The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  And my shoulders settle, as if it should make a difference when it doesn’t.

  It can’t.

  When we reach Hanakapiai Beach, we are told to unbuckle our packs so we don’t get swept away crossing the stream. I question the judgment of doing anything where getting swept away is a distinct possibility, but it’s too late to back out of it now.

  We go across, with Josh right at my back, his hand on my shoulder. It’s equal parts annoying and sweet. We scramble up the other side of the creek bank, and Josh grins at me. He’s grown happier, less burdened by the world, with every mile we set between ourselves and the start.

  “You love this,” I accuse.

  He smiles wider. “I’m too tired to worry about anything right now,” he suggests, buckling my pack for me.

  I wish I knew what it would take to make him this free, this happy and unburdened, all the time. I swear, if it was within my power, I’d give it to him.

  We follow Kai through a small valley, and then the real climbing begins. We ascend…and we continue to ascend. And then we ascend some more. There are no real views to speak of, and the sweat pouring down my face would obscure them anyway.

  We stop at what we’re told is the highest point on the trail—Space Rock, 700 feet above sea level. We have only completed three and a half miles out of eleven. My ice water is gone, my back hurts, and I sort of wish we’d signed on for the campsite at the halfway point.

  After another mile, we descend into the Hanakoa Valley, where Beth and Jim would have stopped to camp for the night had they come. We cross one last stream and then I dump my backpack and collapse in the grass, stretching my arms overhead. “Go without me. I’ll still be here when you get back tomorrow.”

  Josh lies beside me. “Nah, I’m good right here. What the hell was my mother thinking?” And then we both laugh, because there’s literally no way Beth and Jim could have made it this far.

  “I love your mom,” I tell him.

  “Yeah,” he says after a moment, sounding wistful. “Me too. But I’m really starting to question her judgment.”

  Lunch is laid out. We’ve grabbed sandwiches and chips just as Chris arrives with the campers who’ll be staying here tonight.

  “You know who you sort of look like?” says one of them. “That singer.” She turns to her husband. “What’s her name? You know…Naked?” She does the shimmy from the video, the ridiculous, suggestive shimmy that is now practically synonymous with my name.

  I hate my life sometimes.

  “Drew Wilson,” he says, tilting his head to peer at my face. “Holy shit, you do! I mean, she’s always got the whorish makeup thing going on, but your eyes are exactly like hers.”

  Josh’s nostrils flare in irritation. “Lina,” he says, “come sit in the shade.”

  I follow him, grateful to get away. His jaw is locked tight as he takes a seat in the grass. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Those two,” he says, blowing out a breath. “I don’t know how you stand that shit.”

  I laugh a little unhappily. “I’m a living parody,” I tell him. “I’m used to it by now. And that wasn’t even bad. That dude didn’t know it was me. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who do know and still say it.”

  “I don’t understand,” he replies. “Davis has you singing shit you hate. You don’t get to write your own music anymore and you have nothing to yourself. Like…what could possibly be the benefit of continuing to do it?”

  I reach for a few blades of grass beside my hand and give them a hard tug. They break off but don’t pull from the root. “Everyone says I’m like my dad,” I tell him, with a hitch of my shoulder. “And my dad failed. My dad died this pathetic…joke. It’s not how I want my story to end, and now I can’t go backward. I either keep succeeding or I’m a pathetic joke.”

  “I feel like there might be a third option in there, somewhere,” he says.

  “That’s what everyone who dies a pathetic joke tells themselves.”

  Kai crosses the field and crouches before us. “We’ve still got six miles left. I can’t keep waiting for your brother,” he tells Josh, who then glances at me.

  It occurs to me only now that Six has our tent, which means I’ll be sharing with Josh tonight. It’s not as if it’s a big deal, but it still makes me nervous.

  “It’s okay,” I tell them.

  “You sure?” Josh asks.

  I glance at him. “We both knew he wasn’t coming.”

