It didn’t ink, Caddie thought as she looked at the place where the octopus had been. She wished she’d had more time with it; already she was forgetting the exact shape of its golden eye. But there would be others, she reassured herself, and she moved off in search of them.

  She knew where Brian was because of his light. He’d wanted her to stay near him, concerned that she might be disoriented in the dark. But she had assured him she was fine, and he had grudgingly allowed her her freedom. At first they had swum in the combined glow of their lights, but little by little Caddie had moved away from him, until now a dark expanse of twenty or so feet separated them.

  The water was shallow—less than twenty feet—and she knew in which direction the shore lay. This freed her to enjoy her dive. Yet despite the thrill she felt from being there, and from her encounter with the little octopus, she was dissatisfied. This she blamed on her father. He had ruined things. Again.

  She blamed Hudson too, of course. Her father wouldn’t be behaving the way he was if it wasn’t for Hudson. But it was her father who was most at fault, due first to his failure to recognize his own feelings and, now, because he was shutting her out in favor of self-pity. She had said nothing to him about her suspicions; with Hudson gone, she’d thought things would return to normal. Well, she thought, whatever passed for normal when it came to her and her father.

  By now, she imagined, he knew. Hudson had been on his way to talk to her father, and why would he do that unless it was to tell him that his daughter thought he might be gay? She wondered how he’d reacted. She supposed one of two things had happened. Either her father had admitted that he had feelings for Hudson or he had denied everything. Whatever his reaction, she would be the one he blamed. Certainly it wouldn’t be Hudson. Even if he couldn’t face what he felt for Hudson, she knew enough about men to know that he would spare the person he cared for most. And that person wasn’t her.

  Goddamn him, she thought. Why hadn’t Hudson just left them alone? She didn’t think he loved her father. If he had, he would have seen for himself that her father had fallen for him. But she’d had to point it out to him, and he’d seemed genuinely shocked to hear the news. Most queens, she thought, would have taken the opportunity to bask in such a conquest.

  Unless he’s as clueless as my father is, she thought. As if that was possible.

  In the middle of this thought, her light went out. There was no dimming of the brightness, no warning—it simply died. It was as if the moon had fallen into the sea. She was floating in complete blackness.

  She flicked the switch in the light, hoping she had simply turned it off accidentally. Several times she moved it from side to side, with no results. She shook it and tried again. Finally, she hit it with the palm of her hand, hoping to jar something inside and force it to produce illumination, as if whatever was responsible for providing her with light had gone to sleep and only needed to be awakened.

  Having exhausted her options, she looked around for Brian. But she saw no reassuring glow. All around her the water was inky and cold. She shivered, afraid. Where was he? He’d been behind her just seconds before. Now she was alone. Instantly her mind filled with images of sharp-toothed sharks and many-armed creatures (not like the shy and gentle little octopus) that wanted only to drag her into the depths. Even as she thought these things she knew she was panicking, but she couldn’t stop herself. She spun around, searching for any sign of human life, and saw nothing.

  She went up, up toward the surface and light. It took her all of five seconds to get there, and when she arrived she pulled her mask from her face and breathed raggedly, convinced that she was suffocating. She found the lights of the wharf, and this calmed her somewhat. She wasn’t far from shore.

  Then the water beside her broke, and she screamed as something rose up, black and wet. When a light burst forth, blinding her, she stopped abruptly, and her fear turned to anger.

  “Where the fuck did you go!” she yelled at Brian, hitting him with her gloved hand.

  “Ow!” he protested. “Fuck. I was just playing with you. Didn’t you turn your light out on purpose?”

  “No,” Caddie said. “Why would I do something stupid like that?”

  “Sorry,” Brian apologized. “I thought you were trying to see if I could find you. I took a heading on you and turned my flashlight off so you wouldn’t see me coming. I was almost to you when you went up.”

  “My fucking light went out,” Caddie said. She hit it again, and this time it flickered weakly before dying again.

