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Felix rowed with his back to shore and the ship before him, their boat bobbing along with the waves between strokes of the oars. He squinted against the mid-morning sunlight glittering white on blue, and though it was still early he felt daylight slipping away like fine white sand through his fingers.
Another hour or two until noon, and some more until sunset, when the curse would force him to take to the sea again.
“Are you sure you want to waste your day on this?” Ingrid had asked as he prepared the boat for himself and one passenger in the faint light of sunrise. A gentle breeze had stirred the hairs on the back of his neck, and the crew shouted at each other behind him as they collected sails and dropped anchor before they hit the treacherous sandbar between them and the shoreline.
Her question had made irritation flicker in his chest, but he’d kept his tone level when he replied, “It’s not a waste.”
Ingrid’s eyes had darkened with a sad, apologetic understanding, and she’d rested her hand on his shoulder before leaving him to see to her own duties.
Felix didn’t know why he liked to torture himself, yet the closer they drew to shore, the worse the ache in his chest.
Annette sat across from him, devoutly avoiding looking at him with her arm dangling over the side of the boat. Her hat flapped in the wind, but she paid it no mind except to clutch at the top at a more powerful gust. A small carpetbag of her belongings rested at her feet, the fabric damp with seaspray, and she idly reached for it when the boat crested a more violent swell.
Felix’s grip on the oars tightened, his pace faltering as he sought for something, anything, to break their silence. Worse than the screeching of gulls wheeling overhead, than the lapping of the waves against the boat’s hull, than his own heavy heartbeat in his ears.
Why did it take so much courage just to ask her to talk to him when he once mustered enough to ask her to sing?
He licked his salt-crusted lips and tried, “Annette—“
“I don’t see,” she said at last, as if his voice loosened her own tongue, “why I have to leave.” She turned towards him, her mutinous gaze snapping to his face and her arms crossed. “I shouldn’t have to leave.”
They’d had this quarrel before - she nearly fell overboard last time, until he grabbed her and her will seemed to falter. A part of him had wanted more than anything to agree, but when Dimitri put his foot down and insisted (more gently than Felix had) that Annette’s place was on land and not at sea, she’d relented.
Until now, their first time alone since the boar captain interfered, and his own resolve weakened in the face of their impending parting.
“You already know why,” Felix told her. He tore his eyes away from her and concentrated on rowing again.
“Because of your crew’s stupid curse,” Annette scoffed.
“This is no life for you,” he insisted. “You’re a scholar, not a sailor.”
“I don’t see why I can’t be both!” she argued. “Turn us around, Felix.”
His jaw clenched and the knot in his abdomen tightened but his rowing didn’t falter. “No.”
“If you don’t, then I’ll swim back!” she pronounced.
That gave Felix pause, enough his heart skipped a beat in alarm and he lifted his eyes from the bottom of the boat to take in the long hem of her dress and her absurdly floppy hat. “And then what?” he demanded. “The boar won’t let you back on his ship even if you made it all the way.”
Still, Annette peered over her shoulder, but he didn’t miss the stubborn set of her jaw. “Because Captain Dimitri is the sort to let me drown instead,” she muttered.
A sigh escaped him, but he still said, “I am taking you to shore.”
“You’ll just be wasting your one day on me,” Annette said in an eerie echo of Ingrid’s own concerns, but rather than sad she sounded angry, her eyes sharp and narrow when they flitted to him. “And then what?” She seemed to wilt. “Ten years is a long time, Felix.”
“Exactly,” he said, and hoping the danger of her making good on her promise was past he resumed rowing. He gritted his teeth at the ache in his arms, but it was an almost pleasant - and distracting - burn compared to the one in his chest. “You’ll forget about us”—about him—"and you can do as you like without being bound to some asinine curse.”
“As I like?” Annette hissed. “No one’s taken into account what I like!” The boat rocked violently under them as she clambered to her feet, bracing herself with her hands on either side of the hull.
Felix’s jaw fell open, alarm filling him as he dropped the oars and tried not to rock the boat even more as he reached across the boat to her. “Annette, what the hell are you doing?”
“Swimming back,” she said. She carefully - for once, carefully! - pivoted in place, her arms held out for balance, though she wobbled with every bob of the waves.
Each one might as well have been a tidal wave or rogue in his estimation. “Don’t you dare,” Felix said as he lifted himself from his bench and waddled towards her, low so he wouldn’t jostle her.
But Annette dared. She placed one foot on the boat’s stern before glancing back at him and flashing him a smile that still, improbably, warmed his chest. “I’ll see you aboard the ship, Felix,” she said.
She jumped.
Felix leapt to the other end of the boat too late, after she entered the water with a splash, her hat flying from her head carried away by the wind. Warm, sticky droplets splattered against his face and chest, and her dress billowed out around her like a sail. Her arms thrashed as she struggled to keep her head above water with every swell, and he didn’t hesitate to reach over the stern.
