The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  He leans back into his seat, and now it’s just the constellation of indicators and dials around us, the distant red glow of lava leaking from the Earth, the shadows of animals that should not exist, and this, between us, which should not be possible.

  I run my hands over his chest, that swimmer’s chest. I touch the black pearl on that thin leather strap, study him for a moment, then lean in for another kiss. Ness cups my breasts through my shirt, and I arch my back with pleasure. I press myself into his hands and grab a fistful of his hair. Arching my back further, I bang my head on a pipe. We both laugh. “This thing was not built for this,” I say.

  “The arms go down,” Ness tells me. He fumbles between the chairs, and the armrests slide down level with the seats. It makes a short bench. “I’ve never done this before,” Ness says, seeming to read my mind. “I promise. But I have considered the various complexities.”

  “Show me what you’ve considered,” I say, kissing him. In this moment, I don’t care if I’m a one-night stand. I don’t care if this is the last time we touch. I don’t care if being in the same room together is awkward later. I want this, whatever the costs. Something about being so close to death, about this inhospitable place, makes me want to feel alive. And something about being trapped with Ness, about the last three days spent in each other’s company, has me craving what I know I’ll soon regret.

  Ness places a hand on the top of my head, an odd gesture, but when he lifts me up, I realize it’s to keep me from banging into anything. I hold his arms, can feel his muscles flex. To be lifted and moved so easily feels exhilarating. My desire to be in control of every situation is gone. I am floating. Bobbing on the sea. Ness lays me down on my back. He pushes my shirt up, slowly, as if asking permission. I lift my arms up over my head in assent. Starting at my neck, he kisses his way across the smooth hollow of my collarbone, sending trills of electricity through me, then works down to my breasts, kissing them, cupping them with his hands, and I place mine on top of his and make him squeeze harder. My nipples ache with pleasure. I pull my bra down and guide Ness’s head. His tongue circles my nipple before taking me between his lips.

  Ness slowly kisses his way up my chest, up my neck, finds my lips again. He brushes loose strands of hair from my face. The frenetic energy is gone, replaced by a comfortable caressing, a writhing embrace, a pleasurable squirming. I wrap my arms around him and squeeze. I kiss his neck.

  “Maya,” Ness whispers in my ear. If there is more, it is lost as he buries his head in my shoulder. The steel shell around us groans. We are the torus inside. There is no space nor time. No concept of being. Just a floating feeling, a sense of escape and flying, another Icarus kiss, completely free, the empty cosmos around us, exploring each other there at the bottom of the sea.

  Part V:

  Surfacing for Air

  32

  “Shit, I think the mics were on,” Ness says. He finds one of the headsets and places it back on its rack. I’m pretty sure I knocked it off trying to get my arm out of my coveralls. “The operators on the ship must’ve heard everything.”

  “Tell me you’re joking,” I say.

  Ness hesitates.

  “I’m joking,” he says.

  “Come lie back down,” I tell him. “And by lie back down, I mean curl up in an awkward ball on top of me while the edge of this armrest gouges into my spine.”

  “I have to get us surfacing,” he says. “We’ve almost stayed down as long as we can.”

  I groan in complaint. I’m as scared to leave this place as I was to come here. I don’t want to go back to the old rules. I like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rules. “Have them send the other sub,” I say.

  Ness laughs. “It’s a two-hour ride back to the top if we start now. You’ll be sick of me by the time we get there.”

  “I doubt that,” I tell him.

  The sub rocks slightly as it leaves the sea floor. A small motor whirs somewhere behind us. Ness checks one more gauge, then asks me to get up. He arranges himself on the small bench and motions for me to get on top of him. I curl up across his chest and lap, my head on his shoulder, my lips brushing his neck, and he smooths my hair, which has largely come loose from my braid.

  “That was amazing,” I say. I feel like a teenager, where kissing and fondling are as extreme and satisfying as sex. More satisfying. It’s like we both knew to dance along that last line, not wanting to cross it, not wanting to mess up the moment.

