Page 74 of The Wild Beneath

“I’m giving you space like you asked me to—­”

She uncrosses her arms. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Iwantto stay.” Walker grabs his shirt with his fist. “That’s the hardest part.”

“Then stay!”

“None of this is aboutme,” he says. “I shouldn’t have gotten close the way I did. I know you feel alone. I hate that.”

Annie wants to settle him, the way he settles her. She stepstoward him and puts her palms on his chest, rubs them up onto his shoulder. Around his neck. She can feel every molecule of space between them. His breathing rises and falls through her fingertips.

“Don’t make this harder than it is.” Walker is crying now, too. Wiping tears away, then looking at his fingertips like he’s confused by them.

She puts her hands on his cheeks. “That underwater world you show me.” She tilts her face up to his. “It makes everything feel right.”

“Of course it does,” he whispers.

She presses her lips against his.

It’s only a few tentative seconds before he gathers her up in his arms, folds her against his body. Her tongue finds his; he tastes salty.

No stopping. She pulls him by the hand, up the ladder, onto the deck ofPolaris. Then down the companionway and into the berth. He is all around her, his strong hum, his hands over her arms, up her back. She’s against the wall, her mouth on his again, as she pulls him to her.

She peels off his shirt and hers, unhooking her bra. It all needs to come off. There’s enough light to sense the outline of him, his hot skin against her own. The scent of him, behind his ears, his neck, the sea. Rock pools, sea anemones opening and closing.

“Closer,” she says, and pulls him to the bed and on top of her.

He kisses her ribcage, then the soft skin between her breasts.

“Yes,” she says, pushes her hips into him. In one swift motion, she unbuttons her jeans and slides them down. She wants all of him, all at once. “Don’t stop.”

Annie closes her eyes and the visions begin: water, rushing tides, the soft inside of an oyster. It is sweetness and throbbing. Her mind is half inside his; she’s sure of it. Memory passesthrough her skin. A current drags her harder toward him. She sees blue. Thethwump-thwump-thwumpis here, soft and slow. Annie shivers head to toe. The tide comes all the way up and washes over her. She’s ready to dive, ready for the cold shock against her face.

She loses track of where her skin ends and his begins.

Chapter 27

After his standoff with Walker in the shipyard, Evan sits out on the beach alone.

It gets very late. He thinks things over, rakes his fingers through his hair, buttons and unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt, then rolls them up. Anger still simmers inside him. A headache blooms in his temples.

He tries to tame his emotions with logical thinking.

He knows Walker isn’t a bad guy. In fact, if anything, he’s annoyingly good. Maybe because it reminds him so much of Annie, the way she feels like the centre of the earth. His personal gravitational force.

He can’t let Walker make this decision for Annie, though. That isn’t an option.

He moves the facts around in his mind: His father is hyperfocused on the wrong things; their hometown has been reduced to rubble; Ruth is fading faster than he could have imagined. And those facts are taking a toll on Evan. He can feel himself changing, becoming someone he isn’t, someone he was never supposed to be. Pretty soon Annie will be the only person left who genuinely knows who he is or was. If he loses Annie, what would be left for him? But more critically, what would become of Annie? On a boat, no money, no safety net. He could lose her for good. That prospect is intolerable.

His overpowering instinct is to intervene. He can’t leaveAnnie alone with Walker any longer. He has to break them apart, at least until Ruth gets back and talks some sense into her. But how can he do that, without making it look like he’s trying to pull strings?

Evan rises to his feet, brushes sand off his pants and starts to walk home over the garbage and soggy driftwood. He climbs through collapsed houses, over a corrugated roof abandoned beside the disembowelled convenience store, then strides through the clearing created by Isaac’s excavator.

The nearly full moon shines overhead.

He walks uphill to the house he and Isaac have been staying in since the tsunami. Isaac is banging around the kitchen with a half bottle of bourbon in one hand, a full tumbler of it in the other. By the looks of it, dinner is boiled eggs and salted sturgeon. The SSB sits on the counter emitting a staticky hiss. Evan can smell the sharp scent of diesel from the generator droning outside.

Evan folds his body into a kitchen chair beside the table. The generator hiccups, and the overhead light flickers.