room when they arrived. “Thirsty?”
Taylor smiled. “Kind of early, isn’t it? It’s barely five.”
Michael walked over to the ice bucket and pulled the bottle out. “Hey, we’re on vacation. Besides, we’ve got a couple of hours before our dinner reservation.”
“Where are we eating tonight, kind sir?”
“Ah,” Michael said, gently pulling the foil off the top of the champagne bottle, then carefully unwinding the wire around the cork. “That’s a secret. But I will tell you this: this tiny li’l ol’ island here has over fifty restaurants on it, many of them world-class. And over the next seven days, we’re going to hit as many of them as we can.”
The champagne was wonderful, the sex afterward as powerful and as intense as anything Taylor had ever experienced in her life, and the dinner exquisite. The first few hours had taken them from a stressed-out midwinter Manhattan frame of mind and put them firmly on island time. It was nearly eleven by the time they left the restaurant, and just before midnight, they found themselves walking alone on a beach with their third bottle of wine of the evening and a couple of glasses. The Caribbean moon was nearly full and low off the horizon, throwing out bursts of silver onto the ocean’s surface that seemed to light up the whole sky.
Taylor slipped off her shoes and felt the warm sand under her feet. She was sleepy, exhausted, sated, but didn’t yet want to let go to sleep. Next to her, Michael walked silently, shuffling his feet in the sand. She took his free hand in hers and gently guided him toward the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, the water lapping softly against the sand. Taylor dipped her feet in the water and found it surprisingly warm.
She leaned over and put her head against his shoulders as they walked.
“Want to sit down and open this guy up?”
“Sure,” Taylor answered, smiling. “Although I’m not sure how much wine I’m up for. I’m a little tipsy now.”
Michael eased her over to a small mound of sand just ahead of the water and held her hand as she settled onto the ground. He eased down next to her and set the two glasses in the sand, then reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a corkscrew.
“It’s amazing,” Taylor said softly as Michael twisted the corkscrew into the neck of the bottle.
“What’s amazing?”
The cork came loose with a slight pop, and Michael poured two glasses of red wine.
“This, all of it. How can it get any better? I mean, this is perfect.”
Michael lifted a glass in each hand and handed one to her.
Taylor took it and stared at him over the top of the glass.
“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment. “I don’t know that it has to get any better. When you’ve reached perfection, that’s as good as it ever has to get.”
“Great,” she chided. “That means we’ve got no way to go but down.”
He reached over, clinked her glass gently. “No,” he said seriously. “Never. Never say that. It’s just going to get better in different ways.”
She lifted the glass and took small sip. The wine was as perfect as the evening had been.
“How’d I get so lucky?” she asked.
“I was just asking myself the same question.”
Michael leaned over and kissed her softly, sweetly, as a cool wind from the sea blew quietly over them.
The next morning, Taylor and Michael climbed out of bed about a half day earlier than she wanted, but they had an appointment with the dive master. At Michael’s urging, Taylor had signed up for scuba lessons in Manhattan, but had held off on taking her check dive until they got to Bonaire.
She went through the procedures, the equipment, and a test dive off the beach, followed by a quick quiz with the blond, sunburned Australian who ran the dive operation. The next thing she knew, she was standing in front of a passport camera having her picture taken for her “C” card, which certi-fied her as an open-water diver.
“Congratulations, love,” he said. “Now let’s do the real thing.”
She, Michael, and a dozen other divers hauled BCDs-the buoyancy-compensation devices that enabled divers to control the rate by which they ascended or descended-goggles, fins, regulators, and the heavy air tanks on board a thirty-foot dive boat. Taylor had eaten a light breakfast with a little juice and coffee, so was able to hold off the worst of the impending seasickness as the boat pushed through the swells toward open sea.
An hour later, they were farther north on the leeward side of the island, where the reefs were pristine and untouched, the water barely sixty feet deep and crystal clear. Michael had warned her that the first time she dived in open water, she might feel just a touch of anxiety, of drowning panic.
“Remember,” he told her as they sat on the side of the boat, preparing to roll backward into the ocean, “don’t forget to breathe, slowly and steadily. When we go in, let’s just float for a couple of minutes until we get adjusted.”
Taylor already had the regulator clenched firmly in her mouth. She nodded, pulled her goggles down over her eyes, held the regulator with her left hand and the mask with her right. Then she let go.
It was only a couple of feet from the gunwale to the water, but she felt as if she were falling forever. She hit the water, which suddenly seemed colder, and went completely under.
Her eyes widened, and for a moment she felt the surge of panic. She bit down hard on the regulator, trying to calm herself, to fight the urge to start paddling and fighting to the surface.
Then the BCD brought her to the surface and she bobbed there like a cork, her neck and face well out of the water, the heavy metal tank on her back now weightless. She looked around, and Michael was next to her a couple of feet away.
He brought his hands up like a referee calling a touchdown and then bent his arms into circles and tapped the top of his head with both hands. It was the universal scuba sign language for “I’m okay, how about you?”
Taylor forced herself to let go of the regulator, then brought her arms out of the water and mimicked his arm motion. She tried to loosen the muscles in her neck and to let her legs go limp beneath her. She looked down and realized it was almost like being suspended in air, sixty or seventy feet above the ocean floor. The water was warming now, her body adjusting, and she felt almost as if she were inside a womb.
The two floated there for what felt like at least a full minute, then Michael slowly paddled over to her and took the regulator out of his mouth and held it up out of the water.
“You ready to dive, lady?”
“I guess so,” Taylor tried to say, but she didn’t take the regulator out of her mouth and it came out as muffled gob-bledygook.
“I’ll take that at as a yes,” Michael said, slipping the regulator back into his mouth. Then he held up the dump tube off the BCD in his right hand, his thumb on the valve to release the air inside. He nodded. Taylor held her own tube up, her fingers tight, and nodded back. She watched as he pressed the button and his BCD began to hiss softly. As it deflated, Michael’s body sank slowly beneath the surface.
Taylor anxiously pressed her own valve and felt the BCD
around her begin to deflate. There was a hissing sound for her as well, and within, it seemed, half a second, her head was slipping beneath the surface into a silent, warm, thick world of blue.
As her head went under, she realized she’d closed her eyes tightly. Once under water, she forced herself to open them.
A small puddle of water had formed at the bottom of her mask. She tried to remember the procedure to clear it.
A few feet way, Michael had let go of his tube and was hovering just below her. He waved at her slowly, his hand fanning back and forth in the water. She waved back, forced a little more air out of her vest, and descended to his level.
He swam up to her, looked into her eyes through their masks, and reached out for her. He took her two hands in his, squeezed them slowly yet firmly, and she felt herself relax. She was with Michael; she could trust him and she was safe.
He reached for his relief valve again, held it over his head, held her hand with his free hand, then waited for her to lift her tube. He nodded. They both pushed the button and began sinking. Taylor felt the pressure rise in her ears, then let go of Michael’s hand, held her nose through the mask, and blew air into her ears to equalize the
