Chapter 16
The group disperses and I follow Caleb up the dry riverbed towards the village, careful to stay several steps behind.
“You can go to the lab with them, you know,” he says as soon as the rest of the group is out of earshot. “I can search the village myself.”
“And deny you the opportunity to rescue me from quicksand or some flesh-eating insect? Never. We can’t rob you of your daily act of unsolicited heroism.”
Instead of turning his face into that familiar frown crafted specially for me, Caleb smirks.
“Are you always this much of a delight?” he asks.
“Are you always this exhaustingly perfect?”
Caleb nudges a fallen coconut out of the path with his foot. It’s been there long enough that a new plant is starting to grow out of the shell.
“Funny,” he says, “I don’t remember you complaining when you were wrapped around me like a python in front of that shark.”
I freeze. Or wrapped around him in the elevator. I’m glad Caleb isn’t looking at me, because I’m sure I’m visibly blushing. So much has happened in the last few days that I nearly forgot about our encounter in the water.
We walk in silence for a few moments, the memory playing over and over in my head like a skipping record. My hands grasping at the taut muscles of Caleb’s back. His lips on mine. The adrenaline pounding under my skin.
“Honestly,” I open my mouth before I can think of what to say.
I’ll do anything to distract myself from thinking about Caleb’s half-naked body—even if it means actually talking to him.
“I’m surprised you’re out here in the first place.
Won’t Patricia have you drawn and quartered if you get your uniform dirty? ”
Caleb snorts.
“You really think I’m just some order-obsessed automaton, don’t you?” he asks incredulously, and I shrug.
“Kind of.”
I push in front of him, looking back over my shoulder as I climb over the fallen tree in front of us.
I’m so busy trying to remind myself of El Capitan’s many faults that I catch my foot on a root and nearly faceplant into the mud.
But HeroBot 4.0 is there behind me, like he always is, grabbing hold of my elbow to keep me vertical.
“Careful,” he says, and my face heats. “I know you’re not happy I’m on this trip, but offing yourself seems like a pretty dramatic solution.”
I look up and catch his gaze, a shiver of want twisting in my stomach. His hand is hot against my arm, his smile as genuine as it was that first day on the beach. But I haven’t forgotten our conversation on the bridge. Caleb is more than off limits.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I tell him hurriedly as I brush off his arm. “They probably found her already and are just waiting for us at the station.”
Caleb holds up his radio.
“If they found her, we’d know it.”
“Shit,” I curse, realizing how badly I’ve messed this up by bringing them here. “How long before Arthur panics and calls the Coast Guard?”
“I hate to break it to you, but there’s no Coast Guard out here. Just you, me, and Matthew in his Italian leather loafers.”
Now I’m actually getting nervous. There’s no way that pickled skeleton made it this far into the jungle on her own. So much for my day of changing perspectives: now all the Warrens will remember is how I lost their matriarch. She’s probably being devoured by feral pigs or sea snakes as we speak.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, pulling a vine out of my path, “I’m impressed. I can’t believe you got them out here.”
“The tides helped,” I say.
“Maybe, but it’s still a feat. I’ve been itching to get the Warrens involved in conservation efforts since I started here, but I’ve never had the guts to pull it off.”
This time, it’s me who stops in my tracks. Is Caleb actually complimenting me?
“Ya, well, it doesn’t matter now,” I remind him. “If anything’s happened to Patricia, it’s all they’ll remember. I’ll be lucky if they don’t bulldoze the whole damn island out of spite.”
“She’ll take care of herself. She’s a tough bird, Patricia. Even if she can be a little…”
“Terrifying?” I fill in. Caleb chuckles.
“I was going to say prickly.”
“That’s diplomatic of you,” I retort. “But I guess you can’t trash talk the boss.”
“It’s not that,” he says. “I’ve been working for Arthur and Patricia for five years.
When I first met them, I thought they’d be total megalomaniacs.
But that’s not who they are. They have their shortcomings, of course, but when Jim’s mom had a stroke and needed emergency surgery, they paid for all of it.
They gave Allie and Russ the down payment for their house in Toronto.
And they took a chance on me when no one else would.
If I was working on another yacht, it’d be years before I would have made Captain. ”
“Doing good things doesn’t excuse them from environmental ignorance.”