  He looks surprised. As if he knew, but he didn’t think I did. Does he truly believe that all this time I was duped by Six? That I was too dumb to see what he was? The truth is I expected little and I got even less.

  Kai gathers us a minute later and we begin to climb again. All too soon the trail narrows. I now understand why we had to sign mountains of liability waivers last night. We are edging right along the cliff, and stepping even six inches to the right would send me hurtling to my death.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Josh says.

  I turn to glance at him and he growls at me.

  “Face forward,” he barks. “And please keep your eyes on the fucking trail.”

  For the better part of two hours, we fear for our lives. As I cling to the side of the mountain while a gust of wind sweeps by, I wonder who the hell ever decided to try this in the first place and why idiots like us continue to try it.

  We descend to our final destination, Kalalau Beach, just before sunset. As exhausted and sore and filthy as I am, I don’t think I’ve ever been so ecstatic in my life. Everyone is ecstatic. Josh grins down at me, happier and freer than I’ve ever seen him look.

  There is cheering and jumping and after we’ve dumped our shit and kicked off our boots, the tents are put up as quickly as possible and people start running to the water. I look at Josh and he looks at me and then we both run too, stripping our shirts off in the sand behind us as we go.

  The water in January is warmer than LA’s in the height of summer, a pleasure to dive into, and when I emerge, Josh is beside me, water beading off his lovely chest and his perfect arms and suddenly this backpacking trip has gone from being the stupidest thing I’ve ever signed on for to the smartest.

  We are too tired, too exultant, for this to be weird anymore. He’s shirtless and I’m stripped down to my jogging bra and shorts and we splash each other like children—bad children who ignore the dying light, the chilly breeze, and even the sharks that probably feed at dusk somewhere nearby.

  By the time Chris shouts that dinner is ready, the air has grown cool. “Which of us gets the tent first?” I ask.

  Josh’s eyes light up. “I’ll race you.”

  “That hardly seems fair. You’re a foot taller. A gentleman would—”

  “I’ll give you a ten second head start. Final offer.”

  I take off with a screech. Even with the head start, I don’t have a chance of beating him and I know it and it doesn’t matter. I just want more of these moments with him, when he’s so happy and so free. I want to keep them coming as long as I possibly can.

  He catches me easily but then slows at the end to let me hit the boulder in front of our tent just before he does.

  “I won!” I shout, throwing my arms in the air, jumping around in the grass and very intentionally ignoring the fact that he let me win. “Vic-tor-y! Vic-tor-y!”

  “You’re such a dick,” he says with a laugh, and I have no idea why I do it, but my leg swings up to deliver another roundhouse kick, just like it did the first morning we ran together.

  And he catches it and flips me just the same way. Except this time, when my back lands in the grass, he’s above me, his hand bracing my fall, his eyes locked with mine. He’s shirtless, our shorts cling to us, and I can feel all of him, warm and hard and hungry. I can picture how this might unfold if we were other people, in another place—how his hand might slide from the back of my neck down to my waist. How it might move from there to slip inside the seam of my shorts. How he’d lowe
r himself until we were pressed tight against each other.

  My gaze dips to his mouth, his lovely soft mouth I’d give anything to feel against my own.

  It’s only a second, but infinity rests within it. And I see exactly what we could have been. I see what he wants, what I want, and how terrifying it would be if it was at all possible. He would be more. He would be the long journey into the unknown. And I’m pretty sure, with him, I could be convinced to try.

  27

  JOSH

  That night, we sit around the fire eating the food Chris made. We all laugh too easily, exhausted and slap happy. Drew and I have already set up our sleeping pads a respectful distance apart, and there isn’t anything to discuss, really, but I am painfully, intensely aware of the fact that I’m going to be sleeping near her tonight.

  My brother is an idiot. If she were mine, I wouldn’t have let her come on this trip alone and I sure as hell wouldn’t be letting her share a tent with another guy. Maybe Joel assumes I’m safe, but I’m a lot less safe than he thinks.

