Chapter Text
They ended up on an island, because of course they did. The only surprising thing was that it wasn’t Kildare. But they thought it’d be a better break for Pope if they went somewhere he had no responsibilities, and Pope really, really needed the break.
They’d all insisted on Stanford for him, no matter how many times he tried for take-backsies after getting together with JJ and Kie. He was ready to give it up after the first nervous breakdown at midterms, but Big Hayward said no. Instead, they shipped JJ out west, and that held it off for another six months. Of course, then JJ got arrested for living illegally in Pope’s dorm, and after that he blew too much of his share of the cross gold on a penthouse apartment right off campus. It was better having JJ out there, by a lot. Thing was, once Pope and JJ were together, they just missed Kie. It was too fucking much like losing her to boarding school all over again, and they called it after spring term.
By sophomore year, they’d all fetched up at Chapel Hill where Kie and Sarah had started out—and John B for his one semester. After he dropped out, John B ended up running one of the local shrimp shacks near the ferry to Kildare. Worked his way up to assistant manager by graduation, which was a real accomplishment considering how bad he was at jobs. Kie almost didn’t graduate, because she only wanted to take the marine biology and conservation classes she was interested in, not the ones she needed for a degree. But when she came in only 4 credits off, Pope finally convinced her to bite the bullet and finish up that freshman lit requirement, so she walked in her gown with the rest of them.
Pope graduated with honors, summa cum laude—and generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, IBS, and a tendency to yank out his hair that peaked around finals every semester. He was good at college. But college came with a lot of competition, and he didn’t know how to be second best when it came to brains.
So when it came time to apply for forensic pathology school, Kie frowned and ran her fingernails across one of the new bald patches on his scalp, and JJ suggested the surfing was pretty good further south. Sarah and John B went backpacking across Europe, but that sounded way too white for Kie.
Even after the cross gold came through, they’d never really developed a taste for living like the rich. Plus, since Pope had sold it to a museum, they had “don’t worry too much” money, not “never work again” money. Especially JJ, who’d bought the black dirt bike, and a car since the dirt bike would fit his girlfriend or his boyfriend, but not both. Plus three plots of land. And a Grady White. Oh, and a penthouse apartment close enough to campus to spite those Stanford fuckers after they kicked him out of the dorms. So yeah, he needed to work a little more than the rest and thus when they landed in Belize and the surfing sucked, he learned to scuba dive. Turned out, he was pretty fucking good at it.
Of course, the bragging was too much for Kie, so she joined his classes just to beat him. Pope came along just because he liked the way JJ lounged so easy when he came home from diving each day. Pope liked the sea turtles, liked the quiet underwater. But he didn’t take to it the way the other two did. Couldn’t stop checking his gauges, running decompression equations through his head, even for the simplest of dive profiles. Of course, growing up on Kildare meant he could drive a boat like a local, so that’s what he did instead. If it put him with a bird’s eye view of his girlfriend in a bikini and his boyfriend in board shorts every day, well…they were there for Pope’s mental health, after all. And these days, it was getting better and better.
#
Island life seemed slower in Belize than it did in the OBX, at least to JJ. No fucking Kooks, for one thing. Everybody on the island was broke as shit. Only money came in with the tourists, and washed back out the next week right along with them. Even the tourists didn’t seem like the rich people at home, though. They were sunburned and happy and frequently hungover, and left tips as heavy as their breath. JJ didn’t mind them.
Kie did, usually bitching up a storm about their more demanding guests. Some days, he’d send her up top to sun herself in Pope’s captain’s perch while he ran down the line of tourists, buckling them into their inflatable vests, wrestling them into their flippers and coming up with extras of everything they’d forgotten.
He liked the energy of it, the way there was always something more to do. And it wasn’t bullshit stuff, either, like “Bring more bread rolls, JJ… Fill up the fucking waters while everyone pretends you’re invisible, JJ.” No, this was life and death, the only thing he’d ever really been able to sink his teeth into. Plus, problems were easy to spot as one, two, three. He was keeping people safe.