  Ness kisses my forehead. “I forgot to ask if this was going to be off the record or not.”

  “Definitely off the record,” I say, laughing. “And look, I won’t make this hard for you—”

  “Don’t,” he tells me. “Please don’t break up with me at the bottom of the ocean. It’ll make the next two hours really awkward.”

  I laugh.

  “Besides,” he says, “I like you. I have since the moment you stormed out of my house and called me a sociopath. So you’re the one who’s gonna have to decide what comes next, not me.”

  “The story,” I say. “My job.” I think of all the complications that would’ve been ridiculous to ponder an hour ago but which now swirl all around me, the myriad reasons this is a dumb idea. I think of the five-hour drive back and forth, how much a pain in the ass dating would be, how everyone in the office will think the wrong things but will be partly correct. How they’ll say the wrong things, which will be partly true. What my sister will say if I tell her I’m dating Ness Wilde. What Henry will do. His mustache will spin if I tell him about this. Agent Cooper will flip. I think about the rest of my story and my responsibility to our readers, and how hard it’ll be to write that last piece. All this and more haunts me in the space of a heartbeat.

  “Stop stressing,” Ness says. He runs a finger across the worried furrow in my brow. “Let’s take it one day at a time, see if we can even get through this week.”

  “Is that how long this usually lasts?” I ask him.

  Ness kisses my temple and doesn’t respond. I choose not to press him, not to mess this up. Instead, I nestle into his arms and tell my worrying brain to take a vacation, to think on these things later. I allow myself to enjoy this moment, me and Ness in a sphere of twinkling lights, the black world outside fading to a dull crimson, and then a deep, rich blue, as we rise toward the surface and I fall in and out of sleep.

  ••••

  Ness wakes me and says we’re fifteen minutes away. So begins the strangest search-for-clothes-after-making-out that I’ve ever encountered. I get my bra arranged and my shirt back on, then wiggle into my coveralls, trying not to hit any switches with my elbows. As Ness puts on his headset and takes over control of the sub, I comb out my hair with my fingers and then put in a new braid.

  “Okay,” Ness says into the mic. “I’ve got you now. Not sure what that was all about. Comms acting glitchy. No—no, I don’t think we need to tear anything apart to sort it out. Everything else is online. Yup. See you in five.”

  He smiles at me. I push his microphone out of the way and kiss him quietly. I want to see if the rules of the deep still apply this close to the surface, and they seem to.

  “Holly will be so proud of us,” I say.

  Ness laughs. He covers the mic with his hand. “I’ve got her next weekend if we want to plan something. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

  “I’d like that,” I say. I feel a shiver from having crossed some new line, some thermal barrier.

  “Maybe together, the two of you can explain how the cover to my Shelby ended up in the guest house bathtub.”

  “Is a Shelby a car?” I ask.

  Ness shakes his head. “You were so much sexier fifteen thousand feet ago.”

  “Thanks. How do I look? Is it obvious we made out? It’s obvious, isn’t it.”

  “No. You look like you had a claustrophobic fit.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And then somehow ripped off your jumpsuit and put it back on with the buttons snapped all wrong.”r />
  I look down and see that the top snaps don’t line up, that all of the snaps are off by one. I start redoing them. “You better have that mic off,” I say.

  “Whoops,” Ness says, but I can tell he’s joking. I’m beginning to be able to read him. He takes a bit more getting used to than even Melville.

  Outside, the water brightens, like the sun is rising. But we’re the ones coming up. We’re in a golden sphere, approaching the horizon. Ness takes the controls again and guides us toward the underbelly of the ship. Along with the great hull of the craft, and its massive propellers, I see the fins of a diver treading water. We break the surface just a few feet from him; the diver gives a thumbs-up through a porthole, has a cable in his hand. Ness arranges the arms of the sub to provide a ladder to the top. There’s the clanging of metal on metal, and then the slap of a hand on the hull.

