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.

The RIB nosed through the harbour mouth at ten, sun already high enough to bleach the sky. Cora sat aft, hand on throttle, watching the bow lift and fall. Six students knelt in two rows, tanks clanking. Leo was port-side, mask pushed up, hair whipping. He looked green but kept his spine straight, eyes fixed on the horizon like he could will the nausea away.

She cut the engine above the reef. Water here was clearer, sand showing through in pale patches. “Entry point two metres, max depth eight. Buddy checks, then negative entry. Current’s slack now, but it’ll run east when the tide turns.” She spoke to the group, yet her gaze snagged on the way Leo’s fingers tapped his regulator, steady, counting.

They rolled backwards. Cora followed last, purged, descended. The reef appeared as an orange-brown ridge, kelp streaming like long hair. She positioned herself mid-group, fins sculling, scanning. A novice—Sarah, nineteen, gum-chewing on the boat—was already flailing, kicking up a chalk storm. Cora moved to intercept.

Then the current hit.

A cold hand sliding across the ridge, turning kelp into whips. Sarah yelped through her reg, spun sideways, arms windmilling. Cora lifted a flat palm: stop. She kicked forward, planning to grab the girl’s cylinder valve, but someone else got there first.

Leo.

He had drifted above the reef, body horizontal, fins motionless. The moment the water shifted he tucked, pivoted, and shot downstream in a clean glide. One hand closed around Sarah’s shoulder strap; the other flashed the hold sign. He dumped air from his wing, brought her level, then pointed to the sandy bottom three metres below. Together they descended, planted knees, waited. His movements were economical, almost lazy, yet every inch deliberate. Watching him, Cora felt something tighten behind her ribs.

She joined them, gave Sarah the okay query. Wide eyes, shaky nod. Leo released his grip slowly, checking she could hold position. Only then did he look at Cora. Through tempered glass his irises were magnified, darker, rimmed with silver bubbles. He tilted his head: should we surface? She signalled stay, five more minutes. He answered with the okay, fingertip touching his mask, a private punctuation.

They drifted along the reef, current now a steady conveyor. Leo stayed beside Sarah, but his attention kept flicking to Cora, quick glances that lingered half a second too long. She found herself demonstrating fin pivots just to watch him copy: knees bent, ankles relaxed, each kick a slow scissor that sent him gliding. The awkward boy from the harbour was gone; in his place a silhouette that carved through water like it had been written for him.

Near the end of the reef a narrow canyon cut through rock, width of a doorway. She gestured: optional swim-through. Two students shook their heads. Leo simply adjusted his torch and waited. Cora led, he followed. Inside, the walls narrowed, orange sponges brushing their sleeves. Bubbles rebounded, silver coins racing upward. She felt him behind her, the faint pull of his displaced water against her calves. Halfway, she stopped, let him draw level. Torch beams crossed, illuminating a feather duster worm, magenta plumes unfurling. He raised a finger, traced the circle of light, then pointed to her: your find. She shook her head, directed the beam to his chest: yours. They hovered, regulators exhaling twin streams that mingled, rose, vanished.

The canyon opened onto sand. She checked her computer: three minutes to safety stop. They knelt together at five metres. Leo’s hose routed neatly under his arm, SPG clipped, perfect trim. She reached without thinking, flicked a stray strand of kelp from his shoulder. He caught her wrist, not hard, just enough that she felt the pulse in his glove. For three breaths they stayed like that, connected by the thin cuff of neoprene, while the water carried away the heat of his skin.

They broke surface beside the RIB. Sunlight slapped hard after the blue below. One by one students hauled themselves up the ladder. When Leo’s turn came he paused at the gunwale, water streaming off his shoulders, and looked down at her. “Thanks,” he said, voice rough from dry air. She nodded, couldn’t speak, the ghost of his grip still printing her forearm. He climbed aboard and was instantly surrounded by chatter, but she stayed in the water a moment longer, letting the current tug at her legs, tasting metal again and knowing this time it had nothing to do with regulators.

The engine idled, bow pointed into swell just high enough to rock the hull in a steady rhythm. Cora sat on the tube, tank between her knees, drinking from a plastic bottle that tasted of diesel and lemon squash. The others sprawled mid-bench, masks off, hair wild, comparing how many bar they had left. Leo balanced on the starboard edge, feet dangling, forearms braced, face turned to the water. Sun dried salt on his shoulders in white commas.

She watched him watch the sea, the way his eyes tracked a gannet’s dive, the small satisfied exhale when the bird surfaced with a silver twist in its beak. He spoke without looking round. “I start uni in October. Galway. Marine bio.” His voice carried only as far as her; the others were louder, but farther away. “I want to work on mesophotic reefs, the twilight zone. Nobody knows what’s down there.”