  We are all yawning once dinner is over. She is bundled up in sweats but she inches closer and closer to the fire as the wind picks up. Chris and Kai take turns playing the ukulele, but eventually even they are bothered by the gusts of wind whipping off the water. Rain, one of them mouths to the other, and we all head to our tents.

  “You want to change?” I ask, not meeting her eye. I’m doing my level best not to think of her naked inside our tent at any point. “I can wait outside.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m too cold. I’m sleeping like this. I just need to brush my teeth.”

  We both climb in and I grab my toothbrush while she searches her backpack.

  And then I hear her quiet, whispered oath. “Shit,” she says. “Shit.”

  I turn. The contents of her backpack are spread all over the tent. For some reason she’s brought two sleeping bags and a pair of shoes that can’t possibly be hers. “You okay?”

  “No,” she whispers. She buries her head in her hands, taking slow measured breaths, as if willing herself to calm. “Six moved our stuff. He put his sleeping bag in my pack, and he took my toiletry kit. My inhaler was in there.”

  My stomach drops. We are eleven miles from civilization. No one has a cell signal. She’s already thought these things through, and right now she’s trying not to panic.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. I want to kill my brother, revive him, then kill him again but my voice is firm and calm. “You might not even need it.”

  “What happens if I do?” She sounds breathless even as she asks the question.

  I’m already planning, thinking. A part of me wants to get her out of here tonight. If we left the packs I could carry her, but that path along the cliff was treacherous on a sunny day. God only knows what would happen at night, especially if it’s storming.

  “They must have a way to radio for help,” I tell her. It’s probably true.

  She laughs, but it comes out sounding a bit more like a sob. “What good will that do? How long can I go without oxygen?”

  My eyes squeeze shut. Fucking Joel. Fucking inconsiderate, useless, narcissistic Joel. How could he have done this? I want to rage at someone, but the only thing that matters right now is keeping her calm. If I can convince her she’s going to be fine, she might actually be fine.

  I want her upright until her breathing is stable, so I move behind her and pull her against my chest.

  “Here is our absolute worst-case scenario,” I tell her. My voice is measured, certain, almost bored. My heart is ticking like a bomb. “If you have an asthma attack and we can’t get it to stop, we call for help. If help is taking too long, I do an emergency tracheotomy. It’s not the ideal situation, but I have what I need. I’d just be placing a small hole in your trachea, and I’d use a hand vent to push you oxygen until help arrived.”

  She laughs and sobs at once. “Having you perform makeshift surgery on me on the beach is a pretty bad worst-case scenario.”

  “Nah,” I reply. “Believe me, I’ve dealt with worse.”

  And I have, but it would terrify me because it’s her. I couldn’t live with myself afterward if something went wrong.

  “I’d go with you in the helicopter,” I continue, “even if we have to go to Oahu because—I don’t know if you’re aware of this—medical care on the island isn’t great.”

  She laughs, and this time I don’t hear any tears. She’s breathing again. I push our sleeping pads together and spread my open sleeping bag over them like a sheet.

  “Come here,” I tell her, lying down and pulling her against my chest. She does, her small hand grasping the fabric of my shirt unconsciously, as if for comfort, while her body tucks perfectly into my side. She rests her head on my chest, just below my shoulder. I pull one of the other sleeping bags over us both.

  “And then, once we’re back in Oahu and I’ve secured you a cappuccino and some Sour Patch Kids, I will ask you why the hell you’re dating my brother and you’ll explain it to me. I’m assuming there must be sorcery involved, as there’s no other logical explanation.”

  The rain pelts the tent and she nestles closer. “Assuming I operate logically was your first error.”

  Not checking to make sure she had her inhaler was my first error. Maybe she still has lingering faith in my brother, but I have none. I should have known he’d do something like this. I reach up and click the lantern off.

  “Thank you,” she says quietly.

  My hand moves to her hip. “I’m not molesting you,” I tell her. “But I can’t sleep with my arm straight at my side.”

