Vivian Arend - Whirlpool

Shit, even the sight of her beautifully curved handwriting made him react. He put down the notebook and paced to the French doors to stare out into the night. The ocean undulated with the rhythm of the waves. The harbor to the left glowed with an eerie haze, pale greens and blues reflecting off the water as a light mist rolled in from the sea.

The azure tones reminded him of the body paint Chelsea wore and this time his cock didn’t leap to attention. Ever since she’d walked out on the stage something had bothered him, something other than how dire his need to fuck her had become. A faint memory tickled the back of his brain.

He’d seen the blue before. The glow of St Elmo’s fire.

Jamie went back to an old reference book he’d found days ago, tucked onto Braden’s shelf, the pages yellowed with time. He traced a finger over the page, the words he’d read earlier leaping out at him. St Elmo’s fire—watchers, saviors—legends are told by sailors of the fortune of the ships guided by their light. Sailors recovered from the storm-tossed sea speak of mermaids bestowing the kiss of life to their drowning souls.

Damn it all, where had he seen that glow before? Jamie walked out on the balcony to stare at the ocean again. It wasn’t a picture he was trying to remember, he was sure of it. The water crashed against the shore and another memory intruded.

The rush of waves, the taste of salt on the air…

It teased him. Like the faintest of memories, hidden in the recesses of his mind. There’d been surf. The blue shimmer and waves, the heat of the night and…music. Jamie twirled and raced back to the computer in search of pictures from one of his earliest assignments. He flipped through the shots, one after another, until he hit a snapshot from New Year’s Eve. Party hats and tipsy faces smiled back at the camera. He tapped his fingers on the screenshot, over the shoulder of the people. This was a part of what he needed.

Black rocks on the beach. Black on white…

He remembered attending the start of the party, but not the end.

Jamie poured himself a drink and took it out on the balcony, descending the stairs to the beach. The wind picked up, cool on his skin as he sank into one of the lawn chairs clustered together under the condo’s umbrella stands.

The wind had been warm…

He tossed back the fiery liquid, letting it roll down his throat and burn away part of his restraint. He closed his eyes and leaned back. Breathed in the sea smells, the salt and the moisture. The organic scents of seaweed and flotsam.

The sweet fragrance of a woman’s body…

They’d completed their project. Palma de Mallorca—he’d been taunted good-naturedly by his friends back home that his first excursion as an archaeology student was to a location that was a resort destination for many. Even his stuffy parents had somewhat approved. Oh, they would have been horrified at the tiny pensione rooms he and the other students were housed in like the serfs they were. Grunt labor at a dig was not glamorous. Digs were not attractive. Dirty, painstakingly boring maybe, never life-threateningly exciting like an out-of-control Indiana Jones movie. But the excitement came for him in other ways. Digging deep into the past and recovering missing information. Experiencing new cultures.

The strong espresso served in delicate porcelain cups…

New Year’s Eve and it was time to party. Their month-long session of fieldwork was over. In a day they’d fly home and return to digging for clues in books instead of diving beneath the waves or brushing away millennia of grime and dust from ancient sites.

The brush of soft female skin under his fingers…

“Happy New Year!”

Jamie raised his glass again, the cries of happiness around him contrasting with the bitterness in his belly. He wasn’t ready to leave. The new find was too fresh, too unexplored to abandon without knowing what other treasures it held.

He stayed at the party long enough to see his fellow students slip away with willing partners. Jamie was drawn in another direction. He fought it for all of a minute before giving in and returning to his room to grab flippers, mask, snorkel and his headlamp.

Swimming alone was stupid. Insanely stupid. He turned off the part of his brain that screamed at him as he strode toward the water. He wasn’t really going to dive, just like he’d never dream of actually touching anything in the dive area without following proper protocol.

He had to see it once more. There would be no time in the morning before the rush to the airport, and if he did manage to wrangle a trip back in the summer, the site would look totally different.

Maneuvering past the security gate was simple with the key he’d found when he’d packed his bag. Actually, he’d found three of them, all copies he’d misplaced during the month at the site. He rounded the corner and headed to the farthest edge where the rocks cut down to the sparkling white sand, the jagged black boulders shining in the moonlight. The security fences stopped at the rock face, continuing on the far side of the next bay.

The warmth of the water wrapped around his skin like a caress, crawling up his shin and stroking his thighs. This was a part of what he loved so much about his work. The chance to be in the water, to work with his hands as well as his brain. His family had never understood his fascination with manual labor. Jamie smiled as he adjusted the mask and cleared the snorkel, focusing the headlamp to its highest beam. Then with a soft glide, he was away. He kicked his flippers with a slow controlled motion, his hands sculling before his face to hold his upper body at the surface. He didn’t want to dive. He wouldn’t disturb the site. A coin passed under him, the edge of green moss peeled back to reveal a flash of silver. A hunk of wood, the rotting edge of a chest. It was incredible this wreck had avoided being ravished and stripped clean before now with its proximity to the village.

He was there. The gridwork for the squares marked with metal frames instead of wood stakes like at an above-water dig. One square was clean down to the rocky bottom, the one next to it halfway cleared, and in it the open edge of a wooden box extended into his vision. Jamie adjusted his headlamp, the sound of his breathing loud in his own ears through the snorkel, air rushing through the thin tube as his excited gaze swept the area for one last glimpse.

It was gone.

He kicked in a circle to change his perspective. It had to be there. He’d found it just before they’d stopped for the day.

The necklace was gone.

He took a deep breath and dove, anchoring himself on the metal framework to shine his light deeper, closer. Seeing if the ocean current had moved the disk toward shore with the pressure of the tides.

Still nothing. His breath control was good, but not so good that he could stay down forever. After another few seconds of frantically tapping with his fingers along the edge of the wooden frame of the box, he let his death grasp loose and rose to the surface, sucking in clear night air. What the hell was going on? He was in the right spot, he was sure of it. A sliver of beach showed in the next bay, inaccessible except from the water, ragged cliffs towering over it. Jamie swam slowly toward the sand and away from the site, wondering what could have happened. He knew he’d seen the medallion. He’d showed it to a number of the team, and yet it was gone? He paced backward, letting the elongated fronts of the flippers drag behind him in the sand until he was far enough up the rolling waves brushed his toes.

The warm wind off the water dried his skin, the high salt content leaving a soft dusting of white behind as he sat on the sand to decide what could have happened. The head of the team must have already placed the necklace into the main collection. No student would have taken it and the tide couldn’t have dislodged it that quickly. He lay back and closed his eyes, trying to remember the details so he could draw the pendant when he returned to his room.