Cora screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Plenty of people know. They just aren’t publishing where sport divers can read.” She meant it neutrally, instructor tone, but it came out edged. He turned then, grin not quite erased.

“I meant really know. Name every species, map every ledge. The kind of knowing that takes years of watching.” He paused, eyes on her as if she were water he was trying to see through. “Why did you stay here? You could’ve worked anywhere—Red Sea, Caribbean, research vessels.”

The question hit flat between her ribs. She looked away, across to the lighthouse that squatted on the headland, paint flaked to raw stone. She had grown up three streets behind it, learned to ride a bike on the cracked pier, lost her virginity in the car park of the same pub she still drank in on Fridays. Familiarity sounded noble when you said it fast. “I like the tides predictable,” she said. “I like knowing which pub pours the best Guinness and which boat engine starts on first pull. I like coming up from a dive and seeing the same hills every time.” The sentences felt rehearsed, a script she’d recited to parents, ex-boyfriends, herself at three a.m.

Leo nodded, but his gaze didn’t retreat. “Doesn’t it shrink, though? Same reef, same twenty metres, day after day.” He wasn’t accusing; if anything he sounded curious, as if she were a specimen he was trying to place. “Don’t you wonder what the same animals look like under different moons?”

She felt heat crawl up her throat. “Repetition teaches you detail,” she said. “People who hop never learn the slow stuff.” She thought of the way she could predict a current shift by the temperature drop on her cheek, how she knew which week the tompot blennies would emerge from their holes bristling with eggs. Skills earned by staying put. Yet underneath the justification was a hollowness she hadn’t noticed in months, maybe years.

He opened his mouth, closed it, then tried softer. “I just think the ocean’s too big to choose one corner.” He flicked a drop of water off his thigh. “But maybe you’ve already seen the parts that matter to you.”

The engine revved; the skipper yelled for gear check. Conversation ended, but the words kept moving through her like a tide she hadn’t ordered. She stood, tightened straps, felt the boat lift and drop under her weight. Leo moved too, brushing past to collect fins. His shoulder touched hers, deliberate or not, and the contact held an instant longer than necessary. She wanted to catch his eye, to offer some amended answer, but he was already sliding his mask on, already somewhere ahead of her in the blue she had claimed was enough.

She dropped first, rolling backwards without looking, trusting the water to receive her. The reef rushed up in stripes of amber and violet. The others followed, a slow rain of bodies. She finned to the head of the column and angled toward the swim-through, a throat of limestone that pierced the ridge like a bullet hole. The entrance yawned at six metres, dark, fringed urchins guarding the rim.

One by one the students slipped inside, torches wobbling. She waited outside, counting bubbles. When the last pair vanished she checked behind: Leo hovered alone, torch doused, silhouette cut against the bright sand. He tilted his head—after you. She kicked, entered.

The passage narrowed immediately, walls brushing both shoulders. Light thinned to a single blue vein overhead. She felt the water cool by a degree, the way it always did in here, pressure squeezing sound to a heartbeat. Twenty metres in, the group bunched ahead, fins scraping rock, someone’s hose snagged on fire coral. She gestured for patience, squeezed past them, began to untangle the line. Bodies blocked her exit; she was sealed inside a tunnel of neoprene and panic.

A hand brushed her ankle. Leo. He had hung back, letting the others move ahead, and now he floated below her, perfectly trim, one finger tapping his mask. Look. She followed his gaze to a pocket where the wall folded inward. There, half shadow, half stone, the scorpionfish waited, skin the exact mottled grey of the limestone, only the filament fins trembling to prove it lived. Its eyes were tiny rubies, watching.

She felt her lungs pause. She had swum this tunnel maybe two hundred times and never seen it. The creature was ugliness perfected, spines like broken needles. Leo’s torch came up slow, beam low, catching the fish without flaring it into flight. He held the light steady for her, letting her look first, the way you offer someone the last biscuit. She lifted her own torch, touched the glass to his so the beams merged, a single column pinning the animal in shared possession. Their exhalations rose together, silver ropes that twisted once and vanished upward.

The group ahead untangled, fins churning silt. Visibility collapsed into a beige cloud. She should follow, keep them in sight, but Leo’s hand moved to her waist, not gripping, just resting against the weight belt, asking. She killed her torch. Darkness swallowed everything except the joint cone of light on the fish. She felt the ridge of his knuckles through her suit, the small lift of current between their bodies. The fish flicked a fin, decided they were stone, settled again.

