The Diver's Smile

The trouble started on the beach, day one of the festival.

We'd flown in on the Tuesday. Laila, twenty-eight, had been quiet the whole flight. Not angry-quiet. Focused-quiet. There's a difference and I've learned to read it over three years of dating her. Focused-quiet means leave her alone. Angry-quiet means leave her alone faster.

She was doing her warm-up stretches on the sand, right where the reef shallows out. Sun was low. Water that color you get in postcards and nowhere else. I crouched next to her with two coffees and made my first mistake.

"You're rushing your exhale," I said. "When you breathe-up, try counting it out. Four seconds down, hold, then release. It'll drop your heart rate before the..."

"Benji."

One word. I stopped.

"I've been free-diving since before I met you."

"I know. I just thought..."

"Don't." She stood up, brushing sand off her knees. "Don't coach me. I didn't ask for a coach. I didn't ask for you to count my breathing like I'm some first-year at a swim clinic."

I held up the coffees. Peace offering. Bad move.

"So what am I, then? Just the guy who carries your fins?"

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" She was already walking. "You were a competitive swimmer. I get it. You can't help yourself. But this is mine, okay? This race is mine. Go look at your coral or whatever."

So I looked at my coral or whatever.

I sat on a flat rock with my coffee going cold and watched the reef through the surface. Parrotfish doing their dumb parrotfish thing. And I thought about how I'd said the wrong thing in the right way, which is apparently my whole personality.

Here's my side of it, since nobody asked. I'm thirty. I swam competitively through uni, decent times, nothing special, then pivoted to marine biology because I like fish more than I like podiums. I met Laila at a regional meet three years ago. She beat me in my own event and then bought me a beer to rub it in. That was it. Hooked. Line, sinker, the whole tackle box.

We've lived together for two years. It's mostly good. It was mostly good until I started offering breathing advice on beaches like some kind of substitute instructor.

She'd signed up for the open-water race at the Coral Coast Festival back in October. Forty divers, a mile-and-a-half course over the reef shelf, and the deepest safety-margin rules I've ever seen at an amateur event. She trained all winter. Alone, mostly. She'd come home from the ocean smelling like salt and victory and I'd ask how it went and she'd say fine and I'd push and she'd pull. That's been our pattern for about six months now.

The registration tent was up by nine. I watched her march over there from my rock. Watched her fill out the form with that pen-pressing-hard handwriting she does when she's mad. Watched the volunteer flinch at whatever Laila said to him.

Then she came back, arms crossed.

"I'm registered. Solo entry. No support swimmer."

"You don't want a safety swimmer alongside you?"

"It's a marked course. Kayaks every two hundred meters." She shrugged. "I don't need a babysitter."

"I never said..."

"You were about to."

Fair. I was about to.

"I'm going to walk the beach," I said. "Check out the north reef for my survey transects. You want company?"

"I want to stretch."

So I walked the beach. Alone. Carrying two coffees like an idiot.

* * *

The welcome party was that night, on the resort deck. String lights, rum punch, a guy with a guitar who only knew four chords. Half the diving community of the Caribbean in one place, tanned and sunburned in about equal measure.

Laila changed before we went. Green dress. The one she bought in Martinique two summers ago. She did a little turn in the doorway and said, "Well?"

"You look incredible."

"Just incredible?"

"Devastating. Career-ending. Other divers will see you and drop out of the race out of shame."

That got a real laugh out of her. First one all day. I thought, okay, maybe the ice is cracking.

Then we got to the party and the ice reassembled itself, which is not a thing ice does, but she managed it.

She found her people fast. Divers. Actual free-divers, the deep crowd, the ones who talk about static apnea times the way I talk about water temperatures. There was a woman named Fran who'd placed third at nationals, and a big loud Guatemalan guy called Elijah who hugged Laila like they'd grown up together. Apparently they'd met at a clinic in Cozumel. Apparently they trained together sometimes. Apparently a lot of things happened that I didn't know about, which I learned by standing three feet away holding two rum punches.

I watched her throw her head back laughing at something Elijah said. Her whole face open. She hadn't looked at me like that in weeks.

