ecstatic cactus

And so on a moonless night when thunder booms and maelstroms spring up in the surf, the guards open the castle gates for a priest who staggers in out of the cold rain, and when Mother is told of his arrival by a servant she runs to meet him and ushers him to a chair set before the hearth. There he collapses in the red glow of the fire, drinks the mulled wine that Mother brings to him with her own hands, eats the hearty brown bread and butter and stew made from fish and leeks and potatoes. You and Dalton, just children, steal downstairs to watch your strange guest from the shadows. Mother kneels before the priest on the stone floor, waiting for him to speak.

The baby is sick, you see; he is six months old but he’s never grown much. You love him, but when you hold him he does not seem to know you’re there. Mother has sought the wisdom of midwives and maesters. Father is away at sea, and Mother worries; she does not know what else to do.

The priest drinks the last of his mulled wine and sighs from where he is slumped in the firelight. He gazes listlessly at the golden goblet, chiseled with the outline of a kraken, turning it slowly with his gaunt, gnarled hand. He is a dark silhouette against the flames; his long grey hair hangs in ropes. “The baby will die,” he says apologetically. “There’s nothing you’ve done wrong. It has to happen this way.”

Mother nods, not protesting, not vengeful, surrendering to the Drowned God’s will. But she begins to weep.

“You will mourn many children, but your bloodline will be eternal. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Mother says, but she sounds doubtful.

“It will rule not just the Sunset Sea, but all those of Westeros. I see bubbles rising from the depths. I see ships snapped in two and pulled under.”

Now, beside you in the clandestine gloom, Dalton’s eyes are alight; he was born hungry and he’s never known what it means to be full. He’s always been older, he’s always been braver, he’s always had the ruthlessness of a true Ironborn. You feel grateful that he forgives your many failings, for Dalton was born to be a great lord and a reaver, and he is the pride of your house.

But when Mother turns to the shadows, tears like gemstones on her face, it is you she calls for, her hands outstretched and sobs splitting from her throat. You cross the freezing stone floor on your hands and knees, rest your head in her lap, and watch the flames turn to smoke as she holds you.

Something striking your forehead, like a nail into wood; you jolt awake to see Aemond standing over you, silver hair, cold eyes, his right hand still hovering in midair. “The marriage wasn’t consummated,” he says.

You are in your bed. You crept there last night once Aegon was asleep and snoring, the women he fucked instead of you still tangled in his arms, his sheets, their skin shimmering with sweat and perfume. You peer groggily up at Aemond. “Did you just flick me...?”

“That’s not important.”

You remember that you are wearing nothing—your black lace wedding gown and thin chemise rest on the floor in a heap—and snatch your blanket up to your chin.

Aemond smirks. “Fear not, I cannot be aroused by a squid. And we have a chaperone for the sake of propriety.” He nods to his left and Floris trudges into view, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Aemond repeats: “The marriage wasn’t consummated.”

You don’t know what to say. If you accept responsibility, you’re a failure; if you blame your husband and your king, you’re a traitor. “How do you know?”

He scoffs. “Everybody knows. What’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

“My brother is perfectly capable of completing the act. He’ll do it with anyone. So what’s so wrong with you that it couldn’t happen?”

I don’t know. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know why he doesn’t want me. “Nothing.”

Aemond swats at your head and you yelp, more startled than hurt. “Stop lying.”

“I’d prefer not to discuss the most intimate details of my marriage with you!”

“The most intimate details of your marriage are what the survival of my family depends upon, and so regrettably I cannot afford to be unconcerned with them.” His glacial blue eye skates down the indistinct length of you, a mountain range beneath the blanket, a jagged cliffside, an atoll in the Sunset Sea. I want to go home, you think, but you’re already there. “Are you ill or deformed? Did you refuse him?”

“I tried my best,” you offer weakly.

“What aspect of it required effort? Being as you’re the woman, you just have to lie there,” Aemond says, then turns expectantly to his wife for support.

“You just have to lie there,” Floris agrees glumly.

“Leave my chambers now,” you command Aemond, and he should listen because you’re the queen. But am I really? If the king never claimed me?

Instead, he leans in and grabs your throat, ignores it when you scream, pins you to the headboard of the bed where Helaena slept only one month ago, before her son was decapitated and her windpipe was slit to the bone. Even Floris is alarmed, her dark eyes wide and darting to the door as if hoping for someone to interrupt. “Until the marriage is consummated, it is invalid in the eyes of the Faith and the laws of man,” Aemond says. “It can be undone. And everything we’ve worked for will fall apart too. At this very moment, your brother is amassing his ships in Blackwater Bay. I’d like to keep them there. But you’re jeopardizing that. Which means you are endangering the family I have left.”

Aemond releases you and you gasp for air, staring up at him, incredulous, horrified, rubbing the front of your neck like tracing the chain of a necklace. Floris looks away, embarrassed.

Aemond says: “Breakfast is in an hour. Meet us in the gardens.” Then he leaves, Floris swishing after him in her seaweed-colored gown. She pauses in the doorway to give you a tight, rueful smile and then vanishes too.

You flop down onto the feather mattress and gaze miserably up at the canopy, green tapestries and gold dragons, another family’s sigil, another woman’s life. What’s there to be afraid of? you had said to Dalton the day before you left the Iron Islands. You thought you had been prepared for every eventuality: a tyrant of a husband, the perils of war, pain on your wedding night or during pregnancy or in childbirth, battles, storms, the rage of dragons, the frailty of flesh, death by water, death by fire, death by blood. But you never could have predicted this. You don’t even understand what it is.

But there is nothing to be accomplished through idleness. You get up and go to the driftwood trunks containing your possessions, delivered yesterday by servants and left carelessly in the middle of the floor, on top of the rug that makes you think of the bloodstained stone underneath. You hastily throw on trousers, boots, a tunic, a belt with a sheath to hold your knife with a short dull blade in case you find any oysters. Before you leave the room, you pick up your wedding gown—before a maid has had the chance to whisk it away to be washed—and take the marble-sized green pearl out of the pocket hidden in the skirt. You contemplate it; you had planned to gift it to your husband, but that’s not possible now. There’s nothing to celebrate. You walk to the vanity, open one of the dead queen’s jewelry boxes, and maroon the dark pearl in a tiny rectangular sea of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethysts, flecks of moonstone and dragonglass.

They haven’t moved any of her things. It’s like she’s still here. Then you close the jewelry box and flee from this haunted bedchamber so you can go to where you think best.

When you pass Aegon’s chambers, the door is closed and the rooms beyond it silent. You get lost three times trying to find your way down to the beach. You don’t ask for help, and no one offers; courtiers gawk at you like dead fish, servants flit by invisibly. Eventually you stumble upon a long winding staircase of sand-colored stone and descend it to the shore, where calm crystalline waves lap and sunlight gleams blindingly off the crests. It’s too bright, and too hot, and there’s no sea spray or fog in the air, but just like you always did on the Iron Islands you begin running and you don’t stop until your lungs are on fire and your muscles turn weak and trembling. You traverse a narrow, craggy jetty of stones and collapse facedown at the end of it, one cheek resting against sun-sweltering rock, one hand dipped into the tranquil clear water.

What am I going to do?

Then you remind yourself, because there is no greater sin than weakness: I’m not so far from the sea. I’m not so far from the Drowned God. He brought me here, He kept our ship afloat and my arrows on the mark. He must want me to be the queen.

You hear a rumbling, mournful cry from the Dragonpit, and pick up your head to look at the dome that looms over the cliffside. Dreamfyre? you wonder, the beast who lost her rider. You don’t envy the Targaryens their dragons; you don’t think you’d ever want to fly. But a monster that rules the sea instead of the sky...you cannot deny the magic in such a notion.

You turn back to Blackwater Bay, and there is a twisting red flash of something beneath the waterline, another gift from the Drowned God. You smile and reach for the knife at your belt.

Everyone at the table is so ensnared in a tense discussion—something about Daemon and the Riverlands—that they don’t notice you approaching. You set down the platter and they recoil; Alicent shrieks and Sir Criston Cole whirls towards her and reaches instinctively for his sword.

“What is that?!” Otto Hightower demands, covering his mouth, appalled, nauseated. Aemond glares venomously at you; Floris seems afraid for you, a palm pressed to her heaving chest. The king, your supposed husband, does not look at you but only nurses his wine and stares at the curled, blistered tentacles with glazed eyes, his skin sickly pale, his silver hair hanging limply. The table is cluttered with a kaleidoscope of vibrant fruits, goblets of wine, tea, milk, cheeses, cakes wet with jams and creams and honey. There is only one empty chair, the place setting next to Aegon. You remain standing; it feels wrong to be so close to him. A warm breeze rocks through rose bushes and rattles windchimes.

“It’s an octopus,” you say, bewildered by their reactions. “They bring good fortune, and they’re very hard to catch. You don’t eat them here?”

“Why would anyone eat an octopus?!” Otto exclaims.

“Octopus is better for breakfast than honey and cakes and fruit. It’ll keep you full longer.”

“And you...” Sir Criston points to the platter. “You...cooked this...?”

“I found it in the bay and got butter and herbs from the castle kitchen.” The cooks and scullery maids had observed this with slack-jawed astonishment, and by the time they thought to offer assistance you were already gone. “And the platter too, of course. Then I made a fire on the beach. Octopus doesn’t take long, you just spear it on sticks and hold it over the flames for a while.”

There is a lengthy, uneasy silence as they goggle at the octopus. “Well...that was very thoughtful!” Alicent manages at last, forcing an anemic smile. There are threads of grey in her coppery hair and deep lines branching out from her large, well-dark eyes. She looks like she hasn’t slept for a hundred years. Or perhaps only for the past month, reliving her daughter’s murder again and again and again—

“And what are you wearing?” Otto snaps.

You glance down at your trousers and tunic and boots, all wet and freckled with sand. “I thought it was alright for breakfast with the family. This isn’t a public spectacle, is it? We haven’t invited the court.”

“You are always at court,” Otto says, growling, menacing. “You are always being watched and judged as our queen. You must conduct yourself accordingly.”

Aemond turns to his grandsire. “We should have negotiated harder for that Celtigar girl.”

Otto sighs. “Alas, Lord Bartimos could not be coaxed from Rhaenyra’s side.”

“Or a Caswell or a Costayne to improve our support in the Reach.”

Alicent is nodding wistfully as she sips her tea. “I have some cousins who are Costaynes. They were always good people.”

Otto says: “Except for Polly, that hog.”

“Yes, perhaps not Polly,” Alicent concedes.

“And now where do we find ourselves?” Aemond asks his family bitterly, biting into a fireplum, violet juice on his lips. “Diluting our bloodlines with the mud and ignorance of the First Men. Contaminating our lineage. Thinning our magic. How are we to claim to be the truest of the Targaryens? Aegon’s children with a Greyjoy will appear no more Valyrian than the Strong bastards. Assuming they can manage to produce any at all.”

Otto, Alicent, and Criston shift uncomfortably in their seats; no one wants to ask why you remain a maiden the morning after your wedding. Floris stays very quiet, as if hoping Aemond will forget that the Baratheons have a great deal of blood from the First Men as well and that thus her own children will be ordinary in appearance and ever-farther from the enchantments of Old Valyria.

Criston says pragmatically: “We needed ships and an army, now we have ships and an army.”

Aegon looks up at you, only briefly, but you see no wrath from last night in his drawn face, no fire, no blood. What you glimpse there instead is shame, and what else? Something swimming in his glassy blue eyes. He reminds you of unarmed men, of boys knocked to the ground in a castle courtyard. Remorse, you think. You sit down beside him and everyone flinches. The last person who sat in this chair, you realize, was Helaena. You use your fork to stab one of the tentacles, lift it from the platter, and gnaw on it. No one else touches the octopus.

“You’re late,” Aemond says to you.

“No I’m not.”

“I told you breakfast was in one hour.”

You aren’t sure how to respond; you aren’t even exactly sure how long an hour is. On the Iron Islands, arrangements are made differently: around dawn, around dusk, around midday, perhaps later, whenever I get back from sailing. “I was running.”

“Running where?”

“On the beach,” you clarify. “I run every morning. It helps me think.”

Aemond smirks. “A squid would require assistance thinking.”

“And I need someplace to practice my archery.”

“Archery?” Otto says as if he must have misheard. “There will be no archery for you.”

You are stunned; you are heartbroken. “Why, my lord?”

“You will preserve your strength for the most vital task at hand, which is the consummation of your marriage and the production of heirs.” Then he gives you a patient smile, tilting his head to the side. “What did he do to horrify you?”

You hesitate. Whose error was it really? You insulted him, he abandoned you. You imagined him to be someone different. He did not consent to your arrival at all. But if Aegon is truly your husband, he is owed your allegiance. “What?”

Otto gestures to Aegon, who stares back at his grandsire with dull impotent hatred. Dalton, only the Lord of the Iron Islands, sits at the head of every table he visits; Aegon, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, is a begrudged guest in his own castle. Aemond is seated at the head in his place. “I have no doubt he inflicted some depravity upon you. Something that would scandalize even an Ironborn. Go on and tell us, so that we can properly chastise him.”

Aegon waits for you to tell them what he did, and when you don’t he’s not just shocked. He’s grateful too. “Nothing,” you say, eating your tentacle.

“Nothing,” Otto echoes flatly.

“The king treated me with every courtesy.”

Otto raises an eyebrow, then redirects his attention to Aegon. Aemond, Floris, Alicent, and Criston turn to him as well. “Nothing? Then what was the impediment?”

The king grabs his fork and serves himself a piece of octopus from the platter. After a moment, Floris follows suit, nibbling cautiously at the tip of a tentacle as if it might seek vengeance from the grave. Aegon says: “It just wasn’t the right time.”

Otto is incredulous. “What were you waiting for?”

“We needed to get better acquainted.”

“There’s plenty of time for that after the wedding is consummated! We know there is no lack of ability on your part. There is nothing that should have stopped you from legitimizing this alliance and securing the survival of our family. You have behaved irresponsibly, and selfishly, and utterly unlike a king.”

Aegon thumps his elbows on the table, clasps his hands together, and says sarcastically: “Would you like me to rape her, Grandsire?”

Otto Hightower is puzzled. “She’s your wife. There’s no such thing.”

You, Aegon, Floris, Alicent, and Criston all gape at him, dismayed. Only Aemond nods as he finishes his fireplum and licks the juice off the pit. Then he says: “Make them have a bedding ceremony.”

“Her brother would not consent to it,” Otto replies, clearly vexed.

“She may practice her archery,” Aegon says. He is chewing his octopus with great determination and in a manner that suggests he’s not enjoying it.

“She may not,” Otto counters.

Criston tells you: “We have targets set up in the castle courtyard, Your Grace. You may use them, if you wish.”

“I need moving targets.” Now it is you they all stare at, and you explain: “It’s not often that men stand still in battle.”

Otto chuckles dismissively. “You will not see battle.”

“None of us know how the war will progress, my lord. If I can be of use to the people of King’s Landing, I would like to have that opportunity.” And the Drowned God commands us to be brave.

“The Kingswood would suffice if we were in peacetime, Your Grace,” Criston says. “It’s too dangerous now, with assassins and traitors lurking in every shadow...” A burdened silence, dripping with blood. “But when the war is past, you would enjoy it, I think. There are deer and pheasants and turkeys.”

“And wild boar, Criston,” Alicent scolds him. “It’s no place for a lady.”

“Good thing she isn’t one of those,” Aemond says, starting in on another fireplum.

“Perhaps the Godswood?” Criston suggests. “It’s within the castle walls, and there are small creatures, squirrels and chipmunks and the like. And birds, of course.”

“This is ridiculous,” Otto says.

“She may practice her archery,” Aegon repeats, gazing fearsomely around the table. And suddenly he appears taller, older, like a man who could kill if he wished to.

“It’s improper,” Otto says. “It’s not our custom.”

“I am the king, do you remember, Grandsire? You put me there. And what do I ask for from any of you? What do I receive?” The king’s eyes glitter with resentment, perhaps a lifetime of it. “Let her do what she wants.”

Otto drums his fingers against the table. “Very well, she may indulge in such pursuits until she is with child. Then she must rest, for all of our sakes. You have only one son left, sweet young Maelor. Others must follow.” He looks severely from you to the king and then back again. “Tonight, this marriage becomes valid.”

“Tonight,” Aegon agrees, but now his eyes are downcast again.

“Tonight,” you vow, unable to fathom this stranger parting your legs and sinking into you, footprints in wet sand, an arrow pierced through flesh.

Otto mumbles, shaking his head and chomping on a lemon cake: “Virgin wives, warrior queens...everything is so out of order.”

“The Targaryens have sent women to war, haven’t they?” you ask. You cannot claim to know their history well, but you’ve heard things. Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms has, surely; perhaps everyone in the world. “Queen Visenya and Queen Rhaenys, the Conqueror’s wives?”

“But the Westerosi will not understand it, and they won’t respect it either. See how so many of them hate Rhaenyra.”

Aegon says: “Perhaps if we’re so concerned with Westerosi norms, I shouldn’t have married my sister.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Aemond agrees. “Look how it ended up.”

Aegon strikes his fists against the table, knocking over his goblet, and leaves as red wine spills across the wood.

You are in your bedchamber unpacking your driftwood trunks—tunics, trousers, gowns, your bow and quiver of arrows, the gold-hilted dagger you paid the iron price for on the journey here—when Floris appears in the doorway, bored and sighing. She is always hovering in doorways, it seems.

“You look lovely,” she says, noting that you have changed into one of the dresses you brought from home, a cool grey stitched with intricate patterns of dolphins and sharks and sea turtles in black thread. Mother made it. Mother was a Harlaw before she married Father, and she spent her childhood locked away in the Tower of Glimmering, waves thrashing outside and nothing to do but dream and clean and sew.

“Floris, what am I supposed to be doing all day?”

“The old queen embroidered, mostly,” Floris says. “Can you embroider?”

“No.”

“Well...she spent quite a bit of time with her children, too.” But you have no children yet, and Aegon’s were sent far away to secret places. “And she collected insects.”

“Collected them?”

“In cages and glass jars and things.”

“Why?”

“Why do you eat octopus and shoot arrows at people? We all have our oddities, Your Grace.”

You smile. “You’re right, of course.”

“I suspect that for the present, you and I are supposed to be getting pregnant, and all other pastimes should go by the wayside.”

You marvel: I yearned for this so savagely, and now the thought of it makes me sick.

“Will you play cards with me?” Floris says. “Or dice? Oh, let us play cards and dice! We can do it outside where we can hear the birds and see the ocean. The weather is so fine here. Back home...well, it’s called the Stormlands for a reason.”

“I suspect stags and squids play different games.”

“That’s no obstacle. I shall teach you my games, and you will teach me yours.”

Again, you smile. “Then let’s play.”

There is a soft knock on the doorframe, and you both look to see a maester standing there, the same one who attended your wedding. He is motionless for a long time before you realize he’s waiting for permission to enter. Is this the first time someone has truly treated you as the queen?

“Come in,” you say. You don’t use his name because you don’t know it.

His chains clink as he steps into the room. He is carrying a letter. “Your Grace, I apologize that I was not able to formally introduce myself yesterday or congratulate you on your nuptials. I am Grand Maester Orwyle, and I hope to be of service to you for many, many years, and to make your reign as queen as comfortable and productive as possible.”

You are pleasantly surprised. “That’s very reassuring to hear. Thank you.”

He fidgets with the letter awkwardly. “And also...I was asked by Dowager Queen Alicent to inquire as to whether you have any...questions about the process.”

“The process...?”

“Of how to...become with child.”

“Oh. No, you are very kind, but I understand how it’s done.”

“Because sometimes ladies of high birth are so sheltered from the realities of life that they need specific instructions. There are picture books I could bring for you to review at your leisure.”