  “Locked in,” Ness says into his headset. And up we go, softly spinning again, water sheeting across the portholes, the sea falling away beneath us until the railing of the great ship swings below our feet once more.

  We touch down with a clang, and Ness pops the hatch, water dripping down in a veil. As I crawl out of the sub, I feel like I’m in possession of some incredible secret. Like a kid sneaking kisses behind my parents’ backs. All the questions the deck crew has for Ness are about the sub, not about what happened between us. I marvel that no one suspects anything, that such an incredible moment—making out with someone for the first time at the bottom of the sea—could be contained by the two people involved. Part of me is dying to get on my phone and tell someone; the other part wants to keep this selfishly for myself and never tell another living soul.

  The next hour is a blur, my head still swimming, my hormones coursing and adrenaline raging. I barely have time for a shower and a quick lunch before Ness is saying we need to leave. After I grab my bag from my room, I track down Ness’s room with the help of a crew member. He startles when I walk in, was just in the act of stuffing the last of his things into his bag. As we navigate the tight corridors of the ship together, I brush his hand with mine. He turns as he ducks through a doorway and is grinning from ear to ear.

  The helicopter ride back to the island is smoother this time, the rain having slowed to a trickle, the sky clearing. We land on that small island about as far from civilization as one can be, and get back on the plane. I look forward to the flight. The time to think. To relax. Ness stows our bags and then walks to the rear of the plane, past the eight leather recliners, beyond the bathroom, and to the door at the very back.

  He opens it and waves me toward him. The flight crew folds the steps behind me and shuts the door, and the jet engines whine as they power up. “Ladies first,” Ness says, in what has become a little mantra of sorts, a private joke between us.

  “What’s in there?” I ask.

  “A bed.” And when he sees the look on my face, he quickly adds: “I’m not suggesting anything. Just thought you’d be more comfortable. If you wanted to get some rest. That’s all.”

  I squeeze past him and into an opulent bedroom. Rich cherry veneer, a queen size bed, a lounging area, a closet, a pile of pillows. It reminds me of the master stateroom in a yacht I toured once for a shelling piece I wrote.

  “Is this the same plane we flew in on?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Ness says.

  “You mean you let me sleep in that chair on the way here instead of telling me about the bed?”

  Ness bites his lip. He looks guilty. “I … didn’t want you out of my sight. And it’s not like I could’ve stayed in here with you. Not then. So yeah, it didn’t occur to me to send you back here.”

  “You’re just saying that now to be sweet,” I say, a hand on his chest. “You didn’t think that at the time. Not yesterday.”

  “I did. I thought it all day when I had to leave you on Wednesday, when I had to put that note in your door. If it hadn’t been an emergency, I wouldn’t have left you. I didn’t want to go.”

  “I’m so confused.” I place a hand on my forehead. “Why is this happening?”

  “Get some rest,” Ness says. “If you want, I can stay out here—”

  “No, I want you in here with me. I’m not confused about that. Just about … life.”

  The room sways as the plane begins to taxi. I lose my balance, but Ness steadies me and steers us both so that we collapse into the bed.

  “Should we be buckled up?” I ask, scooting so that my head is on the pillows.

  “Probably,” Ness says, but neither of us gets up. We just slide back in the silk sheets as the jet accelerates, clinging to one another and laughing, and I feel young, dangerously young, like new love feels when you have no idea where it might lead.

  We are entwined and kissing before the plane leaves the tarmac. At one point, I have to pull away and pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. “Only you could be cute doing that,” Ness says. I crawl on top of him and stretch out, so our bodies are pressed together from head to toe. There’s no pressure for us to get naked, to move too fast, even though we both must know our time is limited, that there’s no way this can work, that it’s too ludicrous to contemplate.