They stayed like that until her computer chirped, thirty seconds at this depth remaining. She nodded once, switched off her light. Total dark. She kicked forward, shoulder brushing his chest in the narrow space, the contact deliberate, skin to neoprene, nothing more possible here. He followed so close his bubbles tickled the back of her neck, warm bursts that cooled instantly. When they emerged the others were already ascending, silver chains of bubbles rising to the bright ceiling far above.

She let them go, hung at the exit, neutral. Leo drifted beside her, eyes on her face instead of the fish now lost in silt. He raised two fingers, tapped his heart, then pointed at her. Not a heart sign, nothing so childish—just an acknowledgment, steady and clinical, the way you confirm pressure on a gauge. She answered with the okay, forefinger to thumb, but held it longer than necessary, until the shape of the gesture felt like something she might keep in her mouth.

Above, the safety stop glowed pale green. She kicked upward first, not checking if he followed; she could feel him there, a second pulse in the water. At five metres she grabbed the mooring line, wrapped two loops round her gloved hand, and waited. He copied, closer than needed, their thighs brushing once before the current parted them. She stared at the surface far overhead, counting seconds, and tried to remember whether she had ever felt this awake inside her own skin.

The engine cut and the boat drifted the last metre to the pontoon. Cora killed the ignition, tossed the stern line to Leo without asking. He took the weight like he’d done it every summer of his life, wrapped it once round the cleat, then moved forward to catch the bow. The others were already on the pier, voices echoing off the sheet-metal sheds, gear bags slung over their shoulders, planning whose couch would host the Xbox tonight. She watched them go, feeling the same flat exhaustion that always followed a charter, but also something else—an elastic pull behind her ribs that kept her from calling after them.

She stayed in the cockpit, unscrewing cylinder valves, bleeding the last bars of pressure so the regs wouldn’t whistle. Leo stepped down beside her, picked up the first tank, hefted it to his thigh. Water dripped from his shorts onto her boots. She could smell the salt drying on his skin, metallic and warm.

“Leave the twins,” she said. “I’ll wheel those.”

“I’ve got them.” He stacked two more against his hip, muscles sliding under the thin skin of his forearms. Eighteen, she reminded herself, but the knowledge felt theoretical, like reading the depth off a gauge; the body in front of her was already a man’s, shaped by years of surf club paddles and rugby preseason. She let him take the weight.

They worked without speaking, falling into the rhythm she usually performed alone: rinse masks, coil hoses, check O-rings for sand. The sun had slipped behind the headland, air cooling fast, and the shed lights buzzed when she flicked them on. Moths threw themselves at the bulbs, dropped onto the bench like pale coins. Leo’s movements were unhurried, precise; he hung each BCD on its numbered peg exactly straight, the way she liked. She found herself watching the line of his back, the way his shoulder blades shifted under the damp fabric, and felt the same underwater hush settle over them, as if they were still suspended at fifteen metres, sharing a single cone of light.

When the deck was clear he filled a bucket, sluiced fresh water over the transom. She heard the slap of the brush, the grit scraping away. I should tell him to go, she thought; instead she wiped her hands on a rag and listened to the cadence of his breathing, slower than hers, almost meditative. The space between them measured less than an arm’s length, yet neither moved to close it. She could feel the heat coming off him, or imagined she could, a low steady radiation that made her aware of her own skin under the damp neoprene.

“Tea?” The word jumped out, automatic as a reflex test. She gestured toward the kettle perched on the tiny shelf above the compressor. “I’ve got the proper stuff, not the bagged muck.”

He straightened, brush dripping in his hand. For a second she thought he would say yes; she saw it in the way his shoulders relaxed, the small intake of breath. Then his gaze flicked to the clock on the wall, the one with the faded PADI sticker peeling at the edges. “I should head. My aunt’s expecting me for dinner.”

The excuse was polite, probably true, but it landed like a closed hatch. She felt the disappointment precisely: a soft collapse behind her sternum, followed immediately by irritation at herself for feeling anything. She nodded, already turning to twist the kettle plug from the socket. “Another time, maybe.”

He dried his hands on his shorts, hesitated. “Tomorrow? I could come by early, help you load if you’ve got the advanced group.”

She kept her back to him, counting to three before answering. “Eight o’clock. Don’t be late.”

She listened to his footsteps fade down the pontoon, the hollow thud of his flip-flops on the planks, the final skip onto the concrete. When the sound stopped she let out a breath she hadn’t meant to hold, then reached up and killed the lights. The shed went dark, the smell of rubber and brine settling around her like a second skin.