And here's the ugly part, the part I don't love typing out. I wasn't just proud of her. I was jealous of the ease. Of how she talked to them. They didn't ask about her training plan or suggest breathing techniques. They just talked about fish and wrecks and the time Elijah lost a fin at sixty feet and had to kick up in just one.

She caught my eye across the deck once. Raised her glass a little. I raised mine back. That was our whole conversation for about an hour.

Fran's boyfriend turned out to be standing next to me, also holding a drink nobody was drinking.

"She's amazing, your girl," he said. "That pace she held at the Cozumel cup? Nuts."

"Yeah. She is."

"You dive too?"

"I look at coral. Professionally."

He laughed. I didn't, really.

So I made a decision standing there with my warm punch. I decided not to push. Not tonight, not about the race, not about anything. If she wanted space I'd give her so much space she'd need a boat to find me. Because pushing was clearly making it worse, and because I hated who I was at that party, some anxious shadow holding two drinks.

She came over around eleven, glowy and loose from the rum.

"You surviving?"

"Barely. Elijah invited me to a spearfishing trip I'm definitely not going on."

"He's a lot."

"He's a hurricane in a tank top."

She laughed again. Small one this time. "I'm going to stay a bit. You can head back if you're tired."

Tired. Sure. I'll take tired.

"I'll stay," I said. "I like watching you be happy."

That came out more raw than I meant it. Her smile went crooked. She squeezed my arm, quick, and went back to her divers, and I stayed on the deck being the supportive boyfriend of the year until midnight, when I gave up and walked the quarter mile back to our bungalow alone.

* * *

The bungalow sat up on stilts over a stretch of scrubby sand, all louvred windows and a ceiling fan that sounded like a dying seagull. I was in bed with a flashlight and a field notebook, pretending to log reef observations, when she came in.

She stood in the doorway a while. I heard the fan. I heard the reef doing its night-noise thing out past the porch.

"I was a bitch to you today," she said.

"Bit of one."

"Benji."

"You were. And I also poked at you when you asked me not to. So. We both owe drinks."

She came over and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. She was still in the green dress and her feet were sandy and she looked at her hands instead of at me.

"I have to tell you something and you're going to think it's stupid."

"Try me."

She took a breath. The long kind. The four-second kind, which almost made me laugh and would have ended me.

"I'm scared I'm going to fail in front of you."

I put the notebook down.

"That's it? That's the big secret?"

"It's not nothing, Benji. You watched me train. You know my splits. You know what my best is and what my average is. If I choke out there, you'll know exactly how badly I choked. There's nowhere to hide. With strangers I can just be some diver who had a bad day. With you, you'll see the whole thing. Every second of it."

I sat up. The seagull fan churned away above us.

"Can I say something without it being advice?"

"That's a very suspicious way to start a sentence."

"I mean it. Not advice. Just a thing."

She nodded.

"Okay. Here's the thing. I don't want you perfect. I've never wanted you perfect. I met you the day you beat me, remember? I liked you mean and sand-crusted and holding a beer over your head like a trophy. If you win Saturday, great. If you come ninth, also great. I'll be on that beach either way, cheering like an idiot in a sunhat."

"You don't own a sunhat."

"I'll buy one. That's how serious I am."

She laughed. Wet-eyed, though. That combination she does.

"I want you happy," I said. "That's the whole job. That's the entire job description."

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at me properly for the first time in days.

"God. When did you get good at this?"

"I've always been good at this. You keep hiring me for the wrong job."

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. Just that. Quick and sandy and enough.

"Saturday," she said. "Then we talk."

Then she went to brush her teeth like nothing happened, and I lay there listening to the fan, feeling like maybe I'd finally said the right wrong thing.

She came out of the bathroom in her green dress still, hair loose, and stood there looking at me like she was deciding something.

"Benji."

"Yeah."

"Come here."

I got up. I crossed the three steps of that little bungalow and she met me halfway and we kissed. Clumsy at first. Noses bumping. She tasted like the mint toothpaste and rum underneath it. My hands didn't know where to go. Her hands didn't either. Three years together and we kissed like strangers at a bus stop.

"Sorry," she mumbled against my mouth. "I'm out of practice at this."

"At kissing?"