“If I have any questions, Floris can enlighten me,” you say, and Floris is so startled she giggles.

Maester Orwyle bows, perhaps relieved. “As you wish, Your Grace.” Then he gives you the letter. “This is from your brother, Lord Dalton Greyjoy, Master of Ships. It just arrived.”

But you’re not the first person the read it; the wax seal has already been broken. Otto? Aemond? You unfold the parchment. Dalton has written, in impatient smudged scrawls of black ink:

What is this I’m hearing?

You are no coward. A woman’s battlefield is the marriage bed: to be invaded by her husband, to give life to his heirs. Will you run from it?

Remedy this failure without delay.

Unless...have we been grievously misled about the nature of the Usurper?

Write me if we have chosen the wrong side.

However you proceed, all the realm will learn of it. Whispers fly even faster than ravens.

He has signed it at the end: The Red Kraken.

You close the letter, feeling nauseous and cold. You hand it back to Maester Orwyle.

He asks tentatively: “Do you wish for me to pen a reply for you?”

“If I wanted to write back, I would do it in my own hand.”

Orwyle bows again, looking distressed. He thinks he’s offended you. “Maester Orwyle, is it true that the skull of Balerion the Black Dread is preserved here in the Red Keep?”

“Yes, Your Grace. It is down in the tunnels, where the barrels of wine and rum are stored.”

You turn to Floris. “Shall we go find it?”

“I’m not going down there again,” Floris says. “You’re welcome to. It’s all rats and dust and spiders, I sneezed so much I thought my brain would fall out of my nose.”

“You’ve been to the tunnels?”

“Aemond made me go. He showed me the skull and went on and on for ages about the Conquest. I think he was trying to frighten me. Be a good wife or our dragons will eat you, that sort of thing. I wish he’d spared me. I don’t force him to endure stories of the Storm King or Orys Baratheon. Not that he’d listen.”

“Can I see it, and then we’ll play games when I return?”

“Sure,” Floris says, swishing towards the door. “I’m going to have to get myself a tiny dog or something. You Ironborn don’t eat those, do you?”

You can’t tell if she’s joking. You grin. “No, we don’t.”

“What a relief,” Floris says, and is gone.

Maester Orwyle leads you out of Maegor’s Holdfast, where the royal family is housed, and into the lower bailey where the sun shines glaringly bright and squirrels skitter around grabbing up crumbs of bread and oats. You can hear gulls squawking overhead and ravens cawing from the rookery. Orwyle, his chains clattering, climbs the serpentine steps to another bailey, passes the sept and the stables, and slips inside the Tower of the Hand. You have little time to fear bumping into Otto Hightower before Orwyle opens a door to a narrow, spiraling staircase, and together you follow it down and down and down, at last reaching a sprawling mosaic of the Targaryen crest illuminated by torchlight, a red three-headed dragon against a field of black. It is aged, the stones cracked and the colors faded. There are shadowy passages leading in every direction, and Orwyle indicates one of them.

“You will find what you seek here, Your Grace. Would you prefer me to escort you the rest of the way? I will do it, if you ask.”

But you can tell he is uneasy here. Indeed, it is a bleak place, damp and cold and filthy and dripping and ill-lit; but it reminds you of the Iron Islands, and so you don’t mind it. “No, Maester Orwyle, you’ve been so helpful.” And then, because he still doesn’t move: “You are free to go.”

He bows and vanishes swiftly, as if something is chasing him, and you walk down the corridor—torches burning and dust stirring with each footstep—until you reach a large circular chamber. From somewhere very far above, a gloomy aisle of daylight spills down onto Balerion’s skull, which is mounted on a pedestal and snarling with eternal, black fury, reptilian fangs and great empty wounds of eye sockets. The skull is surrounded by an altar in the shape of a crescent moon, so many flickering candles you could never count them all, wax melting over wax for years, perhaps even decades. You peer up into Balerion’s dead yet immortal face, thinking: Who are these people you’ve brought across the Narrow Sea?

Shuffling footsteps come echoing down the tunnel, and Aegon materializes out of the darkness. He jolts to a halt, stunned to have found you, not at all pleased. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see the skull. What are you doing here?”

“It’s someplace I can be alone.” Then he raises his eyebrows expectantly. You aren’t sure why.

“We have dragon skeletons on the Iron Islands too.”

“Hm,” he offers ungenerously, disinterested.

“During the Age of Heroes, the Grey King slayed the sea dragon Nagga and made his hall from her bones. They are still on Old Wyk, at a place called Nagga’s Hill. I’ve seen them.”

Aegon only stares at you. He is always wearing dark green stitched with golden dragons—different designs, great care taken to produce each one—and you are reminded that the dead queen liked to embroider. The heavy gold chain draped across his shoulders glints in the candlelight.

“The Celtigars don’t ride dragons,” you say.

He sighs, rubbing his forehead. “No.”

“Why not? They came across the Narrow Sea from Old Valyria, the same as the Targaryens and the Velaryons. They are your kin, and yet they have so little to show for it.”

Aegon shrugs, exasperated. “Perhaps long ago they sold away all their eggs for treasure, and now they’ve lost their magic.”

It’s a flippant explanation, but it’s the first one you’ve ever heard that sounds true. Perhaps there is some wisdom in him after all, beneath the wine and the misery. “They have a horn that can summon krakens from the deep.”

Aegon perks up a bit. “Do they?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.” You smile. “Dalton wants it. He hopes you’ll send him to reave the traitors in the Crownlands: Duskendale, Rook’s Rest, Claw Isle.”

“A horn that summons krakens,” Aegon muses softly.

“It could be useful, to have such an artefact. Krakens are the dragons of the sea.”

“Do they exist?”

“I think so. I hope so.” Only now do you realize he’d wanted you to leave; that’s why he said he comes here to be alone. You cross the chamber, meaning to disappear into the tunnel and return to the surface and the sunlight, far too bright, forever making your Ironborn eyes ache.

“You must think you’ve been sold to a monster,” Aegon says suddenly, and you stop.

You hesitate, not wanting to quarrel with him. He’s volatile, you are learning. “It was not an auspicious beginning.”

“Tonight will be different.” He tries to sound reassuring, but there is something troubled underneath. It occurs to you that perhaps the only women he’s ever been with were his sister and his whores, never a stranger who expected something more from him. Were you unfair? Was he besieged by ghosts? “Do you know what’s involved?”

“I do,” you say, then smirk as you recall what you glimpsed between your fingers last night. “I think I understand it even better now.”

“Are you afraid?”

Of lying with a man, of pregnancy, of childbirth. What’s there to be afraid of? It’s triumph or a glorious death. “No,” you say honestly. “I’d been anticipating it. I’d been...you know. Hoping for it.”

“Oh.” He is surprised; not so much by your desire, you think, but by the fact that you are so willing to share it with him. “That’s good.”

“I just don’t want it to be ruined.”

“By me?”

“By anyone. But since you’re my husband, by you especially, I suppose.”

He looks guilty, he looks forlorn, and again you are reminded of the blood that drips from his walls and the hopelessness on the faces of the men you’ve led to Dalton with an arrow at their backs.

“I’m not horrified by you being with others,” you say. “I know that happens, even when two people are married, even when they are devoted to each other. Many Ironborn men have salt wives. My father had them, and he loved my mother fiercely. What the Faith teaches about fidelity...that’s not really something I believe in.”

Aegon is watching you, intrigued, perplexed, perhaps a little sad.

“And I’ve heard things about you. Even from all the way across Westeros on the Iron Islands. I knew not to expect faithfulness.” Your voice catches, and you reveal yourself to be weak. “But you didn’t give me a chance.”

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them he says: “I think that to Helaena, our entire marriage felt like a never-ending violation, and so she became even more averse to physical touch than she was before. And I...I just needed lust to feel right again. Something that could be light and simple and painless. Something that didn’t make me a monster. I know whores are paid to pretend they like me. But I’m never cruel to them, and they compete vigorously for my favor. I believe they enjoy themselves too. And so when I’m feeling small and stupid and weak...they are who I find refuge in.”

Am I the phantom of a woman who was a ghost all her life? “Thank you for telling me that.”

“I’ve never told anyone that.”

“We don’t lie to other Ironborn. We are truthful even when the words sting like saltwater in a wound. It burns but it cleanses, it heals. I intended for you and I to be the same way with each other.”

Aegon is contemplating you, uncommonly curious, aware of you in a way he’s never been before. “Your brother has a great talent for murder, I’ve been informed.”

“My people say that the Drowned God gives each of His children a gift. Dalton’s is combat. He was born for it, he never tires of it.”

“And what is your gift? Violence as well, in the form of your archery?”

“Oh no,” you say, chuckling. “I am adequate with a bow, but nothing beyond that. I’m not sure what my gift is, but it isn’t war or reaving. I’m too merciful. But Dalton abides my faults, I am fortunate to have his affection. When I feel worthless, he calls me a pearl.”

“Perhaps mercy is your gift.”

“Mercy isn’t a gift, it’s a weakness.” And to be weak is the greatest of all sins.

“It is a rare one, and it is often overlooked. But mercy is a gift nonetheless.” Aegon gazes at you thoughtfully, ocean-blue eyes becoming deeper, and abruptly there is warmth in your cheeks and your lips are curling up at the edges like singed parchment. “You said you heard things about me.”

“Yes.”

“What do they say about me on the Iron Islands?”

“That you’re a warrior. That you’re a conqueror. That you’re just like us.”

Slowly, Aegon smiles. “I’ll see you tonight,” he says, and he watches you leave until the darkness of the tunnel devours you and nothing remains.

Otto has taken great pains to make you as appealing as possible: at nightfall, maids arrive to bathe you even after you insist you can do it yourself, fill the water with rose petals, scrub your hair and your skin, slather you with oils and lotions that smell of flowers and herbs, splash you with perfume. They coax you into a silk shift the color of an overcast sky and with frilly lace trimming, and you feel absurd, frivolous and practically naked.

They are just about to escort you to your husband’s bedchamber when you hear someone screaming. You and the maids rush out into the hall, where servants are weeping and whispering, and you catch a glimpse of Aemond storming down the staircase, his white shock of hair flying behind him like sails full of wind. Aegon’s companions— Reyne, Estermont, and Waters—are scattering. Floris is standing by the top of the steps, her face looking like it belongs to a corpse. You can see the blue-purple of the veins in her eyelids and her throat.

Alicent is in Aegon’s doorway and trying to claw her way into his chambers. He shoves her back and roars: “You told me to send him away! You told me he would be safe at Oldtown! You forced me onto the throne and killed Helaena and Jaehaerys and you won’t stop until we’re all dead!” Then he slams the door in her face and she flees, sobbing, a flock of maids sprinting after her.

You run to Floris and have to shake her shoulder to get her attention. “Floris, what happened?”

“It’s Maelor,” she says, her dark eyes vacant, her voice hushed. “He was discovered and butchered in the Reach, at a town called Bitterbridge. A mob ripped him apart with their bare hands and scrapped over the pieces to collect as keepsakes. He was three years old, can you imagine? Now Aegon has no heirs. Only Jaehaera, only a girl. And perhaps the traitors will find and kill her too. Do you think anywhere is safe? Do you think the best any of us can pray for is a quick death?”

But you cannot consider this now, because Aegon is alone in his rooms. No one else dares to enter, but you open the door and steal inside and find him in a chair by the fireplace, the light red and vengeful and his head in his hands as he sobs, dressed in the clothes he was supposed to wear as he took you to bed for the first time, loose pale blue cotton, no gold threads, no chains.

He looks up to see you and tries to hide his face, turning away, hemorrhaging horror and shame.

Why are they all grieving alone? Why are they a family of closed doors and cold words?

“Or both.”

“Or both,” you agree. You slurp down the oyster—cold brine, bloodless flesh—then shuck another with your short, dull blade. Nestled inside the gelatinous viscera is a pearl the size of a marble, dark green like pine trees. “Look!” you say excitedly, showing Dalton.

“That’s a good one,” he admires.

“Isn’t it?”

“Massive! And a rare color, too.”

“It’s an omen,” you say, beaming, warmth in your cheeks. You quarry the pearl from the oyster and rinse it off in the turbulent surf that roils around your ankles. “The Drowned God sent it to me.”

“A wedding present.”

“A promise.”

“A token of approval.”

“I’m going to give it to him,” you say, tucking the pearl away in the pocket of your trousers that are rolled up to your knees. Dalton knows who you mean: the man waiting to marry you in King’s Landing. Letters flew back and forth clutched in the beaks of ravens, propositions from Rhaenyra relayed by her son Jacaerys and the Sea Snake Corlys Velaryon, counteroffers from Aegon scrawled by the hand of his grandsire Otto Hightower. In the end, Dalton chose the Greens. It was a decision you agreed with wholeheartedly, not that he asked. But still, he knew. He always knows.

“The Usurper should receive it gladly.” Dalton slouches against the rocks and smirks at you, his ghost-grey eyes cunning and rakish. “He seized the throne from Rhaenyra, the dead king’s wishes be damned. He rides into battle on the back of a monster. He reads little. He rages much. He lives without shame. He does not concern himself with his hair or his clothes. He drinks and he whores and he’s not afraid to get bloody. He takes what he wants, he does not wait for permission. He is an honorary Ironborn.”

You gaze into the south, where now the tides are murderous and tomorrow you will set sail into your new life: first following the jagged coastline of the Westerlands, then passing the Reach, then circumnavigating Dorne and the Stormlands and Massey’s Hook until at last you dock in Blackwater Bay. You’ll be married the same night you land; there’s no time for delay. You wish it could be even sooner. You murmur, imagining the Usurper—a man neither you nor Dalton have ever met, a vanquisher, a warrior, a myth, a paragon—undressing you in the candlelight: “He is perfect.”

“He will know what to do,” Dalton says cavalierly, popping open an oyster and gulping it. “You need not worry about that. He has plenty of experience, and he has the temperament for it. He will tame you as a man should.”

“I know he will.”

“And once you’ve given him an heir or two, you can sample other goods if you like. Surplus children will just be shipped off to the Citadel or the Faith or an irrelevant marriage anyway. They needn’t be true Targaryens.” He chuckles. “No one will know the difference. We are descended from the First Men, just like House Strong. Your children will look like you no matter who fathers them, they won’t be strange, silver-haired foreigners.”

This is a common sentiment on the Iron Islands. It’s true that the priests implore women to remain steadfast and incorruptible, but when men are permitted to have any number of salt wives and can be gone away sailing for long, long months, well...in practice, eyes do wander, and allowances are made. Any good rock wife should remain a maiden until marriage and faithful to her husband until the continuation of his lineage is assured, and beyond that, the details are less important. Mother has sought companionship from a castle mason for years, even before Father died. But your body—and it is a deeply corporeal conviction, famished muscles and cavernous bones, visions that keep you awake at night—craves only one man. “I don’t want anyone else.”

“Someday you might.”

“Perhaps,” you say, still thinking of the husband who waits for you in King’s Landing, the dragonrider, the king, not because the Conqueror’s crown was given to him but because he took it by force. He paid the iron price.

In the morning, Mother tells you goodbye in front of the great hearth, the fire crackling as cold grey rain falls outside; carved into the stone of the overmantel is a kraken, the sigil of your house. Dalton waits impatiently with one hand on the moonstone pommel of his sword, Nightfall. He’s not trying to be disrespectful. He’s always impatient.

Mother is not beautiful, but even if she was that’s not what the Ironborn would say about her. Beauty has little value here. Beauty does not keep ships afloat or bellies from starving in the winter. The best things a woman can be are hardworking, proud, fierce, fertile, and Mother is all of them, and so the people love her. She buried three children; you and Dalton are all that’s left. But still, she does not worry for you. Or if she does, she hides it well. She touches your cheek with her rough weather-beaten hands and she says, smiling softly: “If you are worthy, the Drowned God will see you safely to King’s Landing.”

“I love you.”

“I love you,” Mother echoes, drawing you into her, holding you there for a very long time.

You are up in the rigging when you hear the lookout shout from the crow’s nest: ships on the horizon, two of them. You climb down the ropes to where Dalton is standing at the bow, squinting through his spyglass. You wear trousers, boots, a loose white linen tunic held closed at the bust with gold buttons, each embossed with a kraken. It’s warm here; you are just off the west coast of the Reach, Old Oak and Highgarden and the Shield Islands. When you venture close enough to glimpse the terrain, the hills and cliffsides are greener than you thought it was possible for land to be. You feel the smooth round weight of the pearl in your pocket. I’m almost home.

You ask Dalton, shading your eyes from the glaring sun: “Whose banner is it?” For Aegon or for Rhaenyra? Friend or foe?

A long moment passes before he answers, gulls squawking and waves breaking against the hull. The ship rocks on glittering, foaming surf that is choppy with wind. You adjust your balance instinctively; you never get seasick. Sometimes you think you belong here more than anywhere, a creature of riptides and undertows. The earth is so still. “House Grimm of Greyshield.” Dalton grins, all the way up to his eyes, a shark that breathes air. “And they chose the wrong side.”

“Soldiers?”

“No, cargo.” He collapses his spyglass. “Too easy.”

He shouts for the men to prepare to board and you sprint below deck to the captain’s quarters, where you and Dalton sleep at night and where you’ve stowed your personal effects. You yank on your leather gloves, grab your bow with your left hand, throw your quiver of arrows over your right shoulder. Up on deck, you see that the farthermost ship is escaping, banking sharply towards the coast; but you’re swiftly gaining on the other. You’ll catch it, there’s no doubt. Ironborn vessels are smaller, shallower, more agile than any ships in the realm...even with the scorpion mounted on the forecastle. Its bolts—if providentially aimed—could kill any dragon currently living, except perhaps Vhagar, a leviathan of the sky. But you have no need to fear her. She is your ally now.

“Starboard,” Dalton tells his men as they rush by him with rope and grappling hooks. He knows you shoot best from that side. On the ship you are rapidly flanking, you hear sailors screaming, praying, scrambling to take their chances in the lifeboats. But it’s too late for that. Up in their crow’s nest, a man is raising a crossbow and aiming at Dalton. Your brother sees this but does not move; he’s waiting for you. You nock an arrow and feel the fletching whisper between your fingers. The man in the crow’s nest is struck through the heart and goes plummeting to the deck.

Ironborn men cast grappling hooks over the starboard side of your ship, catch the rigging and bulwarks of the Grimm vessel, and haul it close enough that they can pour onto the decks like a rogue wave. Dalton goes over first. He is the captain, and every captain is a king aboard the country of his ship, and none among the Ironborn will follow a king who cannot kill. He raises Nightfall, and when the blade falls, gore splatters across the wood and paints his own skin crimson. That’s why he’s called the Red Kraken; he emerged from his first battle bathed in blood, sixteen years old, a force like a hurricane. The only parts of him that remained clean were the glinting grey pools of his eyes and the flash of his teeth when he smiled.

You board last, leaping over the bulwark of your ship to land hard on the captured vessel’s portside quarterdeck. You shoot down two men—one swinging at you with a cutlass, the other sprinting for the lifeboats, an arrow through the throat, an arrow to the spine—then creep down the steps to the door of the captain’s cabin. All around you, Ironborn are roaring as they wield axes and swords. None assist you. None watch out for you. If you are worthy, and you are meant to survive and wed the Usurper, the Drowned God will protect you. If not, you will die in battle—a glorious death, unquestionably—and sink through the depths to feast in His halls for eternity.

You kick open the cabin door, and sure enough cowards have hidden there, three of them. One charges you with a dagger and you put an arrow through his eye socket. His corpse thumps to the floor. The other two remain crouched and trembling, showing you their empty palms. You rip the dagger out of the dead man’s grip and admire it—sharp blade, gold hilt—then tuck it into your belt.

