Page 32 of The Wild Beneath

“There’s no rush, though. Are you sure?”

“We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“That’s not what I asked.” He pulls back again to meet her eyes.

She kisses him again. “I’m sure.”

He inhales deeply, his movements careful and restrained. She makes a cry into his shoulder as he enters.

He pulls back and searches her face, eyebrows drawn together.

“Don’t stop.” She pulls him back down until he’s entirely inside her. A brief pain, a sweet spasm. Then an exquisite ache—­is this what she’s needed for so long?

“Christ,” he groans. “I won’t last.”

He reaches his hands under her hips and sinks into her. She finds a slow rhythm against him, some kind of nirvana, a blurry and all-encompassing heat. She wants every inch of him and cannot get close enough.

Chapter 13

Now

Walker pulls against the oars.

Each stroke takes them further from shore and closer to Galene, the twenty-seven-foot Newport Henry towed from the shipyard.

Annie would be much happier keeping Walker to herself, staying inside the calming bubble he makes, where they roam the beach at low tide and try to piece his story together.

Ruth’s deep in logistics: “Day twelve and food’s going to get trickier—­”

“We have plenty of food, don’t we?” Annie asks.

“Henry said folks in town don’t want to fish for themselves. They’re worried about bodies. Contamination.”

“Is that true?”

“That’s the last kind of pollution anyone needs to worry about,” Ruth says. “But they won’t listen.”

The ocean is blue and crystalline. It’s hard to distinguish the sea from the sky, as they blur together in matching tones.

“The water isn’t contaminated by that,” Walker says, mid-row.

“In any case,” Ruth says, “I think they’ll take fish from Henry if he has it. They’ve been buying fish from him their entire lives.”

They’d been buying fish from Annie and her parents, too. Is it childish, the way she’s secluding herself in the cabin, feeling sorry for herself? She thinks of Evan. The ways he is dutiful. Should she be less hard on him? Where is he?

Ruth goes on: “Apparently, the coast guard is still pulling people off Vancouver Island. We have to make do until—­”

“Stop.” Annie holds up her hand.

She does not want to hear Ruth sayuntil they evacuate usor whatever otheruntilRuth is thinking. Evacuation feels like the end, her previous life sealed off, the matter of her parents resolved. No more ocean. They’re dead and the story is over.

In Walker’s orbit, the story isn’t finished yet.

“I feel seasick,” Annie lies, stuck in the darkness of an oceanless world.

Ruth narrows her eyes. “You never get seasick.”

“Can we just get this over with?” Annie says as they pull alongside the sailboat.