Chapter 8: The Reef Lesson
The water swallowed Lorna’s body in a warm, weightless embrace. It felt like stepping out of her own life. She gripped the cheap plastic snorkel, her knuckles white.
“Just relax into it,” Chermaine said. She stood waist-deep, effortless, the water smoothing over the carved wood of her stomach. She held her own mask up. “Spit in it. Rub it around. Rinse. Stops the fog.”
Betty, already a few feet away, performed the ritual with a cheerleader’s automatic grace, spitting into her lens without a second thought.
Lorna hesitated. It seemed vulgar. Common. Chermaine watched her, not blinking.
Lorna did it, quickly, her cheeks burning. She swished the mask in the sea.
“Good. Now place it on your face, seal it. Don’t pull the strap too tight. It’s a seal, not a tourniquet.”
Lorna fumbled. The silicone skirt pinched a strand of her dyed black hair. She winced.
“Here.” Chermaine was behind her suddenly. Her hands, cool and sure, came around Lorna’s head. She loosened the strap, her fingertips tracing the line of Lorna’s jaw, the sensitive space below her ears. She smoothed the stray hair away, her touch lingering at the nape of Lorna’s neck. “Breathe slow,” she murmured, her lips close enough that Lorna felt the words as a warm vibration against her wet skin. “In through your mouth. Out through your nose. Steady. Panic is a choice.”
Lorna tried to breathe. Her heart was a frantic animal in her chest. The touch at her neck was an anchor and a shock.
“Look down.”
Lorna lowered her face into the water. The world opened.
Silence, except for the hollow, Darth Vader rhythm of her own breath. Light shafting down in wobbling pillars. The sand below was pale and rippled, scattered with tiny, cautious shells. A school of neon-blue fish no bigger than her thumb darted past, a synchronized pulse of life.
Chermaine’s hand pressed against her hip.
Lorna jerked, sucking in a sharp breath that rattled the snorkel.
The hand remained. It was a firm, guiding pressure, turning her gently. Then it slid to the small of her back, palm flat, fingers splayed. It burned through the thin, chlorine-faded fabric of her old one-piece. Chermaine pointed with her other hand.
Ahead, the sandy bottom fell away into a chaos of color. Coral rock, riddled with holes and clad in fuzzy brown algae, rose like a miniature mountain range. Fans of purple and yellow waved in a slow, unseen current. Fish in impossible colors—electric yellow, lurid orange, stripes of black and white—drifted and fed.
Betty was already there, hovering above the reef, her body a long, pale line against the blue. She looked back, her mask enormous on her face, and gave a thumbs-up. Then she kicked and propelled herself forward, exploring.
Chermaine’s hand urged Lorna onward. They swam, side by side, Chermaine’s touch a constant, undeniable presence. It wasn’t tender. It was proprietorial. It said this way. Follow.
Lorna’s mind churned. She was a fifty-eight-year-old vice-president of acquisitions. She commanded a floor of analysts. She was wearing a faded swimsuit and had spit in a mask, being led by the hand like a child by a woman who… who…
Her body betrayed her. A low, heavy heat pooled beneath that guiding hand. Each kick of her legs seemed to amplify it. The breath in the tube came quicker.
Chermaine stopped them above a broad, flat plate of brain coral. She released Lorna’s back, and the absence of the touch felt like a cold shock. Then Chermaine tapped her own shoulder and pointed down.
A creature like a living jewel rested on the coral. A spotted moray eel, its head tucked in a crevice, only its thick, patterned body visible, gills pulsing slowly. Primordial. Patient.
Chermaine looked at Lorna through her mask. Her eyes, magnified by the glass, were dark and unblinking. She brought her hand up between them, in the fluid space. Slowly, deliberately, she ran her own fingers down the line of her throat, over the hard ridge of her collarbone, down the center of her chest. The gesture was obscene. A mapping of territory. An invitation.
She then pointed at Lorna, and traced the same invisible line in the water between them.
Lorna stopped breathing. The eel below seemed to watch. Betty was a distant flicker of limbs near a coral arch.
Chermaine moved closer. The water displaced by their bodies pushed them together. Her thigh brushed Lorna’s. Her hand came back, not to Lorna’s back, but to her side, just above the swell of her hip. A squeeze. Possessive. Insistent.
Lorna’s panic wasn’t about drowning. It was about surrender. It was about wanting that hand to move, to explore, to claim more. It was about ten years of arid loneliness ending right here, in this public, secret, liquid world.
She kicked back, breaking the contact. She turned and began a clumsy, frantic swim toward the shallows. Her snorkel tipped, letting in a gulp of burning saltwater. She choked, sputtering, standing up in the waist-deep water, tearing the mask from her face.
She stood there, coughing, water streaming from her hair and nose, her chest heaving.
Chermaine surfaced a moment later, smooth as a seal. She pulled her own mouthpiece out. “See something that spooked you?” she asked, her voice neutral.
Betty waded over, concerned. “Aunt Lorna? You okay?”
Lorna couldn’t look at either of them. She stared at the perfect, distant hull of the Swordfish. “Water,” she gasped. “Swallowed water.”
“Happens,” Chermaine said. She walked past Lorna, her body cutting the surface. “The reef’s something, though, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She moved up onto the sand, water sheeting from her skin, and reached for a towel.
Lorna remained standing in the gentle surf, feeling the sun bake her shoulders and the ghost of that hand on her back, her side. The taste of salt in her mouth wasn’t just from the sea. It was the metallic tang of fear, and the terrifying, undeniable flavor of her own want. It sat on her tongue, and she didn’t know how to spit it out.