“Come with me,” you tell the sailors, and you keep a nocked arrow at their backs as you lead them down to the main deck, where Dalton and his men have dragged the survivors and pushed them down to their knees. Dalton is laughing, Nightfall dripping blood in his grasp, inspecting the trove of goods onboard: crates of apples and melons and peaches and fireplums, barrels of mead and wine, Arbor gold and Arbor red.

“I believe the contents of this ship were meant to go north and feed Cregan Stark’s wolves, would you agree, sister?”

“Looks that way.”

“But not anymore.” Dalton scrutinizes the prisoners and then stops when his finds the captain, perhaps thirty years old, a short beard and drooling red, several teeth freshly evicted from his skull. “What do they call you, land dweller?”

“Gabriel of House Grimm,” he answers, gruff and bold.

“Gabriel?” Dalton thinks on this, twirling Nightfall. The moonstone pommel gleams. “I’ve never heard of you. You must not be important.”

“My father has many sons, and I am far from the eldest.”

“Ah! Then you won’t be missed,” Dalton says, cleaning the blood from his sword with a rag that one of his men tosses him. “Lord Gabriel Grimm, I’ll be taking your ship, and I’ll be taking your life. Any final requests in the meantime? You have until I’ve counted to ten in my head.”

Lord Grimm spits blood at Dalton’s boots. “You’re a beast from the lowest, hottest hell!”

“That wasn’t a request. Try again.”

You study the condemned crew—some old enough to be grandfathers, some so young they have not yet married, never loved a woman, never had children, never left lasting footprints in the sand of the world—and feel yourself, with shame burning in your face, becoming kind. To kill in battle is one thing, the Drowned God praises it, even requires it. But to execute the pitiful and yielding is something else. So many have been lost already: soldiers and sailors on both sides, dragons meant to live for centuries, Viserys, Father, Mother’s dead babies, Lucerys and Jaehaerys and Helaena. Surely the earth is not meant to be bled dry like a man with a slit throat. “You could take them as thralls,” you suggest. “As the Ironborn sail off to war, we will need men in the dockyards and the fields and the mines.”

“Oh, they wouldn’t be interested in that.” Dalton is joking, but you don’t think anybody else knows it. The captives’ wide, desperate gazes flit between the two of you.

“They might be.”

“Men of the Reach are soft. They yearn gluttonously for sweet wine and late mornings. They’d rather be dead than useful.”

“But they could be of use to us.”

Dalton smirks, mischievous, amused, and sheaths Nightfall. He gestures to the captives. “Go ahead. Make your proposal.”

You stand in front of them; they peer up at you from where they kneel on the deck, their eyes sodden with hatred and horror. “We have kept thralls since before the Conquest. You will be taken back to the Iron Islands and put to work for a term of seven years. You will receive food and lodging. You will not be paid for your day labor, but you may endeavor to earn wages in your allotted leisure time if you have a craft or cultivate produce. If you serve faithfully and diligently, and you survive the first three years, you will earn the rights to marry, own property, write letters, and father heirs, who will be born free. If you complete your term, you will become Ironborn and enjoy all the same liberties as a man native to the Islands.”

Some of the captives are glaring at you, barbarous, bloodthirsty; but others have the silvery sheen of hope in their eyes.

“But if we sail you home and you betray us,” you say, your voice turning dark. Dalton grins, toothy and reptilian. “If you spill the blood of an Ironborn or attempt to flee your covenant, we will send you to the Drowned God. And He will not invite you to spend eternity in His halls of golden light and feasts and wine and mermaids to attend to your every desire. He will damn you, and you will be alone in the black and the cold, and the last touch you’ll ever feel...” You pull off one of your leather gloves and skate your fingers over the face of the Grimm lord, slowly, tauntingly; the men watch you, stunned and transfixed. “Will be the tentacles of the Drowned God dragging you down, down, down.”

You allow time for them to ruminate on it, the only sounds the low immortal rumbling of the ocean, the screeches of circling gulls restless to rip flesh from bones and jelly-filled eyes from sockets, the warm western wind in the sails.

You ask Lord Gabriel Grimm: “Would you like to build our ships, or would you like to meet the Drowned God?”

“Ships,” he rasps immediately.

“Very well,” Dalton says, surveying the captured men. They are dripping with maroon gore and sea spray, silent, shivering. “Who else would like to build ships?”

Five hands shoot up immediately.

Dalton turns to his second mate Rollo Pyke, a bastard from the Lonely Light. “Slay everyone who hesitated.”

Blades are ripped from scabbards and find their way to jugulars, windpipes, the vulnerable spaces between the ladder rungs of ribs. Red floods across the deck; bodies buckle and convulse. The six survivors cover their faces and flinch, moaning as hot blood soaks through the knees of their trousers. You watch them, thinking: I hope I’ve done the right thing, and their lives are worth living.

Dalton says: “Rollo, you and a skeleton crew will sail this ship back to the fleet. When you get there, deliver our plunder, and tell the men to eat and drink until it’s gone. Task someone with transporting Lord Gabriel Grimm and the other thralls back to the Iron Islands. You and I will reconvene in King’s Landing.”

“Yes, captain.”

Then Dalton strolls away from the slaughter and beckons you to follow him. Your two pairs of leather boots clop against the deck in tandem. You pass him the dagger you found and he marvels at it as the blade glimmers under the sun. He plucks an apple out of a crate, wipes off the blood that speckles it with his sleeve, and takes a wet ravening bite. He nods back to where Rollo and the others are gutting the captured crew and tossing their corpses overboard. There are splashes and screams. “You would make friends of them?”

You smile reticently; you don’t want him to think you’re weak. There’s no greater sin in your world. “Friends don’t come back to kill you someday.”

“Too much mercy. Too much discretion.” He beams and breezes his lips across your cheek, a gale of coppery blood and crisp apple. “This is why women make good wives and mothers, but poor reavers.”

“If you think so highly of wives, you should acquire one.”

He cackles. He has many salt wives already, but no rock wife, and therefore no true heir nor regent to act in a boy’s place until he comes of age. If Dalton dies young, there will be chaos. Distant Greyjoy cousins will crawl out of their stony hovels to assert their claims. Dalton’s concubines will murder each other’s children to try to nudge their own sons closer to the Seastone Chair. “I have plenty of time to do that. I will please the Drowned God so immensely He’ll let me live for a hundred years.”

But I have offended Him with my compassion. That’s what Dalton believes, anyway. You cast your eyes down to the deck, ashamed. “I’ve disappointed you.”

Dalton stops, the dagger still nestled in his right hand, and lays the point of the blade against your throat. “Do not speak these words again,” he says with mock severity, then grins and spins the dagger in his palm, offering you the hilt. “You are the pearl in the oyster of my life.”

You stare at the dagger, perplexed. “I gave it to you. You’re the captain.”

“You paid the iron price for it. It’s yours.”

You smile and take the dagger. Dalton takes your face roughly in his calloused fingers and kisses you full on the mouth.

Otto Hightower is waiting for you at the harbor, the Greyjoy banners sighted long before the ship docked. As Ironborn men rush ashore for a night of drinking and whoring—tomorrow the rest of the Iron Fleet will arrive in Blackwater Bay, and their work properly will begin—you and Dalton meet the Hand of the King under hot late-afternoon skies the color of glowing embers. There are two people with him: one a woman, the other a man who at first you think is the king—he has the right bearing for it, lethal and arrogant and dauntless—until you are close enough to see his eyepatch.

Not Aegon, then. Aemond. The second son. The son who killed Lucerys Velaryon and started this war.

You smile at Aemond; you’re family now. He glowers back. Your smile dies.

“Lord Dalton Greyjoy of the Iron Islands!” Otto says, too enthusiastically, his delight strained in a crevice-lined face and his eyes darting. “The Master of Ships. Our beloved friend. You are very welcome here. And my gracious, you are much younger than I’d imagined!”

Dalton is in his mid-twenties but doesn’t look it yet. He smirks, his posture ungainly. He is always slinking and listing when he’s on land, searching for a current to roll beneath his feet. “You are much older.”

Otto chuckles uncertainly and then bows to you, a deep and desperate bow. “Lady Greyjoy, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Prince Aemond and his wife, Princess Floris of House Baratheon.”

“Hello,” you greet them both cheerfully. Aemond glares, saying nothing. Floris—tall and statuesque, dark-haired, beautiful but bored—sweeps a dull curtsey. You kneel down on the dock and reach into the sparkling sea below, gliding your hands through waves that are startlingly calm and warm. “Dalton, it’s like bathwater!”

Otto says to your brother: “I was surprised that you wrote your letters in your own hand, my lord. I’d heard that most Ironborn can’t read or write at all, that some even view it as witchcraft.”

“I would never allow a maester or scribe the power to deceive me.”

“Your esteemed father was not literate, was he? I think I recall that about him.”

“He wasn’t. But no king should be bound to the will of the one who came before, and the same is true for the Lord of the Iron Islands.” Dalton smiles wickedly. “My father would never have entered into a war on behalf of the Targaryens, nor any other house of the mainland. But fortunately for you, I have greater ambitions.”

“Indeed,” Otto Hightower says, and in his Andal-blue eyes you think you can see doubt, apprehension, distrust. He looks around and becomes alarmed. “You brought no maids with you?”

“No, my lord,” you reply, standing and drying your hands on your gown.

Dalton grins, glancing at you proudly. “It’s bad luck to have women aboard unless they are one of the very few inclined towards sailing and war.”

Otto looks at you, puzzled. “But who attended to you on the journey?”

Dalton says: “Ironborn noblewomen, even Greyjoys, brush their own hair and draw their own baths and scrub their own floors. They do not idle.”

Otto considers you, troubled. “She will have to acclimate to our ways.”

Dalton abruptly lurches forward; Aemond grips the hilt of his own sword Blackfyre and strides to meet him, but Otto Hightower holds up a palm to dissuade his grandson. Dalton seethes to the Hand of the King: “You chose us because of who we are, land dweller. Do not disdain us for the same reason.”

Otto and Aemond exchange a glance. Aemond’s smug, scarred face seems to say: I told you.

Dalton embraces you, a kiss for each cheek, lingering so long that Otto, Aemond, and Floris all blink at him uneasily, their mouths twisting into grimaces. “Write me afterwards. Tell me how it was.”

“I will,” you promise, and Dalton leaves to join his men in the most shadowed, unsavory corners of the city.

“He will not give you away at the wedding?” Floris says as she watches him go, baffled.

“It’s my responsibility, not his.” You were not there when Dalton killed his first enemy or sailed his ship as the captain for the first time; he will not be there when you and Aegon exchange vows and uncover each other’s skin in the candlelight. “Where is the king?” And you expect a heroic answer: he is beating men bloody in the castle courtyard, he is burning traitors alive with his dragon.

“I’ll go wake him,” Aemond tells Otto, very loudly, as if he wants you to hear it. Then he casts you one last glare before he leaves.

Otto Hightower attempts to distract you. “My lady, your belongings will be brought up to your chambers straight away. I’ve arranged for Princess Floris to give you a tour of the Red Keep so you can start to become accustomed to your new home. Your kingdom, in fact. You will be its queen in a few short hours.” He sounds like he can’t quite believe it, even now, even though he was the architect of this design. “I will send for you when the septon is ready to begin.”

When my husband is dragged from his bed and sufficiently roused, you mean. “Thank you, my lord.”

Without any further words of invitation, Floris begins to walk away. You trail after her, moving swiftly in your gown. You cannot wear trousers and tunics to court, you know that much. You will marry the king in a dress of black lace that Mother sewed for you, working through the night more than once. Over the bodice is a metal corset: gold, gleaming, sharp points of tridents and a large kraken in the center.

Floris leads you first to the gardens of the Red Keep, so you can see them while there is still enough daylight. She languidly points out fountains, and fishponds, and arbors, and innumerable species of flowers in colors you didn’t know existed; you have the sense that she is purposefully stalling. There are cats everywhere, dozing on stone benches, pawing at shimmering fish when they swim up to the surface to swallow insects and bits of plants that have been carried there by the warm southern breeze.

“Because there are no more rat catchers,” Floris says when she notices you pondering the cats. And that’s right, now you remember. Aegon had them all hanged after one helped murder his wife and son.

As the sun sets, Floris shows you the way to the Great Hall where the Iron Throne looms like a shadow, and then the castle courtyard alight with torches, and then Maegor’s Holdfast where you ascend the staircase to the royal apartments. There are courtiers everywhere, wearing vivid colors and smooth fragile skin, gawking and whispering, and although you smile at them very few manage to conjure up polite greetings in return. You catch disjointed phrases of their gossip: A Greyjoy? Unthinkable...when Jaehaerys the Conciliator needed a new Hand of the King, all the realm agreed that choosing a squid would be disastrous, and now we are to be ruled by one...she will not please him...her children will be savages...why is she dressed like that...how did it come to this...and none of it would have happened if Aemond hadn’t killed little Luke Strong.

And then there are a handful of young women fluttering around in revealing gossamer gowns, their faces and fingernails painted, their wrists jangling with bracelets, their hair arranged ornately and yet tumbling out of combs and pins, simpering curiously at you as they prop their elbows on bannisters and windowsills and rest their chins in their palms. You’ve seen women like this before. But could they really be...?

Whores. And you have no illusions that men enjoy them, and men like your future husband most of all, but to have them here so openly, and on his wedding day...it evinces a lack of care that stuns and stings. “Are those...?”

“He was more discrete while the queen was alive,” Floris says, like she regrets having to tell you. “He kept them away from the Red Keep. But I suppose he’s been in need of distractions.”

Since his wife and firstborn son were butchered. “Were you here when it happened?”

Floris nods, then shudders. “Helaena’s screams woke the whole castle. The poor lamb. She was a gentle woman, no one in all the Seven Kingdoms deserved such a grisly fate less than she did. Aegon wasn’t so happy even when she was here, but now...well, it couldn’t have been easy to see something like that.”

“He saw it?”

“The aftermath, anyway.”

You follow her into the queen’s chambers, which clearly have not been touched since Helaena’s death. Hightower-green tapestries hang on the walls, embroidered with dragons of gold. Another woman’s jewelry is still here, and her hairbrushes, and her perfumes and powders and paints. And when you lift up a rug that seems oddly placed, you find a vast crimson stain on the stone floor beneath. Here the blood flowed. Here all of your lives were irrevocably changed. Floris turns away, embarrassed. It is becoming unmistakable how haphazardly your arrival was treated.

But the Usurper is fierce and fearless and insatiable. He’s an Ironborn in all but name and blood. He wants me. He will tame me.

There are wooden figurines in a row on the vanity: butterflies and moths, praying mantises, beetles, caterpillars, arachnids. “He must be exhausted from battle,” you say, picking up a spider to examine the skillfully carved legs. “That’s why he did not greet me at the harbor.”

“The king has never been in battle.” And then, when you stare at Floris with bewilderment: “Aemond goes, Criston goes, young Daeron is fighting in the Reach. But the king does not.”

“But we’d heard that he’s a great warrior who flies to war on dragonback.”

“Well, that sounds better than the truth, doesn’t it?”

You gaze helplessly at Floris, disbelief settling until it begins to feel real. You wish Dalton had not left you; you suddenly miss him direly, unbearably.

At last, she smiles. “I’m glad you’re here, even if no one else is. I’ll finally have somebody to talk to.”

“You don’t talk to Prince Aemond?”

“He doesn’t believe I have anything of interest to say. Not that I expected he would, mind you. Cassandra is my father’s favorite, Ellyn is my mother’s, Maris has always been the most beautiful. I am well-versed in my unremarkable nature. That’s why Father gave me to Aemond, even though everyone knows he’s a monster.”

You had assumed this was slander, in the same way people hate Dalton. “Is he really?”

“After what he did to little Luke Strong? How could he not be?”

You are becoming overwhelmed with disorientation and dread; you are dizzy with it. “What about the king’s mother Alicent? Can’t you talk to her?”

“Oh, she is hopeless,” Floris sighs, and you wonder what she means. “I’ve been instructed to accompany you tonight. I’ll escort you to the sept, and then to the king’s bedchamber following the ceremony.”

This is strange; you’ve always known men to go to their wives’ beds, not the other way around. “He won’t visit me here?”

“He will not set foot in this room,” Floris says, looking at you. “Not tonight, not ever. He refuses.”

A woman appears in the doorway, a shock of coppery hair, large dark eyes swimming with misery, a green velvet gown that hangs from her bones. She is surrounded by a flock of somber, listless maids. She’s been crying; her voice is thick and her cheeks flushed. “We are ready for you, sweetheart,” she tells you numbly, and vanishes again before you can reply.

“That was Alicent,” Floris explains.

You think: These people are so heartbroken and so afraid that there’s no room for them to feel anything else.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” Floris says, scrutinizing your gown and corset.

You don’t know what she means. “Of course it is.”

“Let’s go then,” she says, and you walk with her out of your chambers that aren’t really yours, across the hall, down the staircase, through the tumultuous sea of courtiers thrashing with crosscurrents, shaggy cats hissing at you when you step too close.

“Where are the king’s children, Jaehaera and Maelor?” you ask Floris. “I was looking forward to meeting them.” You’ve never had younger siblings who lived; you thought they might be something like that to you.

“Gone,” Floris says, not breaking her stride, not glancing back at you. “Sent far away for their own protection. Children aren’t safe here.” A pause. “I’m not sure we are either.”

Outside the night is warm, humid, hums of insects in the air, illuminated by torches. You try to gaze up to see the stars but find only smoke and a canopy of trees instead, no knobby limbs of pine but lush branches and fat leaves clattering. You cannot hear the ocean, or breathe in the salt of the sea, or fathom the Drowned God having any dominion here. This is home? you think doubtfully. Then you are in the sept, candles burning and stone pillars in the shape of the Seven: Father, Mother, Warrior, Smith, Maiden, Crone, Stranger. You don’t believe in them. A condition of your marriage had been your conversion to the Faith, and you and Dalton had laughed as he scrawled his agreement, black ink dripping from a white quill made from a gull feather.

Hardly anyone else is here. The light is dim and shadowy, as if this is a secret. The other attendees wear dark green clothes and tense frowns: Otto, Aemond, an aged septon, a maester, Alicent, a knight who must be Lord Commander Criston Cole. The king’s mother keeps whispering fretfully to him, something about how there is supposed to be a cloak to cover you with, but no one remembered to procure one. Sir Criston soothes her, a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter,” Criston is telling Alicent. “It won’t take long.”

Otto mutters to Aemond: “Where the fuck is he?”

Then a door creaks open and the king appears, to the others’ palpable relief. He is attended by three of his Kingsguard. Floris murmurs the names of the men to you—Reyne, Estermont, Waters—but you pay no attention to them. You are looking at your husband instead.

He takes his place with you before the septon, silver hair unkempt and wine sweating out of him, sweet fruit, bitter poison. He wears a cape over his tunic, muddy green accented with gold-thread dragons, a heavy gold chain draped across his shoulders, the Conqueror’s crown on his head. He’s smaller than you imagined, but that’s no disappointment. Dalton isn’t so strapping himself, nor was Father when he was still the Lord of the Iron Islands; it’s not height or muscle that makes a man. But Aegon is small everywhere: in his presence, in his spirit. He drowns in the voices that echo off the towering walls and domed ceiling of the sept. He could be easily lost in a crowded room. He stands in front of you slumped and swaying, not speaking, not even studying you, not bothering to see if you are to his liking. He has already decided, it seems. You keep trying to catch his gaze so you can give him a smile, soft and shy, I’m glad to finally meet you. But he avoids your eyes, and for the first time since your ship ventured south of the Westerlands, you feel cold.