  And maybe this is what dooms his relationships. Maybe his fame and wealth and reputation never recede enough for two people to simply be a couple. Perhaps I’m the one who’s Icarus, destined to get burned.

  Ness rolls me over and kisses my neck, my shoulder, my cheek, the crook of my arm. I try to imagine what this is like for him. I’m so caught up in the absurdity of making out with him that it doesn’t occur to me that he might be feeling the opposite. That I’m overly normal. And then I see everything in a new light, and I feel sorry for Ness. Whoever he’s ever been with, there’s the pressure he must feel to just be himself, not the CEO of anything, not the son of someone, not the great-grandson of someone, but just a man. Maybe he’s looking for normalcy. Maybe he’s trying to forget that he was named after a monster.

  33

  Not long after the plane levels off, Ness gets up and says he’ll be right back. I take the opportunity to use the en suite and freshen up. I have to dig my toiletry kit out of my bag. Ness’s bag is beside mine, and I feel a twinge of reporter curiosity that I have to wrestle away. I feel guilty for even thinking it.

  Ness returns with a tray. There are two glasses of fizzing champagne and a bowl of strawberries and blackberries. He sets the tray on the bed, and I ask him about the tattoo on his shoulder. I noticed it on the dive trip and again in the sub. He lets me lift his sleeve to study it.

  “It’s the Crux,” Ness says. “Also known as the Southern Cross.”

  The tattoo is simply four stars arranged in a crooked pattern.

  “It’s the closest thing this hemisphere has to a North Star. It isn’t over the South Pole really, but it points to it.”

  “What’s the significance?” I ask. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”

  “I have, but that’s not why I got it. Well, not really.” He hands me a glass of champagne.

  I take a sip and grab a strawberry from the bowl. “This is going to sound snobby,” I say, “but I was totally meant to live like this.”

  Ness laughs. “You would’ve made a fine Egyptian princess.”

  “And died when I was twenty from an infected tooth and then had my brains slurped out my nose.” I feed him a blackberry. “So why’d you get the tattoo, then?”

  “Because …” Ness takes a deep breath. And then a sip of champagne. “I guess I spent a long time searching for myself before I finally realized I was looking in all the wrong places. College, marriage, work, meetings. When I got into shelling, I realized there was half a world I wasn’t seeing. Like the other side of a coin. Options I never knew I had. It hit me in Australia, off the Barrier Reef. I think it was there that I realized what kind of process my grandfather went through.”

  “You mean from reading his journal?”

  Ness nods. I take a sip of champagne and enjoy
the light airy fizz against my tongue.

  “So what’s your background?” Ness asks. He’s rubbing my arm and studying it.

  “Are you asking me what kind of breed I am?” I pull my arm away from his touch.

  “No … God, no. Not that. I love your skin. Your complexion is amazing. I mean—of course I want to know where your parents are from. I want to know everything about you. What I meant was, what was your childhood like?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. That’s just usually what people mean when they ask that, so I get testy about it. My childhood was basically me and my sister sticking up for one another, people picking on us, black kids and white kids. Meanness is just as immune to color as kindness, as it turns out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Must’ve been tough.”

  “We got through.”

  “What does your sister do?”

  “She’s an investment banker. She would tell you she stares at charts all morning and PowerPoint slides all afternoon. She thinks I live this amazing life, of course.”

  Ness smiles and makes a show of sweeping his arm at our surroundings.

  “Touché.”

  He laughs. “Okay, so now that all that’s out of the way, exactly what kind of mongrel are you?”

  I grab a pillow from the bed and swing it at him, and Ness has to block it with one hand and save his champagne with the other. “If I spill this on my pants, they’ll have to come off,” he warns me, laughing.

  “If you really must know, my mom was from Antigua and my dad was from Boston. They’re both … they passed away when I was younger. I mean, I was an adult, but it was years ago. So I’m able to talk about them without turning into goo.”

  “Can I ask how they met?”