Here, he could play the hero six, sometimes seven times a day. And yeah, it was a little like babysitting, only with a bunch of toddlers he got to huck into the ocean, where they had to be quiet and follow along while he went swimming for a living. As far as jobs went, it was so good he chuckled a little every time he picked up his paycheck.
Far as the rest of life down here, mornings were JJ’s favorite. There wasn’t a mattress on the island big enough for them, so they’d smashed three together, filling up the whole floor of their bedroom. Their place was smaller than the Chateau, with a thatched roof and a wide, shady porch whose hammocks overlooked the postcard-blue water of the Caribbean. He’d wake up warm and a little sweaty, the ceiling fan stirring the air so it danced from Pope’s back to his, then across Kie’s bare tits because she never slept in clothes, anymore. The happier JJ got, the more he woke with a burst of energy, like HEY!, but he’d lay quiet as long as he could, because Kie would roll grumpily onto his chest and pin him down if he tried to get up too early. And if he’d had a stressful dream, Pope liked to hold hands for a bit, and JJ didn’t want to miss that.
Once the other two were roused, though, JJ’d make the acrid instant coffee they’d all gotten addicted to down here, mixed with a can of thick-sweet condensed milk. Swallow it down, then go for a swim inside the reef or a run on the sand. Racing Pope or Kie or some days, both. Other days, Kie liked to throw on a pair of John B’s old basketball shorts and a tank top of JJ’s he’d outgrown in high school, walk down to the end of the road, and gossip in Spanish with Ethia, the juice lady. Ethia sat most days on her dusty cooler, selling refilled water bottles of every color to the endless parade of bicycles and golf carts and dirt bikes that buzzed along the dusty main road. If she was gone, Pope’d come in early with JJ, and they’d get to work up a sweat hauling heavy scuba tanks down the dock, JJ enjoying watching Pope’s muscles grow back into themselves after all those college years of pushing pencils. So yeah, mornings were good.
Then again, nights might be JJ’s favorite. He was always flush with tip money he mostly used to buy the locals beers, because they loved to buy him rounds back. Just about every building was a bar on this island, or a hotel with a pool and a bar. Everyone had a dock you could jump off when you got hot, or use to thumb a ride back up the coast to their hut if they got too drunk to walk. After about a month, he knew everybody, and before that, they all knew about him. The three pretty Americans who were all together.
When they kissed in public, they still got stares, but only from the tourists. The locals knew the score and the whispers about them washed from one group of visitors along to the next until they didn’t have to tell the newcomers anymore. What a thruple was, or that all three were off limits to flirting. No matter how it started, that always ended in an energetic bar fight, and they’d taken out the whole wall of the Bonfire Club with the last one. Those gringos could PUNCH, went the local lore. Every week or two, still, some horny idiot on spring break would try and the betting pool at Maggie’s Bar would get collected depending on which of the three had landed the knockout punch. The smart money always rode on Kie, who hadn’t gotten less feisty as she got older: she just learned to hit harder. JJ was always a close but safe second, by virtue of consistent frequency of punches thrown. He was less angry than he’d been when he was younger, but maybe liked fighting even more now that he could do it just for fun, rather than necessity.
Pope was the long shot but the locals who kept their bets on him raked it in big the two times he was pushed far enough to lose his temper. It became legendary because the first time it happened, the tourist had to be flown back to the mainland to get his jaw put back together, and nobody ever found all his teeth.
The other reason JJ liked nights was the moment when they all got to go back to their place together. Laughing all their way home under the stars along the dirt road or catching a ride back in somebody’s boat, spray misting his skin. Even after years of sharing apartments in college, it always felt brand new to realize he got to live with them. Like waking up on a morning when the break was huge. Maybe it was because of their first, unlucky time together, but he never could shake the feeling that when they fell asleep together, in their customary heap of tangled legs and goodnight kisses, that somebody was going break in and bust them up. The cops, or parents, maybe. So going home with Pope and Kie, every night? Made his day, every fucking day.
