“What about eels?” I counter. “I’ve seen Planet Earth. Those are definitely nocturnal.”
“Look, you can keep naming the potential dangers of the ocean all night if you want to. But I’m going for a swim.”
The sliver of moonlight glimmers off his teeth as he smiles at me before tipping backwards into the water. I squeal as the kayak rocks, splashing me in the thigh, but as soon as Caleb hits the water his whole body explodes in fluorescent light.
What the…
This isn’t a shark feeding. He’s taken me to a bioluminescent lagoon.
Just like my memory with my dad. He was listening.
I watch in awe as he glides across the water, his powerful arms trailing ribbons of light across the lagoon. He pops up a few feet away and for a second, his face illuminated by the glowing plankton.
“Change your mind yet?”
Pajamas be damned. There’s no way I’m missing this.
I don’t wait for Caleb to dive under again before stripping off my t-shirt and, nervously, my shorts. Thank God I didn’t change out of my bra and underwear after dinner. I take in a deep breath before launching myself off the edge of the kayak.
I have to keep myself from gasping as the world around me explodes into a galaxy of phosphorescent light. My hands glitter against the darkness—my feet glow as I kick tiny luminous bubbles in every direction. When I come up, my whole body is racked with laughter: a joy that radiates through me like the glow of the plankton themselves.
“This is unreal!” I shout, spinning in the black. Caleb pops up like a dolphin and splashes me with the sparkling neon water.
I barely recognize the man before me: the otherworldly plankton that shiver across his arms and shoulders are eclipsed only by the white of his smile. There is something in the way he glides into the dark, the way he wears the water like a second skin, that is more than comfort. More than familiarity. It’s as if every cell in his body is suddenly alight.
Caleb is more alive here than I’ve ever seen him on the decks of the Vela Bianca. He belongs to this water the way the tides belong to the moon.
He glides past me, and I clamp my hands together to keep from reaching out to touch him. Something in me is begging me to slide my hands across his arms, to watch the tiny lights dance between our skin.
When he pops up in front of me, we’re almost close enough to touch. I watch, mesmerized, as little beads of glowing water slide down his nose and cheekbones.
“Can I ask you something?” Caleb asks, and I nod.
“What does the D stand for?”
“D?”
“On your notebook. The initials are SDO.”
I cringe, wondering whether not to answer him truthfully.
“Would you believe me if I said Danger?”
Caleb laughs. But when I don’t laugh with him, he narrows his eyes.
“Wait, you’re serious?”
“Unfortunately, I am.”
Caleb scrunches his eyebrows into his ‘very serious captain’ expression.
“Your middle name is literally Danger?”
“Apparently it was my mom’s idea,” I tell him. “My dad didn’t talk about her much—she left us before Jules was even two—but for some reason this story stuck around. Her dad was obsessed with Westerns, and he used to read her some book when she was a kid learning English–I think it was a play actually.The Cactus Wildcat.Guess that line always stuck with her. She probably didn’t count on her daughter being such a wimp.”
Caleb chuckles.
“Dunno about that. Would a wimp be swimming in a dark lagoon in the middle of the night?”
