Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
The other groups keep moving, so now we’re alone on a sheet of glowing water. It casts a blue-green glow on her face, and I can’t look anywhere else. Even the glorious underwater show can’t compare to the sculpted brows and the sweet sweep of her lashes. The curve of her cheekbones and the obstinate jut of her chin.
“What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?” she asks after a few moments of silence.
“You.”
She blinks a few times, shaking her head, giving me a look redolent with affection. “Place you’ve ever been.”
My answer’s the same, but I know what she means. “I don’t know. It’s hard to compare all these places that offer something uniquely beautiful.”
I glance up at the dark sky and mentally impose a curtain of azure, emerald, and scarlet, swirling in an atmospheric lightshow. “I’d love to take you to Antarctica one day to see the southern lights.”
“Antarctica, huh?” she teases with a laughing glance. “Sounds like a real vacay.”
“Trust me. You’d love it. People always talk about the northern lights, but the southern lights are just as fantastic. Aurora Australis. Antarctica is spectacular.”
“Not a word I would have ever thought to apply to a frozen tundra.”
“You have to see it, I guess. Don’t get me wrong. It’s one of the toughest places I’ve ever been. Nearly uninhabitable, especially in the long, sunless winter, but Grim used to say it was like another planet. You see and hear things there you can’t see or hear most other places on Earth.”
“Like what? Tell me.”
“There are illusions,” I say, hearing the eagerness enter my own voice from the memory of the wonders I experienced when we wintered over. “These microscopic ice crystals are suspended in the air, and it changes how light and sound travel.”
I wonder if she’s bored yet, but in the glow of stars from above and the bioluminescence from below, her eyes are locked on me, rapt, so I go on.
“The cold literally bends the sound waves differently there than at lower altitudes, bending them down toward the surface instead of up. Soft snow absorbs sound energy better and mutes it, but hard-crusted snow like you find in Antarctica doesn’t absorb as well. Sound literally bounces off the harder, smooth ice surface.” I laugh, knowing she won’t believe what I’m about to tell her. “Under the right conditions, you might hear conversations up to almost two miles away.”
Her pretty mouth drops open, and her eyes go round, and it’s such a look of almost childish disbelief, I want to freeze this moment of wonder and innocence.
“You said you see different things, too,” she says after a moment. “Like what?”
“Well, the hot and cold air bend light rays, and that makes the light bounce off clouds, water, and ice to create optical illusions.”
After all these years, I finally get to share what makes Antarctica special to me and how it made me think of her even when we were apart.
“There’s this one optical illusion called water sky. Sailors have used it forever to navigate because the light projects open lanes of water onto the clouds and shows them how to avoid dangerous ice floes. I thought of your eyes every time I saw one.”
“You did?” Her smile softens, grows tender.
“Yeah, you have water-sky eyes.”
“I’m not sure how, but you’ve actually made me want to visit Antarctica.”
“You just have to be prepared to take the beauty with the bad.” I scoot forward and grasp her hands between mine. “You go months with no sun, but then you go months where the sun never sets.”
“That’s a great way to describe forever.” She traces my palm, the thinner skin of my wrist, exciting a response through my body from every point she touches.
I don’t answer because I know I’ll screw this up—say the wrong thing. The “not yet” thing. The “too soon” thing—that I want an endless day with her where the sun never sets on us. So I don’t say any of that but let her guide the conversation, like the paddle in the water, lighting our way with each stroke.
“That was a crazy time in our lives,” she finally says.
“Which time?”
“When you went to Antarctica and I graduated college and started working in politics.” She glances up at me. “I wonder how different things would have been if I’d listened to you—given you a chance when you came to see me at Jim’s campaign headquarters.”
“Very different. I’d probably have a lot less money.”
“What? Why?”
“You see how I canceled Germany because you had a week free in DC?”
“Yeah.”
“It would have been like that all the time. I would have dropped everything all the time, followed you anywhere, I think.”
She stares at me, confusion or disbelief gathering in her eyes.
“You were it for me before I even knew what it was, Nix,” I say with quiet honesty. “What I’ve done in the last ten years, most people don’t do in a lifetime. I don’t say that to brag but to say it required everything, all my focus, all my life to build what I have now. It’s in my DNA to do that. My father, his before him, his before him—they were pioneers, businessmen, entrepreneurs who, when others saw flat plains, saw oil fields. When others saw disaster, they saw opportunity. That’s who we are, but I wouldn’t have been that with you. I’m already changing.”