  “That surprises me,” she says. “Not what I pictured.”

  “I didn’t realize you pictured me sleeping.”

  “It was only when I wanted to creep myself out. Mostly, I saw you posed like a corpse.”

  I smile in the darkness. “So wishful thinking, then?”

  She laughs. “Precisely.”

  Sloane was wrong about her. Maybe my feelings for her are messy, but she isn’t. She’s a tiny little fighter, resilient and perfect just as she is.

  It doesn’t take long, with my breath against her hair and rain lashing the tent, for her to fall asleep. But I lie awake for a long time.

  I will never forgive my brother for this. I’m going to stay calm tomorrow, until I get her home, and I’ll probably put a good face on things for my mother’s sake. But I’m never going to fucking let this go.

  28

  DREW

  January 31st

  There’s a warm, hard body snuggled up against my back and an erection the size of the Washington Monument pressed against my ass.

  It wakes me. Because I know what it feels like to be nestled against Six, and that is not Six. Jesus Christ, that’s not Six.

  There is obviously no longer a safe distance between us, and Josh’s arm is tight around me, his hand pressed flat to my stomach, his breathing still slow and even in sleep. I never would have assumed he was a cuddler. I would have assumed he had a sizable appendage if I’d thought about it, simply because, well, he’s a big guy.

  Who am I kidding? I’ve thought about it.

  But how do I proceed now? I don’t want to wake him because then we both have to deal with the awkwardness of this. How do you make an erection die? Other than talking about my feelings, nothing comes to mind.

  I know when he wakes because for half a second he curls closer, and then I hear him say “shit” far too close to my ear and feel him roll away.

  I suppose I could pretend to be asleep but that’s really not me. “Happy to see me this morning?” I ask instead.

  “Don’t get too flattered,” he says moodily. “I just need to pee.”

  “I wasn’t flattered. I assumed it was one of your robotic parts malfunctioning. Though I find the idea of a malfunctioning sex robot weirdly titillating.”

  “Drew,” he says between his teeth, “that really isn’t helping.”

  I like the idea of Josh with
a raging erection he can’t get rid of slightly too much, but he was nice to me last night so I decide to be a decent human being for once. “What would help change the mood?”

  “You seem to enjoy talking about death,” he says. “That should do it.”

  “Hmmm,” I say, trying to think of something death related. “I really only enjoyed discussing Sloane’s death, to be honest, but let me think. Oh, got it. When was your first funeral?”

  “My grandmother,” he says. “When I was ten. She didn’t look real. Yours?”

  “My dad, when I was eleven.” I stare at the top of the tent, at the beads of water all over its surface. “It was a closed casket. I think that’s part of what made it so hard to accept.”

  He glances at me over his shoulder. “Why was it a closed casket?”

  “You and your sexy questions,” I say, poking him. He’s such a doctor. “Suicide, so it was too messy. Brains everywhere, apparently. Is this still turning you on? Because that wouldn’t surprise me about you.”

  He gives a short, low laugh. “No.”

  “So anyway, I convinced myself he wasn’t really in there. For that first year I kept thinking he was going to come back for me, and I pictured him, like, climbing through my window, or pulling up in front of our apartment in his Jeep and laying on the horn. And then on the anniversary of his death, I woke up and I finally realized nothing was going to change.”

  I had been shocked, and I was also old enough to know how stupid it was that I was shocked. And when my mother said What’s wrong with you? in that tone she had, as if she was already mad at me before I’d answered, I didn’t dare tell her why.

  He’s rolled toward me over the course of this fun trip down memory lane. “Jesus,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was fifteen years ago. I’m over it. How’s your dick?”

  “It’s great,” he says with a quarter smile. “Thanks for asking.”

  I wasn’t sad, but something about the sympathy in his eyes makes ancient grief stir and I have to force it back into its little box. “You’d better go pee before I pull this sleeping bag off. I don’t want you getting excited again.”