Travis took off his glasses and put them on the desk, his midnight-blue eyes landing on mine as he blinked his long lashes, making me wonder if I’d ever noticed a man’s eyelashes before. “You wouldn’t want to know, Professor. Trust me.”
I tutted, leaning over and pulling my laptop from my bag. “What’s with the ‘professor’today?”
“Well, you’re the big boss now, about to meet with heads of the Oceanic Centre and some oil and gas bigwigs. I didn’t think you’d want me calling you Jas anymore.”
I picked up a pen and threw it at him like a tiny javelin, but he caught it before it hit him. “I’ll always be just Jas to you.”
There was a flash of something across his expression that I couldn’t read. Like a shooting star, it lit up his eyes but instantly faded.
With my laptop now loaded, I clicked open my email and groaned when I saw the amount that had appeared since I checked them when I got up this morning. My new job hadn’t even officially started, yet I was being bombarded, and not for the first time, I wondered if accepting this new role was a good idea.
I took the elastic hair tie from my wrist and pulled my hair back, tying it up into a short ponytail.
“You’ve still not answered me. Why are you going? Really?” he asked. I kept my eyes low, locked on the screen in front of me, trying to hide the emotion from my face.
“It’s time.” I shrugged as if my answer was obvious when I knew it was anything but. He understood how much I loved this place and was struggling to understand my reasoning, although I’d not told him the whole truth. I couldn’t. Partly because I didn’t understand it myself.
“For?”
“To grow up. To go home. I can’t keep living out here, diving with you every day and messing about taking pictures of the seafloor.” This is what I’d convinced myself. I mean, work was meant to be hard and stressful, and my job was idyllic. Perfect. I’d spent months thinking this couldn’t be my future. I should be chasing more. That was what I was missing in my life. It had to be.Right?
His eyes widened and then narrowed. “Is that really how you see what we do?” He sounded hurt.
I scoffed. “Of course not, but it’s what everyone else sees.”
He let go of the screwdriver and it banged to the table and rolled a little. “That’s bullshit and you know it. This started as a project you dreamt up at uni, then you came here and worked your arse off.Weworked our arses off. Now it’s a multimillion-pound research project that will be done across six countries, exploring all five oceans… plus all the seas we’re going to be mapping too. That’shuge,Jas. In fact, it’s fucking massive. How is that someone messing about?” His tone had changed, the hurt morphing into an anger I wasn’t used to seeing from Travis. “I mean, in the last couple of years, we’ve created a more detailed picture of deep-sea life than has ever been done before. The Diel Project is groundbreaking, and you started it. What the fuck about that isn’t grown up?”
He stood and stormed to the door, but he stopped and looked back over his shoulder, the light bouncing off his angled cheekbones, his day-old scruff dusting his jaw, adding to the dark, moody look he emanated, despite being the polar opposite.
“You know, we’ve been friends for years and I love you, Jas, but sometimes I don’t have a clue what you’re thinking.”
And with that, he stepped outside, letting the scorching heat leak into the air-conditioned space as I mumbled, “You and me both.”
TWO
TRAVIS
I saton the lounger outside, staring out across the ocean, the sun warming my skin, the sunglasses I’d unhooked from my t-shirt, giving me a barrier from the world. I wasn’t sure how long I sat there before a shadow fell over me.
“Sorry.”
I didn’t look up. “For what, Professor? Insulting your life’s work or telling me what we do here isn’t grown up enough.”
“I’m a dick.”
“Yeap.” I brought my knees up to my chest, so there was room for him to sit on the end, wondering if the fact we’d only ever brought one seat out here was actually a sign that Jas was never meant to stick around.
He sat side on, giving me a view of his profile. That slightly crooked nose from where one of his brothers punched him as a kid and broken it, the curve of his Cupid’s bow I dreamt about tracing, the sandy-coloured beard that was in desperate need of a trim, and that neck, where his pulse hammered invitingly, begging for someone to press their lips to it.
“Do you ever just feel like you can’t do this?” he asked quietly as he stared out at the horizon.
I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head, not caring when the light blinded me, my attention fixed on Jas. “Do what?”
He let out a hollow laugh. “Life. I mean, knowing what to do, making the right choices?”
I dropped my legs on either side of the bench, shifting closer to him.
“Jasper, look at me.”