“No,” Caleb says. “It doesn’t. What I’m trying to tell you is that they may be stuck in their ways, but they’re decent people at their core. More than decent. And if you give them the chance, they might do something to surprise you.”
“That’s easy for you to say, wonderboy,” I quip. “Not everyone on this boat is daydreaming about you falling overboard.”
Instead of hitting me with some snappy comeback, Caleb goes quiet for a minute. After a few seconds, I look back at him to make sure he isn’t being devoured by some serpent or poisonous plant.
Don’t get your hopes up, Stella.
“Gia heard your conversation about the whale at dinner,” he says as we lock stares. I stiffen. If Caleb gives me flack for walking out on dinner, too, I swear to this island I will chuck one of these fallen coconuts at his head. “Is that why you wanted them to come here so badly?”
As he speaks, his blue eyes catch one of the ribbons of light that dances through the canopy.
“That’s part of it,” I say, stepping over a large, murky puddle to walk past him. I don’t give him any more information, which of course makes him want more.
“And the other part?”
“Everyone keeps telling me how great the Warrens are… But they live in a bubble. As crazy as this is, I don’t think anyone has ever impressed on them how detrimental climate change really is.
People always seem content to bury their heads in the sand and pretend our planet isn’t on fire.
But this family actually has the means to do something about it.
I thought if I showed them a way they could make a difference, maybe it would help them get involved in creating solutions. ”
Caleb nods.
“Well then,” he says slowly, as if choosing his next words very, very carefully. “It’s a good thing they have someone like you to teach them.”
It’s a good thing they have someone like me?
I do an audial double-take. For the seven-thousandth time this trip, I think back to when we first met on the beach, before Caleb turned saltier than a margarita glass.
I wonder what things might have been like if we’d met under different circumstances.
If Caleb’s initial disdain for me was less about my background and more about his obsession to please the Warrens.
If he, like Jules, is just desperate to be accepted into their little clan.
“Hey, have a look at this,” he tells me, bending down towards a tangle of small white flowers on the side of the trail.
For a second, I wonder if he’s spotted some kind of danger—killer crabs?
Man-eating tarantulas? But he pulls out a pocketknife from his back pocket and emerges with a cutting of sooty, brown root.
He holds it towards me to smell.
“Is that… ginger?” I ask, recognizing the scent.
“It grows fresh all over the islands,” he tells me. “Turmeric, too. If we’re lucky, we might even see some guava off the trail, though it’s technically considered an invasive species.”
He hands me the root and I inhale its peppery scent. Instantly, my nose feels clearer—my senses sharper.
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
I nod, but I’m barely listening. A glimpse of Caleb’s clenched hand around the roots instantly transports me back to the elevator, when his strong fingers were buried in my hair, pulling me towards him. I snap my hair tie against my wrist.
“How do you know so much about native plants?” I ask.
“My godmother moved back to Fiji when I was twelve, and I’d come visit every few winters. Her father is Fijian, and she taught me all about the medicinal plants of the island.”
Guess I can cross environmental ignorance off my list of reasons to try and hate Caleb.
“I didn’t realize you knew the islands so well.”
Caleb nods.
“If I hadn’t started on yachts, I’d probably be somewhere on Viti working a dive job.”
It’s not hard to imagine given how easily Caleb moves through the water. I haven’t forgotten what he said on the beach about being a glorified babysitter. Maybe if he’d stuck to diving, he wouldn’t be in such a bad mood all the time.
“Do you regret it?” I ask. “Becoming a captain?”
“Not at all,” he laughs. “I love the Vela Bianca, and I like working for the Warrens. But one day I’d love to have a boat of my own. A charter I could run and captain myself.”
“You got a secret twenty million stashed away?” I ask him. “Because if not, I’m sure Patricia has some single friends you could work something out with…”
“Very funny,” Caleb says. “But I’m not talking about a motor yacht. A sailboat. Something older that I can bring back to fighting shape. I’d do winters in Hawaii or Mexico, maybe, and summers in Desolation Sound.”
My heart skips a beat, and I have to repeat the words over in my head to make sure I’ve heard him correctly.
“What did you say?”
“Desolation Sound. It’s part of—“
“The Gulf Islands,” I finish for him.
“You know it?”
“My dad was Canadian. He used to take me up there when I was a little girl.”