  “Those halogens are temperamental,” Brian remarked helplessly.

  Caddie ignored him and began the swim to shore. As had happened so many times lately, she understood that she wasn’t mad at Brian, she was mad at herself. Not because she had allowed herself to lose track of him but because she had been afraid. She had lost control of her feelings, been blindsided by the maelstrom of emotions that had sent her reeling and forced her to the surface. It wasn’t unseen dangers from which she’d run, it was the ones lurking inside of her.

  When she reached water shallow enough to stand in, she pulled her fins off and walked out of the ocean. She didn’t wait for Brian as she stormed up the beach to the car. Her anger helped her ignore the cold that gripped her, a result of the seawater trapped in her wet suit. When she pulled her zipper down, she felt what little warmth was left in her rush out and splatter on the asphalt.

  When Brian reached her, her teeth were chattering and she was having trouble making her fingers work. Brian opened the door and took out a towel. “Here,” he said, wrapping it around her shoulders.

  Caddie pulled her wet suit off and dried herself as best she could. She could do nothing about her swimsuit, but she pulled a pair of sweatpants over it and accepted the sweatshirt Brian offered to her. “Get in the car,” he told her. “I’ll take care of your stuff.”

  She hated to let him do it, but she did. Huddled in the front seat, she pulled her arms inside the too-big sweatshirt and hugged herself. Slowly she began to warm up, and when Brian, the stowing of the dive gear accomplished, got into the car beside her, she was able to speak without her voice breaking. “Sorry about earlier,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Brian. “Me too.”

  He started the car and turned on the heater. Caddie held her hands up to the warm air coming from the car’s vents, grateful for its touch. She’d never been so cold, and she knew that it was only partly the effects of the water and the night. It came from within her, as if her heart had begun to turn to ice.

  “Can I stay at your place tonight?” she heard herself ask Brian.

  He looked over at her, but she continued to stare straight ahead. Say I can, she begged, hating herself.

  “Sure,” Brian said.

  Back at his house, she went into the bedroom and stripped, tossing the damp clothing onto the floor. Brian, coming in behind her, said, “You should take a hot shower.”

  Caddie turned to him. “Come here,” she said, grabbing his shirt and pulling him to her. Her hands grappled with the belt of his jeans as she kissed him, and when her fingers touched his cock, he jumped back.

  “Hey, ice princess,” he joked, “take it easy.”

  When his clothes had joined hers on the floor, Caddie pulled him onto the bed. On her back, she spread her legs and wrapped them around his waist, pulling him into her. Her hands moved over his skin, craving his warmth, and his mouth on her nipples seemed to be breathing life into her frozen body.

  “I want you in me,” she whispered in Brian’s ear.

  He sat up. “Let me get a rubber,” he said, starting to stand.

  Caddie grabbed his hand and pulled him back to her. “It’s okay,” she said as she kissed him, and he didn’t question her.

  She couldn’t get warm enough. As Brian pumped against her, she tensed, trying to hold him inside where she could draw heat from him. But each time, he slipped away from her, leaving behind a pocket of cold that burned viciously. When she cried out, it was in pain and frustration at not being able to drive the wintry kiss of the sea from her body. When her nails scraped at Brian’s back, it was because she was trying to get at his beating heart.

  Afterward, she lay wrapped in a sheet that felt like a shroud, wishing she were dead. She was still cold, still swimming in that black sea from which, she realized now, she had not really escaped. Whatever faint light had been produced by her coupling with Brian had quickly been extinguished. His seed inside of her was slivers of ice, each one slicing through muscle and bone as it wormed its way deeper and deeper.

  “You should get mad at me more often,” Brian said, touching her hair.

  She shivered and said nothing. I’m dead, she thought. I’m at the bottom of the ocean, and it’s night.

  “I’m going to take that shower now,” said Brian. “You can join me if you want to.”

  Caddie closed her eyes. He would go away if she just stayed quiet. He didn’t know she had died, that he was talking to a waterlogged corpse. He thought she was still alive. But he was wrong.

