The Current Between Us

Cora zipped the wetsuit bag shut and looked at the clock: 08:47, thirteen minutes until the introductions began. She had done this same course twenty-three times since coming back to the harbour, and the script hardly varied. Regulators, masks, the mnemonic she still recited in her sleep—out of air, buddy breathing, controlled ascent. She could deliver it half-asleep, hung-over, heart-bruised; she had.

The shop smelled of neoprene and brine, comforting as old bread. She carried the crate of gear to the quayside where the new intake waited, bright trainers and sun-creamed noses, cameras already out. They always took a picture of the rusted compressor, as if it were quaint. She set the crate down, wiped her hands on her shorts, and began.

“Morning. I’m Cora, your instructor. You’ll breathe today, or you’ll panic. Either way, I’ll know.”

A ripple of laughter, the ice broken by her own practiced bluntness. She ran through the medical checklist, the liability forms, the number of metres in a bar, the golden rule of never holding your breath. While she spoke she scanned faces, cataloguing problems before they happened: the overweight man who’d suck air too fast, the girl chewing her hair who wouldn’t clear her mask, the boy in the faded black T-shirt standing at the back.

He wasn’t a boy, not legally. Eighteen, the form said: Leo O’Donnell, Dublin. Tall, narrow shoulders, hair the colour of wet sand. He met her eyes and held them without smiling, as if measuring something inside her. The gaze lasted half a second longer than politeness allowed, then dropped to the clipboard she passed along the row. She felt it like a fingertip dragged across her ribs and dismissed the sensation as indigestion.

When the forms came back his handwriting was small and precise, each letter sitting on the line like a soldier. She assigned equipment: BCDs by height, fins by shoe size. He waited until the others had lunged for colours they liked, then took what was left, examining the buckles before pulling the jacket over his head. Efficient. Self-contained. She approved, automatically.

They walked the fifty metres to the harbour ladder. She explained confined-water objectives: flood and clear, regulator recovery, fin pivots. The tide was slack, surface oily and flat, reflecting a sky the colour of dishwater. Seagulls screamed overhead. She finished the briefing and asked for questions.

A girl asked whether fish would bite. A boy asked about Go-Pro mounts. Leo said nothing, but when she dismissed them to gear up she found him beside her, squatting to rinse his mask.

“Dish-soap film,” he said, rubbing the glass with a thumb. “Stops fogging.”

His voice was lower than she expected, a quiet baritone that didn’t match the thin wrists or the adolescent scatter of spots along his jaw. She grunted agreement, annoyed he’d stolen her next instruction.

They entered the water in pairs. She watched him descend: slow exhale, fins motionless, the perfect Buddha fin-pose she spent weeks drilling into clients. At three metres he stopped, waiting, lungs relaxed. She swam down, adjusted a hose here, purged a regulator there, and came to rest in front of him. Through tempered glass his eyes were pale green, pupils wide in the dim. He blinked once, equalised, then gave the O-K sign without being prompted.

She reached for his waist to test buoyancy, fingers slipping beneath the weight belt. The neoprene was cold, the flesh beneath it warm. She felt the faint tremor of his breathing, the narrow span of bone between hips and ribs. He didn’t flinch. She tightened the belt a notch, told herself the thud in her throat was nitrogen nerves, nothing else.

They practised mask removal. Water flooded his face; he blew out through his nose, cleared, looked at her again—still no smile, only that steady appraisal. She surfaced at the end of the session with salt on her lips and the imprint of his torso lingering against her palms, like wax that hadn’t cooled.

The second exercise was fin pivots: head-down, feet-up, hover like a seahorse. Leo’s legs sank the moment he stopped kicking, heels dragging through the silt. He jack-knifed upright, grabbed his regulator, and stared at the gauge as if it had betrayed him. Cora tapped his shoulder. He shook his head, the gesture sharp inside the frame of his mask.

She swam around him, positioned herself above. With one hand she pinched the dump valve on his BCD, with the other she pressed between his shoulder blades, forcing a trickle of air from the vest. Her thumb found the hollow at the base of his neck; she felt his pulse hammering against the rubber cuff of her glove. She held the pressure, counting seconds until his chest rose, buoyant. His hair drifted up, dark seaweed in the artificial light.

