With no food, much of my fresh water gone and not much more collected in the violence of the storm, my last meal sat heavily in my stomach. I laid on the deck in the setting sun and drank it in. I let it be peaceful. I let it be almost nice. The sound of the water lapping at the Kestrel no longer filled me with dread, nor robbed me of hope. It was simply there. I was simply here.

And so was he. So were we both.

He was not a monster, and I was not better than him.

I was not better without him.

Whatever illusion of dignity I told myself I was maintaining by separating myself from him had shattered last night. Such a simple moment of sharing a conversation while I cooked—I wanted more of it. I needed more of it, desperately. I was going to die anyway, so why should I die lonely?

As the sun set I made my way down to the hold again. The musket stayed strapped securely around my chest, hanging from my back, but I did not think about it. I found him awake.

“Ms. Carmen,” he said, giving me a little bow.

“Mr. Cort. I hate to interrupt your busy schedule.”

“Ah yes, my incredibly busy schedule. I have to organize all this straw by length you know. And then I have to disorganize it into piles again.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking. I decided it wasn’t important. “Well, as gripping as that sounds, perhaps instead you’d like to teach me those knots you mentioned before.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Well, certainly, there’s always time to learn something new.”

Even if we’re going to die soon, was the implication. We both knew it well enough by now that neither of us even paid it a passing wink.

And so a short while later, we sat with the bars still separating us, but close. As we were both cross-legged our knees could nearly touch through the gaps. He held two lengths of rope in his hands, and I two in mine—with a marked difference to his. His ropes were tied in a neat, symmetrical knot. Mine were not.

“Please start over again,” I prompted, and he laughed, easily untying the knot and holding up the two ropes. Step by step, he showed me what he had done one more time. I followed each step as before, and this time, I managed it.

“Ha!” I crowed at my success, and held the rope up proudly.

“There you go!” Cort laughed at my enthusiasm. “See, I knew you’d get it.”

“Well, I didn’t. And that one wasn’t even that hard,” I muttered the last part mostly to chastise myself as I untied the knot and easily repeated the steps to tie it again. It wasn’t hard at all.

“Things don’t have to be hard for you to take a moment to understand them,” he reassured me. “Do you want to learn another?”

“Why not?” I sighed, pulling the two ropes to test the strength of my knot. “What was this one called?”

“The one we use to reef sails?”

“Yes.”

“A reef knot.”

He had this stupid smug smile on his face. I could have slapped him. “Well how was I supposed to know that?” I sputtered, smacking at his knee through the bars, and he laughed.

“They aren’t all that simply named, I promise you, that’s a bad example.” He pulled his knees back, still laughing. “Take this one, for instance.” He made quick work of tying a new knot, and held it up to me. It felt similar in some ways to the knot we’d just learned, but this one looped a single piece of rope back in on itself, creating a loop on one end.

“What’s that one called?”

“Bowline. This is a good one—if you remember how to tie one knot after this, then this is the one it ought to be.”

I didn’t remark on the fact that he was still talking as though we had any kind of future ahead of us. “Show me, then.”

This one was easier. I got it in a matter of seconds. Cort gave me polite applause when I was done. “All right, now the reef knot again.”

I frowned. “Was that a trick to make me forget the reef knot?” I accused.

“What, why would I do that? Just because that’s what the man who taught me did?” he laughed, smiling at me with that crooked smile that made him squint just one of his warm brown eyes. I was frustrated—and, of course, charmed. I sighed. “It’s just a test,” he said when he saw my disheartened expression, sweet as ever, even in his teasing. “I can show you again.”

“No, no, I better see if I can remember it.” I muttered in response, holding both ropes in my hands. I had just seen it. Just done the steps twice. I could do it again.

I looped the ropes around each other, then back in on themselves. As I was about to make the final move to tie it off, his hand reached out through the bars, resting softly on top of mine and stopping me in my tracks. My heart jumped, and I found myself a bit speechless. Luckily he didn’t seem to expect me to speak as he instead lifted my hand gently, guiding me the opposite way from what I’d been about to do. With the knot done, he held his hands cupped under mine, and the two of us looked down at the knot, refusing to meet each other’s eyes.

I tried not to think about the fact that we were touching. Certainly we’d touched before, when he’d caught me and saved me from the same fall he took, the one that would have killed me. But that was different. This was tender. And it was still happening, even as I held my breath, wondering who would draw away first. I looked up, and my breath caught in my throat when I realized he hadn’t been looking at our hands at all. He was watching me, and when I looked up, he let out a little chuckle.