No, the nights were probably JJ’s favorites, but every morning, he liked those so much he sort of forgot they weren’t his favorites, too.
This morning, the breeze was still cool and they already had all their tourists lined up like obedient little ducks on the benches to each side of the boat. Full house today, which meant his wallet would be groaning with tips tonight. JJ hopped up to give a hand onto the boat to a woman with a pirate-print one-piece and shining grey streaked hair.
“Morning, Miss Nancy.” He unwound the dock rope with one hand and danced her onto the boat with the other, giving her a spin. “Gonna be a good day in the ocean today, hey?”
“JJ, you didn’t set up my gear for me again today, did you?”
“Nah, nah. Stork did it!” He grinned, brilliantly, and handed her onto the bench where everything was already waiting. Miss Nancy was leaning hard toward her seventies, and she’d still do everything including carry her steel air tanks onto the wobbling boat herself if he let her. He liked that kind of spunk, in a touron. Which was why he never let her lift a finger. Her and her husband had been there for weeks now, diving with him and Kie damn near every day, and they were starting to feel like a part of the family of their little boat. The dive shop had other staff, had other boats, but Pope and Kie and JJ worked so well together they’d just sort of slipped into this one being…theirs. It was named the Boss Lady, and JJ told everybody it was named after Kie, which wasn’t close to true except that it sounded a whole lot like it was.
JJ rapped a knuckle on the ceiling and from his captain’s perch, Pope revved the engine and pulled smoothly away from the dock. Kie came up beside JJ, the ends of her waist-length hair tickling across his elbow as she finished her side-braid.
“You wanna do the briefing today, Butch?”
She gave him one of her peeking-through, sideways smiles that meant he was on her good side this morning, but she wasn’t going to admit it out loud. “Nah, Sundance, you’d better do it. We’re going to the Cliffs of Insanity.”
It was one of their riskier dive sites, and he did a better job of gently scaring the tourists out of being their dipshittiest selves, while still making it sound like a joke so nobody was pissing their rental wetsuits. He rolled into his regular morning safety speech, the rise and fall of his oft-reused jokes soothing, the way some people probably said their prayers in the morning.
He finished up with, “And we’re going to the Cliffs of Insanity this morning. Where the reef drops off into the dark, dark ocean. Right there on the edge, you can see the top edge of a pirate shipwreck from 1865, so we’ll go over and take a peek.” He gave them a crooked smile. “Unfortunately, we can’t go any closer than that, because the entire wreck rests below the recreational dive limit of…” He ticked a finger toward the ceiling, where Pope called down, “130 feet.”
“Thanks, Captain. So anyway, unless somebody brought their submarine, shipwreck exploring is out today. What else, what else?” He rubbed his hands together. “Oh! Don’t touch the turtles, don’t ride the sharks, if you don’t want to get a big old bite taken out of you.”
“By the sharks?” One of the teen tourists from Cincinnati looked worried.
“Nah, the sharks are chill. But Butch here will do you in, for sure.” He fired a finger pistol at Kie, who rolled her eyes at him and then turned on her friendly customer service smile.
“He exaggerates. But the marine wildlife is really friendly here, and they’ll stay friendly if we don’t teach them that humans are anything to be afraid of.”
“It’s just like a pretty girl at the bar,” JJ said, for the benefit of the father-and-son team of Russian bankers sitting near the end of the boat, who looked like The Type. “They stick around longer if you don’t go grabbing at them.” That got its usual laugh and he winked and turned away toward Kie.
“Zip me?” She pulled on the top of her wetsuit and turned her back. She was flexible enough, she could do it herself in her sleep, but all that hair was another story. He gathered up the heavy braid and all her loose strands, giving them an expert twist out of the way then skimmed his knuckles down her spine, saying goodbye before he closed the zipper and hid all her smooth, gorgeous skin from view. Kie’s wetsuit was skintight sleek black with wicked white slashes up both sides of her tiny waist and licking up her calves. She looked like a superhero about to drop into a bank vault, every time she wore the thing.
