Chapter 17 #3
When we dock, people disembark quickly, most still casting subtle glances my way. Holden steps aside with Tristan.
“Can you carry her gear back to camp?” he asks.
“I can do it,” I interrupt, frowning. “I said I’m fine.”
“No,” Holden says, turning to me with an expression that brooks no argument. “You’re going to the infirmary.”
“I’m what?”
The pitch of my voice rises slightly—possibly from surprise, possibly from the fresh spike of pain behind my temples. Okay. Maybe he has a point.
We walk to the small tent near the cabins that doubles as the camp’s first-aid station. The concerned murmur of students fades behind me, like background noise swallowed by rising pressure.
I sit on the little chair while Holden explains the incident to the guide—clinical, detailed. His tone is all clipped restraint, every word precisely chosen. Then, without looking at me again, he turns and walks out.
The guide looks me over, pulling out a checklist that includes everything from reaction tests to breathing exercises. At one point I blow into a plastic tube like I’m failing a roadside sobriety test. She checks my blood pressure, pupils, pulse, and expression.
When I insist, for the fifth time, that I’m fine, and her instruments appear to agree, she finally nods and tells me to wait while she steps out to find her colleague.
I swing my feet gently under the chair, the cool air in the tent doing wonders for my pulse. If someone handed me a blanket and told me to nap, I wouldn’t argue.
And then I hear it.
Holden’s voice.
Outside the tent, sharp, unmistakable.
“Do you know how dangerous this could’ve been?”
The words land hard, carved out of ice.
“I—I don’t know what happened, sir. Everything looked okay, and—”
“Okay?” Holden’s voice cracks into something raw. “One look at the rusted pressure ring should’ve told you it wasn’t safe! You could’ve killed her!”
That last sentence hits like a dropped weight. Not just the words—but how loud they are. How uncharacteristically uncontrolled. Holden, who keeps his emotions filed away like field notes, is suddenly a storm front.
I sit frozen, every muscle in my body reacting to the fury in his voice. He’s never sounded like this. Not when Mateo chased a shark. Not even when Summer yelled at him in front of his office. This is different.
The assistant mutters something—an excuse, maybe. Something about the tank lasting one more dive, that he planned to fix it before tomorrow.
But Holden’s silence now feels even heavier.
Then footsteps. Fast, retreating. And silence.
I sit there for maybe another five minutes, eyelids heavier with each passing second, before the guide returns. She offers a warm smile and tells me I’m good to go—but that I should rest for the remainder of the day.
I nod, thank her sincerely, and step out into the warm air.
Chloe and Emma are the first to rush me, pulling me into a hug, followed closely by the others.
There are more questions than I have energy for—Are you okay?
What happened? Do you remember everything?
—but I give the same answer to all of them: I’m fine.
I downplay it, say it was nothing, promise I’ll sleep it off and be better tomorrow.
They nod, reluctantly, but their brows stay drawn as they let me slip past them and back toward the cabins.
When I step inside ours, Holden’s there. Sitting on the bottom bunk, elbows braced against his knees, head cradled in his hands.
He looks up the second the door clicks shut—and then he’s on his feet.
He crosses the small room in a single stride and his hands are on my face, large and warm, tilting my chin up. His fingers are steady but his eyes—those deep, dark eyes I’ve spent too long trying not to memorize—search mine like he’s making sure I’m really here. That I’m breathing. That I’m real.
“You only have two eyes now,” I say softly, smiling.
A joke. A small one. But it’s what I can offer.
He doesn’t smile back.
And I don’t care. Not right now. Not after today. Not after the scariest moment of my life—whether I’m ready to say that out loud or not. His hands on me feel grounding, like an anchor, and I lean into one without thinking.
To my surprise, he lets me.
His thumb brushes my cheekbone, featherlight. Reverent.
“What did the guide say?”
“That I’m a living miracle and probably the next Captain Marvel.”
“Coralie.” His voice is low. It’s not annoyed—it’s raw.
I giggle, but his expression stays carved from stone, and the smile falters on my lips. “She said I’m fine. To rest. That’s all.”
He nods once. His hands fall from my face, and I try not to mourn their absence.
Then he walks over to the little table and grabs my duffel bag, holding it out to me.
“Change,” he says. “Then you should do what she said.” His voice is gentler now. Reassuring, even. “I’ll step out. Five minutes okay?”
I nod, and he turns. His broad back catches a slice of sunlight through the doorway before he steps outside and closes it behind him.
I make quick work of slipping on cotton shorts and a tank top, discarding my wetsuit over the back of the small wooden chair in the corner, then look for my blue Rip Curl hoodie.
Instead, I pull out a larger, more worn-out black one—and my eyes nearly bulge out of my head.
I did not pack Holden’s hoodie.
In fact, I’d planned on giving it back when we got home. I had left it neatly folded at the foot of my bed, completely intentional, completely not in my bag. So how the hell is it here?
Maya.
I can see her smug little smirk in my mind already. She knew exactly whose hoodie it was. She knew why it had been sitting on my bed for over a week. And apparently, she thought it would be funny to swap it for mine.
Holden walks in then, eyes on the floor.