“Ah, if you’d done what you were about to, it’d have been a very different knot,” he said, taking only one hand out from under mine to trace the knot in my hands. “See, if this loops the wrong way, we get what’s called a ‘granny knot.’ They’re not nearly as strong.”

“Oh,” I said, hoping my voice sounded more assured than I felt. Less flustered. I rather thought it didn’t. “Say, Cort?”

“Hmm?” he cocked his head softly, and I had to look away again, drawing my hands back.

“What say we get you out of the brig?”

There was a pause. Not a long one. Then, he said, “I would like that very much.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The way he said things like that. I didn’t know what it was, but it twisted my heart like damp cloth, wringing out any misgivings I could possibly have for him. I had to force myself to keep my face straight and my thoughts at least a little focused.

“Come on then,” I muttered, half to myself, and stood.

I made quick work of undoing the lock—he had locked it himself the night before, which had surprised me a bit when I’d come down to check. He’d already been asleep, then, and I fear that’s when all this started. I had begun to wonder at that moment if he even had the capacity to do me harm, if the thought even occurred to him in any serious matter. I almost felt like he would ask me for my permission to bite me, even as his lips were pressed to my neck.

With the lock undone and the distance between us so short, I felt my breath come a bit faster than I would have liked. I knew what this feeling meant and more than that, I knew I’d been feeling it for a lot longer than I wanted to admit. I pursed my lips.

“Perhaps we could move to the deck?” I suggested, as though the clear sea air would ease the heat that had risen to my face.

“If the sun isn’t out,” he said. His tone was light. If my actions had registered with him as out of the ordinary, he wasn’t remarking on it.

I wished he’d remark on it. Then I wouldn’t have to. But it appeared that neither of us were going to, not yet. So I just nodded, and stepped out of his way again. “Sun’s down.”

“Then the deck sounds just fine to me.”

The seas were calm tonight, and the peace I’d felt in the sunset was back the moment I felt the evening breeze. The moon, full overhead in slightly-cloudy skies, lent everything a cool glow. Cort made his way to the rail, and leaned on it. I watched his chest rise and fall just once, as he took in a deep breath of sea air. After a moment, I finally worked up the nerve to join him.

We stood quietly for a long while. For a few minutes my heart still raced, both at the idea of the danger I might be in, and then at desire I knew stirred just underneath that fear. Or maybe they were deeply intertwined, one and the same. Maybe they were born from each other in a way. Just the same, I did not act on them. I did not run, nor did I follow my impulse to take his chin between my fingers and turn his face to mine, press my lips to his. I just stood next to him. Then, perhaps, I got a little closer. Just a bit.

He spoke before I did. “I think I’m glad it was you, at least.” He said.

I didn’t ask what he meant, because I didn’t need to. “I know I’m glad it was you,” I replied.

“Now, Carmen!” he laughed, turning to me with a bit of surprise.

“Don’t act surprised. Do you think any of the other men would have made it out of that brig? Do you think I could have shot Mrs. Statler even once? Truly I’m lucky.”

“We both are, indeed,” he agreed, “as lucky as people in our circumstances could be.”

I paused. Poured over the remark on my tongue. Said it anyway. “Perhaps,” I said, “I could be luckier.”

“I suppose you could,” he replied.

“I would be luckier,” I tried again, “if you would kiss me.”

That got it. He fell silent immediately. I turned to face him, refusing to pretend I hadn’t said it, as much as I wanted to. He turned back, slowly, with that same charming smile and just a slight air of disbelief to it.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Carmen?” he said.

“Not at all Mr. Cort,” I replied, a bit more assured for the fact that he hadn’t said no, “I said, kiss me.”

When he realized I was serious, he cocked his head slowly. The smile did not fade, though neither did the confusion, not at first. “Are you sure?” he asked.

I supposed I didn’t blame him for wondering if I was serious. But I was. “I am.”

He moved slowly still, which I had expected, almost like he was afraid if he moved too fast I would retract my request. He reached out with a hand first, wrapping it softly behind my head, eyes scanning my face. He still thought I was joking, I thought, and so I leaned in, and I kissed him first. His lips were cold as his hands had been. He drew away a bit in shock, but just as our lips parted, it finally registered that I was sure. I wanted him. And so when our lips met again, the kiss was deeper. Hungrier, but not in the way I’d been worried it would be. It was salty from the sea’s spray, and yet, it was the sweetest kiss I’d ever had. Perhaps because I knew it’d be one of my last.

