pictures of you, but I read about you finding a shipwreck with another guy.”
“I didn’t let them photograph me for the articles about our discovery because people are batshit crazy when it comes to money. I’d rather be the grungy guy with the backpack that people give space to than the rich guy who found the sunken ship who becomes the target of every scam out there.”
“I don’t blame you for that. But you’ve done amazing things, and I want to hear about them.”
“None of it was romantic, like we imagined.” They’d dreamed of spending nights in cabanas and making love on boats beneath he stars. But what teenagers would let bugs and snakes into their dreams of makeshift tents or life-threatening squalls that left them praying for their lives and shaking with cold dampen their fantasies?
She splashed him and said, “Let me be the judge of that. I forced myself not to think about you for so long, now that we’ve cleared the air, I kind of like thinking of you out there in the wild.”
He swam underwater to her, guiding her to waist-deep water out of the shadows of the boulders, far away from the divers.
“Tell me everything,” she said, sunlight twinkling in her eyes.
He didn’t want to tell her about the lonely, painful months following his leaving Pleasant Hill, when it had taken everything he had just to make it through the day, forcing himself to get as far from home as quickly as possible for fear of turning back. So he began with their last encounter. “The day after we hooked up in Mexico, I went to a bar to drown my sorrows, and that’s when I met Luis Rojas—”
“The guy you found that ship with off the coast of the Bahamas?”
“Yeah,” he said as a group of teenagers bounded into the water. He put an arm protectively around Carly and said, “Want to sit in the sun a bit?”
She nodded, and they made their way back to their belongings. They spread towels on the ground beside the rocks, and as they sat down, Carly said, “Tell me about Luis.”
“You’d like him. He’s an old-school kind of guy who doesn’t mince words and looks like an aging pirate. In fact, he’s got Captain Jack hair with some gray in it, a bushy beard, and eyes like my father’s that see everything. He’s very wise, and an underwater archaeologist. He’d just turned fifty-five when we met, and he’d been trying to find the wreckage from the Black Widow pirate ship for more than twenty years. We hit it off right away. Anyway, he was leaving the next day to head down the coast, and he hired me on. He became my mentor, my best friend, and if you ask him, he’d probably tell you that he was my therapist, too. We’ve had a lot of great conversations over the years. Not a day passes that I don’t miss working with him. And by the way, he often gave me hell for the way I left you.” Luis hadn’t known Carly, Tory, or Beau, which had made him safe for Zev to talk with about everything that had happened without seeing the devastation in his eyes that Zev had seen in everyone else’s. And even though Luis had given him a hard time about the way he’d left Carly, talking with Luis had also allowed him to revel in the sweetness of what he and Carly had once had.
“He was right,” Zev said. “I should have stuck around so we could have tried to work through things together, but I was too immature to realize it. Nothing has ever felt right without you, Carls. Something was always missing. Like I said, I knew in Mexico that I’d made a mistake by leaving, but what I didn’t understand until I saw you at the wedding, was that nothing would ever feel right because you were the something that was missing. I’ve been lonely for us. For all the little things we had, for our friendship as much as our love. I missed the way we used to look at each other and know what the other was thinking, our inside jokes, our stories, the way we could lie beneath the stars without saying a word and be happy. When I was busting my ass to make ends meet, I knew if you were there, we’d be having fun even in the most awful, exhausting times.” He exhaled a long