“I don’t know what to do,” Astrid said. “I don’t know.”
Diana leaned far out over the side of the boat and dipped her head into the water. She kept her eyes closed at first, intending to come straight back up once her hair was wet.
But the flow of cool water around her ears and scalp was so very pleasant that she wanted to see and wanted to stay there. She opened her eyes. The salt water stung. But the pain was a new pain and she welcomed it.
The water was green foam, swirling down the side of the boat. She wondered idly if Jasmine would come floating up toward her, face bloated, pale…
But no, of course not. That was a long time ago. Hours. Hours like weeks when you’re hungry and sunburned and now thirst is screaming at you to drink, drink the lovely green water like punch, like Mountain Dew, like refreshing mint tea, so cold all around your head.
All she had to do was let go. Slip into the water. She wouldn’t last long. She was too weak to swim very long and then she would slide down into the water like Jasmine had done.
Or maybe she could just hold her head down here and take a deep breath of water. Would that do it? Or would she just end up choking and puking?
Caine wouldn’t let her drown, of course. Then Caine would be all alone. He would raise her up out of the water. She couldn’t drown until Caine was gone, and then she might as well because, as sad as it was to realize, he was all she had.
The two of them. Sick puppies. Twisted, arrogant, cruel and cold, both of them. How could she love someone like that? How could he? Process of elimination? Neither of them could find anyone else?
Even the nastiest, ugliest species found mates. Flies found mates. Worms, well, who knew? Probably. The point being…
Sudden panic! She yanked her head back up and gasped at the air. Choked, gasped, and started crying with her face in her hands, sobbing without tears because you needed something inside you to produce tears. The water running down from her hair felt like tears.
No one noticed. No one cared.
Caine was watching the shore of the island as it passed on their left.
Tyrell was checking the gas gauge nervously every two seconds. “Dude, we’re on empty. I mean, we are way in the red.”
The cliffs were sheer and impossible. The sun beat down on Diana’s head and if someone had magically appeared beside her and said, here, Diana, press this button and…oblivion…
No. No, that’s what was amazing as she thought about it. No. She still wouldn’t. She would still choose to live. Even this life. Even though it meant spending her days and nights with herself.
“Hey!” Penny said. “Look at that. Isn’t that, like, an opening?”
Caine shielded his eyes and stared hard. “Tyrell. In there.”
The boat turned lazily toward the cliff. Diana wondered if they were going to just ram the wall. Maybe. Nothing she could do about it.
But then, she saw it, too, nothing more than a dark space in the buff, sun-blasted rock. An opening.
“Probably just a cave,” Tyrell said.
They weren’t far out from the cliff and it didn’t take long for them to see that what at first looked like a cave was actually a gash in the rock face. At some point a part of the cliff had collapsed in on itself, creating a narrow inlet, no more than twenty feet wide at the base, but five times that wide at the top. But the base of the inlet was choked with rock. There was no sandy beach awaiting them, no place to land the boat.
And yet, if a boat could be landed, a person could climb up the back of that rock slide to the top of the cliff.
The engine caught and missed several strokes, sending a shudder through the hull.
Tyrell cursed furiously and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”
The boat kept moving toward the gap. The engine died. The boat lost way.
It drifted and the opening fell slowly away.
Only twenty feet. So close.
Then thirty feet.
Forty.