Page 13 of Sucker For You

“You don’t know me, either,” she said.

“No, but. . .” A painfully huge yawn cracked his jaw before he could argue more.Fuck this.“Look, I’ve been awake for over forty-eight hours, so just—take the bed.”

“But—”

“No.” He flopped onto the couch. The cushions wheezed. He grabbed at the afghan, ducked it over his head. “Finders, keepers. Remember?”

Silence.

He waited.

Still quiet.

He went on waiting. He counted his own breaths under the blanket. He listened to the noises of his own body, listening for hers. . . and was eventually rewarded for his patience: when Isabel spoke again, he triangulated her voice near the bedroom. Her whisper was barely audible over the burbling reef tank. “Thank you.”

Hinges sighed.

A lock turned.

He peeked out from under the afghan. She’d absconded with the strawberries. His stomach growled louder than the water hissing in its pipes as the shower switched on. But he grinned, and flicked off the light.

3

Slivers of kaleidoscopic light pierced his eyelids. Coastal morning light. Very, very early coastal morning light.The golden hour.Rolling over on the couch and out of direct range from the illumination prodding him from sleep, Wes squinted at the bungalow’s wall clock.

Sunscreen, according to the dials.

Barely after five.

Very, very,veryearly.

But his jet lag made the chances of dropping back into a doze slim to none. Not with the hungry growls coming from his stomach. Not with the crash of waves just outside the bungalow, either.

The bedroom door was still closed.

Moving quietly, he shrugged off his afghan and the terrycloth robe. Sleeping nude as he usually did hadn’t seemed right last night. He kept a watch on the door while he unzipped his duffel to extract a pair of board shorts, a rash guard, and a tube of sunscreen, then rinsed his face and ran a toothbrush around his mouth over the kitchen sink. He pulled his hair into its elastic and got dressed. His stomach muttered again, almost louder than the tank behind him. Isabel’s work on the pump and tubing had made some headway against its algal pea soup, but she was probably right about needing oysters for full filtration.

Unless the otters had shucked them all, there’d be some of those bivalves in the bay.

He should be out in the water, too, taking advantage of the light.

Maybe the waves would be warmer this morning?

With a fisheye lens port screwed onto his Nikon, which he snapped into its Ikelite underwater housing and clipped to a strap over his shoulder, he grabbed a strobe, a dive mask, a snorkel tube, and fins. He kicked on his sandals and wandered outside. The air was heavy, moisture beading on his arms as he ducked under a fringe of wind chimes, shells, and crystals at the bungalow’s half-moon gate, before ambling over to Baby. A small oil slick pooled beneath her engine. He gave her an apologetic pat. But she’d survived yesterday’s trip over the Santa Cruz mountains with no more damage than a splat of gull guano on her windshield, and now he was here in Monterey, ready for an exploratory dive—with minimal kinks in his neck. So everything was fine.

Or, mostly fine. There was still the conundrum of Isabel Wright.

Next hour’s problem, he decided.

He stepped off the road, past a sign pointing directions to the dirt-packed Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, down onto the beach. The sand was prickly with driftwood, rock, saw-toothed grasses, cracked mussel shells, and patchy succulents. A sage-scented wind bit the scar tissue on his shoulders. Nothing like the fine powder and sweet breezes of Central America. His contract with the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute had specified a long list of underwater hazards that he might encounter while photographing the region’s resurgent biodiversity: barracudas, riptides, plus great white sharks migrating in the bay’s canyonor ambushing prey in the kelp. Decapitated abalone divers occasionally washed ashore.

There was also hypothermia, of course.

But he strode without pausing through a short forest of rockweed and a maze of intertidal crevices that teemed with hermit crabs and urchins, freckled barnacles, grazing turbaned snails, cowrie shells sheltering under algae, and fish trapped in pools after the last high tide. At the surf’s edge, he left his sandals to be investigated by what might have been the arm of an octopus concealing itself in a discarded soda can. Then he pulled on his fins, breathed to oxygenate his body against the inevitable gasp and shock of cold water, suctioned on his mask, and half-waded, half-plunged into the knee-high waves.

“Fuck!”

Immediate submersion was the best, quickest way to acclimate to a temperature change, but—Jesus. When he breathed again, biting hard on the mouthpiece of his snorkel tube, shivering and pushing downward to douse his camera and his head, the waves left an icy burn on his skin. He forced another breath through the tube, however. Then another. He invited the chill deeper.Breathe.He equalized it against the furnace-like heat of his chest, gauging his ability to hold air in his lungs while submerged, without expelling it in a reflexive exhale. . .