Eventually, Aegon notices your black lace gown and furrows etch into his brow. When he speaks, his voice is deep and dazed, very solemn, very slow. “Are you in mourning for your future here?”

“For the late queen,” you say, mystified that he has not realized this already. Surely it is the proper way to proceed. Respects must be paid. And it was a glorious death: fighting off armed men with her bare hands to try to stop them from killing her children, screaming so loudly all the castle jolted awake, saving Jaehaera and Maelor from the same fate as their brother, who was erased from existence before he could become anything, brave or cruel or weak or legendary. Did they burn what was left of him? you wonder. As a true Targaryen?

“Oh.” Aegon does not look like he approves. He looks away instead, his eyes a weak watery blue, more like rain than the ocean, more like a puddle than a sea.

Who is he? you think with dawning horror. Who was I sent here to marry?

The septon begins the ceremony. You have heard Ironborn mock the frivolities of mainland weddings—songs, pageantry, seven vows and seven blessings—but none of this happens tonight. The words are rushed and hollow. The witnesses watch with wide, restless stares. When Aegon kisses you to seal the union, he reels and mostly lands on your cheek instead, barely touching your lips.

Floris guides you to the king’s bedchamber—presently unoccupied—where servants bring you a bowl of beef-and-barley stew, bread, and wine, a careless meal you only eat a few bites of. You aren’t used to the meat of land animals; it tastes heavy and like iron, like blood. You abandon the tray and it is removed. A maid arrives and delivers fresh linens, lights candles, begins filling basins with water.

“Good luck,” Floris says, and then goes to leave.

You can’t stop yourself; you call after her: “What will happen now?”

She halts in the doorway and smiles bleakly. “It won’t be too bad. He’s no beast.”

Then she’s gone and you stand forlornly in the center of the room wringing your hands, gazing at the bed, the silence turning loud. The maid continues to bustle around the bedchamber. In the fireplace, logs crack and flames flicker.

You know he must enter you, but not in which position or for how long or at what sort of rhythm or what it will feel like, or what he will do with his mouth and his hands, or what he will say to you during, when you are no longer strangers but the closest you’ve ever been to another person. You reach into a clandestine pocket sewn into the skirt of your gown and touch the small, smooth weight of the green pearl you found during your last full day on the Iron Islands. You had planned to give it to your husband on your wedding night. Now you leave it hidden, not knowing what to do with it, not knowing anything.

He comes in quickly, heavy determined footsteps, and for a moment you have hope: Now he will at last become the man I believed him to be. The king, the Usurper. He will tear off my gown and push me onto the bed and cover me, conquer me, show me what it means to be tamed—

Aegon grabs at you with drunken, artless hands. He finds where to unhook your metal corset easily enough, and it falls to the floor with a bang. You hope he hasn’t broken it; Dalton forged that for you. But then he fumbles with the lacing at your spine, unable to open your bodice. He tugs futilely at it, then sighs and surrenders, staggering off towards the bed.

“Girl,” he orders the maid. “Remove her gown.”

The maid hurries over to you and begins deftly unfastening the lacing. You watch as Aegon goes to the bed, braces his open palms against the soft feather mattress, lowers his head and squeezes his eyes shut as if he’s trying to summon the will to touch you. His lips are dark and bloody with wine.

You think of all the nights you’ve been sleepless as you starved for him, ached and pulsed for him, consummated this marriage over and over again in candlelit mirages until your chest was a sheen of sweat and your thighs were slick. It’s not going to be like that. He doesn’t want me at all. It splits out of you like lightning from a dark sky: “No, you must do it!”

The maid lifts her hands away and recedes into the shadows. Aegon stands up straight and gapes at you as if he can’t believe you’ve spoken. His eyes are glistening and confounded and lost. “What?”

“You are older, you are the husband, you have taken women before. You must lead me through this. You cannot leave it to servants.”

He closes the distance between you, his boots pounding on the stone floor, his golden chain rattling. “You would tell your king how to conduct himself?”

“You’re supposed to be forceful and fearless. You’re supposed to overpower me. Why else would a woman follow a man?”

“I’m not good enough for you?”

“You are a grave disappointment.”

On the Iron Islands people tell the truth, even when it’s harsh, even when it’s painful. That’s how you show respect. But you can tell this hits him somewhere deep; stunned, childlike woundedness shines in his eyes and is soon eclipsed by wrath, the reflections of flames burning there like dragonfire. “Then you are free to go.”

“You know I can’t.” Already, you regret it. He’s not just your husband now, he’s your family. When Mother’s babies died, you consoled her. When Father got sick and Dalton wept, you held him.

Aegon snaps at the maid: “Fetch Lotus and Serenity.” She bows dutifully, shoots you a skittish and pitying glance, glides out of the room.

Your heartbeat hammers in your ears. Cold dread seeps across your belly like blood from a wound. “What are you doing?”

“You don’t wish to be my wife?” Aegon pitches at you as he sits down on the edge of the bed and yanks off his boots, flings away his chain. “Then I’ll proceed as if you’re not.”

“Aegon, what are you doing?”

The door opens again, and this time two interlopers appear, some of the same young women you observed earlier: beautiful, giggling, sheer gauzy gowns and clanging with earrings and bracelets. One of the whores drops to her hands and knees and crawls like a shadowcat towards the bed. The other lingers by the writing desk, smirking at you, pouring herself a goblet of wine and drinking it in long, slow gulps.

From where he sits on the bed, your husband opens his trousers and grins at you, vacant and drunk and cruel. “Watch and receive your education.”

The whore on her knees takes him in her mouth, and there are wet slopping sounds as you yelp in shock and despair and hide your face in your hands, as Aegon rolls down—one vertebrae at a time—until he is flat on the bed, moaning with his fingers in some other woman’s hair, then reaching for the second whore when she climbs nimbly onto the mattress to join them, smiling, laughing, kissing his wine-stained mouth and then leading his hand between her legs. You can’t watch, but you can’t leave either; if you flee from your wedding night, all the realm will know. You will dishonor your husband, but you will dishonor yourself more.

Through glimpses between your fingers, you see things that were supposed to be yours: another woman’s panting ecstasy, the lust unfurling across Aegon’s face, his hunger, his relief.

You curl up on the frigid stone floor, sobbing into your palms, and wait for it to be over.

The archer, only twenty years old, enters the tent and joins the procession of men of the Reach waiting to enlist. The stakes are real now, because the war is too: dead royal children on both sides, dragons taking flight, marriages arranged, armies massing, the Sea Snake and the Red Kraken commanding hundreds of ships between them.

When he gets to the front of the line, he finds a man at a table making lists. The recordkeeper asks without looking up: “Where do you come from, my lord?”

“House Grimm of Greyshield,” the archer answers. “My brother Gabriel and the rest of his crew were butchered by the Red Kraken when he sailed south to deliver his sister to the Usurper.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” the man says disinterestedly, as if half the soldiers he’s seen have come with such a tale: a dragon burned my home, a man destroyed my life. Only through bloodshed can I resurrect it.

“The other ship got away, but they saw my brother’s overtaken by a vessel with Greyjoy banners. Through their spyglasses, they watched the Red Kraken cutting down men with his Valyrian steel blade, Nightfall. And do you know what else they saw?”

The man sighs, his quill scratching against the parchment. At last, he gives the recruit his full attention. “What?”

“His sister participated in the slaughter,” the archer says, glassy revulsion in his eyes. “Boarding my brother’s ship. Shooting down men with arrows. What sort of woman has no mercy in her heart? How could she violate the laws of the Seven, how could she reject the Mother who made her?”

“The Ironborn are heathens, and the Greens are monsters. Alicent Hightower poisoned the old king, Aegon stole the throne, Aemond murdered Prince Lucerys. Like attracts like.” The man shrugs. “What can you do? Load scorpions? Set broken bones?”

“I’m an archer.”

“Oh, the gods are good. We need more of those.”

He adds as it occurs to him, soft and meditative, almost a prayer, almost a prophesy: “I’d like to kill that Greyjoy bitch someday.”

“And the fruit flavored ones. You pick the others.”

Aegon is still browsing. “I want to try this fire and ice situation.”

“I’m down.”

“And the kind that glow in the dark! Alright, you think we have enough?”

You survey the boxes in the cart. “Aegon, that’s like...sixty condoms.”

“Should last us a week,” he says, and you’re smiling, flushed, giggling as he pushes you against the shelves and pins you there with his hands and his hips, kissing you, nuzzling you, ignoring when boxes and bottles quiver and fall to the tile floor. Other Walmart shoppers peek into the aisle and then hurry away, revolted. “You want any toys too, freak?”

“No, just yours.” You grind against Aegon and bite his lower lip, and he practically sprints to the self-checkout machines.

You bag and he scans, beep beep beep, and then you hear the machine ping one too many times and you realize that in his haste, Aegon has accidentally scanned the very last item—the box of studded condoms—twice.

“Oh no,” he says, staring with horror at the screen. He glances at the nearest Walmart employee, a bored-looking teenager with long frizzy hair dyed pink and an eyebrow piercing, and then back to the machine.

“Just pay for the extra box,” you blurt out.

“I don’t think I can.”

“What?!”

“I don’t think I have enough money.” Aegon pulls his wallet out of his Levi’s, opens it, counts dollar bills. Tami pays you both weekly, always in cash. “Yeah, I’m four bucks short.”

“Didn’t you just win a thousand dollars?”

“I haven’t cashed the check yet!”

You comb through your own wallet, although you already know that all you have left is a few quarters. “I should not have bought those candied pecans at the rodeo.”

Now the employee has spotted Aegon and is approaching the self-checkout machine, shuffling in his fuzzy rainbow socks and Birkenstocks. His name tag reads Liam. “Sir? Do you need assistance?”

“Awesome,” Aegon mutters, but he smiles when you burst out laughing, a warm vivid pink in his cheeks. “Hi, sorry, I scanned this box twice so can you take the extra one off the total, please?”

The Walmart employee, Liam, ogles the box of condoms that Aegon offers to him. “Um...sure...” Finally, he takes it. “I’ll have to look in your bag to make sure you’re not hiding a second box. People do that, you know.”

Aegon sighs and gestures to the plastic bag suspended from the metal hangers. “Enjoy.”

Liam paws around in there, increasingly scandalized. You and Aegon exchange an exasperated glance; he rolls his eyes, you laugh and press your palms to your burning cheeks, he winks at you. And you think very clearly, but do not say: I might love you.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Aegon tells Liam. “Stop denting the boxes. Don’t damage my merchandise. If I have a kid, I’m coming after you for child support. Hey, no no no, you don’t need to read the size, that’s completely unnecessary. Liam, man, have mercy—”

“Y’all can pay now,” Liam says. He scans his store badge, deletes the extra charge, and wanders away, whipping out his phone and tapping the screen with great purpose.

“He’s totally making a TikTok about us,” you say, smiling.

Aegon shoves crumpled bills into the self-checkout machine and receives a paper receipt in return. “Give me your keys.”

“Why?” But you’re already complying, digging them out of your purse. When you and Aegon take the Jetta anywhere, you usually drive.

“I want to show you a shortcut,” he says, catches the keys when you toss them to him, and hurries out of the store: the plastic bag swinging from his wrist, the automatic doors opening like the mouth of a cave, not eons-old darkness but sunlight and humid mid-90s air and the growls of truck engines revving.

It’s not really a shortcut to the ranch; it’s back roads and transmission towers, fields of tomatoes and watermelons and cantaloupes. Then Aegon swerves onto the shoulder, sending dust flying up in a tsunami that engulfs the car, and through the glass of the windows you can hear cicadas shrieking and woodpeckers hammering away at the bur oak trees. Aegon puts the Jetta in park and yanks off his seatbelt.

You begin: “What—?”

“If we go for Round One now, I’ll be ready for another by the time we get home.”

And it takes no more convincing than that; as the car idles you meet him in the back seat, you shimmying out of your denim shorts and Aegon tearing open the box of studded condoms, all the things you’ve run from disappearing into the endless blue sky, no storms, no sirens.

Aegon says, grinning as you climb into his lap: “I hope you’re better at this than you are at riding horses.”

You laugh, your palms cupping his stubbled face, your lips roving from his mouth to his cheek to the shell of his ear. “I am,” you whisper through his windswept hair, and then you prove it.

~~~~~~~~~~

For all of his jokes, he won’t be buying you a replacement for the cantankerous Dust Bunny. Instead, Aegon uses most of his bull riding winnings to purchase a secondhand motor for the Gulfstar. He says that he takes it down to Galveston once in a while and goes fishing in the Gulf, and although you don’t want to you imagine the puny thirteen-foot aluminum vessel at the mercy of the ocean, rocking and bobbing and pitching, dark waves lapping precariously at the black spray paint he’s scrawled onto the hull.

“That’s funny, by the way,” you tell him one morning, pointing to the boat as you walk together down to the stable, two pairs of Levi’s, two sets of footprints left in the earth by your boots. From behind barbed wire, the Longhorns gaze brainlessly, chomping on buffalograss and swishing their tails to ward off horse flies.

Aegon smiles. He has his hands in his pockets, but for some reason he keeps glancing at yours. “Couldn’t afford a real Gulfstar. Had to make my own.”

With the remainder of the prize money, he treats you to a celebratory dinner at Remember—porterhouses and Coors Lights and their Dessert of the Day, buttermilk pie—and then shows you the flea market he frequents in the city, the one where he found his belt buckle with the rattlesnakes in the shape of an A. He tells you to find something you like, literally anything; as long as it’s fifty bucks or less, that is. There’s a gruff old man selling jewelry at one table, strange vintage pieces that might be real or fake, and he conveniently has a story for each of them. He tries to convince you to buy the first ring you pick up—“It belonged to the beautiful young wife of an oil tycoon, and blue topaz is the official state gemstone of Texas, did you know that, ma’am?”—but even if it reminds you of Aegon’s eyes and the open sky above the ranch, it’s way over budget. As Aegon watches, you settle on a tiny gold ring with a bumblebee in place of a stone, delicate, lightweight, practical. It won’t get in the way.

There are no days off; the horses always have to eat. But at night, you and Aegon curl up together on the couch and watch whatever is on tv, and inevitably one of you makes the first move and you end up on the floor, or in the shower, or stumbling into bed together and staying there until morning. You agree on a system. You share the burden of cooking, although it doesn’t really feel like a chore with him. You do the dishes and the laundry. Aegon scrubs the bathroom and the kitchen, kills the roaches and the spiders, relocates the mice outside so something with fangs can eat them. You both pretend to forget to vacuum.

Aegon teaches you how to open beer bottles using the edge of a table. You bake him two versions of the same cake, banana or carrot or German chocolate or Italian cream, one vegan and one not to see if he can tell the difference, and he always can. You make chili together, Aegon browning ground beef in a pan and you chopping garlic and peppers as Alright by Darius Rucker pipes from the radio. You light the fire pit and talk until the stars are bright and countless. Aegon tells you about Dale Earnhardt and the UT Austin Longhorns. You tell him about continental shelves and paleoclimates. Time rolls, slow and warm. Each day under the sunlight, your fragile bumblebee ring glints on your right hand.

A few times a week, Tami invites you and Aegon to her house for meatloaf or Hamburger Helper or Frito pie. She has photographs of her kids everywhere; the décor is grandma chic, ceramic animals and floral everything, Tami’s mother did it decades ago and no one has cared to update it since. One night as you’re using her bathroom, little elephant figurines staring at you from the shelves, you get an idea and check the medicine cabinet. Sure enough, Tami has a prescription for when her arthritis is bad: oxycodone, 20 milligrams. You make sure there are enough pills in the bottle that she won’t notice a few missing and then swallow two with a palmful of water from the sink. And you get to float for a while, above the waves and under the radar.

Somewhere out there in the world you have student loans that aren’t being paid, and your former professors—if they’ve bothered to reach out at all—have had their emails bounce back with the alert that your university account has been disabled, and your old friends are having engagements and weddings and babies that you know nothing about, and your parents avoid mentioning you when they see their friends at church each Sunday, and Meredith’s parents are meeting with lawyers to try to get the investigation reopened. But here you are not a part of that world. You are separate, you are preserved, you are a fossil embedded in the limestone of a cave, you are thirty million years away from the person you were before.

But still, even through the epochs, the ricochets come back to rattle your walls if you aren’t careful. One night you are sitting on your bedroom floor popping tiny pink Benadryl tablets out of their blisters, listening absently to the baseball game playing on the television out in the living room: the Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Rays. Tampa is winning.

Meredith is in the doorway, not here on a ranch in Austin, Texas where you have to check your boots for scorpions before you put them on but in your freshman year dorm room at the University of Miami, and it’s the first time she has ever been away from home.

Meredith asks anxiously: Do we leave the door open at night?

You smirk, thinking you’ve gotten the slow roommate. So all the creeps on this hall can watch us sleep? No, obviously we shut the door at night, Meredith.

But I didn’t bring a nightlight or anything. Did you?

Is this kindergarten? Um, I don’t think so.

Meredith peers back at you from where she hovers in the threshold, in the fluorescent yellow luminescence from the ceiling lights in the hallway. I’m afraid of the dark.

And you almost laugh, believing she must be kidding, but no: her elven face is direct and somber and childlike. Oh, okay, you say, hoping she can’t tell how stunned you are, realizing you’ll have to be gentle with her. Yeah, totally, me too. We’ll figure something out.

So, six years ago and 1,300 miles away, you open your laptop and find a YouTube video of manta rays that plays on a ten-hour loop, and you leave that on all night so the dorm room is illuminated by soft rippling bluish light; and Meredith wakes up before you for her Italian Cinema class, but she leaves a thank you note on your keyboard, looping cursive and cerulean ink, a smiling manta ray doodled in one corner.

“Hey,” Aegon says, startling you, and now he is the one standing in the doorway. He’s wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s wet around the collar from his dripping hair. You’d thought he was still in the shower. His eyes snag on the pills in your hands, his expression troubled. “How many of those do you take?”

“One or two.” A lie. Now it’s usually four; you’re building up a tolerance.

“Can you sleep without them?”

“You’re not my boyfriend, Aegon.”

It flickers across his face, something recoiling, something wounded. Then he shows his palms in surrender and leaves you to sink.

~~~~~~~~~~

Pepper snorts impatiently as you use a hoof pick on him, scraping out clumps of soil and rocks that have gotten jammed in the grooves on either side of the frog. Then you flip the pick around and use the brush side to clean off the remaining dirt. Aegon is holding him by the halter; Pepper is the only horse he still won’t let you groom alone. The task finished, you lower Pepper’s hoof to the ground, hang the pick from the hook on the wall, and wipe your hands on your jeans.

“Pepper’s a cute name,” you say, trying to make conversation. Aegon has been quiet all morning.

“It was originally Dr. Pepper, but Tami and I decided he’s not benevolent enough to have ever taken the Hippocratic Oath.”

He tells the stallion goodbye, stroking his long black forelock. Then Aegon leaves the stall. You follow him out into the aisle of the stable and Aegon waits—forbearing, but perhaps unamused—as you take off his cowboy hat and playfully put it on your own head. Then you reach out to comb your fingers through his disheveled blonde hair, dust and fragments of straw whirling in the sunlight, cicada screams and horse nickers coloring the quiet.

Aegon says, not cruel but very firm: “Don’t touch me if I’m not your boyfriend.”

You drop your hands, shocked, a little slighted. “You’ve never had sex with someone you weren’t dating?” You know that’s not true. He certainly wasn’t dating Mackenzie when she was sending him you up? texts while her boyfriend was hard at work on a wind farm.

Aegon is immovable. “I’m not going to sleep with you if I’m not your boyfriend.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not messing around here. And I’m making sure you aren’t either.”

“I don’t know what you want.” But that’s not quite true. What you mean is: I don’t know how to give that to you.