“Can I, um… come in?”
I hum in answer, still caught mid-horror, holding the hoodie like it might detonate.
He lifts his gaze—and freezes. His eyes trail slowly up my bare legs, past my tank top, to the black hoodie clutched in my hands.
“I—well—I packed my own hoodie but Maya is a snake and I think this is her sick idea of a joke and I’m not even that cold, I swear, actually here, it’s yours—”
He steps forward and takes the hoodie from my hands like it’s nothing, like my heart isn’t currently trying to throw itself off a cliff.
“Arms up,” he says.
Just that. Calm. Certain.
And maybe the near-drowning fried my brain because I actually do it. I lift my arms and let him pull the hoodie over my head, down my shoulders, past my arms. It hangs almost to my knees, soft and worn, and still faintly smelling like him.
His hands drop away, but he doesn’t step back instantly.
Instead, his eyes close for half a second, jaw tightening—and I could swear I just heard him groan.
Soft. Low. Barely audible.
But very real.
When he opens his eyes again, they’re darker than before. His gaze lingers a second too long before he turns away and walks to the other side of the room.
And I just stand there in his hoodie, very aware of every inch of my skin it now touches. Very aware that, as far as accidental wardrobe thefts go, I might have to thank Maya for this one.
He motions to the top bunk. “Are you okay climbing up?”
I nod and give it a try, but my foot slips—twice—and I frown, pausing before a third attempt. Damn. That dive really did short-circuit every part of me.
Holden steps in, gently prying my hand off the ladder. “Yeah, no. You’re not sleeping up there.”
“Just help me up,” I protest weakly. “I’ll be fine.”
“Uh uh.” He shakes his head. “What if you have to pee in the middle of the night? What if you get dizzy and fall? Coralie, you can’t even get up there now.”
I cross my arms, mostly to look less like a ragdoll and more like someone with agency, but he’s got a point. A small, infuriatingly logical one. And I’m too exhausted to argue.
He nods toward his bed instead.
I raise a brow. “Where are you going to sleep if I take your bed? The fifth cabin still isn’t fixed.” It was supposed to be done by now, but I’m pretty sure the staff noticed we weren’t complaining and decided not to rush.
“I’ll take your bunk.”
“Ah. Trying to finish the job, I see.” I glance up at the rickety wooden frame that already groaned under my weight. Add Holden’s? I’d be a pancake by morning.
He shakes his head, lifts the thin comforter, and holds it open—a silent command.
So I give in. To hell with it. I crawl into his bunk, still smelling faintly of him and saltwater, and sink into the mattress. He tucks the blanket around me—not rushed, not careless—and then moves to his bag.
When he returns, he’s holding a familiar protein bar, the same chocolatey kind he gave me that day in the lab. He sets it beside me on the mattress before sitting down on the floor and leaning his head back against the bedframe.
My fingers itch to run through his hair. I want to feel those soft black waves curling through my fingers. I think maybe, maybe, he’d let me.
But instead, I open my mouth and ruin the moment.
“Holden?”
“Mmm?” He opens one eye, looking up at me from where he sits, shadowed and silent.
“Why do you always have chocolate protein bars if you hate chocolate?”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. But something shifts. Stillness, sharper than before. Like he’s holding very, very still on purpose.
“You never eat enough when you’re focused on your work,” he says.
The words hit harder than they should. Quieter than they ought to.
So what—is he saying he keeps chocolate bars in his bag, in his desk, in his life, just in case I need them? That he picked the one flavor he can’t stand because it’s the only one I’ll actually eat?
Surely I heard him wrong.
But he doesn’t take it back. Doesn’t look away. Doesn’t soften the impact.
He just closes his eyes again, and leans back like he didn’t just level me with one sentence.
I stay quiet for a while, letting the weight of the last fifteen minutes settle in my chest. It’s hard to tell what was real and what might’ve been a hallucination conjured by exhaustion and the desperate things I’ve been wanting to believe for too long.
Maybe none of it was what I think it was. Maybe I’m just tired.
I turn toward him, shifting onto my side. “Thank you for saving me today. Again. So many pickles.”
He exhales slowly and turns, too, until our faces are just inches apart in the dim cabin light. “I wish I didn’t have to,” he says.
His eyes flicker down to my mouth, then back to meet mine.
I think back to his lecture in BIOL 403 months ago—how sure he was when he told us that saving someone couldn't come at the expense of your own life. That self-preservation was the rule, not the exception.
“You could’ve put yourself in danger,” I say, voice softer now. “You told us not to do that.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“Still,” I murmur. “You said not to risk your life for anyone.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just watches me, eyes steady. My own lids are unbearably heavy, weighted by the dive, the adrenaline crash, and whatever this thing is between us that neither of us seems ready to name.
Then his hand rises, fingers calloused and warm as they brush hair from my cheek. He lingers, his palm grazing my temple, like he’s trying to memorize something before he lets it go.
And just as I feel myself slipping into sleep—into the kind of unconsciousness that comes only when your body has nothing left and your heart feels safe for once—he speaks, quiet and clear.
“You’re not just anyone.”
It’s the last thing I hear before the world disappears.