When we parted, I felt breathless. His eyes still seemed to scan my face. I knew he wanted to say something, so I waited for him to say it.

“… Is this okay?” he asked, voice trembling a little.

“It is,” I answered, and he leaned down, pressing his forehead to mine, cradling my head in his hands. “It’s okay,” I said.

With that it was like a dam broke. He kissed me again with the passion I’d hoped for the first time. My tongue slipped past his lips and grazed over one of his fangs, and I was not afraid. The musket was the first thing I shed, dangling it by the strap before I let it fall to the deck.

He no longer moved slowly or like he was afraid I would draw away. I had been afraid that in this moment he’d behave like the animal I’d seen feed before, with movements I did not understand, but every movement he made felt familiar. It felt more human than I’d even felt of myself in the past months. There was desperation, certainly, in the way that his hands slipped up under my shirt and pulled me in, clutching me with this strange mix of tenderness and hunger. I had not felt anything like it before.

His lips left mine and pressed to my cheek, my jaw, and then they hovered a second over my neck. My heart was hardly beating a calm rhythm to begin with but the realization of his position caused it to trip over itself. I was tangled in his grasp, pressed against the rail of the ship, and my weapon lay beside me. I was not afraid, no. I should have been. But a thrill ran up my entire body as he rested his face in the crook between my shoulder and my neck, inhaling deeply the same way he had over the open sea.

He was not entirely still, instead holding me close and running one hand from the back of my head down my back. His face did not move. He breathed deeply one more time, and I felt his lips press against my neck. Gently. Softly. Feather light. Once and then twice, and then he pulled away, letting me lean back in his embrace so that our eyes could meet.

“You know I’d never hurt you,” he whispered. I could hear it just above the lapping of the waves against the hull.

“I know,” I replied, and I leaned forward again. This time, without the rail behind us, he stumbled back, nearly tripping over the musket. I wasn’t quite sure exactly how or when it happened, but through more whispered communications and worries for each other’s comfort, we found ourselves back below deck, far away from the danger of sunlight. Not in that cursed brig—I wanted to be far from the memories of his deaths, the deaths I’d caused. I did not want to think of him as a creature, or a body. I wanted Cort.

And I got what I wanted, and even more than that. I got everything I could have wished for until the two of us lay quietly in the hammock that he’d slept in while he was alive, my head pressed to his chest. There was no heartbeat there, but I could not find that fact unsettling. It was just him. It was the way he would be, from here until eternity.

“Do you think the sun is out now?” he asked after a long while, “I think you left the musket on the deck.”

“I certainly did,” I replied with a soft chuckle. “I suppose I ought to go put it somewhere safe.”

“Ah, now I wish I hadn’t mentioned it,” he groaned and pulled me closer, causing the hammock to rock a bit. I laughed.

“I ought to check the sun anyway,” I pointed out, “So let me, for both our sakes, and I’ll fetch the damn thing while I’m at it.”

“Hmm. I suppose I shan’t argue.” He stretched a little, then settled again. “All right, but hurry back.”

“Trust me, now that you have me, you won’t be able to keep me away.” I didn’t mention what still lingered in my mind, about that only being true for as long as I stayed living. But, I was no longer so eager to cut that life short. We were both doomed, but the time we had left was not. I tipped myself out of the hammock, and he gave a small yelp as it swung with my effort. Scooping up my shirt from where it had landed a few feet away, I pulled it on as I made my way toward the hatch and up onto the deck.

The sun was out. I hadn’t thought it would be, hadn’t realized we’d been down there for that long. Stretching, I took in the warmth and yawned. I felt relaxed. I hadn’t realized I was still capable of that. I let it wash over me for a moment before I even tried to locate the musket.

As my eyes scanned over the deck, they wandered toward the horizon, past a sort of dark speck—a speck? My eyes snapped back to it. Then, before I could even allow myself to question it, I scrambled to the captain’s cabin for the spyglass again.

I didn’t hope, couldn’t hope, until I had in my gaze for certain. And even then I wondered if I had simply lost my mind, so I lowered the glass, and raised it again.

A ship! A ship, and one that had to be able to see us. I could signal it! I could be saved—we could be saved—

… I could be saved.

My heart sank.

What, I thought, would I have to do with Cort?