“We’re living together,” Aegon says. “Dinner, tv, chores, grocery shopping, horses, the whole thing. We see each other naked all the time. Neither of us is talking to anybody else to my knowledge. Why don’t we just call it what it is?”

You can’t think too much about the future; it makes you breathless, it makes you sick. But Aegon isn’t asking for plans or promises. He just wants what you’re already doing now, and you want that too. “Okay. So you’re my boyfriend.”

He grins, taking his hat back. “Already was.”

You’re smiling too. “Sure.”

And you watch as he heads up the path towards the Longhorn pastures, his white t-shirt filthy, the wind blowing through his hair and the blossoms of firewheel, maypop, Texas Lantana, coralbean. “Don’t forget,” Aegon calls back to you. “We gotta find my lucky belt buckle before tomorrow.”

You don’t mind when he does the other events. You enjoy it, actually. You like going with him to get the Chevy and the horse trailer from where it’s parked in Tami’s driveway, loading up Sunfyre, driving west into the city, waving your homemade signs—Sharpies and glitter glue—as Aegon and his wall-eyed cremello Quarter Horse maneuver deftly through the arena, roping runaway calves and circumnavigating barrels. But there’s no doubt who the real celebrities are. No one gets louder cheers than the bull riders.

That afternoon Aegon is driving the Jetta to Walmart when you feel the car slow to a stop and hear him shift into park.

You say, not glancing up from your phone as you check your shopping list again, dish soap and pads, ingredients for both a vegan and non-vegan pecan pie, marshmallows for s’mores: “Surely we can’t do this in the middle of the road.”

Aegon laughs. “No, look.”

You follow his eyeline to the shoulder, where an armadillo is mauling on the carcass of a half-flattened kingsnake. “They eat snakes?!”

“They’re omnivores,” Aegon says. “You are too. Don’t be judgy.” He opens the car door and steps out.

“Where are you going?”

“To chase it away from the road so it doesn’t get run over.”

You watch him through your window: he approaches the shoulder and whistles shrilly. The armadillo ignores him; that must be some tasty snake. Aegon inches closer and nudges the creature’s shell with the toe of his boot. The startled armadillo—contrary to your expectations—does not curl into a ball but instead leaps comically high into the air, maybe two feet straight up, and then scurries off and vanishes into shrubs of American beautyberry and Virginia sweetspire.

“I thought they curled up into a ball,” you say when Aegon returns.

“Nine-banded armadillos can’t really do that. You’re thinking of the South American kind.”

“Should you be getting that close to one? Do they bite or anything?”

“I mean, they’re not going to attack a human. Although generally you want to keep your distance because they can carry diseases. Salmonella and Lyme and rabies. And leprosy.”

“Leprosy?!”

Aegon flashes a grin. “Just don’t go around licking them and you should be fine.”

You gaze into the shrubs where the armadillo disappeared; your eyes unfocus and the foliage blurs, a haze of green, violet, white, the fertile reddish-brown of the loose earth. “Their shells are neat. They remind me of deep-sea isopods.”

“Armadillos are adorable, but they scare easy. Kind of like somebody else I know.”

Then he shifts the Jetta into drive and puts his right hand on the back of your headrest.

~~~~~~~~~~

On the third buck, he gets thrown off; not Aegon, but the rider up right after him, a guy named Kody Wilhelmi from Oklahoma. Kody hits the dirt, and then one of the bull’s rear hooves come down on his chest, and the shock-absorbing vest might as well be weightless cotton or wool because you hear the crack of his ribs, see the blood spurt out of his mouth and across the dirt of the arena.

The rodeo clowns are rushing in to redirect the bull, and men in their cowboy hats are swarming Kody, pulling off his helmet, trying to calm him down and clean the blood from his face as he screams. You cover your eyes and don’t look again. You can feel that everyone else is moving—the bleachers trembling, seats and sodas and boxes of popcorn abandoned—and the people around you are gasping and shouting, comforting crying children, on the phone with 911, offering help, being useful, but you are trapped.

Your blue-white lights exploding over a sign as it appears out of the murky depths, silt and gloom, shadows and time: Go no farther.

Someone cuts off the music, a George Strait song, Check Yes Or No. Men are telling Kody that he’s going to be okay. You recognize Aegon’s voice among them.

Meredith asking as she stands under the karst window at Devil’s Den: This is safe, right?

You can’t watch. You can’t see that man with a death wish die.

There’s nothing in this cave worth dying for!

A woman is sobbing; his girlfriend, his wife?

Do not go beyond this point.

Minutes pass, you don’t know how many. There are sirens, static from the first responders’ radios, doors banging open and closed.

Meredith confessing from the doorway: I’m afraid of the dark.

Someone is jostling you, a palm on your shoulder. Now they’re trying to pull your hands off your face. You open your eyes and peer up at him from between your fingers, still not looking at the arena.

“You okay?” Aegon says, brow furrowed, a smear of blood on one of his cheekbones.

“Is he gone yet?”

“What?”

“Did they take his body away?”

“Honey, no one’s dead,” Aegon says, smiling. “A rib punctured his lung, but he’ll be okay. Happened to one of our other friends last year. Kody will be fine. He waved when they wheeled him out. He’ll be riding again in three months.”

“What?”

Your hands fall away and your eyes dart to the arena. Sure enough, Kody is not a mangled corpse there. He has been ferried away by people who can save him. In place of his body are only a vague imprint in the dirt, a myriad of footprints, tracks from the stretcher wheels, clotted wet spots of blood that a man is shoveling into a wheelbarrow.

“You ready to go?” Aegon asks, offering you a hand, calloused and stained with earth.

“What?” you say again, dazed.

“That was the last ride. The show’s over.”

For another few seconds, you just blink at him numbly.

FACT: It CAN happen to YOU!

Then you take Aegon’s outstretched hand and descend from the bleachers with him, realize that other people are laughing and smiling again, gaze out the passenger-side window at the grasping limbs of the bur oak trees as dusk falls and Aegon drives you home.

The next morning, you struggle through letting the horses out to graze and then stagger back to the house. It’s a hundred degrees outside, high humidity, and your period has arrived like a hammer pounding rusty nails. You palm pills and crumple back into bed, not floating, more like being tossed by rough waves. Your body hurts, but the sounds are worse: snapped bones, bubbles rupturing from a regulator, sirens wailing, people screaming. You close your eyes and wait for them to fall quiet.

Your phone vibrates, and you flip it over to read the screen. You already know it’s Aegon; no one else ever texts you. He has written: Why are you hiding in the house, lazy?

At first, you’re confused by how he knows where you are; he planned to be in the Longhorn pastures all day. Then you remember that he has your location.

You type: Sorry, I’m sick. Worst ranch hand ever. Will try to muck out the stalls in a few hours.

Fortunately, Aegon is forgiving. Aww no! Need anything?

Just a nap, took some Tylenol already :)

Actually some oxycodone that you squirreled away from your visits to Tami’s bathroom, washed down with several swallows of the Admiral Nelson’s Coconut Rum you found in a kitchen cabinet above where Aegon keeps his bull riding trophies in a row on the counter. He doesn’t drink it, has never mentioned it. Someone else must have left it there.

Mackenzie? you think as you doze off again. Or some other normal woman. Her sins are clean and glamorous: vanity, lust, envy, youth. Her skull is hushed. Her manicured hands are unbloodied.

When you wake up, it’s late, too late. You scramble out of bed and into the kitchen, where Aegon is stirring a pot on the stove.

“Hey,” he says cavalierly. “Don’t worry about the stalls, I took care of them.”

You reach for your boots. “Yeah, but the horses have to be put away.”

“I did that part too.”

You drop your boots and investigate the kitchen table, a strange sight: ginger ale, sleeves of Ritz crackers, bowls and spoons. Aegon removes the pot from the stove and fills both bowls with chicken noodle soup, thin but steaming hot, not homemade, Campbell’s.

“What’s up with this?” you ask him.

Aegon is puzzled. “You said you were sick.”

“It’s my period, Aegon.”

“Oh.” He stares at you, then down at the bowls on the table. “So is chicken soup good for that, or...?”

You laugh and join him, pulling out a chair, pouring yourself room-temperature ginger ale from the bottle he just bought, the carbonation fizzing up over ice cubes. “Yes. Absolutely.”

Aegon smiles as he slurps soup from his spoon. “Congratulations on not becoming a parent this month.”

“Yeah, you too.” If they gave out trophies and thousand-dollar prizes for bad ideas, that would be a winner for sure.

On the couch an hour later, he’s right next to you, your head on his chest and your fingers twisting lethargically in his hair. But every time your eyes dip shut—Coors Light flooding amber in your veins, your last stolen oxy making you frail and boneless—you picture Aegon being ripped away from you and into darkness, or dragged under the muddy hooves of a bull, or bitten by a rattlesnake or pulverized by glass and metal in a car crash, and any of those things could happen, effortlessly and inescapably. The world is a slaughterhouse and we’re all in line, isn’t that the oldest truth there is?

In the flickering artificial light of the television screen, some race you don’t care about, you kiss him, delicately at first and then forceful, frantic, in his lap, feeling that he’s hard beneath you.

Gently, bewildered, Aegon takes your face in his calloused palms. “Honey, what are you doing?”

“We don’t have to use a condom right now. But if you’re not interested, I get it. It’s messy.”

“Oh no, that wouldn’t stop me, we can put a towel down. I just thought...you said you weren’t feeling great.”

You look at him: ocean blue irises, stubble on his cheeks, crinkles around his eyes that cut down towards breakable bones. It’s not desire that you feel. It is a weakness, a deprivation, something fearful and anemic. When you speak, you are close to tears. “I really need to be close to you.”

“Okay,” Aegon says softly, skimming his thumbprint over your lips, studying your face, trying to read the layers of eons there. And he is slow and careful, more than he’s ever been before, and you don’t finish—that’s not in the cards tonight, that’s not what this is about—but you make him believe you have, because otherwise he will think he hasn’t given you what you needed.

Afterwards, your blood painted on his thighs and his belly, Aegon says in the panting lull before you wash each other clean in the shower: “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” you murmur, curled up against him, a towel hurriedly spread on the living room floor.

“I know you’re at kind of a weird place in your life and everything.”

Understatement. You smile dimly. “That’s not a question.”

“Am I just a distraction for you?” Aegon says like he’s been trying to work up the courage for a while, and you know exactly what he means. Sex is a drug when it’s good, the same as pills or powder or bottles or smoke. “Is that how you think of me? Is that what we’re doing here?”

You’re someone I’m becoming very afraid of losing.

Instead you say:“You make me happy, and I didn’t expect to find that this summer.”

“That’s good,” Aegon replies, but maybe a little uncertainly.

I’m terrified I’ll hurt you. I’m terrified something will happen and I won’t be able to save you.

“I really like you, Aegon.”

“I like you too.”

“And you’re my boyfriend.”

He chuckles, kissing your forehead. “Right. I am.”

Is that enough? It has to be. If he thinks he wants something more, it’s only because he doesn’t know you yet.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Do you know what they’re called?” you ask, gazing up at the constellations with your fingers laced behind your head.

You and Aegon are lying in the bed of the Chevy, a few old wool blankets thrown down over the cold metal. The front porch has a floodlight—good for scaring away coyotes, bobcats, and feral hogs—but Aegon turned it off so you can see the stars better, and the craters of the moon, and the phantom glow of the Milky Way like the ribbon of an ice age. Aegon’s Michael McDowell flag crackles in the breeze. From the radio floats Runnin’ Outta Moonlight.

“Oh yeah, definitely,” Aegon says. He points. “There’s that Orion dude with his belt, and...uh...over there is the...um...the Baby Bear or whatever.”

You laugh. “I don’t know them either.”

“You were usually looking in the opposite direction, I guess.”

“Right.” At the seafloor and the fossils and the basins and the tectonic plates, into the darkness, into the depths.

“You could do space stuff,” Aegon says with sudden enthusiasm. “You know, instead of the ocean. There are rocks in space. We have the Johnson Space Center in Houston.”

You shrug dismally. “Most of my credits wouldn’t count for that.”

“So get new credits.”

“College isn’t free, Aegon.” Especially not for people who can’t get scholarships because they ditched their PhD program and failed all their spring semester classes.

And what would happen when someone recognizes me from the news coverage, or when they Google me to see if I’ve published any research articles and find my mugshot instead, or when Meredith’s parents show up on my new campus to tell everyone I’m a murderer?

“I’ll pay for you to go,” Aegon says, grinning drowsily over at you, the hazy gold glimmer of beer in his veins, the silver sheen of moonlight in his eyes. “I’ll ride as many bulls as it takes.”

You smile, but you don’t mean it this time. You’re still watching the night sky, and it’s a little like the ocean in reverse: vast dark depths, cold pressure that crushes and suffocates, infinitesimal pinpoints of light, of life. Even if the stars look close together, they’re not. Trillions of miles separate them; each is alone and will stay that way, a prisoner of astrophysics. “If I asked you to stop riding bulls, would you do it?”

Aegon cackles, as if you’ve suggested he take a bullet to the chest. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“So you don’t die,” you say simply.

“It’s safe, we wear helmets now. You don’t have to worry. I’m not gonna end up like Chris Benoit.”

A vulnerable plea, a last attempt: “Aegon, I don’t think I can handle it.”

He is earnest now, never trying to upset you. “Look, to be completely transparent, I can’t make ends meet without the money I get from bull riding. That’s how I bought the Gulfstar, that’s how I afford new bridles and saddles for Sunfyre. And I’d like to have my own truck someday. Maybe even my own house, no roaches or mice permitted, imagine that! Aren’t you trying to stack up money too? Don’t you have dreams you’re saving for?”

Not really, you think.

But there’s something else too, and after a moment Aegon admits it. He smiles, a little guiltily, a little ashamed. “It’s the only time people have ever cheered for me.”

He’s not going to stop, you realize. And you can understand that; nothing would have made you stop cave diving except what did.

Aegon says, trying to lighten the mood: “Besides, without my bull riding winnings, how would I afford all our condoms?”

“I’m sorry that I’m not on the pill. I used to be, but then everything happened and my prescription refills ran out and I just...never got a new one. Didn’t see the point. Didn’t think I would need them, to be real.”

Aegon snickers, incredulous. “You thought you’d never have sex again?”

“For a while, I kind of thought I’d never do anything again.”

Now Aegon is alarmed. “What are you talking about?” And then, when you don’t respond: “You don’t mean...that, do you?”

“Everyone hated me,” you say, logical, clinical. “My parents, Meredith’s parents, the lawyers, the cops, a bunch of people I didn’t even know. I lost my best friend, then I lost all my other friends too. I lost my degree and my career. I woke up every day feeling like the worst person who had ever existed. And I didn’t really want to die, but I couldn’t feel that way anymore. I didn’t know how else to get rid of it. Cave diving used to be the place I went to make the world go quiet, but I lost that too.”

Aegon is staring at you, dull astonished horror. “What were you going to do?”

“I had this idea that I’d take a boat out into the Gulf of Mexio, then go for a swim and let the boat drift away out of reach. And I’d just...wait to get tired, I guess. Sink all the way down. Become sediment and history. That’s where Meredith is, you know. In the Gulf. So it seemed right for me to end up in the same place.”

“No,” Aegon says. “Honey, no.”

“But then I remembered reading somewhere that people who attempt suicide almost always immediately regret it, and I envisioned myself splashing around screaming for help as the boat vanished into the distance and the bull sharks closed in. So I put the plan on hold.”

“Hey,” Aegon says, turning your face towards his. His eyes are glistening, his voice severe. “You have to promise me that you would never do something like that, okay?”

“I’m a lot better now,” you reply, aware on some level that it’s not exactly an answer.

Aegon notices. “Then promise me.”

“I promise.”

He shakes his head, strokes your cheek, ghosts his thumbprint across your lips like he likes to do. “Maybe you should talk to someone about it.”

“I’m talking to you.”

“No, like a therapist,” Aegon says.

“What’s a therapist going to do? Go back in time and stop it from happening?”

“I don’t know, aren’t they supposed to help give people perspective? Like show them another way to look at things so it’s easier to cope?”

“What other way is there to look at it?”

A pause. “No, you’re right, forget it,” Aegon says and lies flat again, sighing.

“Anyway, I could get back on the pill if you want me to. Although, honestly, my orgasms are way more intense now. It must be a hormonal thing.”

He glances at you, mischievous. “It’s cool. I kind of like that you ovulate. It makes it so one week a month, I can’t keep you off me.”

“Yeah, but what if I get pregnant?” You’re only half joking. The prospect is terrifying.

Oddly, Aegon doesn’t seem scared at all. “If you get pregnant, we’ll just have to keep doing this forever.”

“You can’t have a kid and live the way we do now.”

“Kids can eat chili. Kids can watch NASCAR.”

“Kids need financial stability and parents who aren’t drunk all the time.”

Aegon chuckles. “We aren’t drunk. We’re tipsy, we’re happy.” He rolls onto his side and pulls you in, a current, a riptide, kissing your face and your temples, tangling his fingers in your hair. “And you’re not gonna get pregnant unless it’s on purpose. We’re careful.”

You snuggle into him, smiling, sheltered. “Yeah, we are.”

“So I have an idea.”

“Okay.”

“When your contract is up in August, you should sign another one.”

You draw back to look at him, to make sure he means it. “Really?”

“Another three months. Fuck, make it another six. Tami doesn’t usually need extra help through the winter, but I could convince her to keep you on. You’d love Thanksgiving here, all her kids come home to the ranch with their significant others and their pets and it’s chaos, dogs chasing cats, guinea pigs squealing all night. We play poker and do puzzles.”

You gaze into the blue of his eyes, thinking desperately, trying to make yourself believe it: He’s not too far away, he’s not leaving. He’s right here.

“You want to stay, right?” Aegon asks, a ghost of apprehension, a phantom of hopefulness.

“I want to stay,” you agree, kissing him beneath the starlight.

“Yeah, wild, isn’t it?” you say. “They had to add those because idiot scuba divers kept prying up the grates to get to the cave system and dying down there.”

“They got lost and couldn’t find their way out?”

“Well, the current doesn’t help. One side is a spring, the other is a siphon. A spring will help push you back out, but a siphon sucks you in. Get past that grate, and you’d drop seventy feet down to a thirty-million-year-old bedding plane, and good luck swimming out again.”

Meredith nods but she’s pensive, letting down her hair so it can air dry. She’s tall with narrow, breakable bones, dark eyes, olive skin and a white streak through one of her eyebrows, some kind of birthmark. You—eternally preoccupied with time, its passing, its ancient layers—are always struck by relief that her ancestors lived in the warm coastal hills of Southern Italy. Her genes wouldn’t have survived someplace meaner. She never would have made it through long dark winters as a Medieval peasant.

You resolve to distract her. “What did your mom say when she called last night?”

Meredith smiles. “She said you’re a bad influence.”

“True.”

“And that you’re going to end up being one of those women who dye their hair blue and have cats instead of children.”

“I’m closer to motherhood than you, Virgin Mer-y.”

She laughs, she’s not sensitive about it. If she was, you wouldn’t make jokes. “This is safe, right?” she asks, serious again. “I mean, it’s like riding a rollercoaster. You feel like you might die, but no one actually does. That’s how I’m trying to think about it, anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“You’ve done, what, fifty trips over the past six years?”

“Something like that.”

“And nothing bad has ever happened.”

“Because we follow the Golden Rules.”

Meredith kicks them off. “Actually have cave training before you go in a cave.”

“Always use a guideline.”

“The Rule of Thirds.” Budget one-third of your air supply for entry, one-third for the return trip, and one-third to keep in reserve in case of emergencies.

“Don’t dive deeper than forty meters.” Any more than that risks nitrogen necrosis, otherwise known as the Rapture of the Deep.

“At least three lights per diver.”

You grin and give her a high five. “And we all survive and get slushies on the way home.”

“The giant catfish here are neat,” Meredith concedes. “I was following one around for a while. It was almost as big as me. I got to touch its whiskers!”

“Just wait until you dive in saltwater. There’s coral and sea sponges and all kinds of fish. We even see goliath groupers sometimes.”

“What the hell? Is that an actual fish or did you just make that up? Like when you tried to convince me a shark bred with a dolphin and there were hybrid aquatic murder monsters on the loose, sholphins?”

“No, goliath groupers are real. They are very huge and very ugly, and they’ve been around for about as long as this cave. Longer than cows, giraffes, kangaroos, deer, seals, swordfish, wolves, polar bears...and humans, obviously. They existed before wooly mammoths.”

Meredith brightens as an idea occurs to her. “Can I take pictures?”

“What, during a dive?” you say. “Yeah, of course! Underwater photography is totally a thing. You’ll just need to figure out what equipment you need. Get your cave diving certification, get some experience, and then you’ll be adding moody black and white shots of sea critters to your portfolio in no time.”

She’s beaming now, standing on the platform in fragile bare feet, her fins in her grasp. Then she starts towards the staircase that leads up to the entrance to the cavern. “Let’s check out the gift shop. I want a t-shirt.”

You scan the platform to make sure everyone from your group is out and safe. They are. “Okay, sure.”

“If you get one too, we can match.”

“What are we, married?”

Meredith shrugs, like she doesn’t make the rules. “I bake you vegan cupcakes. You build the IKEA furniture.”

“Damn, we’re kind of married.”

You laugh together and lumber up the staircase, no easy task in your equipment, and after the gift shop you all pile into the van, and when you stop for gas in Orlando—it’s another three hours south to The U in Miami, you’ll arrive home long after dark—you make sure to pick a Wawa so everyone can get a slushie.

That night, you start browsing caveatlas.com, to which you are a frequent visitor, for possible locations for Meredith’s first real dive once she gets her certification. You know she’s nervous. You know she might panic; it can happen to even experienced cave divers. So you want something easy, no notorious reputation, no human bones from this century. You want a place where no one has died.

You find a sink in the Gulf of Mexico that looks promising, just off the coast of Tarpon Springs, a town near Tampa made famous by the sponge diving industry and the Greek settlers who pioneered it in the early 1900s, descending into the darkness in their ponderous, primitive suits. You read the reports that other divers have left, and search Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube too. There’s not a ton of information—it’s not an extensive or well-known system—but it seems perfect for a nice chill open water dive and a quick peek into the cave if Meredith feels up for it.

Has a nice rock ledge to cruise down, plenty of wildlife, lots of snappers and sheepsheads.

Would definitely keep a knife handy if diving this site. A lot of fishing lines get washed out from the beach/piers and can get tangled around your fins etc. Other than that, it’s a beautiful cave.

Thanks for the heads up! I can’t wait to check this spot out next time I’m in the area.

I didn’t have my dive watch on, but I think it goes down to about seventy feet before you hit the cave entrance, kind of makes an hourglass shape. It’s a nice little spot to do some training, easy to get to.

It’s dark after forty feet so bring a flashlight, friends!

I’ve descended all the way to the cave and explored the first two chambers, then it becomes a tight squeeze. Too restricted for my experience level and I chose not to continue. Awesome trip.

I want to check this out so bad. If anyone is down to be my dive buddy, message me!

Saw a goliath grouper :)

And if you had read just a little further, you would have seen a comment to give you pause: Depending on the tide this system will siphon, not something to fuck around with.

But you doze off as you’re scrolling in bed, and so you don’t see that part, and you never do until you go back to look months later when it’s too late to matter.

