Page 11 of Prima
He doesn’t rebel at the thought of her handling his vessel—perhaps he really is on the verge of falling asleep.
When he returns to the lounging area, she has tidied away everything from dinner. This time he does change in the wet room. He emerges yawning, his hand over his mouth. She’s no longer there.
He lies down on the bench, closes his eyes, and realize that the lights are still on. But he’s too tired to move. Her footsteps come up from the cabin.
"There’s a sub behind us,” he manages to warn her.
“Yes, there is,” she replies simply.
Then she sits down at the edge of the bench, her hip pressed up against his right thigh. An hour ago, that much contact between them would have been unbearably arousing. Now it’s strangely comforting.
“When did you cut your hair?”
He hasn’t had long hair in years. “They buzzed it off at the hospital,” he says, his lips barely moving. “I had some external head wound.”
And he’s kept it short ever since.
“A pity,” she says. “On the other hand, maybe your magnificent bone structure was actually underserved by long hair.”
He snorts.
The silence that follows—is she simply looking at him?
“Maybe I should have collected some abalones instead,” he mumbles.
Her disappointment has stayed with him. Or perhaps it’s not disappointment, but bewilderment. He’s too worn out to unravel it, except to know that he figured into it somehow.
She picks up his right hand and applies a salve to the numerous cuts and scratches he has disregarded, her touch warm and slippery as the salve melts. “I wanted the same scallops because I wanted to be nineteen again—and falling in love for the first time.”
What a strange reason. The even stranger thing is that he understands, somewhat. “I want pink sunsets for the same reason, I think—even though I can’t remember ever falling in love.”
She ministers to his other hand with equal gentleness. “Doesn’t mean you didn’t, only that you can no longer access those memories.”
So much of his past is inaccessible, and all those he most loved lost to him.
She lifts his pajama shirt and before his sleepy mind can decide how he feels about it, his side stings. “Ow!”
“I don’t think you bothered to disinfect this cut.”
He didn’t. He noticed it during his deck shower, meant to do something about it, and promptly forgot. And now she’s taken it upon herself.
“Thank you,” he says.
Or at least he thinks he’s said it.
She cups his face. He’s too drowsy to wonder whether she means to kiss him.
She only says, after a while, “You’re right: Itwasa pink sunset. I forgot about that.”
ChapterFour
Ten years ago
So many islands. She once read that even in the Before, five thousand of the seventy-five hundred islands in the Ma-I Archipelago had no official names, uninhabited then, uninhabited now.
But back then, these small islands that dotted the western fringes of the tropical Pacific would have looked, well, normal. They still look normal, except these days normal means choked under a mountain of Plant Cover, their original bones only barely visible.
When a variety of formerly harmless fungi adapted to higher and higher environmental temperatures, their spores began to thrive inside the human body. But the successive fungal epidemics that wiped out 80% of the population at least left survivors immune to further infections. The mutations caused by a huge spike in atmospheric CO2levels, however, did no one any good except those plant species that spread like wildfire in every habitat on Earth.