  She waited until she heard the water running before she opened her eyes. She was going to leave. When Brian returned from the bathroom, she would be gone. Then he would understand that she had died. Maybe he would even grieve the loss of her. Not that she cared what he felt. Her heart was now a ball of ice buried in her chest like a diamond encased in flesh.

  She got up, reaching for her clothes. She would dress and walk back to her father’s house. She would creep up to her room and sleep. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t dream.

  She slipped the sweatpants over her feet and realized that she didn’t want to go. In her mind, the door to her father’s house loomed like a great dark mouth waiting to devour her. She couldn’t step across the threshold, not as she was now. He was waiting there, perhaps not alone, and she wasn’t strong enough yet to face him.

  She looked toward the bathroom. Steam from the shower floated into the bedroom. Brian was singing, badly and happily, the words to a song that had been popular the summer before. Caddie had liked it once, she remembered. She and Bree had played it over and over while driving to Laguna one day, until Sam had begged them to stop.

  The sweatpants she tossed away, rising from the bed and walking into the steam. When she pulled back the curtain surrounding the tub, Brian held out his hand and helped her step in. Soap flowed down his body in frothy white floes, dripped from his penis in heavy drops.

  She allowed him to wash her, even her hair. He massaged the shampoo into her scalp, and for a time the world smelled like mangos. Then the water was turned off, and despite the softness of the towel Brian wrapped around her, she felt the cold returning.

  In bed again, she burrowed beneath the blanket and pressed her naked body against Brian’s. When he joked that her feet were blocks of ice, she closed her eyes and fought back tears. Only when he turned off the light did she let them fall, silently and like drops of rain, onto the pillow.

  CHAPTER 39

  “Caddie isn’t here?” Hudson asked, accepting the glass of wine Ben held out to him.

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t know where she is,” he said wearily. “Probably with that guy ...”

  “Brian,” said Hudson, filling in the blank.

  “Brian,” Ben repeated. “Or, I suppose, it could be anybody.” Hudson said nothing. He understood Ben’s apparent ambivalence about his daughter’s whereabouts, but it was unsettling to hear the defeat in his voice. It sounded as if he’d given up and, to Hudson, set a tone for their inevitable conversation that he found dispiriting.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Ben said, sighing. “I do care where she is, and if it has to be with some boy, I guess Brian is preferable to someone she just met.” Again the tiredness showed through his words.

  “She’s just working through some things,” Hudson said.

  “She’s still my daughter,” Ben snapped. He lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s not your fault.”

  Hudson twirled the wineglass slowly between his fingers. He wasn’t so sure that Ben was right about that. In fact, he was pretty certain that he had a lot to do with Caddie’s current return to defying her father in the way she must know would be most hurtful to him. He wanted to tell Ben as much, but, selfishly, he feared it might place him at a disadvantage. He was ashamed of this thought and pushed it aside as soon as he recognized it.

  “This whole thing,” Ben said, waving his hand vaguely. “You know, what Caddie said.” He didn’t look at Hudson as he spoke. “She’s just angry with me.”

  Hudson nodded, but he knew Ben was wrong. He was making excuses, afraid to talk about what Caddie had said and choosing instead to treat the fact that she’d said it as the problem. Now Hudson had to decide whether he was going to be complicit in the deceit or whether he would force Ben to acknowledge what lay between them.

  “I don’t think her mother and I gave her a very good idea of what relationships are supposed to be like,” Ben continued. “It’s no wonder, really, that she’s doing what she is. Maybe if—”

  “Ben,” Hudson interrupted, making up his mind. He waited for Ben to look at him. When he did, he saw in the pained expression that Ben was begging him not to continue. For a moment, he nearly acquiesced. He didn’t want to cause this man any more pain than he already had. But then resolve rose in him like the sun coming up, and he said, “Caddie isn’t the problem right now.”

