It went back in with the same uncanny twist, and a cacophony of noise attacked Charlotte’s brain as her world lurched sharply out from under her.
A surface like a heated wall stopped her fall, and enormous reassuring hands steadied her, cradled her, as the wall rumbled in a comforting way.
“Sorry. I’ve got you. Left ear now, and you’ll be better than ever. Be still.”
She gripped the surface beneath her palms, braced her arms and tried not to move as a one of those warm, supportive hands moved into her hair, tucking the strands behind her ear and then cupping the back of her head to angle it just so.
There was a last sickening slide and the too-loud click as the implant latched itself into place, and then Charlotte’s perspective restored itself.
She was sitting in Dexter’s lap. Her legs dangled between his, her hands supported against the very solid thigh in front of her knees, and he was stroking one hand slowly up and down her back as he used the other to stow the tiny extraction tool safely in its specialized box.
“Don’t you want to know what it was?” he asked, as if she were not sitting in her night rail in his lap, with her hands clenching his thigh.
“I suppose,” she answered, exactly as if his hand were not lengthening its exploratory tour of her back to include a brief circular foray around her hip and buttock.
“Earwax.”
If somebody had told her she would ever find the word earwax titillating, she would have laughed out loud. At the moment, however, it was not remotely amusing.
“Earwax?” Her mind engaged enough to register disbelief. “But the implants are sealed, and I clean the exposed surfaces daily with ethyl alcohol. Doctor Alvarez didn’t mention anything about—”
“Not on the exterior, in one of the pressure valves. A tiny bead of it. It must have been overlooked during the initial installation. I suspect it originally adhered to the casing, then got dislodged enough to gum the works of the implant itself once it hardened. It was causing the valve to stick. But not, I think, every time. Mainly when the pressure tried to equalize while you were moving forward into a horizontal position.” He demonstrated with his free hand, tipping it from the vertical, and Charlotte nodded as though this were profoundly helpful.
It made sense. The Gossamer Wing with its horizontal cradle. The deck chairs on the ship, so comfortable until she had attempted to roll over and sun her back. And the railing, beyond which there had been only fictional porpoises. She had been fine until she tipped that vital bit more forward, and that few inches and degrees of slant had made all the difference. And it might not have even occurred to the doctor to test the devices at that particular angle.
But the sense was hard to focus on, when his hand was making a much more leisurely round of her hip this circuit.
“But what I still don’t understand,” she said, focusing on the one thing that seemed foremost, “is why the ship feels like it’s lurching? I mean if you removed the earwax, and the implants are working properly.”
“That’s easy.” His hand tightened at her waist as one of those lurches threw them slightly off balance and the chair threatened to swivel into the table. “It’s because the ship is lurching. We’re heading into a patch of unfortunate weather.”
Seven
THE OCEAN LINER ALBERTA, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO LE HAVRE
DEXTER’S REASON STARTED to fail him when he held her head steady to reinsert the first implant. And he didn’t even try to pretend to himself that his method of securing her for the insertion of the second was rooted in chivalry or even expedience.
He had wanted her in his lap, the better to touch her with his big, clever paws. He marveled at her delicacy, and at how very tiny her hands and limbs were compared to his own. How his fingers could span the width of her buttock from hipbone to tailbone. He knew that even very small women did not, in fact, break when a large man touched them. Or did other things with them.
The sorts of things men often did with their wives.
He had expected her to bolt once the implants were replaced. But she seemed incapable of moving, and he had long since used up his stores of self-restraint where Charlotte’s body was concerned.
Even the weather seemed complicit in nudging them together, as the swell of the waves and the heaving of the boat urged Charlotte, who had less natural ballast, to cling to the nearest available heavy thing for security. And no heavy thing could be nearer than Dexter was to her at that moment.
“I need to stow my equipment,” he remarked. Things were beginning to slide this way and that, and fetch up against the lip of the table. He caught a magnifying vise with one hand, but never removed the other from her posterior where it was now so comfortably settled. Nor did Charlotte seem inclined to shift herself from his thigh. He wondered if her paralysis was caused by desire, or perhaps more along the lines of what a rabbit felt when caught by the headlights of an oncoming steam car.
Then the boat did a new thing, not a lurch but a tilt, and both of them grabbed at the table as their world shifted to a sickening slant for what seemed like an eternity. Thunder cracked, and the gas lamps flickered ominously and then dimmed entirely until they were in almost total darkness. As the light faded, the ship seemed to slow to a halt, to an equilibrium, a balance that felt as tenuous as they both knew it must be. The very air was alive with terrified anticipation.
The ship went down the swell so quickly they nearly flew for a mad second or two, Charlotte’s insubstantial weight almost leaving Dexter’s lap altogether as he clung to the table’s edge. An open case sailed slowly across the floor past his chair, and he began scooping his fragile, valuable equipment into it.
“Is it an emergency light?”
He glanced around, not sure what Charlotte was talking about, then realized he could actually see quite well given that the wall sconces and chandelier were still out.
“The doctor said the gas would be turned off if it got bad enough. And yes, he said—help!”
She leaned and snagged the case with her foot as it scooted back the other way, clutching at Dexter’s shirt to keep from rolling off his knee onto the floor.
He deposited the last of his stray things in the small trunk and latched it firmly.
“I need to stow it under the berth with the other small baggage. We’ll go before the next trip up. On three. One . . . two . . . three!”
As one they leaped through the dividing door and scrambled for the relative safety of the bunk, and Charlotte climbed up while Dexter opened the compartment below the platform and shoved the equipment case into it. He let gravity pull the door closed and carry him into the berth as the ship began its next descent.
Charlotte was already busy yanking at the heavy curtains, snapping them into place along the rails at the bottom of the bunk to guard against any remaining projectiles. When she had finished, she and Dexter were encased in a snug little cube of bed linens and tapestry, its dark softness punctuated only by a few leaks of the cold blue emergency lighting that seemed to emanate from a single bulb high in one corner of each cabin compartment.
“I think this may be my very last attempt at a honeymoon. They don’t seem to work out well for me at all.”
He laughed, caught off guard. “The first one was hardly the fault of the weather,” he ventured, unsure how far to push a jesting mood in the face of such dark humor. Perhaps only she was entitled to find levity in the subject of honeymoons.
“On the contrary, it rained horribly on the first one. The alligators were interesting, however.”
“I can’t do much about the weather—well, I can’t do anything at all about it, obviously—but I think I can promise you that our honeymoon will at least be free from alligators.”