~~~~~~~~~~

She whips her head towards you, her massive teeth clacking. You yelp and leap back.

From the next stall over where he’s brushing Sunfyre, Aegon cackles. “Did she try to bite you again?”

“She’s demonic!”

“Just smack her with the brush.”

You stare at the brush in your hand, bewildered, then at Dust Bunny who is glowering at you with her ears flat against her head. Her coat is what they call fleabitten, grey marred with dark speckles that appear as the horse ages. “I can’t hit an animal.”

I don’t even eat animals, you think before remembering that’s not true anymore. Dinner last night was chicken nuggets and Kraft mac and cheese. The night before that was chili, and the one before that Frito pie, lovingly homemade and delivered by Tami.

“You won’t hurt her,” Aegon promises. “She’s too big for that. You’ll just show her who’s boss. Next time she tries to bite you, whack her neck with the brush and yell no. Then she’ll stop.”

Right on cue, Dust Bunny grunts and nips at you again. You scream and stumble backwards, crashing into the wall. Aegon is laughing hysterically; he can’t see you, but surely he can picture it clearly enough.

“She won’t respect you if you don’t hit her,” he says.

“I don’t want to,” you moan, miserable, clutching the brush to your chest.

“Then she’s going to keep biting you.”

“She’s glaring at me.”

“So smack her with the brush. Get revenge.”

“Why did you assign me to this evil horse?”

“I told you, she’s the safest to ride. She won’t throw you off.”

There are eleven horses in total: Dust Bunny, Sunfyre, colossal Columbus the half-Clydesdale, Pepper the black and white paint, Mischief the palomino, Dakota the Appaloosa, Cookie and Checkers the Connemara ponies, Uma the red roan, Duchess an Arabian rescued from neglect, and Boxer, a blood bay named after the character in Animal Farm.

Now Aegon is sighing as he enters Dust Bunny’s stall, here to rescue you. He is carrying the brush he was using on Sunfyre, who never bites and never complains, and watches everything with his bulging blue eyes—wall eyes, that’s what they’re called, you randomly remember from that one summer you went to horse camp—like he understands more than any animal should.

“Hey, Grandma,” Aegon greets Dust Bunny as he goes to stand by her head. In return, she gives him a flick of her ears and a reproachful look with her lustrous black eyes. Aegon is dressed in his usual uniform, Levi’s, boots, a white t-shirt stained with dust and mud, and the tan cowboy hat he wears when he’s working out in the sun. He’s smiling, a little wickedly, scruffy cheeks and deep crow’s feet by his eyes. He doesn’t wear enough sunscreen. “Okay,” he tells you. “Try to brush her.”

Tentatively, you lift the brush and glide the bristles down Dust Bunny’s shoulder. Almost gleefully, she turns her head to bite you.

“No!” Aegon shouts, striking her meaty neck with his brush. Dust Bunny flattens her ears and flares her nostrils, but she does stop. “Don’t bite! Act right or you’re going to the Elmer’s factory!”

And as Aegon snarls at Dust Bunny, the geriatric horse settles down and swivels her ears forward, reluctantly paying attention. You stare at him, smiling, unable to stop. When was the last time anyone stood up for you?

Aegon grins at you. “You’re welcome.”

“Thanks, Aegon.”

His phone vibrates; he slides it out of his jeans pocket, checks the screen, groans dramatically and puts it away again.

“Who is it?” you ask, smirking, but you’re pretty sure you already know.

Aegon could lie, but he doesn’t. “Kenzie again.” He shows you his screen; the text from Mackenzie reads: Hello? Aegy???

“Why don’t you answer?”

Aegon raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Do you want me to answer?”

Obviously not. “I’m just wondering why you don’t.”

“I told you at Remember. I’m done with that now.”

“But why?”

He shrugs. In the air are wheeling dust motes, bits of hay, horse nickers and stomping hooves. Pepper, in particular, likes to kick his stall door every once in a while just to keep people on their toes. “I might be sort of interested in somebody else.”

“Then you should do something about it.”

Aegon chuckles, evasive, maybe even sheepish. “She’s hard to nail down.”

You tease: “She’s hard to nail?”

Aegon laughs. “Not what I said! Hard to nail down. Hard to figure out. All guarded and cryptic and whatever. I don’t know if she likes me back.”

“You could try asking.”

“You can’t just ask something like that. You have to feel it.”

You’re watching him, trying to catch his ocean blue eyes, trying to tell him that if he took your hand in his—or your hair, or your face—you wouldn’t stop him. But he keeps looking away. Is he talking about another woman, or is he afraid of you?

Aegon strokes his stubbled cheeks, thoughtful, then as he leaves the stall he taps your shoulder as if he’s looking for an excuse to touch you. “Saddle up, honey. Let’s go move some cows.”

“You bet,” you reply, smiling a little to yourself. Beneath your t-shirt—anonymous, pink, Walmart—your shoulder glows warm and yearning.

This is your life here. You help Aegon repair fences, kneeling in the buffalograss after he’s checked for snakes. In the stable, you fill buckets with fresh water and bins with hay and supplement pellets of alfalfa, oats, flaxseed, an assortment of vitamins and minerals. You hold your hands flat when you give the horses treats—raisins, carrots, cucumbers, pieces of apples and watermelons—and muck out the stalls, put down fresh straw, brush the horses when you bring them in each night. You clean the tack: saddles, stirrups, bridles, bits, reins, the halters all the horses wear when they’re outside so it’s easier to grab them if they decide to forget they’re domesticated. You use a wheelbarrow to take salt licks to the Longhorns.

Today, the Longhorns need to be transferred from one pasture to another. Aegon and Sunfyre do most of the work; you and Dust Bunny hang out near the back of the herd, moseying along at a pitifully slow pace. You keep having to tug on the reins to pull Dust Bunny’s head up when she stops to graze, and then she flattens her ears and huffs and paws irritably at the ground. But she never bolts or tries to buck you off, and she never tries to bite you again either. The air is hot and dry and the color of sand. You can hear that the radio on the front porch is playing Life Is A Highway by Rascal Flatts.

Your eyes keep drifting to Aegon as he trots alongside the cattle, whistling, the wind ripping at his dirt-stained shirt, his blonde hair flying, his ever-alert Quarter Horse shimmering like gold. When one young Longhorn breaks off from the herd, Aegon tosses a lasso and effortlessly snags its horns, wrangles it back to where it’s supposed to be, releases it again. And you can’t stop imagining him covering you like sunlight, something simple, something warm, and you wonder if you’re losing your mind or if he wants it too.

When you return to the house that night after putting the horses away, Aegon is sprawled across the green plaid couch with a bowl of spaghetti in one hand and a fork in the other. He gestures to a second bowl on your couch cushion. On the television, race cars whizz around an asphalt track.

“Texas Toast will be ready soon,” Aegon says.

You take your bowl of spaghetti and sit down beside him. And because you lived with an Italian for six years, you immediately recognize an imposter. “Is this... Barilla?”

“Ragu.”

Even worse. You smile and eat it anyway. You say, meaning the NASCAR race: “So they just drive around in a circle for four hours?”

“Sometimes there are crashes and cautions and stuff.”

You look over at him. “This seems really boring.”

“Says the person who wanted to spend her life staring at underwater rocks.”

You chuckle, twirling spaghetti onto your fork. “Okay. Fair.”

The oven timer goes off in the kitchen, and Aegon gets up. He reappears moments later with a plate piled high with slices of Texas Toast from a bright yellow box in the freezer. He’s also carrying two Coors Lights. You haven’t learned to appreciate the taste yet, but you like that they remind you of him. You take the ice-cold glass bottle that Aegon offers you, already opened.

“The pasta is vegan, by the way,” Aegon says, proud of himself. “I checked the ingredients.”

“The Texas Toast isn’t.”

“Ohhh. Right.” He seems a little deflated.

“I’ll still eat it though,” you say to encourage him, and fork slices of Texas Toast onto your mound of spaghetti. On the television, the number 34 car, Michael McDowell, is not winning.

Aegon flops back down onto the couch and swigs his beer. He drinks a lot, but why should you care? You can’t sleep without popping three Benadryls. Sometimes you start the day with a mini Smirnoff or two to take the edge off. You’re in no position to judge. Aegon leaves his dirty laundry all over the house. He doesn’t wash the dishes for days at a time. He tried to vacuum once and burned a hole in the carpet. He thinks Ragu is real pasta sauce. But when he glances over at you and smiles—like he’s so happy you’re here, like he can’t wait to wake up and do it all over again tomorrow—the things you once considered dealbreakers don’t register anymore. This is a different world, and you’re a different person. Or at least, you’re trying to be.

“So, you’ve lived at the ranch for a long time,” you say.

“A few years. I was a fuck up in high school, my parents kicked me out when I was eighteen. I knocked around all over the place and then ended up taking a job here. Haven’t felt the need to leave since.”

Now you have to ask a question you might not want to know the answer to. “Do you hook up with all the ranch hands?”

Aegon snorts like he thinks it’s hilarious. “They’re mostly guys.”

“But even when they’re not?”

“No,” Aegon says, and he is ostensibly sincere. “I don’t hook up with all the ranch hands. I’ve actually never hooked up with a ranch hand. Didn’t sound like a smart idea, living together and everything. Could get messy. Wasn’t worth the risk. Didn’t like any of them enough.”

“Okay. Good.”

He’s smiling at you again, his head tilted to the side, the bluish television light flickering on his face. “You want to see me ride a bull next week?”

You shrug and peer down into your spaghetti. “I don’t want to see you get trampled.”

“It hasn’t happened yet.” And then, when you don’t reply fast enough: “I’d like you to go.”

“I’ll go,” you agree, watching the race cars zoom over the same ground again and again and again.

Hours later, in your bedroom—once decorated by Tami’s mother and not updated in twenty years—you tear open a fresh box of Benadryl and pop three small pink pills out of their blisters. You wash them down with the last of your Coors Light, your second bottle. Benadryl is convenient. No prescription needed, no controlled substances. Knocks you out like a concussion.

You need it because otherwise you’ll thrash through bad dreams all night: a cloud of bubbles erupting from Meredith’s regulator as she is ripped into the abyss, your lights passing over the black-ink bones of the Grim Reaper, her mother’s voice on the phone when you call, red and blue police lights flashing in the parking lot at the edge of the sand: What do you mean you’re sorry? What happened? What did you do?

~~~~~~~~~~

“You ready?” Aegon asks, materializing in your doorway, cowboy hat, boots, a large belt buckle for extra flair. It’s two rattlesnakes twisted into the shape of an A. He sees you looking at it and grins. “Cool, huh? Found it at this flea market in the city. I’ll take you there sometime.”

“What kind of belt buckle should I buy?”

“One that’s easy to get off.”

You smile at him, never sure how serious he is. “I’m ready. I just need my socks.”

“In here?” Aegon says, thumping his fist on the top drawer of your ancient wooden dresser.

“Yeah, throw me two of them.”

He slides open the drawer and peeks inside, then is startled by something. Only then do you remember what else you keep there. You cover your face with your hands as Aegon picks up your vibrator. “Think you’ll need this at the rodeo?”

“Oh my God, I forgot that was in there,” you say, giggling frenetically; you’re midway between mortified and exhilarated. “Just ignore it. Just put it back and we’ll never speak of it again.”

Instead, Aegon considers the vibrator for a while and then his eyes return to you. His lips are curled up at the edges, his eyes a little mischievous, but his voice is calm. “Can I use it on you?”

You’re sitting on your bed, denim shorts, teal tank top, and underneath is thin breathable cotton that is essential in climates that are sweltering and sun-drenched. “Yeah.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “What? Really?”

“Well I think about you sometimes. During, I mean.”

Aegon is gaping at you, in fascination, in disbelief. Perhaps he can’t tell if you’re serious either.

You go to the open dresser drawer and fish out two socks. “Maybe if you stay on the bull for eight seconds, you can ride me afterwards.”

Then you stroll past him and into the hall, pull on your boots, trod out to the driveway to wait for him.

~~~~~~~~~~

Your Jetta is the only car in the lot, surrounded by trucks and SUVs and trailers for horses and cattle. Tami loves that you have your own vehicle. Now she doesn’t have to let Aegon borrow the Barney the Dinosaur purple Chevy so often.

He walks you to the bleachers and introduces you to some of the guys he knows so you won’t be completely alone. They are all wearing jeans and boots and plaid, and have names like Rhett, Colton, Colby, Walker, Hayden, Sterling, Dylan. They’re nice enough, but once Aegon leaves you don’t say much to them. When you talk to people, they inevitably ask questions: Where are you from? What do you do for work? How are your folks? What brought you here? Where are you going next?

The arena has a dirt floor and massive flatscreens suspended from the rafters; the rodeo clowns are doing a goofy skit to keep the kids entertained and not tormenting their parents too much. White lights shine down, leaving no shadows. You are getting better at recognizing country songs; the one playing now is Drink In My Hand by Eric Church. At the concessions stand, they’re serving smoked brisket sandwiches, hotdogs, burgers, nachos, bowls of chili, candied pecans, popcorn. You aren’t really hungry, but you wander there, restless and avoiding awkward conversations.

“This place is not fit for vegans,” you mutter, smiling to yourself as you read the menu. You buy a hotdog, some candied pecans, and a cold, dripping can of Dr. Pepper pulled from a plastic bin full of ice.

New state, new me.

As you’re heading back to your seat, a little girl with a microphone starts singing the National Anthem in the center of the arena. The bull riders are there too, lined up in order of their scheduled rides; Aegon is fourth. You keep walking until you realize people are scowling at you, so you freeze and dutifully lay your right palm over your heart, precariously balancing your food in your left hand. When the National Anthem ends, you hurry to your place in the bleachers as the announcer’s voice—middle-aged man, thick accent—thunders through the arena, introducing each of the riders and then the bulls as well, their sinister bovine faces projected on the flatscreens.

Two women now occupy the seats just in front of yours, salon-blonde hair curled into waves, floral sundresses, presumably no mugshots to be found with a cursory Google search. They are chattering about the men waving from the dirt floor.

“That Aegon guy is so hot,” the one lady says to her friend.

“You should try to talk to him afterwards.”

“You think so?”

“I would if I wasn’t married.”

“Sweetie, Ryan’s been deployed for six months, he hardly counts as a husband.”

“All I’m saying is if you want to find out what Aegon has under his Levi’s, I would support that.”

You lean forward and tell them, feigned regret in your voice: “He has a girlfriend.”

They groan together. “Ain’t the best ones always taken?” the first lady replies, and you force a somber frown and nod. Oh yeah, sure, of course they are.

You’ve seen bull riding before, but only in passing: at the Florida State Fair while sharing a bag of kettle corn with Meredith, on YouTube while browsing random videos during the Latin class you were forced to take for a university requirement. So this is the first time you’ve bothered to commit the procedures to memory.

The bull is loaded into the chute, caged by claustrophobic metal. The rider climbs onto its back and grips the rope tied just behind the bull’s front legs. The sport isn’t quite as suicidal as it used to be; the riders all wear helmets with cages on the front and a shock-absorbing vest, and the points of the bulls’ horns are cut off so no one gets gored. But if a two-thousand-pound animal wants to macerate your ribs or your spine or your pelvis, there’s only so much that can be done to stop it. Sometimes the bull tries to buck in the chute, or crush the rider’s legs against the side. A bunch of guys in cowboy hats lean in to help keep the rider steady. Then the gate of the chute is pulled open and the bull plunges into the arena, leaping, kicking, reeling, stomping, and the rider’s free hand cannot touch anything—the bull, the rope, not even himself—or he is disqualified. Usually within a few seconds the rider goes sailing through the air and loses his chance at the prize money, and on top of that sometimes the bull tries to murder him too until the rodeo clowns rush in to divert it.

The first rider gets bucked off in four seconds. The second makes it to five and a half. The time is kept on one of the flatscreens, angry red numbers on a black backdrop. The third rider rockets off his bull almost immediately, and then the bull circles back to trample him, massive muddy hooves stomping as the man curls up and covers his head with his hands. And for a moment you are sure he’s going to die, you can’t breathe, you feel your blood freeze in your veins, and the crowd is shrieking and knocking over their boxes of popcorn as they leap up from their seats. But the rodeo clowns manage to intervene and the bull is corralled back to its pen, and the rider takes off his helmet and waves to the audience so they’ll know he’s okay, beaming and hollering, not even a speck of blood on him. Only then do you start to relax.