“Rock paper scissors?” he asked to distract himself because he was getting hard and his old swim trunks weren’t thick enough to hide that much interest.
They traded off leading and following, Kie and him, and he liked both. Liked guiding the dive, finding cool hidden sea creatures to show people and blow their little mainlander minds. Being the boss of everything. But he enjoyed taking up the rear, too. Watching Kie do her thing, calm as a water goddess in her own cathedral. Underwater, the girl didn’t move so much as glide. Her hair floating up around her shoulders, the beads he and Pope had tied into it last week catching the glimmer of sunlight from the surface.
In the back of the pack, he got to flit around as much as he liked. Checking on everybody, keeping them safe. Gathering up the stragglers and running them off on their own little side missions so Kie didn’t have to deal with them. That way, she’d be more relaxed at the bar later, maybe press a kiss into his cheek. Yeah, he loved to lead, but he kind of liked to follow, too, when the view from the rear was this good.
“You mind swimming clean up duty, actually?” She nodded toward the father-son at the back of the boat. “Not to be racist but…”
But they’re Russian, went the rest of that saying. They’d heard nothing but bad about Russian divers since they started their training, and as soon as they were guiding themselves, they saw nothing but bad to back it up. Russians were frequently a little loose when it came to following scuba rules, but rich Russians were the worst.
The thing about rich people was, they thought the rules stopped applying to them. But, as Pope liked to say whenever he dropped another dude in designer shorts off at the decompression chamber, just because you didn’t believe in science didn’t mean that science didn’t believe in you.
“You got it.” He dropped a kiss to the nape of her neck before folding the Velcro of her wetsuit securely closed, his eyes already zeroing in on a loose weight pocket for one of the Russians. Twisted hose on a Cincinnati one. And he was pretty darn sure Skinny Kid from France still hadn’t turned his air tank on.
He scampered down the line, fixing problems, and by the time he had everybody zipped and buckled and buttoned up, Kie was demonstrating the James Bond roll back off the boat into the water.
“Shit,” he muttered. Hadn’t had time to put on his wetsuit, which meant it was gonna be a cold one. But whatever, they weren’t going that deep anyway, he could handle it for one dive. He helped Miss Nancy into the water and handed her down her underwater camera that looked like something out of Star Wars. The group was already descending as he grabbed his own vest and threw it over one shoulder as he nabbed his fins with the other hand.
“JJ!” Pope called. “Wetsuit!”
“No time, I’ll be fine!” He checked his air gauge one more time, even though he knew Pope always sneak-checked his equipment before he went into the water, then cannon balled over the edge of the ship. His heavy air tank knocked hard against his shoulder when he hit, and he started falling, shrugging into his vest with its overstuffed pockets, then wrestling into his fins as he dropped.
He popped a little air into his vest and hovered into place just as Kie finished checking on everyone and turned to glide out into the dive site. He settled into the back, the quiet of the ocean slowing his thoughts.
He’d always known he loved the sea. The vicious toss of the waves, the glimmer of the sun across the water. The way the food was always free and plentiful, if you knew where to look. How to read its rhythms. But once he’d gotten to sink down into the heart of it, he’d never wanted to come back up. With scuba, he could breathe underwater. There was a magic to that, even before he learned how fun it was to move. On land, you had gravity and ground and that was flat it. Deep underwater, you were a king. You could swoosh or flip, hang upside down and never fall on your head. It was like flying, but with no wind, no noise.
Ahead of him, Kie twitched one white fin, the tiny movement smoothing her forward with queenly dignity, the water carrying her like she was its own. He never got tired of watching her under here. How still she was when compared to the thrashing, arm-waving efforts of the tourists. She tapped her tank, gesturing to a turtle who was rising just over their shoulders, unnoticed by everyone else.
