” he complains as I accidentally splash him with the paddle. “Here, watch me.”
He slows down his stroke dramatically to demonstrate. I try to copy what he’s doing, but he just sighs loudly.
“It’ll be easier if you just let me do it,” he says.
“And paddle me off to the other side of the island so you can throw me to the sharks? No thanks.”
“I’m trying to help you,” he complains. “You asked me to come along.”
“I absolutely did not!” I protest heatedly. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Really? How many times have you gotten yourself bitten or spiked on this trip so far?”
“Oh, so you do remember the beach?” I sneer. “That’s funny, I could have sworn you had no idea who I was.”
“Stella,” he practically growls, and I feel something switch on south of my stomach that I immediately try and tamp down. “I told you, I was caught off guard. I already tried to apologize—“
“That was your apology?” I balk. “You need to go back to finishing school.”
For some reason, this really raises his hackles.
“I’m sorry, princess. What would you have preferred? A signed letter?”
“Hi,” I mock humorlessly, my best attempt at a New Zealand accent sounding more like Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I’m Captain Caleb. I save tourists on the beach to make me feel better about myself and then completely ignore them when they’re no longer convenient. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“You could have told me you were on a yacht trip with your family,” he growls.
“And you could have told me you were the captain! Save it, Caleb,” I interrupt him. “Let’s just agree not to throttle each other and call it a day. At least with a snorkel in our mouths, we won’t have to hear each other talk.”
The paddle over to the reef doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, but Caleb makes sure it feels like a lifetime.
I watch his fists clench harder across his paddle as I purposefully drag mine against the water so he has to work harder to move us forward.
He darts a look back at me when he realizes what I’m doing and I just smile sweetly as I dip my hands deeper into the sea, spraying us both.
The water’s turned from navy to sea-glass teal, and I can already see dozens of fish darting below us.
Choosing a spot just off the shelf, Caleb instructs each of us to drop the small anchors off the front of our kayaks.
“Alright, everyone, rule number one today is to use the buddy system,” Caleb says. “Make sure you can see your partner at all times. Jim’s got eyes on us from the boat, so if you’re in trouble, just wave your hands.”
“What’s over there?” Steven asks, pointing to a rocky point at the west edge of the reef.
“I’d keep to the area between the rocks and the south edge, if I were you,” Caleb tells him. “Too deep to see anything past the point. Unless you want to do some free diving.”
“We’ll stick to the beginner section, I think,” Harry says, glancing at his marshmallow of a bride-to-be.
“Also, it’s very important that you don’t touch anything,” Caleb instructs. “Even your fins can damage the coral if you’re not careful. And don’t pick up any of the shells. Some of them are home to poisonous critters that will dart out and jab you.”
“What is this, Jurassic Park?” Matthew asks, disgusted.
Caleb looks right at me as he says, “Just don’t pick anything up and you’ll be fine.”
As far as I can tell, Caleb thinks that just because I didn’t go to prep school, I’m some wild, grubby banshee. I certainly wouldn’t want to disappoint him.
So before he can feed me any more condescending instructions, I pull my mask over my eyes and throw my flippered feet over the side of the kayak.
“Don’t try to keep up,” I quip before I plunge into the warm water.
Though I’m only a foot beneath the surface, I’m instantly transported to another world.
The reef around me ripples with iridescent fish and colorful coral like a scene from Finding Nemo.
I hold my breath and dive down to the bottom, where a school of green and purple parrotfish munch on algae like magical cattle.
I can hear their beaked mouths scraping against the coral, the sounds amplified by the watery world around us.
My hair undulates like sea grass as the gentle waves roll across the surface.
It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
A flash of skin cuts through my vision, and I watch as Caleb jets through a school of tiny yellow fish towards a steep drop into the blue.
He disappears over the lip of the reef, his body slick and fast as a harbor seal, and emerges a few seconds later with a starfish in his hand that is so blue, I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen the color before.
I smile at him beneath my snorkel mask, then remember who it is and turn back to the reef.
We stay down there for what feels like hours, completely lost in the magic of the underwater paradise.
I even come face to face with a ray whose wingspan is wider than my arms. But closer to shore, I begin to notice that some of the coral is bone white: leached of the color that blooms through the rest of the reef.
There are fewer fish here, and those that remain are small and plain colored.
I signal to Caleb and pop my head above water.
“What’s up with the coral?” I ask over the gentle waves. “Is it dead?”
“It’s bleached,” he tells me. “Coral is colorful because of the algae that lives inside it. But when the water gets too warm, it loses its algae and turns white.”
“Does it come back?” I ask. Caleb shakes his head.
“Not usually. It’s due to climate change. Pollution, run-off, rising temperatures… We’ve lost almost 20% of the world’s coral in the last ten years.”
“That’s terrible,” I say, thinking of my conversation with Joanna at Cloud Nine. She said she worked at an ocean conservation center. I wonder if this is part of her work there.
“It’s a tragedy,” Caleb agrees, then pushes himself back towards the kayak.
“What are you doing?” I ask him as he lifts himself onto the plastic.
“Getting back in the boat. We should think about heading back for lunch.”
“No!” I protest, almost too dramatically. I’m not ready to leave the reef—it feels like there’s so much to explore. “I just mean… I want to see the shelf on the other side of the reef.”
“It’s too deep over there. Nothing to see unless you dive under.”
“What, are you scared?” I push back. I don’t wait for an answer. Instead, I use the power of my fins to kick off in the direction of the drop.
“Hey!” I hear Caleb struggling to pull up the small anchor. In a few moments, the whoosh of his paddles catches up to me, and I pop up before one almost catches me in the chin.
“At least get in the boat,” he says, defeated. Even though I want to protest, I keep quiet, and together we paddle around a rocky outcropping to a small cove that’s several shades darker than the rest of the water.
“This is it,” Caleb tells me as he grabs his mask. “Sure you’re up for it?”
“I’ve been swimming since I was four, in much colder water than this.” I tell him. “I know what I’m doing.”
Caleb shrugs, slipping his flippers back on.
“Just keep your eyes on—“
I don’t let him finish before I’m back in the water, sucking in a massive breath just before I break the surface.
It is deep here—even in the clear blue I can barely see the bottom.
But even though I quit the swim team before sophomore year of high school, the muscle memory is still there.
I push myself down, admiring the rocky shelf beside me as pressure builds in my lungs.
A black and white striped eel as long as my leg undulates like a ribbon across the hazy blue.
I gasp in excitement, letting out some of my precious air, and come back to the surface.
Caleb breaks beside me.
“Did you see that?” I gasp.
“Sea snake,” he tells me. “Can be deadly, but their mouths are so small they’d have a hard time getting you.”
“Woah,” I should be scared, but I feel exhilarated. “Again?”