Chapter 321: Chapter 323: The Reef
ARIA’S POV
She’d been staring at it since they arrived.
The reef. Right there under the glass floor, under her feet every morning when she made coffee, visible and alive and doing its thing twelve feet below the surface. Fish she couldn’t name moving through coral she’d never seen outside of a textbook. Colours that had no business being that vivid in real life.
She wanted in.
"Today," she said at breakfast.
Damien looked up from his coffee. "Today what."
"The reef." She nodded at the glass floor. "I want to go in."
He looked at the floor. Then at her.
"You know how to snorkel," he said.
"I’ll figure it out."
"That’s not the same as knowing how."
"Damien." She put her cup down. "I broke into your estate and maintained a false identity for two months. I think I can manage a snorkel."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Fair point," he said.
The resort provided equipment.
Masks, fins, the full setup. A staff member walked them through the basics on the jetty and Damien listened with the focused attention he gave everything and Aria listened with the focused attention of someone who had already decided she was going to be good at this and was collecting information accordingly.
They went in from the steps at the end of the jetty.
The water was warm. Warmer than she expected. She put her face in and the reef opened up beneath her and she forgot everything else entirely.
It was extraordinary.
Not the word she’d use for most things but the only one that fit. The coral in colours that didn’t exist above the surface. Fish that moved in formations so precise they looked choreographed. The specific quality of light underwater.....filtered and shifting and making everything look like it was slightly dreaming.
She surfaced.
"Damien," she said.
He was still on the steps.
She looked at him.
He was looking at the water with the expression of a man who was doing rapid calculations about something.
"Are you getting in," she said.
"I’m getting in."
"You’re still on the steps."
"I’m aware of that."
She looked at him more carefully.
"Damien." She swam back to the steps. Looked up at his face. "Are you okay."
"I’m fine."
"You’re not fine. You’re standing on the steps looking at the water like it personally offended you."
He looked at her.
He said nothing for a moment.
"I don’t love open water," he said.
She stared at him.
"You don’t...." She stopped. "Damien Blackwood. You own a yacht."
"I own a yacht. I don’t go in the water from it."
"You...." She pressed her lips together very hard. "You booked a villa over the ocean for our honeymoon."
"The villa is over the water," he said. "Not in it. There’s a distinction."
She looked at him for a long moment.
She was absolutely not laughing.
She was completely not laughing.
"Okay," she said. "Get in."
"I said I’m getting in."
"Then get in."
He got in.
He was fine once he was in.
She could tell because within four minutes he had his face in the water and within seven he had swum further from the jetty than she had and within ten he surfaced next to her with water in his hair and the expression of a man who was recalibrating something.
"You’re fine," she said.
"I’m fine," he agreed.
"You were fine the whole time."
"I was going to be fine," he said. "There’s a distinction."
She laughed.
He looked at her laughing at him from three feet away in the Indian Ocean and something happened on his face that she caught before he could manage it....the specific unguarded thing, the one that only existed here.
He went back under.
She followed.
They stayed in for two hours.
She lost track of time completely which was something that almost never happened to her....she was someone who always knew what time it was, who tracked it the way some people tracked their breathing, automatic and constant. But the reef did something to time. Made it irrelevant. Made the only thing that mattered the next coral formation, the next impossible fish, the next thing she hadn’t seen before.
Damien swam beside her the whole time.
Pointing things out. She’d look where he pointed and he’d already be pointing somewhere else. He was thorough about it the way he was thorough about everything....systematic, covering the whole area, missing nothing.
She thought about him standing on the steps.
She thought about the yacht he never went in the water from.
She thought about this man who had built an empire and run it with cold terrifying efficiency and who had stood on a jetty step in the Maldives working up to getting into the ocean for his wife.
For her.
She swam over to him and touched his arm underwater.
He looked at her through his mask.
She gave him a thumbs up.
He gave one back.
She went back to the reef.
The sandbank was thirty minutes by boat.
Just white sand and water. No trees, no structure, nothing. A strip of sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean that appeared at low tide and would be gone by evening. The boat driver dropped them with a cooler and a shade structure and the information that he’d be back in three hours.
The boat left.
The ocean went in every direction.
Aria stood on the sandbank and turned slowly and tried to find something that wasn’t water and sky and couldn’t.
"This isn’t real," she said.
"It’s real."
"This doesn’t exist."
"It clearly exists," Damien said. "You’re standing on it."
She looked at him.
He was already setting up the shade structure with the methodical efficiency of a man who approached even sandbanks in the middle of the Indian Ocean as a project to be managed.
She sat down in the sand.
She looked at the water.
She thought about nothing.
That was the thing....she couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about nothing. Her brain was always running something. Differential diagnoses, Foundation logistics, security assessments, the particular mathematics of managing a life that had more moving parts than she’d ever planned for.
But right now.
Nothing.