Maybe this is okay, you think. Maybe they have it all figured out. Maybe Aegon will be fine.

He’s up next. The bull he’s riding is white and named Moonshine Maniac. You watch the chute as he climbs onto the bull, the other men helping to lift him back up when the bull jolts against the metal gate and throws back his horns. Then Aegon at last gets settled and gives the signal that he’s ready.

The chute opens and the bull lunges out, but instead of the arena you see, suddenly, disorientingly, your lights gliding over the sign at the bottom of Devil’s Den, white polystyrene plastic, the Grim Reaper in the company of his heap of dead divers.

Prevent your death!

You hide your face in your palms; you shrink into yourself, your elbows on your knees, your skull full of a thousand spectators’ screams. You are underwater, you are under the world, you are watching Meredith get wrenched into the next chamber, you are hearing the metallic rattle of handcuffs as they latch around your wrists.

There’s nothing in this cave worth dying for!

Bubbles, silt, stones, darkness, flashing lights of red and blue.

FACT: It CAN happen to YOU!

Then there is a buzzer, deafeningly loud, and you are startled back into the arena, and when you look up at the flatscreen with the stopwatch you see that the numbers read eight seconds even.

People are cheering, clapping, chanting Aegon’s name. As the bull is led away by the rodeo clowns, Aegon takes off his helmet and hurls it away, pumps his fist over his head, searches for you in the bleachers and waves, points to you, mouths with a radiant grin: I told you. I’m not gonna die.

At the end of the show, he gets his picture taken, a small trophy shaped like a rider on a bucking bull, and a check for a thousand dollars. He’s the only winner today. Then he comes sprinting through the bleachers to you, drags you out of your seat, and puts his cowboy hat on your head, smiling as he tries to fix your hair that he’s tangled. The women sitting in the next row twist around and glare at you venomously.

Then Aegon gets a better look at your face, and his brow furrows. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m okay.”

“Because you seem...kind of out of it.”

“I was just worried about you.”

You didn’t watch any of the other rides. You hid in the bathroom or roamed around the concessions stand; but you don’t want to ruin Aegon’s happiness, and now that it’s over and he’s here—touching you, real and tangible, dirt on his face, crinkles by his eyes—you’re feeling better anyway. And by the time you’re halfway back to the ranch, the Jetta cruising east on State Highway 71, you’ve almost forgotten your panic entirely, almost sunk it back down into unconsciousness. Aegon has his hand on your headrest, and he’s saying that next time you get dinner together at Remember the Alamo, he’s going to order the most expensive steaks they have, filet mignons or porterhouses. He’s going to help Tami retire to a private island in the Caribbean. He’s going to buy you a better horse.

You’re still talking, still laughing, when you slip through the threshold into your bedroom; but Aegon stops in the doorway, sipping a Coors Light he grabbed from the refrigerator, leaning against the frame like he’s afraid that stepping inside will make him an intruder.

“So,” he begins, somewhat nervously, swigging his amber-gold bottle of Coors Light that is wet with condensation. You imagine how his hands would feel on you: cold from the glass, cautious with nerves. “Do you want to see if there’s a baseball game on or something?”

“Did you think I was joking earlier?”

He stares at you, the light streaming in through the window still a sepia-photograph yellow. Late sunset, early summer. Aegon’s face is stunned, hesitant, unmistakably hopeful. “Weren’t you?”

“No. I wasn’t.”

Then, to see what he’ll do, you yank off your boots and socks and fling them into the corner, then sit on the edge of the bed with your legs crossed. You throw the cowboy hat he put on you and it sails to the opposite end of the room. The quilt is a faded off-white and patterned with flowers. The pillowcases are cheap and blue, courtesy of Walmart. Aegon takes one last gulp of liquid gold from his frosty bottle, then crosses into your bedroom and sets it on top of the dresser. He slides open the top drawer, takes out the vibrator, then looks at you again, smiling now. Your eyes still caught on his—like a lasso around a bull’s horns—you lie back, your knees bent and the soles of your feet flat on the mattress, your fingers wandering down to your denim shorts to undo the button and zipper. But you leave your shorts on; you aren’t sure exactly how far either of you are prepared to go.

Aegon takes off his boots and climbs onto the bed. He lies down beside you on his side, and it’s the closest you’ve ever been to him, and when you breathe he’s all there is: salt, earth, beer, horses, cattle, sunlight. He gazes at your face, your lips, then opens his mouth like he wants to say something. He changes his mind and clicks on the vibrator instead, a hum, a whirring, and he slides the tip of it under the denim but over the cotton, as if letting it touch your skin would be too much, as if he’s not certain you’re ready to show him that.

The sensation is warm and hypnotic, dulled by the thin layer of cotton so that it’s gradual, taunting, something you are impatient for. You watch Aegon—his face, his eyes, pools of glimmering blue—and he stays with you, not looking at where you are becoming wet and ravenous, where your hips are beginning to shift so the vibrator presses harder against you. Your breathing is swift and jagged. You bite your lip to try to stop yourself from making a sound that is too vulnerable, too intimate to share with an almost-stranger. Then you moan without meaning to, soft and whispery and helpless, and Aegon kisses you, not like a first kiss, not tentative, not polite, but deep and fast and uncareful, his free hand on your cheek, his body angling closer to yours like the moon covers the sun in an eclipse.

You feel—like you always do when you’re close—a sudden and starving need to be full. You reach down to hold the vibrator in place yourself, then you use your other hand to touch Aegon’s now unoccupied fingers. You glance to your unzipped shorts. “Can you...?”

He realizes what you mean and tries to act casual. “Oh, yeah. Sure. No problem.”

Aegon tugs your shorts off your hips and then slides them all the way down, his fingertips lingering on your thighs, knees, calves, ankles, like he’s not convinced he’ll ever get another chance. He tosses your shorts to the floor and then runs two fingers up the inside of your thigh, to the thin grey cotton covering you—now soaked through, dark and beckoning—and then under the fabric, still not daring to reveal you completely. He finds you, sinks into you, and the pressure is intoxicating—better than pills, better than bottles—and when his fingers move inside you your hips follow the rough, insistent rhythm. He’s buried to the knuckles and it’s still not enough, not for either of you. He’s almost on top of you now, and you drag him in like a riptide, your tongue parting his lips, your hand in his blonde hair and specks of dust and hay floating in the late-afternoon sunlight. There are no sounds but low mechanical humming, two sets of lungs fighting for air, your hushed clandestine whimpers, his whispers and his sighs.

Then Aegon does something strange. He sweeps your hair off your face and kisses your forehead, as his palm on your cheek holds your face still and his thumb skates across your lips. And then it’s on you like lights blazing through the depths, like a current, like an imprint of a footstep preserved for eons in the fossil record: you arching into him, a moan hemorrhaging from your throat, constricting muscles and electrified neurons.

You gaze dizzily up at Aegon, and any hesitation you still had is gone now. He wants it too. He won’t ask, but he wants it. His fingers are still inside you, entombed in drenched, pulsing warmth. You click off the vibrator and let it tumble to the floor, your hand shaking and weak.

You ask breathlessly: “Do you have a condom?”

He looks furious with himself; he looks devastated. He should have thought this through. He wasn’t expecting it either. “I don’t.”

Still, you need him. “How good are you at pulling out?”

“I am so good at pulling out.”

“Do it,” you exhale, you plead. And at last he unveils you completely, helping you yank off your panties and tank top and a simple cotton bra that doesn’t match. Aegon doesn’t care, doesn’t even notice. He’s after what’s underneath. And is that just flesh, or is that you?

His dirt-flecked white t-shirt is gone, then his Levi’s, then his boxers too. He’s kissing your cheek, your jaw, your throat. He’s between your thighs now, thrusting gingerly into you. “Oh, fuck,” he gasps, blue eyes wide. “Not that good.”

You laugh and prop yourself up on your elbows. You catch his face in your hand, needling him with your fingernails—not hard enough to hurt him, only to distract him, to leave fleeting indents of crescent moons in his skin—and you whisper: “Stay with me a little longer.”

Aegon nods obediently, not closing his eyes but diving into yours, focusing, steadying. “Okay, I’ll try. I’ll try.”

You roll your hips, very slowly, and he fits perfectly with you; he’s still watching your face, absorbed, mesmerized. Then he’s kissing you again, gently this time, like suddenly there’s no rush, like you have forever. He tastes like beer and sun and sweat and heat, like earth, like life.

Abruptly, Aegon breaks the kiss and abandons you so he won’t finish, collapsing onto his back and staring up at the ceiling, panting raggedly. “I’m sorry,” he says, ashamed, shaking his head. “I can do so much better than that, I swear. I’ll get condoms. Please don’t think I’m a loser.”

But now the light is inescapable, open-water blue sky and dust billowing as your 2009 Jetta bumps up the driveway. On either side of the winding dirt road are pastures fenced in by barbed wire, oceans of firewheel, American beautyberry, buttonbush, coralbean, buffalograss. Texas Longhorns mosey over the bluffs, ears twitching, tails swishing, ever-chewing, watching you pass by with their vacuous oil-drop eyes. Their coats are colors of the earth, as if they’ve grown up out of it: brown, tan, cream, the grey of stones or ashes, sand yellow, clay red.

“Future cheeseburgers,” you mutter as you steer around the worst of the dips in the road so you don’t break an axle. “Sorry, guys.”

At the end of the driveway is a small single-story house, old and weathered. The white paint is peeling off the wood; there is a covered porch and a brick chimney, and a stable off a ways to the west where the June sun is just beginning to sink towards dusk. In an adjacent paddock, horses are grazing. Parked in front of the house are a decrepit Chevy with a custom paint job—Grape Fanta purple—and a detached trailer hauling a cheap thirteen-foot aluminum fishing boat. Someone has scrawled Gulfstar on the side with spray paint, which is kind of funny. Gulfstar was a company that made yachts back in the 80s.

You cut the Jetta’s engine and grab your purse, and as the dust clears you see that there’s a man crawling out from under the truck. You step into the bright, bone-dry afternoon to meet him.

“Hey!” he says, trotting over and yanking off his oil-stained gloves, then offering you his right hand to shake. He’s wearing cowboy boots, Levi’s, a filthy white t-shirt, blonde hair full of dirt. On the edge of the front porch sits a radio tuned to a country station, not your preferred genre. It takes you a few seconds to recognize the song: Body Like A Back Road. “You’re our new ranch hand.”

“And you’re the dude from the emails.”

“Aegon Targaryen,” he says as you shake. His palm is warm and calloused; he’s smiling, stubble on his face, eyes like the Gulf of Mexico. He seems pleasantly surprised to see you, like you’re a winning scratch-off ticket. You envision him taking a quarter to your skin and scouring it away until the daylight pours in.

“Aegon is an...interesting name.”

“Family tradition, it’s a whole thing, don’t worry about it.”

When you drop his hand, your gaze flicks to the flag mounted on the porch, not the American flag or the Lone Star of Texas or even Don’t Tread On Me. Instead, to your bewilderment, pictured there is a middle-aged man, a yellow car, and the number 34. “Who’s that?”

Aegon turns to see what you’re looking at and then says, like it’s obvious and you should already know: “Michael McDowell. He’s a NASCAR driver.”

“Does he win a lot?”

“Nah. That’s why I like him.”

Then Aegon grins, straight white teeth and crinkles by his eyes. And you—who had expected to find no happiness this summer, in fact under the circumstances happiness feels almost sacrilegious—think to yourself: I might be kind of into this guy.

“Come on,” Aegon says, nodding to the house. “I’ll help you with your bags.”

You don’t have much, a backpack and two suitcases. You left everything else at your apartment in Miami: furniture, cups and plates, towels, textbooks. You didn’t even try to donate them to a Goodwill or list them on Facebook Marketplace. You probably weren’t getting your security deposit back anyway.

Inside the house where you will spend the next ten weeks, you discover three tiny bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room featuring a green plaid couch and a tube tv with a VCR, and a kitchen with sheet vinyl flooring the color of lemonade and a square table shoved haphazardly in one corner, a few chairs, none matching. Tami is sitting in one of them. She’s the person who hired you, and after only your late-night, half-baked response to a Craigslist ad and her follow-up phone call, fifteen minutes tops, mostly complaining about her osteoarthritis and then mentioning that her employee would email you directions to the ranch. She presents you with a cold can of Dr. Pepper and then looks at Aegon.

“You changed the oil in the Chevy?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You fixed that fence?”

“Well...I’m gonna.”

“You’re fired,” Tami says, and they both start laughing. “If the cows get out, you can chase ‘em.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow. I got help now.” Aegon winks at you and then drags your suitcases down the hall to the bedroom with wood paneling walls, uninspired beige carpet, a blanket set that looks like it belongs to a seventy-year-old woman, a vast window that draws in the sun.

Tami asks you how the drive was. She is a very large person, broad shoulders, booming voice, short dark hair in an unglamorous ponytail. She was born here in Texas, got married at nineteen, had four fantastic children—three attended UT Austin, one is in the Marine Corps—and then lost her husband when out of nowhere he dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty. After some midlife soul searching, Tami discovered she was a lesbian and enjoyed several blissful years with her girlfriend Liz, an anthropology professor, until Liz left her for a grad student and moved three hours north to Arlington. Now the only life partner Tami is interested in is her favorite horse Columbus, who is more loyal than any lover of either gender and absolutely massive, half-Clydesdale. Tami lives in her own house on the other side of the ranch, and it’s much nicer than this one, she makes sure you’re aware. This house is just for the hired help.

You know all of this because Tami tells it to you in the span of less than five minutes, chatting away as you nod and interject with an occasional wow or no way, not expecting any meaningful contributions. When Aegon returns from depositing your luggage, he grabs a Dr. Pepper for himself out of the refrigerator and then stands leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for Tami to tire herself out, smirking, staring at you when he thinks you won’t notice.

“And I know that’s not politically correct,” Tami continues. “Having a horse named Columbus. But he was called that since before I bought him as a baby, and I’ve tried to change it but he won’t listen to anything else. So now I just pretend it’s after Columbus, Ohio instead of Christopher.”

“I’m actually from Columbus, Ohio,” you say, amused.

“My condolences,” Tami replies. She glances resentfully at a stack of papers on the table, then asks: “Have you eaten?”

“I got some gas station hummus when I drove through Houston.”

She guffaws. “Well, that ain’t food.”

“I haven’t eaten either,” Aegon says.

“Don’t care.” Tami sighs and shuffles the papers. Beside them on the table are a set of car keys, presumably for the Chevy out front. She turns to you again. “Well, why don’t y’all go get dinner and talk everything over, and then if you’re still interested in the job we can sign the contract and the tax forms when you get back.”

You are puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I still be interested?”

“It’s a lot,” Tami says. “Plenty of folks show up excited, then take a look around and decide they’d rather not bother. The work is hard, the house ain’t pretty. And the pay’s bad, as I told you on the phone.”

That’s true, but the rent is free. “I really want to be here.”

Tami beams, like she’s proud of you, like she’s your mom and she’s about to hang one of your finger paintings on the refrigerator. Then her eyes dart slyly to Aegon. “Guess it’s just gonna be y’all in this house, huh? All alone. No one to interrupt.”

Aegon slurps his Dr. Pepper. “We can all count, Tami. No need to do the math out loud.”

She pulls some cash out of her wallet and gives it to him. “Where are y’all goin’ for dinner? Over to Remember?”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

You are confused again. “Remember...?”

“Remember the Alamo,” Aegon says. “It’s a steakhouse.”

“What’s the Alamo?”

Aegon cackles. “Girl, keep it up and Texas is going to secede from you.” He swipes the keys off the table and you follow him outside, the air hot and golden and dusty, cicadas screaming from the bur oak trees.

First he leads you down to the stable and the paddock with the horses, pointing out the path already worn into the earth by decades of footsteps and telling you to stay on it. There are rattlesnakes, and scorpions, and fire ants, and copperheads. You never go wandering around without closed-toe shoes on, and you never step off the trail. Then he stops at the paddock fence, rough wood, split rail. A few roadrunners are sprinting through the field; one of them has a misfortunate gecko clenched in its beak.

Aegon gestures to a nearby horse, not very big, a pale shimmering gold color you’ve never seen before, blue eyes and a pink nose. “That’s Sunfyre.”

“He’s beautiful! What is that kind of coat called? Palomino?”

“Cremello. He’s a quarter horse,” Aegon says. “You know how to ride, right? You mentioned you had experience in the emails.”

“Yeah, I went to horse camp.”

“Awesome.”

“When I was twelve.”

“Oh, fuck,” Aegon says, and bursts out laughing. “Well, I’ll be doing most of the Longhorn corralling anyway. I always do, even when we have ranch hands who are good riders. You’ll muck out the stalls, feed and water the horses, groom them, put them out every morning and then back in at night, clean the tack, that kind of stuff.”

“Got it.”

“And we’ll give you a nice easy horse to ride.”

You scan the herd, maybe a dozen in all. One stallion catches your eye: tall and muscular, a black and white paint. “Can I have that one?”

“No, that’s Pepper. He’s very strong and very opinionated, and he needs a firm hand. He’ll throw you off.”

“Okay, so which horse is mine?”

Aegon grins and waves to an ancient grey mare, very short and very round, chomping greedily on clovers with brown teeth. “Dust Bunny.”

You are aghast. “That’s not a horse, that’s a pony.”

“I am delighted to inform you that she is officially one inch too tall to be technically considered a pony.”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“What?! How long do they live?”

Aegon shrugs. “Like thirtyish.”

“I can’t ride Dust Bunny. She’s pathetic.”

“She’s perfect for you. She’s very slow and doesn’t get spooked by anything. And if you lose your balance, it’s not far to fall.” Still grinning, he starts back up the path towards the house and the driveway, spinning the keys around on his index finger.

Aegon doesn’t have his own car, he explains as he starts the purple Chevy, which rumbles to life and quakes like an unsteady old man; dark, pungent exhaust streams out behind it. He rides Sunfyre around the ranch, and Tami lets him borrow the truck when he needs to go farther than that. He rolls down the windows, then grabs a towel off the floor and gives it to you to spread over the leather seat so you won’t burn your legs. The Chevy is sweltering from sitting in the sun, and you’re wearing shorts.

“You brought jeans, right?” Aegon asks as he drives, the truck jolting over the ditches in the dirt road.

“Just shorts. I know it’s really hot here during the summer.” You Googled it.

“It can get chilly at night, and you need jeans for riding. We’ll run out to Walmart tomorrow. If you want Tami to front you the money, she can just take it out of your first paycheck. Boots?”

“Nikes,” you admit guiltily.

“No problem. We have a bunch of extra pairs floating around, all different sizes. Some of them will fit you.”

You watch him, left hand on the wheel, no ring. His blonde hair whips in the breeze, dust flying out of it. It’s weird to feel interested in something again. It’s weird having someone be this nice to you. “You’re here all year?”

Aegon nods. “I’m the only permanent employee. Everybody else is seasonal. We were actually supposed to have a guy in that third bedroom, but it didn’t work out.”

“What happened?”

“He told Tami he just got out of prison for embezzlement. No big deal, she’s hired ex-cons before. But turns out he wasn’t released. He escaped. And then they caught him.”

“Oh wow,” you say, chuckling. “You haven’t been to prison, have you?”

“Not yet. There’s still time.” Then Aegon turns serious, maybe even nervous. He strokes his stubbled cheeks, taps his left boot on the floor. “You know...I get that the house is nothing special and the pay is really low. Minimum wage, basically. But Tami’s a gem, and the horses are sweet—most of them, anyway—and if the money is a potential dealbreaker for you, there are ways to get more. So I hope you’ll stay.”