“Annette, for the goddess’ sake!” he shouted at her. His heart raced against his ribs, fear trying to force itself up his throat - strong swimmer or no, she hadn’t the stamina to cover the entire distance back to the ship, not with her dress beginning to soak in the saltwater and weigh her down, and not while fighting the current.
But damn her, she tried. Unburdened by her bag or by her hat, her arms parted the water, before he frantically grabbed a single oar and steered the boat around in an arc.
She coughed as she went, a treacherous wave trying to force her under, and Felix half-stood to lean out of the boat. He grasped for her shoulders, her arms, the fabric of her dress, any part of her he could reach, and when his fingers latched onto her shoulder he yanked.
“F-Felix!” she gasped in alarm.
But one tug brought her closer, and he could grab her arms with both hands and heave her into the boat.
They fell to the bottom in a wet heap, Felix’s own breathing almost as harsh as Annette’s, less from effort and more from anger and no small amount of fear. With her practically lying against him, the water soaking her dress seeped into his clothes, and though it was warm he shivered.
They lay there, staring up at the blue sky and letting the hot late morning sun dry them. Felix let his frustration fade, let Annette’s presence and her steadying breathing in his ear calm him.
It was cramped and crowded with them both lying in the base of the boat, either side of it enclosing them, but at the moment he couldn’t bring himself to move. Instead, he mustered his words enough to ask, “Are you done pulling stupid stunts?”
She didn’t reply; instead, he was greeted with a sniffle.
“Annette?” He turned his head, lips downturned in a frown, to find her rubbing at her eyes. He lifted his head, suddenly uncertain that she was all right. He shook her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
Annette shook her head and lowered her hands before wondering in a tremulous voice, “A-are you r-really so eager to be rid of me?”
Felix scrubbed a hand over his face and pushed damp, sticky strands of his hair away. “Why would you think I am?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked, though rather than accusatory or angry like she was before she jumped out of the boat, her tone dripped...unhappiness. “You’re insisting I leave, and after today you won’t see me again for ten years if you want to see me again at all.” She paused to breathe before continuing, “And I know it’s because of a witch’s stupid curse, but you’re so...insistent.”
His fault for the misery in her voice, Felix knew, though he felt the same in the heaviness in his chest and the dread that only intensified the further the sun moved across the sky. Still, he needed her to understand that no matter how much he wanted her with him, she couldn’t be.
“If you stay and you join the crew,” Felix explained in a low voice, “you’ll come under the fold of the curse too. Is that what you want?”
Annette sucked in a breath. “I—“
“Ashe didn’t join up until after that witch cursed us,” he said, unable to keep the desperation from his voice. “We didn’t know what would happen until it was too late, and now he can only see his family on shore one day every ten years.”
She flinched against him, making it obvious he struck a nerve, but Felix swallowed any guilt that threatened. He needed her to understand what staying meant. “You can’t stay,” he said. “You worked so hard to reunite your family. Do you really want to be parted from them?”
“I either part from them or from you, is that it?” Annette snapped. Water left tracks on her cheeks, and from the red staining her eyes he knew they were not all from her careless dive into the sea.
“Yes,” he admitted, because it really was that dreadfully, awfully simple. His brow furrowed, remembering a different time and place when he disdained the effects of the curse, when they didn’t matter to him like they did to his crewmates, but of course meeting Annette would change everything.
He shouldn’t matter enough to her that she would want a life at sea, dodging pirates and monsters and storms.
They lapsed into silence again with only a chorus of gulls and waves lapping and rocking the boat beneath them. Annette slumped into him, a sigh slipping from her, and despite their wet clothes making it almost uncomfortable he wrapped an arm around her shoulders to tug her closer.
“You lost your hat,” he observed rather inanely. He slipped his fingers through her damp hair, made darker than its lustrous, sunlit orange by the water.
“It’s just a hat,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “It’s not like...not like I’ll miss it, not like I’ll miss you.”
Felix wondered if it was possible to drown without a single toe underwater as he tried to swallow the emotion welling in his throat. He thought he could bear it when he insisted he would be the one to take Annette ashore, and yet…
He froze when a warm hand cupped his jaw. He turned his head to find Annette staring at him, her eyes a shining blue deeper than that of a sunlit sea, before she leaned closer.
Her lips brushed his almost tentatively before she kissed him, her breath warm on his cheek the only warning. His heart raced faster as his eyes fluttered shut, and he dragged her closer against him by the back of her head.
He’d never been happier or so elated to taste something so salty as Annette’s lips.
But it tasted of farewell too, of heartbreak and a long, bitterly regretted parting, so when they pulled apart what could’ve been as little as seconds to as much as hours later, Felix couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze.
“I’m sorry I wasted our day and that you had to fish me out,” Annette said in a small voice.
Felix sighed - the same protest was growing rather tiresome - but held her tighter. Her head fit neatly under his chin before he kissed her hair and murmured into it, “You didn’t waste anything.”