He twisted to look at her. The mask skirt distorted his eyes, made them rounder, younger. His mouth opened slightly around the mouthpiece, a small oval of surrender. She let her hand slide to his waist, fingers spanning the width of belt and nylon and skin that must be there beneath. She thought of nothing, then thought of the weight of a human lung: two pounds, give or take, the first thing she learned in rescue class.

She released him. He hovered now, perfectly neutral, arms out like a crucifix. A stream of silver bubbles slipped from his exhaust valve and brushed her cheek on the way up. She signalled thumbs-down, move on. He answered with the same sign, slower, deliberate, as if the direction were a promise.

They practised regulator recovery: out, sweep, replace. He dropped his twice, the second time letting it fall too far, forcing him to roll belly-up. The hose snaked behind his head; he flailed and sucked in a mouthful of harbour. Cora caught the regulator, shoved it toward him, purged the water with a sharp hiss. He took it, exhaled hard, cheeks ballooning. A thin line of mucus drifted from his nose, pearling in the torch beam. She looked away, embarrassed for them both.

When they surfaced the class was already clambering the ladder. She stayed behind, claiming gear count, watching him tread water. Salt crusted his lashes; he wiped them roughly.

“You’ll get it,” she said. The phrase sounded like something her own instructor had told her twenty years ago, the same gruff kindness she’d resented.

“I know.” He blinked, clearing the sting. “Just hate being bad at things.”

She laughed before she could stop herself. “Diving’s mostly being bad at things until one day you aren’t.”

He considered that, then nodded, satisfied. They floated in the shadow of the harbour wall, barnacles clicking in the swell. She felt the drag of her cylinder against her shoulders, the ache in her calves, and still she delayed, letting the others haul themselves over the rail, letting the space narrow to the two of them and the slap of water.

Back on the quay she rinsed masks in the barrel, dunking each faceplate until the silicone squeaked. Leo handed her his last. Their gloves were off; his fingers were pale, knuckles red from the cold. She took the mask, brushed the glass with her thumb, and returned it. The brief contact left a wet print on her palm that evaporated before she could close her fist.

The students drifted toward the café for chips. She locked the cage, coiled hoses, feeling the day settle into the familiar ache of shoulders and lower back. Yet every time she inhaled she tasted metal, as if some part of the harbour’s silt had lodged behind her teeth. She told herself it was the regulator mouthpiece, nothing more, and walked up the stairs to the flat, the echo of a heartbeat still pulsing against the pad of her thumb.

She was kneeling on the rubber mat, shoving regulators into the fresh-water barrel, when he spoke.

“Is the Aeolidiella alba still on the Kestrel wreck?”

The name, Latin and precise, startled her more than the question. She looked up. Leo stood with a mask in each hand, dripping, eyes fixed on her as though the answer mattered.

“Where did you hear about that?” she asked, keeping her voice level.

“Paper in the Irish Naturalist. Last year. They said the white nudis were spawning on the starboard rail at twenty-two metres.” He shrugged, almost apologetic. “I’ve never seen one.”

She plunged a gauge console under water, watching bubbles rise. “They’re still there. Tiny, the size of rice grains. You need a torch and no silt.”

“I’ve got a 600-lumen back-up.” He hesitated. “Would you show me? I mean—after the course.”

The request hung between them, stripped of student–instructor politeness. She could feel the day’s chill through the concrete, seeping into her knees. “You’ll need nitrox if you want bottom time,” she said, instead of no.

“I’m certified. Enriched air, deep, wreck. I did them in Gozo last month.”

She sat back on her heels. Most teenagers she met measured dives in Instagram selfies, not gas mixes. “Why bother with a slug that looks like snot?”

His mouth twitched. “Because it’s there. And because most people won’t ever notice.”

She understood. The Kestrel lay a mile east, broken open by winter storms, visibility usually crap. She had logged a hundred dives on her own, hunting for the same ghost-white animals, recording numbers on a slate because it gave the descent a purpose beyond the echo of her own breathing.

She handed him a bottle of disinfectant. “Rinse, don’t soak. The silicone rots.”

They worked side by side in silence, masks lined like empty faces. When the last one was stacked, he stayed while the others drifted toward the chip van. She locked the cage, wiped her hands, felt him waiting.

“Down there,” he said suddenly, “everything slows. Like the world’s on a dimmer switch.” He searched for words. “Up here it’s all… noise. Underneath it’s just breath and pressure.”