You prop your elbow against the windowsill and rest your head in your palm, gazing at him as sunlit wind blows through the cabin. “What’s your side hustle?”

“I rodeo with Sunfyre.”

“Barrels and roping?” You’ve seen that at the Florida State Fair in Tampa.

“Plenty of those, for sure. But the big prizes are in bull riding.”

You raise your eyebrows. “That’s really dangerous.”

“It’s hard to argue with a thousand dollars for eight seconds of work.”

“No amount of money is worth dying over.”

Aegon snorts, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “I’m not gonna die.”

And you know he thinks he’s invincible, and you know he’s wrong.

Remember the Alamo, an unassuming steakhouse just off State Highway 71, has a gravel parking lot full of pickup trucks and red neon signs in the windows: Budweiser, Coors, Miller. When you climb out of the Chevy beneath a fiery sky, your lungs are filled with wood smoke, sizzling fat, spice rubs. It’s a little nauseating, honestly; but maybe you could get used to it.

Next to the front door is some sort of shrine, an autographed poster encased in a glass box: a mustached man wearing black sunglasses, a large number 3. Another NASCAR driver, you presume. “Who’s that?”

Aegon, hands in the pockets of his Levi’s, is trying not to sound like he’s mocking you. “That’s Dale Earnhardt.”

“Does he win a lot?”

“Well honey, he’s been dead since 2001, so not really.”

You lurch to a stop, your Nikes skating over the gravel. Aegon seems alarmed; the word slipped out before he could stop it. It was a reflex. “Honey?” you say, teasing.

“Yeah,” Aegon deadpans. “Honey is platonic. Honey is something you call your coworkers.”

He opens the door for you and you step inside, smiling, feeling his eyes wash over you like a wave. But already you are thinking: It won’t last. He won’t look at me that way once I tell him.

The light is low, Longhorn skulls and rusty horseshoes on the walls, the bar packed with people watching the flatscreens mounted there. One shows baseball, another NASCAR, a third the FIFA World Cup. There is a country song playing that you don’t know, a mournful baritone voice lamenting a lost love. Aegon claims a booth without waiting for a waitress. There are laminated menus already tucked behind bottles of A1 and Heinz 57; Aegon hands you one and begins skimming the other himself. There is another flatscreen on the wall behind you—basketball, the College World Series—but he doesn’t pay any attention to it.

“Okay, Tami only gave us fifty bucks for dinner,” Aegon says. “So what are you getting? The ribeye is really good, lots of marbling.”

“Um...” There’s literally nothing you can eat here. No, wait, there’s one thing. A side of applesauce. And maybe a plain potato? “I’m kind of a vegan.”

Aegon’s jaw drops open. “You’re joking.”

“Seriously.”

“Why?!”

“I saw an animal rights documentary in undergrad and it radicalized me. I’ve been mostly vegan for years. I still eat scallops and shrimp and stuff, but no other animal products.”

“What the fuck, why didn’t you say anything?! We could have gone somewhere else.” He groans, frowning morosely at the hopeless menu. “Why do you make an exception for scallops?”

“Mollusks don’t have feelings.” You’re still contemplating the menu, your thoughts turning treasonous. Wasn’t the whole point of this to start over? “But, you know...since I’m in Texas...”

“Do you want to go to Chipotle?”

You tuck your menu back behind the bottles of steak sauce. “No, let’s do it. Order me a ribeye.”

Aegon is doubtful. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Just a little one though.”

Now he’s grinning. “If you’re falling off the wagon, you have to go all the way. Loaded baked potato for your side?”

“Okay. But I’ll probably eat two bites of it and get violently ill.”

“I hope not. We share a bathroom.”

“Great, you’ll be there to hold my hair for me.”

He’s still snickering when the waitress arrives, very busy and barely making eye contact and not even bothering to scribble down a single word on her paper pad. Aegon orders two ribeyes (one 7 oz, one 12 oz), a loaded baked potato, green beans with bacon, two bottles of Coors Light, and two glasses of water. The waitress dashes off and returns a moment later with the drinks. Then she circles back around to toss a basket of rolls and cornbread on the table before vanishing into the kitchen.

Aegon takes his Coors, glowing like amber and glistening with condensation, and hooks the cap on the edge of the wooden table. He slams it with his other hand, and the cap pops off and rolls away. You glance uncertainly at your own bottle. You don’t know how to open it. You’re used to screw tops, wine bottles, Margaritas, Hurricanes.

“So,” Aegon says, swigging his Coors. “You have no idea what the Alamo is. You’re a recovering vegan. You haven’t ridden a horse since you were twelve. Why did you apply for this job? I mean, how the hell did you land here?”

You take a roll and start gnawing on it; out of habit, you don’t slather it with any of the butter in the little plastic cup that came with the bread basket. And you peer around the room evasively as Aegon waits, increasingly curious. You’re soaking up these last few seconds before he starts looking at you differently. “Okay, I’ll just tell you,” you say. “Because if you Google me, you’re going to find out anyway. It’s not like I can hide it. I had to give Tami my real name for W-2 reasons.”

His brow furrows, but his eyes sharpen. Now he’s really intrigued. “Okay.”

“Do you know what cave diving is?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen The Descent. Super scary.”

You smile; he keeps making you do that. “No, not spelunking. Cave diving, like with scuba gear.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“I’m from Ohio,” you say. “We don’t have oceans there. We have Lake Erie, which isn’t the same thing, and it’s over two hours away from Columbus anyway. So when I went to college at the University of Miami, I wanted to try everything related to the ocean. I did surfing, sailing, fishing, kayaking, snorkeling, paddleboarding, literally any lessons I could sign up for. But what I ended up getting really obsessed with was cave diving. After I got certified and racked up enough experience, I started leading group trips for The U. We travelled all over the state to visit different dive sites. Florida has a ton of them. High water table.”

Aegon blinks at you. “You like going underground and swimming around in the dark and hoping you don’t get lost or stuck and slowly suffocate to death?”

You spin your cold glass bottle of Coors Light between your palms. “I used to, yeah.”

“Not a lot of cave diving in Austin.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“So what happened? Why’d you leave?”

It’s the first time you’ve ever had to tell this story. Everybody else already knows. “My freshman year at The U, my randomly assigned roommate was Meredith Ferrera. And we had absolutely nothing in common, she was from a rich Catholic family in Manhattan, she’d grown up with maids and had never been to a McDonald’s before.”

Aegon laughs. “That’s impossible.”

“I swear to God. She was really sweet though, she wasn’t arrogant or anything, even if she should have been. She was classically gorgeous, the guys on our floor were always hounding her and I’d have to chase them off. Meredith was too polite to do it. She was an Italian Studies major. She loved The Divine Comedy. And she took photos. They always came out shadowy and grainy, which was weird because she was so...not that, you know? Really nice, really naïve. She’d only ever been too all-girls schools and never had a boyfriend. I think guys kind of scared her. I don’t know if that’s because she never met the right one or if she just genuinely wasn’t interested. We were complete opposites, but we got along really well. I told her all my unhinged dating stories and introduced her to Chicken McNuggets back when I still ate those. She’d bake vegan cookies and take me on her family vacations to Nantucket and the Hamptons.”

Aegon smiles, illuminated by the dim yellowish lightbulbs and the glow from the flatscreens. “Meredith sounds cool.”

“She was.”

“Was?” Aegon says, joking. “What, did she die or something?” And then, when you just stare at him, Aegon’s smile slowly fades.

“Meredith thought the cave diving thing was insane. She’d make jokes about having to find a new roommate before every trip, like I wasn’t going to come back. But of course, I always did. And I kept trying to get her to go. She wasn’t a risk taker. I mean, she wouldn’t even climb the rock wall at the gym. But I didn’t stop asking. We ended up rooming together all four years, and then I stayed at The U for grad school.”

“What did you study?”

“Marine Geosciences.” You got two years into a five-year program. Now those credits have been abandoned, the same as your old couches and cups and towels and bedsheets.

“And Meredith flew back to her fancy family in Manhattan.”

“No, she did freelance photography in Miami. She decided she didn’t want to leave, mostly because I was still there, I think. We got an apartment and it always smelled like whatever she was baking.” You gaze into the warm liquid gold of your unopened Coors Light, like sunshine, like honey. “Her parents wanted her to come home. There’s a path people like her are supposed to follow. Get a degree, work in the city for a few years, get married, get a brownstone, have kids, etcetera. But I think Meredith was trying to figure things out. And then one day when I asked her for the hundredth time about going on a dive with me, fully expecting rejection...she said yes.”

Aegon is watching you, his eyes—like clear skies, like a blue Hurricane clinking with ice, like the Gulf of Mexico you fled from, dreams of dark currents and kaleidoscopic plumes of bubbles—fascinated but full of dread.

“It was so fun,” you say, and your voice breaks, and you have to stop to steady yourself and swipe tears from your eyelashes. “She got certified, and I went to every lesson with her. She was still freaked out. She was the last one in the water for every single dive. But she did it. She got her hours, she got her certification. And Meredith was...you could tell she was proud of herself, you know? She’d never done anything like that before. Her parents were furious. But she was doing it anyway.”

You pause, and Aegon waits a long time for you to begin again.

“There are caves where people die, right? Like Devil’s Den or Weeki Wachee, or Jacob’s Well here in Texas. There are caves that are known for being really dangerous. They put signs down inside them to warn people. Stop. Prevent your death! Go no farther. And they add the Grim Reaper too, just to make it more obvious. Because scuba divers are stupid and will try to go down there without cave training, and they’ll have the wrong gas mixes in their tanks, or get lost without a guideline, or stir up too much silt and have zero visibility, and then they’re dead.”

“Right,” Aegon says, not like he actually understands but like he wants you to think he does.

“And I never would have taken Meredith somewhere like that for her first dive. The plan was to keep things easy. So for the next trip I organized at The U, I picked this little sink right off the coast of Tarpon Springs. It’s barely even a recognized cave, it was mostly an open-water dive, honestly, which is way easier. There’s no overhead, so if something goes wrong or you panic, you can just swim straight up to get to the surface. No navigating required.”

“That makes sense.”

“The water is pretty shallow at the surface, so we took paddleboards out to the sink. It’s marked by a buoy so people can find it, it’s a popular spot for snorkelers and freedivers. The ground slopes down and then opens up into a vertical hollow, basically just a hole that’s about seventy feet deep. Then at the bottom of that there’s a chokepoint, and if you swim through it, that’s the entrance to the cave system. Beforehand, I told Meredith that we didn’t even have to go into the cave if she wasn’t feeling it. We could just swim around and explore the hollow, let her build up her confidence using a guideline and lights and everything. But she got down there and she loved it. Some people in our group were up at the surface, others stayed in the hollow, but Meredith and I went all the way to the bottom. You can’t talk when you’re diving, but you can still see each other’s eyes behind the mask, and she was, like, mesmerized. She was examining the rocks and the coral. She was pointing at the fish as they swam by, snappers and cobia, and there was a goliath grouper, which are like living dinosaurs. And when we got to the chokepoint, she gave me a thumbs up, so we went in.”

“What’s it like down there?” Aegon says softly. “In a cave?”

“Dark. Claustrophobic. Terrifying.” You smile faintly. “But it’s time traveling. Some people say it’s an adrenaline junkie thing, like it gets you high. But that’s not what it ever felt like for me. It makes everything quiet. And whatever is happening outside in the world doesn’t matter, because you’re here with the ice ages and the fossils and the stalagmites. Every single dive, it was hard for me to leave. I wanted to stay there forever.”

Aegon shakes his head in disbelief, like you’re insane.

“We were the first people into the cave, no one else in the group had made it down there yet. Not a big chamber, kind of circular, limestone walls that glowed mossy green under our lights. I was running the guideline, so I had to keep stopping to attach it to tie-offs. Meredith was supposed to stay behind me. But I guess she got impatient, and she started drifting off to my right. We’d displaced some silt, but it wasn’t too bad. I could tell she wasn’t far away, I could still see her lights in my peripheral vision. So I finished a tie-off and then looked up, and she was searching for the entranceway to the next chamber. She was approaching an opening, just a few feet wide, pitch black inside. And when she turned back to me, she smiled and waved. Like she was saying: I found it! I did it!”

“But then...” Aegon prompts, like he’s afraid to hear what happens next but can’t turn back now.

“There are these things called siphon currents,” you say, you force out shakily, demonstrating with your hands. “They can be affected by tide or pressure changes, and they flow into a cave. And if you get caught in a really intense one, it can drag you inside. And I didn’t...I didn’t know that was a problem with this cave. I thought we were better off there than anyplace else, because it was no big deal, it was small, and not infamous, and not taken seriously by cave divers, and it was an easy in and out. No warning signs. No Grim Reaper. Even right then, if we’d decided to leave, it would have taken ten seconds to turn around and go back up and out through the chokepoint.”

“Totally,” Aegon murmurs, his eyes wide and glassy.

“But I guess the tide was changing. And I didn’t know any better. And as I was watching Meredith, I saw the silt we’d stirred up suddenly start pouring into the opening to the next chamber. And then she got yanked inside and was gone.”

“What?” Aegon asks, horrified. “Where did she go?”

“Into the cave system,” you say. “Down fifty feet or a hundred or two hundred, no one knows.”

“Fuck,” Aegon hisses, flinching, raking his fingers through his hair.

“I tried to go after her, but I could feel the current dragging me in too, and I thought...even with the guideline, it might snap or I might lose my grip on it, and I didn’t...I didn’t know what to do. I knew the procedures, I knew what was supposed to happen. But real life is different.”

“Yeah, I bet it is.”

“I swam up into the hollow,” you say. “Then to the surface. We called 911, but what the hell are they supposed to do? While we waited for help, a bunch of us went back down to the cave and tethered ourselves to the guideline—which cave divers don’t usually do—and we tried to go into the next chamber. But the current was way too strong, it would have sucked us in, even with the tether. One guy, the biggest dude we had with us, got close enough to peek inside the chamber, but he couldn’t see Meredith. I kept checking my diving watch. I knew how much air she had in her tanks, and I realized at a certain point that...” You swallow noisily.

That she was suffocating down there in the blackness and the cold, or would be within minutes, and that she was all alone.

Aegon nods; you don’t have to say it.

“The rescue divers were useless. And then even when the tides changed and the current was weaker, the recovery divers couldn’t find her. And she never washed up on the shore or anything. So she’s...she’s still down there.”

He covers his mouth with both hands. “Oh my God.”

“Meredith’s parents flew to Miami. They wanted a police investigation, they spoke to the press. There were no witnesses, only Meredith and I had been in the cave, and they kept saying that...that I should have known about the risk. That it was my fault. That maybe I even resented my beautiful, affluent roommate. I got arrested and charged with negligent homicide. There’s a mugshot if you want to look it up. I’d rather you didn’t, but I can’t stop you.”

“I won’t look,” Aegon promises.

“So then my parents flew down, and took out a second mortgage so they could get me a good lawyer. It’s hard to prosecute something like that, especially without a body. So the charges got dropped.”

“I’m glad your parents are supportive.”

“Oh no, they hate me now,” you say. “They also think it was my fault. They don’t want me to go to prison, but that doesn’t mean they like me.”

Aegon studies you. “So you came here.”

“I thought I was going to spend my entire life researching the ocean. Now I can’t be anywhere near it. I don’t want to hear the waves, I don’t want to read my textbooks, I don’t even want to drive over bridges with water underneath. Everyone at The U knows what happened. My friends, my classmates, my professors. I dropped everything. I left my PhD program. I abandoned my apartment. I couldn’t stay in Miami, but I couldn’t go home either, not to my silently aggrieved parents and their twice-mortgaged house. I just...I needed to be somewhere I’d never been before.”

“Like a ranch in Austin, Texas.”

“So that’s how I landed here,” you tell Aegon, fully expecting that he will see you how people back at The U did: perhaps pitiful, perhaps unraveled, perhaps guilty. “I figured I’d use this summer to get away, and make some money, and decide what comes next.”

He takes a gulp of his Coors Light, his blue eyes still on you. When he speaks, his words are hushed and gentle. “I’m really sorry that happened to you.”

“It was my fault.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was my fault,” you repeat.

Aegon shrugs. “When I was younger, I was an idiot. I drove drunk, I drove high. In a slightly different universe, I could have killed somebody too. I think a lot of people make mistakes. Yours just happened at the worst possible place and time.”

“Why aren’t you freaked out?” you demand. “Everyone is freaked out by this. You should be judging me. You should hate me.”

“Look, I’m not saying that what happened to Meredith wasn’t horrible or that I don’t feel bad for her and her family. I guess I just don’t think beating up on you is going to bring her back.”

You stare at him as the waitress arrives with the steaks, clattering a plate down in front of each of you, and the overwhelming aroma of meat—which you haven’t tasted in years—is suddenly not metallic or gamy, but warm, nourishing, from the earth. And you think, slowly beginning to smile: This is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

“Here, need me to open that?” Aegon says, gesturing to your Coors Light. He grabs it, positions the glass bottle against the side of the table, and hits it so the cap pops off. He hands the bottle back to you. “Drink that really fast, then we’ll get you another one. You need it.”

You giggle, taking a sheepish nip. It’s kind of gross, bitter and grainy; but it also tastes like baseball games, barbeques, late sunsets on summer nights, Americana. “I really do.”

Aegon slides his phone across the table to you. “Put yourself in as a contact. I’ll text you back so you have my number too. Then share your location with me.”

“Why?”

He cuts into his ribeye and shoves a massive, dripping slab into his mouth. “So if you fall off Dust Bunny and are lying in a field with both your legs broken or something, I can find you.”

“Valid.” You type with one hand, eating a forkful of your loaded baked potato with the other. Bacon, cheddar cheese, sour cream, butter: forbidden, cheap, fatty luxury, high blood pressure, heart disease. It’s fucking delicious. Has food always been this good?

Just as you finish adding yourself as a contact, a new text comes in from someone named Mackenzie. Busy tonight?? :) she’s written. You knew he was too good to be true.

You smirk as you return the phone to Aegon. “Mackenzie wants to talk to you.”

Aegon chuckles, dismissive. “She should talk to her boyfriend instead.”

“You’re not going to reply?”

“Nah, I think I’m done with that.”

He starts tapping on his screen, searching for you in his contacts list so he can text you. You slice off a piece of your ribeye, blood red and gleaming with grease. It tastes like salt and muscle and garlic and smoke and sunlight. It tastes like the corporeal wealth of the earth. You finally recognize one of the country songs that have been playing since you walked in: American Kids by Kenny Chesney.

“So what do you think?” Aegon says, like he’s hopeful but trying not to show it too much. “You’ll stick around?”

“Yeah. I still want the job. I’ll stay.”

“Cool.” Aegon grins and reaches across the table to clink his Coors Light against yours. Then he laughs when he finally finds you in his phone and realizes what you’ve done. You’ve entered your contact name as Honey.

~~~~~~~~~~

When you get back to the ranch, Tami has gone down to the stable to put the horses away for the night. You use the ten minutes you spend waiting for her to unpack your things in your new bedroom: shorts, t-shirts, socks, bras and underwear, pajamas, toothbrush, hairbrush, lip balm, rechargeable vibrator, pink boxes of Benadryl, miniature bottles of Smirnoff, just the essentials.

By then you can hear Tami returning to the house, her voice carrying far and loud through the cooling dusk air. She’s bitching about Pepper refusing to come in again and having to lure him to the stable with peanut butter. Aegon suggests they turn him into glue sticks. They both chortle, and then the screen door creaks open, and you leave your bedroom to meet them.

As you sign your contract on the kitchen table, Aegon jokes: “You just sold your soul.”