Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

“What’s in there?” I ask.

“A bed.” And when he sees the look on my face, he quickly adds: “I’m not suggesting anything. Just thought you’d be more comfortable. If you wanted to get some rest. That’s all.”

I squeeze past him and into an opulent bedroom. Rich cherry veneer, a queen size bed, a lounging area, a closet, a pile of pillows. It reminds me of the master stateroom in a yacht I toured once for a shelling piece I wrote.

“Is this the same plane we flew in on?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Ness says.

“You mean you let me sleep in that chair on the way here instead of telling me about the bed?”

Ness bites his lip. He looks guilty. “I… didn’t want you out of my sight. And it’s not like I could’ve stayed in here with you. Not then. So yeah, it didn’t occur to me to send you back here.”

“You’re just saying that now to be sweet,” I say, a hand on his chest. “You didn’t think that at the time. Not yesterday.”

“I did. I thought it all day when I had to leave you on Wednesday, when I had to put that note in your door. If it hadn’t been an emergency, I wouldn’t have left you. I didn’t want to go.”

“I’m so confused.” I place a hand on my forehead. “Why is this happening?”

“Get some rest,” Ness says. “If you want, I can stay out here—”

“No, I want you in here with me. I’m not confused about that. Just about… life.”

The room sways as the plane begins to taxi. I lose my balance, but Ness steadies me and steers us both so that we collapse into the bed.

“Should we be buckled up?” I ask, scooting so that my head is on the pillows.

“Probably,” Ness says, but neither of us gets up. We just slide back in the silk sheets as the jet accelerates, clinging to one another and laughing, and I feel young, dangerously young, like new love feels when you have no idea where it might lead.

We are entwined and kissing before the plane leaves the tarmac. At one point, I have to pull away and pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. “Only you could be cute doing that,” Ness says. I crawl on top of him and stretch out, so our bodies are pressed together from head to toe. There’s no pressure for us to get naked, to move too fast, even though we both must know our time is limited, that there’s no way this can work, that it’s too ludicrous to contemplate.

And maybe this is what dooms his relationships. Maybe his fame and wealth and reputation never recede enough for two people to simply be a couple. Perhaps I’m the one who’s Icarus, destined to get burned.

Ness rolls me over and kisses my neck, my shoulder, my cheek, the crook of my arm. I try to imagine what this is like for him. I’m so caught up in the absurdity of making out with him that it doesn’t occur to me that he might be feeling the opposite. That I’m overly normal. And then I see everything in a new light, and I feel sorry for Ness. Whoever he’s ever been with, there’s the pressure he must feel to just be himself, not the CEO of anything, not the son of someone, not the great-grandson of someone, but just a man. Maybe he’s looking for normalcy. Maybe he’s trying to forget that he was named after a monster.

Not long after the plane levels off, Ness gets up and says he’ll be right back. I take the opportunity to use the en suite and freshen up. I have to dig my toiletry kit out of my bag. Ness’s bag is beside mine, and I feel a twinge of reporter curiosity that I have to wrestle away. I feel guilty for even thinking it.

Ness returns with a tray. There are two glasses of fizzing champagne and a bowl of strawberries and blackberries. He sets the tray on the bed, and I ask him about the tattoo on his shoulder. I noticed it on the dive trip and again in the sub. He lets me lift his sleeve to study it.

“It’s the Crux,” Ness says. “Also known as the Southern Cross.”

The tattoo is simply four stars arranged in a crooked pattern.

“It’s the closest thing this hemisphere has to a North Star. It isn’t over the South Pole really, but it points to it.”

“What’s the significance?” I ask. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”

“I have, but that’s not why I got it. Well, not really.” He hands me a glass of champagne.

I take a sip and grab a strawberry from the bowl. “This is going to sound snobby,” I say, “but I was totally meant to live like this.”

Ness laughs. “You would’ve made a fine Egyptian princess.”

“And died when I was twenty from an infected tooth and then had my brains slurped out my nose.” I feed him a blackberry. “So why’d you get the tattoo, then?”

“Because…” Ness takes a deep breath. And then a sip of champagne. “I guess I spent a long time searching for myself before I finally realized I was looking in all the wrong places. College, marriage, work, meetings. When I got into shelling, I realized there was half a world I wasn’t seeing. Like the other side of a coin. Options I never knew I had. It hit me in Australia, off the Barrier Reef. I think it was there that I realized what kind of process my grandfather went through.”

“You mean from reading his journal?”

Ness nods. I take a sip of champagne and enjoy the light airy fizz against my tongue.

“So what’s your background?” Ness asks. He’s rubbing my arm and studying it.

“Are you asking me what kind of breed I am?” I pull my arm away from his touch.

“No… God, no. Not that. I love your skin. Your complexion is amazing. I mean—of course I want to know where your parents are from. I want to know everything about you. What I meant was, what was your childhood like?”

“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. That’s just usually what people mean when they ask that, so I get testy about it. My childhood was basically me and my sister sticking up for one another, people picking on us, black kids and white kids. Meanness is just as immune to color as kindness, as it turns out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Must’ve been tough.”

“We got through.”

“What does your sister do?”

“She’s an investment banker. She would tell you she stares at charts all morning and PowerPoint slides all afternoon. She thinks I live this amazing life, of course.”

Ness smiles and makes a show of sweeping his arm at our surroundings.

“Touché.”

He laughs. “Okay, so now that all that’s out of the way, exactly what kind of mongrel are you?”

I grab a pillow from the bed and swing it at him, and Ness has to block it with one hand and save his champagne with the other. “If I spill this on my pants, they’ll have to come off,” he warns me, laughing.

“If you really must know, my mom was from Antigua and my dad was from Boston. They’re both… they passed away when I was younger. I mean, I was an adult, but it was years ago. So I’m able to talk about them without turning into goo.”

“Can I ask how they met?”

“Yeah, well, it’s almost as good as how your parents met. Just a bigger spot in the sea than an oil rig. My dad went to Antigua for a destination wedding. It was for one of his frat brothers, who got hitched right out of college. My mom was a server at the place where they had the reception dinner. One of the other frat guys had too much to drink and came on to my mom, and my dad rescued her. Or as he used to tell it, he stole her away and was only able to do so because of the favorable comparison he made to his drunk friend.”

“So you’ve got island blood in you,” Ness says.

“Yeah, and Boston is a sea town if ever there was one. I think that’s why I feel lost when I’m away from the water.”