She leaned against the rail. Salt crusted the metal, flaking under her forearms. “You get that in a harbour puddle?”

“Depth doesn’t matter. It’s the weightlessness.” He met her eyes again. “You must feel it every day.”

She did. She also felt the cold, the equipment failures, the students who cried when their masks flooded. But she didn’t say that. Instead she heard herself ask, “You free-dive?”

“Sometimes. Before school. There’s a pool near the house. Four metres, nothing fancy. I hang on the bottom until my lungs burn. It’s the only quiet I get.”

She pictured him alone underwater at dawn, hair drifting like kelp, the same serious face watching the tiles. The image lodged under her ribs.

A gull landed on the roof beam, shook out its wings. She became aware of the distance between their shoulders: eight inches, maybe less. She could smell neoprene drying, and beneath it something faintly metallic, adolescent skin and salt.

“I should close up,” she said.

He nodded, didn’t move. “Thanks for the tip about the torch.”

“Bring two. And stay off the silt.”

He smiled then, small but real, and walked backward a few steps before turning. She watched the faded black shirt disappear around the corner, the same shirt that had clung to his spine when she pressed air from his vest. Her palms tingled, phantom pressure.

Inside, she coiled hoses, logged cylinders, the routine mechanical. Yet every time she closed her eyes she saw pale nudibranchs on rusted steel, and a boy who spoke of quiet as if it were a country they could share.

She microwaved leftover pasta and ate it straight from the plastic bowl, fork scraping. The flat smelled of rubber and brine, same as the shop below, but up here the scent settled into the wallpaper, into her clothes. Through the open window the harbour lamp threw a yellow cone across the water; inside it, moths jittered like faulty pixels. She watched them while she chewed, counting heartbeats the way she counted surface intervals.

When the bowl was empty she left it in the sink. The tap dripped once, twice, then stopped. She peeled off her shirt and sports bra, dropped them on the bathroom tiles, stepped into the shower. The water ran cold first; her nipples hardened, skin stippling. She turned her back to the spray, let it drill between her shoulder blades where the tank had sat. Soap slid down her spine, pooled at the cleft of her arse, rinsed away. She closed her eyes and saw Leo’s ribs under her palm, the faint tremor when she pressed air from his vest. Her hand moved without permission, fingers splaying over her own sternum, measuring the space that had held his heartbeat. She opened her eyes, killed the water, reached for the towel.

In bed she lay on her side, sheet twisted at her waist. The digital clock glowed 23:17. She could still taste metal, or imagined she could. She thought of the way he’d said weightlessness, the careful shape of the word, as if he were handling something fragile. Her mind replayed the harbour session frame by frame: the hose drifting behind his head, the silver bubbles brushing her cheek, the moment his body had gone neutral under her hands. She shifted onto her back, stared at the ceiling crack that looked like a fault line. The warmth in her chest spread lower, slower, a tide creeping over flats. She pressed her thighs together, not arousal exactly, more the memory of pressure, of holding something steady in surge.

She reached for her phone, thumb hovering over the class roster. His name was there: Leo Murphy, eighteen, emergency contact his mother in Dublin. She closed the app, opened weather instead: wind southwest, swell one metre, visibility ten. Diveable. She pictured taking him to the Kestrel tomorrow before the others arrived, just the two of them descending through green haze until the wreck materialised like a sunken sentence. She saw him spotting the nudibranchs, eyes widening behind glass, the small sound he might make around the reg. She saw herself guiding his hand, torch beam overlapping hers, their bubbles mingling upward in a single silver rope.

The phone darkened. She set it face-down, rolled onto her stomach, face buried in the pillow that smelled faintly of her own shampoo. Between her hips a dull ache pulsed, insistent, familiar as nitrogen. She ignored it, breathed through her mouth, counted four seconds in, four out, the way she taught panicked students. The ache stayed. She thought of his voice saying quiet like a password, and the ache sharpened. She slid one hand beneath herself, fingers pressing fabric against skin, nothing more, just pressure, just the weight of her own body anchoring her to the mattress. She kept her eyes open, fixed on the crack in the ceiling, and did not move again until the harbour lamp flickered off at midnight, leaving the room black and the sea outside invisible, its presence only the slow lift and drop of her own chest against the sheet.