  Ben, silent, nodded. He drained his wineglass and reached for the bottle. Hudson, stepping forward, stopped him by placing his hand on Ben’s. He felt Ben freeze, and then his hand trembled beneath Hudson’s like a trapped animal.

  “It’s not going to help,” Hudson said. He set his own half-finished glass on the counter and released Ben’s hand. Ben drew it back and shoved both hands into his pockets.

  If they were going to talk, Hudson realized, he was the one who would need to begin. Ben clearly couldn’t, or wouldn’t, without some kind of encouragement. Not knowing what else to say, Hudson began to talk about Paul.

  “I told you that Paul was married,” he began. “I’d like to say that I didn’t know it at first. But I did.” Emily’s face appeared in his mind, fine-boned and pale, beautiful in its frailty, all blue eyes and hair the color of corn silk. He might have fallen in love with her, too, if things had been different.

  “Paul claimed not to love her,” he continued. “That was a lie. He did. But that wasn’t enough, at least not for him. I don’t know if she was satisfied with him or not. I never spoke to her, not once in the two years Paul and I were lovers.”

  Ben was watching him as he spoke. He’d leaned himself against the counter, and his hands were still thrust into his pockets. Hudson saw that they were balled into fists, as if Ben were trying to contain his fear by blocking its outlets.

  “At first I hated her,” Hudson said. “She was, after all, my competition, at least as far as Paul’s time was concerned. He always had to go home to her. While she got to sleep with him beside her, I got to sleep by myself, wondering if he was touching her. Wondering if he was thinking about me,” he added.

  “Eventually I just felt sorry for her,” he went on. “From what Paul told me, she seemed like a nice person. Even though I was the one her husband was cheating on her with, I didn’t like that he might be hurting her.” He smiled sadly. “Of course, I could afford to pity her, because Paul preferred me over her sexually. It’s not so hard to be compassionate when you’re the one partially to blame for the other person’s misery.”

  Again he thought of Caddie, and of his part in her unhappiness. “Not that Paul wasn’t equally at fault, of course,” he said quickly. “But he made excuses. He couldn’t leave her because they had a child. He couldn’t leave her because of the complications of divorce and money and a million other things.”

  He wanted badly to take up the wineglass and fortify himself with a drink, but after what he’d said to Ben, he didn’t feel he could. Instead he imitated Ben, stuffing his hands into his pockets and worrying the inner liner with his fingertips.

  “I didn’t want him to leave her anyway,” he said. “I mean, I did. But only because I wanted to be the person who won.” It had taken him a long time to understand that about himself, and telling it to Ben didn’t make him feel any better about it. It was a terrible thing to realize about himself, that he could see another person as a prize to be taken away from the person who held it.

  “I got used to the arrangement,” he said, glossing over the months of fighting and petulance that resulted in this truce. “And Paul seemed happy enough with it as well. Once he discovered the manuscript, we had a legitimate reason to spend a lot of time together. That made it easier. He told Emily I was his assistant, which I sort of was, really. She had no reason not to believe him.”

  Now he was getting to the truly difficult part of his story. He’d already admitted to Ben that he hadn’t told the whole truth about his relationship with Paul. Ben, he thought, most logically assumed that he’d been hiding the fact that Paul had had a wife. But that was only part of it; the rest was far more difficult to tell.

  “Paul didn’t die of cancer,” he said.

  Ben, who hadn’t spoken a word during Hudson’s telling of the story, removed his hands from his pockets and crossed them over his chest. “What was it?” he asked.

  He’s wondering if it was AIDS, Hudson thought, not without a spark of anger at the implicit homophobia in such a fear. But Ben’s face revealed no sign of disgust, and Hudson reproached himself for ascribing motives to his question. It was, after all, a question that had been posed by several people who knew of Hudson’s relationship with Paul, as if his infidelity presupposed him to self-destruction as well. He’d sensed beneath the surface of their concern for his well-being a kind of triumph that was repellent, a thinly veiled searching for evidence of their superiority to someone who would not only commit adultery but commit it with someone of his own sex