Page 2 of The Captain
I did. I loved all of it. The messy honesty. The intimacy of knowing a body to the point of reverence.
Another wave broke, stronger, foamy tongues licking up my thighs to the hem of my shorts. My shirt dragged over my nipples when I leaned forward. I let myself feel it—the rawness of it, the heat—and then harnessed it like I always did, feeding it into focus.
There were uses for hunger. I had built a career on alchemizing mine.
A low thrumming reached me from far offshore. Not the steady bass of a tanker. Smaller. Closer. I tilted my head, angling one ear to the horizon, the other to the breath at my knee.
“Do you hear that?” Becca asked.
“I do.” I didn’t say what I thought it was. I didn’t have to. The rhythm vibrated in my marrow, a tune I’d learned to hate and parse in equal measure. I checked my watch. The exercise window wasn’t supposed to open until next week, but the calendar was a living document, like the coast itself—subject to tides, wind, and men in crisp uniforms who spoke in acronyms.
The dolphin shivered, jaw quivering, and brayed a thin, heartbreaking sound that wasn’t quite a whistle. My throat went tight. “Je sais, je sais, mon cœur. Reste. Respire. Respire.” I let the French pour out of me like heat. It always did when I needed softness. When I needed home.
Home. What a treacherous word.
When I was twelve, home had been Paris rooftops and métro stairs and my mother’s lipstick on a porcelain teacup. My father came home in his dark suit, smelling faintly of diesel and cedar, and told us about a city across an ocean with streets that oozedlike honey in summer and a harbor full of hulking ships. A contract, he said. A project too good to refuse. The Americans wanted him. Needed him. We moved to Charleston and it welcomed us with palms and humidity that licked every inch of the body like a lover with no sense of boundaries.
I became fluent in salt and heat and what it meant to be watched.
Now, the watching was my job. I read currents and tides and the micro-twitches that telegraphed panic through cetacean muscle. I logged numbers with ink that bled when it got wet, data points spaced like freckles across a page I never seemed to fill.
“Truck is five,” Becca said. “They’re bringing the big sling.”
“Good.” I pressed two fingers gently behind the jaw. The pulse was still too fast. “We’ll need to keep his blowhole clear when they shift him. You on that?”
“Yes.”
“And Becca?”
She looked up. “Yeah?”
“Breathe.”
She laughed, short and startled. The sound hiccupped into the wind and made a man at the dunes lower his phone. My intern tucked loose hair under her cap and breathed. Good girl.
“Dr. Allard!” A voice I knew too well. I turned to see Tamika James jogging down from the access path, radio bouncing against her chest, the network’s battered old umbrella under one arm. “We got calls about two more reports south of here. Could be the same animal, could be different. You good if I peel to check?”
“Go.” I nodded toward the umbrella. “Leave that.”
She stabbed the post into the sand, popped the canopy, and shade kissed the dolphin’s skin. Tamika squeezed my shoulderbefore she peeled away, her palm leaving a warm print I felt through cotton.
The horizon shimmered. Far out, beyond the last sandbar, a solitary head bobbed in the chop where a swimmer cut a clean line. Bold. Too far even for most surfers on a good day. He moved like he belonged there, each stroke slicing the glare the way a blade parts water.
I dragged my gaze back down. Not now. I wasn’t here to meet men who looked like trouble. I was here because the ocean kept dropping broken things at my feet and expecting me to fix them.
The rumble off the coast deepened. My jaw ached from clenching. I spoke softly to the dolphin to keep from cursing. “You hear it, too, hm? You want to go to deep water away from the headache and the screaming, and the whole world is shallow here.”
Becca’s timer chimed and she re-lubed the eye. “When the Navy liaison called yesterday, did you answer?”
“I let it go to voicemail.” I adjusted the towel. “He can wait.”
She chewed her lip. “He said it was urgent. That they were cooperating in good faith.”
“They always are,” I said, and poured a bucket of water over the towel, letting the overflow run down my wrists and into my boots. The coolness shocked me even though the day was already hot. I felt awake and irritated in the particular way I only felt in Charleston—like this city had a hand down the front of my shirt, pawing at me without asking, assuming I’d take it because that’s what a good girl did.
I wasn’t a good girl.
A cluster of teenagers crept closer, barefoot and sticky with sunscreen, whispering about how soft the dolphin looked. One reached out. I fixed him with a gaze so flat I watched the impulse die on his face.
