Omair’s chest tightened. He realized now why she’d looked softer, more feminine to him. It was the pregnancy. Her breasts were full because of it. She glowed with it. A powerful protective fire began to rage in him. Nothing in this world was going to stop him from marrying her, being with her for the rest of his life—as long as she would have him.
He suited up himself, tested the scuba tanks. She grabbed a pair of fins and shrugged on her tank as he checked the charge on the DPVs. He zipped his phone into a waterproof pouch, gave her a diving knife, and he took a spear gun. They each slung a canister containing a single person inflatable life raft across their chests.
Within fifteen minutes they were bobbing quietly in the slowly heaving swells alongside the yacht as the sun sank below the horizon. They waited a few moments longer for full dark, when they’d no longer be visible via satellite from the sky.
Omair met her eyes through the dive mask. She gave a thumbs-up, nodded.
And down they went. LCD displays showed depth, and at a mere eight feet they leveled out below the surface. Bubbles streamed behind them as they put the DPVs to full speed, using their bodies and fins like dolphins to steer.
Faith’s hair flowed white behind her and Omair smiled around his mouthpiece—she was his killer mermaid. And if this worked, if the yacht was blown up, it was the perfect time for her to vanish from her old world for good, and enter his new one.
They traveled for almost an hour in the mystical darkness of the ocean, tiny lights from their DPVs throwing phosphorescence in their wake. Through the surface above they could see the glimmer of stars. After another hour of traveling, Omair flicked his light, their sign. She killed her engine, and their vehicles floated slowly to the surface as they held on.
They bobbed on the surface in the dark for maybe twenty minutes before an explosion sent shock waves through the water. About ten miles out an orange glow lit the sky. They watched it fade over time as pieces of Da’ud’s yacht burned and drifted down to Davy Jones’s locker. No one would know they weren’t on that boat.
When the fire in the distance had died, and there was no sign of any jet crafts heading their way, they inflated their personal survival rafts.
The U-shaped design of the rafts allowed for easy entry from the water, and with the sea anchor deployed, the rafts floated facing downwind so the canopies could remain unzipped.
Omair held on to Faith’s raft as they bobbed in the dark. Their bodies were submerged below the waterline, which was comfortable but cold.
After yet another hour, the cold grew bitter. Faith began to shiver, but it didn’t matter. She reached out for Omair’s hand, squeezed. Even adrift in the ocean in the dark and cold she’d never felt safer. And in the darkness like this, she sensed they were three, a family. Them against the world on the ocean of life.
“Will you marry me, Faith?” he said suddenly out of the darkness.
Surprise rippled through her. Then she laughed, but she quieted as she felt the weight of his sincerity in the following silence.
She glanced at him, his black eyes glittering in the shadows of his orange life cocoon.
“I never dreamed about getting married,” she said, “but if I had, not in my wildest fantasies could I have imagined being proposed to in his-and-her life rafts in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
Silence descended, apart from the slap of water against their rafts.
“You didn’t answer,” he said after a while.
“I think you know the answer,” she replied quietly. “I was destined to be a part of your life, one way or another, from the day I saw you in that Tagua cantina, Santiago.”
He chuckled. “So that’s a yes?”
“It’s a maybe. Yes would make it too easy for you.”
He yanked her raft toward him, reached over and kissed her.
They fell silent again, and time seemed to stretch to eternity as they watched the heavens move above them. Faith supposed that if they did die out here together, it would still be a good ending, considering her life, and all the other ways she could have gone. She started to drift inside her mind, shivering in the cold.
“Why’d you never dream of marriage?”
She pulled herself back into focus. “Let’s just say my father and mother weren’t exactly great ambassadors for the institution of marriage and family life.” She was unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.
“They made me see marriage was a farce, a lie, and that behind smiling families and little white picket fences, there lurked dark things you didn’t share with neighbors.” She paused. “I hated them both because of it.”
“Yet you brought a damaged photo of them on your mission—why?”