Chapter 8 #3
“Christ on a cracker!” Wes yelped, knuckles whitening around his camera’s underwater housing when the first swells swept over his ankles.
But he kept pace with her while she waded through the buffeting currents and the chill; kept pace with her eagerness to submerge her skin, to clamp her teeth over her tube’s silicone mouthpiece and duck her head under the waves, to escape this transient, liminal state, caught between air and water.
There.
The next wave knocked her awkward, elongated feet from under her.
It tossed her up from the marine substrate and pulled her out with a tidal exhale, into the ocean’s weightless embrace.
She gave no resistance. It would have been futile, fighting the sea.
Instead, she surrendered to the submersion and the cold.
V-v-very cold. But if the temperature was shocking, it was also a seeping chill, not like the brutal cut of wind.
She stretched herself into it, opening her body, softening despite the prickle of her skin.
Roaring, the ocean dragged her deeper. She stroked along with it.
Now her hands parted slippery gas bladders and fronds.
When an experimental kick downward through the spume connected with nothing solid, she filled her lungs, kicked again—once and hard—and dove.
Quiet.
Sinking beneath the turbulence, she drifted into bars of gold-green sunlight and an undulating forest of kelp. The algae weren’t brown, but a gleaming topaz here under the waves. She expelled a few bubbles and sank farther through a slow, descending circle, her chest aching with relief.
Safe.
A striped and speckled surfperch flitted between her knees.
On the rocky bottom, lingcod scuttled among holdfasts and a colony of bright sea stars.
Sand dabs buried themselves in gravel. Two spotted leopard sharks cruised for lunch.
A glossy, twisting shadow in the distance was either an otter or a juvenile California sea lion.
Musical, keening moans were the conversations of migrating whales beyond the kelp.
Closer by, a cormorant sped down from a nesting rock tower to puncture the surface.
She turned to follow its flight—and found Wes underwater with her.
Okay? he flashed his fingers.
Okay.
Even with the distortion of his mouth around his snorkel gear, his smile was visible.
He gestured: at the chalky-pink curves of abalone rooted to the sea floor, at schooling sardines in their effervescent balls, at a dozing swell shark, at an otter prying up a hapless red sea urchin.
Around them, the forest teemed with activity.
Life, resurgent.
Bubbles drifted through his tube as Wes expelled air to reduce his body’s buoyancy.
Then the muscle in his shoulders, stomach, and thighs—ink and power visible beneath his rash guard, which billowed with the swells against his skin—flexed.
He flipped head-down with his camera, kicking to the substrate.
His movements were quick and streamlined and graceful in the dappled sun and shadow, just like any other marine mammal.
. . . gorgeous, she exhaled.
Submerged, her own muscles seared with cold, the heat in her cheeks was a distant thing. Maybe she could let herself examine—admire—him without fear or shame for a moment. Just here. Just for a little while?
Shape and movement.
Muscle and mind.
Beauty and mastery in the water.
Swimming along the forest floor, did he feel as good in his body as she did? Under the waves and the gentle heave of faraway surf, weightless, the one place where inhabiting her skin was a pleasure, where she could simply be, could look, could—
Drown?
Because she was inhaling sharply now, shock sputtering through her mouthpiece as something flexible and suckered began to crawl across her mask.
Water filled her snorkel tube. It filled her mouth and lungs.
Sputtering, coughing against the silicone, instinct sent her kicking away from the suckers, through fish and stipes to the surface.
She spat out her mouthpiece, gasping for breath.
“Isabel?” Wes cleared the water beside her. His concerned voice was nasal through the gear still pinched over his nose. “What’s wrong? Are you—”
“Ah—I’m f-fine.” She swallowed more air and spray, then blew through her tube to clear it. “But—something’s wrong.”
She bit into the mouthpiece and submerged again.
He kicked into the kelp and the green-lit cold after her.
Something’s wrong?
There was no turtle thrashing in a fishing line, no barracudas or mako sharks looming out of the murk.
Isabel’s head just swiveled from side to side, eyes darting behind her mask as she paddled herself in a circle, scanning, searching for her something through the bubbles and the gloom, concerned but not afraid.
. . before torpedoing away with a stunning burst of speed, moving powerfully, gracefully, confidently through the water—then fanning out her body in an abrupt arresting of momentum.
Stop.
He followed.
And he tried not to stare at the taut, slender curves of her chill-peaked breasts visible through her cheap—fantastic—swimsuit, at the delicate jut of her hip bones swiveling with a water-treading eggbeater kick, at the length of her legs patterned by sunlight and kelp, at the misty swirl of her hair escaping its elastic to coil across her mask.
Tried. He’d known she was beautiful before. He wasn’t blind.
But here. . .?
Two fingers tapped her mask. Look. Isabel pointed.
He refocused, willing his drumming pulse to stabilize.
Then blinked.
An octopus was swimming toward her: a juvenile California two-spot with archetypal blue rings behind its eyes.
It propelled itself through the open water with its siphon, its skin mottled into a piebald brown and white.
Uncamouflaged. A spiny dogfish flashed past with teeth and a whacking tail.
No ink, no jetting for cover. No change in the octopus’s color or texture, either.
Closer, closer. One arm connected with Isabel’s dive mask, another with her chin.
This wasn’t normal behavior.
Before he could register more than that, Isabel had tugged off one of her snorkel fins.
A hand reached up to stroke the palm-sized octopus’s mantle, where it clung to the plastic beside her right ear.
She eased along its arms to entice the suckers into wrapping around her thumb instead of her tube.
She raised the empty fin in her other hand, offering its opening to the creature’s dominant eye, the pupil a dark bar in a sphere of glittering silver.
Very gently, she detached a row of suckers from her knuckle and placed the adhesive cups on the fin.
A bubbly exhale glimmered toward the surface.
Waiting. For an anxious moment the two-spot’s tentacle hung in the water, untethered—but then, with liquid energy, the creature uncoiled from Isabel’s skin and poured itself into the cavity.
Apparently satisfied, Isabel tucked the fin into the crook of her elbow and began a lopsided stroke back toward the beach.
Wes rolled his eyes.
Dropping his camera around his neck to hang on its strap—at least the cold had numbed his jellyfish burns—he kicked around in front of her. He extended his arm past ribbons of kelpy frondescence and wiggled his fingers.
Give me your hand.
She hesitated.
Rolling his eyes again, he repeated the gesture and pointed at her bare foot. He flexed his own dual fins. Look, with a tap against his mask, nodding at a shadow gliding nearby: the spiny dogfish. It was scenting the water.
Scenting the octopus.
Isabel gripped his hand.
He towed them to the surface to breathe.
Then he stroked away from the submerged wonders and dangers of the kelp forest, leaving the dogfish behind through the thrashing of Elkhorn Slough’s cloudy breakers, into the surf.
Isabel released her hold on him and clambered awkwardly out of the water on her single fin, the other still clutched to her chest.
“Thank you,” spitting out her tube. “Bring the cooler, please.”
He did.
She emptied their picnic and his sun-blistered Nalgene bottle onto the sand, replaced their sandwiches with rocks scavenged from the tidal flats, and filled the container with seawater.
A hand inserted into her fin convinced the octopus to emerge; she tilted it out into the makeshift tank.
Leaving Wes to retrieve the lunch fixings, water bottle, and their towels, she lugged the cooler to MORI’s parking lot and climbed into his Jeep.
“Wait—shouldn’t we take it into the institute?”
“No.” She folded her arms over the lid. “The bungalow.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer, just gripped the cooler tighter.
He drove them all back to the beach house.