“Our parents talked about moving us to another school, but they didn’t. I think we stopped telling them how bad it was because we worried it was all our fault. And you know, looking back, it wasn’t like the school was against us. It was probably five or six kids. Everyone else was nice to us or ignored us. But at that age, you just remember the ones who are after you.”
Ness squeezes my hand.
“So anyway, I hated my skin. When I was six or seven, I would alternate between covering up and staying out of the sun, hoping I’d turn white, or I’d lay out in the back yard with no clothes on trying to get darker. Neither of which worked like I hoped. All I wanted was different skin. I would have killed to have different skin. I even used to have these dreams when I was a kid where I could step into a skin suit and zip it up and no one would know it wasn’t mine.”
I wipe a tear off my cheek. I feel bad for ruining the moment, but what started as an urge to share something, anything, wells up into a desire to really have this off my chest.
“So the reason I got into shelling—it has a dark history behind it. I’m almost ashamed of it. Which is difficult, because it’s become the thing I most love doing in the world. But it all started when I was nine. Like I said, for a few years there, I didn’t care about shells. I liked them when I was real young, because my parents and my sister did, but then I became consumed with this self-loathing, which is a crazy thing for a little kid to feel, and that’s all I thought about.
“Then one day, we were on a hike on the bluffs up from my childhood beach, and we came across this writhing ball of hermit crabs. Like two dozen of them. They were crawling all over each other. You could hear them crinkle as their little legs tapped on each other’s shells.”
“They were swapping,” Ness says.
“That’s right. I sat with my mom and watched crabs crawl out of one shell and into another. Some shells were empty. It was all this furious activity, hermit crabs leaving one home and jumping into another.”
“And you wished you could, too.”
I bob my head, my vision swimming with tears. My voice cracks as I try to get it out. “I told my mom— told her ‘I wish that was me,’ and she said—” Ness gives me a corner of the towel, and I dab my cheeks with it. “She said, ‘Why would you want to leave our house?’ and I said, ‘I want to leave me.’ And I don’t think she ever got it. But I was mesmerized with this idea. I never saw shells as anything other than rocks that came in pretty shapes. Didn’t realize what they were. But after that day, I wanted to find all of them. I thought there might be one out there shaped like me that I could just crawl into.”
I’m bawling by the time I finish. Ness grabs me and pulls me against him, letting me sob into the crook of his neck. He kisses my cheek, smooths my hair, and holds me. I cry so hard that I shudder, letting out this thing that I’ve contained all on my own for far too long, this dark secret to my passion, this ignoble reason for what I do and who I am.
“I think you’re perfect,” Ness says. “You are perfect just like you are. With every chip and ding. With the polish rubbed off. There’s nothing wrong with you in the world.”
I control my sobbing so I can hear him. And then I’m not crying anymore. I’m kissing him. And this time the kissing grows into something frantic, a rawness from having exposed myself, from becoming more than merely naked. Throwing the towel off, hot now, I straddle Ness and sit up in the breeze. I let him see me in the cast of starlight. His hands are on my hips. They trace up my waist, cup my breasts.
“I want you,” I tell him. “Right now. I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my life.”
I feel his hands stop. Something flashes across his face. “I can’t be an escape for you,” he says. “Not some temporary home.”
“I don’t want temporary,” I tell him.
With this, his hands move again. He rolls me over and lowers me to the blanket. As he kisses my neck, and then down my body, I keep my eyes open. A field of stars glitters above us, the sea lapping nearby, streaks of light as foreign bodies strike the Earth’s atmosphere, exploding and burning upon entry. Ness’s mouth is against me, and now I can’t tell if all the stars I’m seeing are real. My vision bursts with them. I have to close my eyes; our hands interlock; I arch my back and moan with pleasure.
When I can’t take it anymore, I pull him up so I can kiss him. So our chests are together. So he can enter me. And for the first time, I forget who this man is outside of any context beyond the last few days together. I let go of his past. My past. There is nothing behind us, nothing before us, just a promise of now. The world is not flooding. All the tides are slack. Waiting. Pausing. Nature catching her breath. While the two of us lose ourselves in each other.
36
The next morning, I wake up before Ness. I watch him sleep for a long while. I notice that the crease in his forehead is gone. Like the worry that seems to plague him during the day is giving him respite in his sleep.
When I can’t hold it anymore, I get up to pee. I grab my phone on the way to the bathroom to check the time, and marvel that I have signal. It’s just wi-fi, though. I wonder how this works with Ness’s “no laptop” rule, but I use it to check my email and my messages while I’m on the toilet. I have a depressing metric ton of both. I scan for important names, see my sister asking me how things are going, that she assumes the silence is a good thing, reminds me to let Ness know she’s single. I stifle a laugh at this. What in the world am I going to tell her?
There are tons of messages from Henry. I have a workaholic breakthrough by opening none of them. Just one day of not caring what the emergency is. A way of honoring Ness’s laptop rule. Leaving the bathroom, I worry my flushing might’ve woken Ness, but he’s still sound asleep. I decide to venture out for coffee. As I’m passing the bed, I see inside Ness’s bag, which is open. It’s the bright orange plastic case that catches my eye.
I freeze, glance back at the bed, see that he isn’t moving, then crouch down beside his bag. I pull the case out. It’s identical to the murex case Agent Cooper gave me. In fact, I fully expect to see a lace murex inside as I work the latch. Instead, some water sloshes out, and I have to tilt the case in a hurry to get it level and keep from making more of a mess. I lift the lid slowly. Inside is something that looks like a cross between an auger and a cerith. Not quite as smooth as the former or as bumpy as the latter. When it moves, I realize where it came from. And why the water inside feels so warm. And why these cases have rubber seals.
I close the lid, secure the latch, and put the case back in Ness’s bag. My mind is racing, but it’s going around in circles. These clues seem important, but they aren’t spelling out the big picture. When I stand, I turn to find Ness stretching in the bed. He looks over at me.
“Morning, gorgeous.”
I feel terrifyingly naked. I don’t know how much is my usual shyness and how much is my swimming thoughts.
“C’mere,” Ness says.
I crawl into bed and kiss his neck. “My breath is awful,” I say.
“Is that your polite way of saying that it’s my breath that’s bad?”
“No, but I assume it isn’t hunky dory either. I’m going to make coffee. You want some?”
“Yeah, because that’ll fix our problems.”
I laugh and push him back against the pillow when he tries to sit up. “Stay here,” I say. “I’ll get it. And can I borrow a robe?”