JJ hung for a moment, breathing slow as the glimmering bubbles of his air sparkled their way back up to the surface, where Pope would be watching. His feet kicked up on the upper deck, reading a fat sci fi novel. He loved learning every rule of history and culture of a whole other planet that didn’t even exist, as if their own world wasn’t enough challenge for him. Even as he read, though, he’d always be watching their bubbles, tracking their dive and zooming over to pick them up early if Kie had to send up a guest who’d huffed through his air too fast. With a group this full, that would happen sooner or later.
JJ flicked his fin, backing out of the way as Miss Nancy eased closer to take a picture of the turtle. Still giving it space, her air bubbles easy and smooth. He couldn’t get why Pope didn’t feel safe down here like he did. It was everything wrong with the upstairs world, erased. Simplified. Smoothed.
Maybe it was why he was so much more chill in Belize than he’d ever been in the OBX. He got two morning dives and sometimes another in the afternoon, maybe one at night, chasing flashlights underwater like a bunch of kids playing hide and seek with the whole ocean as their playground. It was hard not to have it seep into you, all this smooth silence. The easy fun of it.
Kie signaled to him, her hand slim and quick. They had their own language down here, all cobbled together from shared memories and people they’d known in the OBX. Couldn’t be read by anyone else because it was way beyond the normal scuba signs. This one was a tummy rub like she was hungry, getting skinny like Amy Jean who ran the tackle shop. He looked up and sure enough, one of the Cincinnati teens was popping toward the surface, looking around like she was confused and flailing her fins, which was only pushing her up faster.
He kicked up quick and caught her, unzipped her vest pocket and tucked a spare weight from one of his overstuffed pockets to hers. Patted it with a quick cheerful flick of his hand so she’d know she wasn’t in trouble. Tucked her back into the pack as Kie brought them up to the edge of the reef, where it dropped away into deep blue.
It called him, sometimes. Even without that prow of a ship jutting up out of all that nothing, like the one day they’d seen the Royal Merchant come across the stolen submersible’s screen. All that blue had kind of fucked with him since this one time he’d swam with whale sharks, just a skip down the coast in Honduras. Seeing something as big as a shipping container emerge from the depths of the ocean would pop your eyeballs all the way open like, fuck, man. Anything could be down there.
The ocean was big enough to cough up ships and whales and myths and legends and you never knew what you were gliding over, when you left the fish-thick shallows of the pretty corals and jumped out into the Big Boy ocean.
He blinked away from staring into the blue, and the rail of that ship he was still itching to go down to, despite all Pope’s lectures about the many terrible things that could happen to you at that depth. Human bodies were meant for the lightness of air, not that weight of water, he was clear on that much. He flickered amongst the tourists, making sure nobody got tugged past the edge by the current. Pointed out a passing nurse shark, a striped lion fish hidden under a ledge. Those were invasive as shit, Kie said, but pretty. She spearfished them with vicious aim when the tourists weren’t looking and they’d cut up more than one lunch on the dock from the fruits of her revenge. Kie didn’t eat meat much, but invasive species ceviche was her favorite.
JJ just liked free food.
Kie’s tank clanged, not her quiet, ocean-cathedral tap of look-at-this but her sharp look-at-ME tap for dipshits. JJ looked for the dipshit and sure enough, it was the young Russian. Not accidentally slipping over the edge toward the ship but swimming down toward it. He looked back once, and Kie gestured him upwards…and the dude just kept going.
JJ went for it. He usually swam to conserve air down here, not for speed. But he had speed, if he wanted it. Honed by racing Pope to the next dock, blow jobs for the winner, swimming until his lungs blew out and his legs burned, even knowing there was no losing in a race like that. He reached, almost catching the edge of a rental fin, but the Russian slipped past JJ’s grasp just as his dive computer beeped a warning. 120 feet, descending too fast. Kie whacked her tank, the goddamn-it-JJ sound and he leveled off, hovered as he watched the tourist reach the bow of the shipwreck.
JJ looked up, but the father hadn’t followed the son. He was gesturing wildly, but the blessing and the curse of humans not being made for underwater was, they couldn’t make a damn sound that carried. Unless you had a wand of metal to clink on your tank, all you could do was shake your fist at your dumb ass son.
Kie was hovering at the edge, her posture tight as she watched their escaping guest. Miss Nancy beckoned JJ back up, worriedly.
Instead, JJ let himself slip down the last ten feet. 130 feet, deep as you should ever go without the huge rig of a tech diver or a fucking submarine. Deep enough to eat your air just as fast as living in America ate your money.
If that tourist was dumb enough to go even deeper with a recreational scuba setup just to see a boat, he was definitely going to try to come up too fast. JJ’d catch him as soon as he turned around. He slowed his breathing, because even if the tourist didn’t remember, he did. Every breath you took this deep filled up your lungs just the same as it did on the surface, but you were actually sucking down your tank three times as fast. Everything was compressed down here. Your brain, your oxygen molecules. Even thirty feet above him, Kie would be going through her air slower.
JJ looked down and fucking hell that tourist hadn’t stopped at the rail of the boat. He was still swimming, Kie’s tank clanging fast and angry from up above, like a warning bell ringing. And that asshole kept swimming, right into a hole in the hull.
He looked up. Kie gestured, fast and angry, the shape of a bandanna around a neck. Guy’s going full John B. It was their code for when someone had an impulsive, stupid plan. Used to be, that was JJ’s MO, but in recent years, John B had won that title for good and JJ was happy to cede it. Doing crazy shit had lost its savor when he’d seen how it would tip an already-college-anxious Pope into insomnia for days on end.
JJ eyed the space where the tourist had disappeared, back to Kie.
Thing was, scuba was a lot of complicated math figuring out how you could let a land-based person live in the sea for a few stolen hours without killing them. Those equations had been discovered the old fashioned way--by fucking up a lot of navy recruits, back in the day when they were still finding the limits of this whole breathing underwater thing. JJ didn’t get it, really, but fancy math all boiled down to pretty simple rules. Don’t rise too fast, don’t go too deep. Deeper you get, the faster your air goes. Deeper you get, all the other gases in your tank that ain’t oxygen build up in your blood, start to bubble and warp and fuck you up until you ain’t quite human shape no more.
There were a lot of ifs ands and buts, and Pope knew them all. Studied them until he could do dive tables in his head, no computer. And that’s why he’d quit diving. JJ remembered the day it happened. He’d shaken his head, said, “There’s too much variability in the system. It’s odds, not equations, and I don’t want to gamble with my life.”
Not even Pope could control all those variables. So he quit diving, and when JJ and Kie wouldn’t, he bought them the best dive computers on the market. JJ’s did all the math for him, and beeped when he was getting close to fucking it up. Usually, the beep of a rule being broken just spurred JJ on…except when it came from Pope. Sweet Pope, who was waiting at the surface for him, lounging long in the sun and reading thick books about aliens. For Pope, JJ obeyed those beeps like they were his god. And right now, they were telling him not to go any deeper.
Problem was, that Russian dude had been inside the boat for One Mississippi too many, and JJ was pretty sure he hadn’t been carrying a dive light. At this point, dude was either lost, or stuck. Either way, he wasn’t making it back on his own.
JJ looked up at Kie. She slashed a hand. Immediately no. Their instructions were clear. Save the guests, but not if it put a second life on the line. Plus, he didn’t know the rules past the legal dive limit because the one time he’d pushed it, Pope hadn’t spoken for three days. Not like the silent treatment, like the dude got so stressed he couldn’t talk. To anyone. After that, JJ didn’t push shit.
Except the clock was ticking, and the thing was, JJ could remember what it was like to do something dumb, then feel the darkness close in around you once you were caught. How you got scared, all in one breath, once it was too late. He remembered Kie, screaming from a sewer pipe before the water swallowed her up. He couldn’t leave this dude to die, like the dumb kid JJ had once been himself.
JJ jackknifed and started to swim, ignoring the sharp clang of Kie’s tank yelping after him. He’d wasted too much air already, waiting on the dude to come up on his own. He wasn’t coming; couldn’t most likely. But lucky for him, JJ was going to save the whole motherfucking day.