Love Not at First Sight by Sarah Ready

8

Sam

I wakeVeronica after a few hours of sleep. We’ve been in the cave for thirty hours. A day and a night have passed since we were trapped. After last night, I want to get out of here more than anything. Before I met Veronica I was drifting. I was finally starting to head in the right direction, coming to Romeo, but I was still drifting. Now, everything is clear. I’m going to start my tech think tank, I’m going to move to Romeo, and I’m going to spend my life being worthy of her. That starts with getting us out of this cave.

My stomach gives a long growl and I try to push aside the fact that I haven’t eaten since dinner at Evie’s place. Unfortunately, I had coffee for breakfast on my way up from New York City and didn’t eat before my hike.

“We should have some water,” says Veronica.

We drink from the stalactite we found last night. Veronica and I take turns catching the slowly falling water droplets. My mouth is dry and the thirst hurts so much that it’s painful to wait. It takes thirty minutes for us to swallow enough to quench our thirst. My stomach rumbles.

“How long can a person go without food?” I ask. Veronica knows more survival statistics than anyone I’ve ever met.

She’s quiet for a moment, then, “It depends. Usually, anywhere from eight to twenty-one days. You have to account for hydration levels, exertion, the environment, the person’s physical health and body composition.”

“Are we on the lower end or the higher end of that range?” I ask. I hold my breath and wait for her answer.

She reaches over and threads her fingers through mine. I let out my breath.

“Roughly?” she asks. She playfully knocks her shoulder against mine. “Are you looking for an equation?”

I smile. “You could say that.”

“Okay. Well, you can multiply my stubbornness by your determination and kick it to the power of twelve. So, I’d say we have all the time we need to find our way out of here.”

“Roughly,” I say.

She clasps my arm and squeezes. “Not roughly. My equation is exact.”

Her stomach growls and we both ignore the sound. I do a separate calculation in my head. It’s cold, we’re using a lot of energy, and we aren’t well hydrated. I’d say we may have more than a week, but not by much. And who knows how long we’ll be able to keep moving once the effects of starvation and worsening dehydration set in. The clock is ticking.

“We should go,” she says in a quiet voice. Maybe she was having the same thoughts.

I light my watch and we walk through the small room to the tight passageway.

“We’ll have to crawl again,” I say. We make sure the cairn and arrow are set up before moving on. We’ve been meticulous about marking our progress. Yesterday we hit so many dead ends and forks that we would’ve been wandering in circles without them. As it is, we’re wandering, but not in circles. I’ll mark up this entire cave with arrows and cairns if I have to. But we’re going to find our way out of here.

I crawl through the tight confines of passage and keep my watch lit. I hear Veronica curse.

“You alright?”

“Okay. Just cut my hand on a sharp rock.”

“Do you need to stop?”

“No. It’s just a scratch.”

I nod, she’s tough. I keep moving forward, careful to push aside loose rocks that could hurt her hands. The skin on my shins and knees burns, and the cuts that sealed after yesterday’s crawl open up again.

I hear Veronica sniff, it sounds like tears, and I remember yesterday in the tight, coffin-like crawl that she needed a story. “Do you remember the Greek myth about the minotaur?” I ask.

“The half-man, half-bull in the maze?”

“That’s right. It was a labyrinth, an impossible maze built by Daedalus and his son Icarus.”

“The Icarus who flew too close to the sun?”

“That’s him. The minotaur was the son of the queen of Crete and her lover, a bull. The Queen’s husband, King Minos, caged the minotaur in the labyrinth and demanded the Athenians send seven maidens and seven youths every nine years for the minotaur to eat.”

“Gross. Please tell me we aren’t crawling toward a man-eating minotaur.”

I chuckle and squeeze up and over a stone mound. The tunnel is widening a bit and there’s more room to crawl.

“Theseus, the King of Athens’ son, volunteers to go for the third tribute and swears he’ll kill the bull.”

“Brave.”

They always were. Brave and foolish. “When he got there, the King of Crete’s daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with him. She begged Daedalus to tell her how to defeat the maze. Before Theseus went in she gave him a ball of string. He let it out behind him, found the minotaur, killed it in battle, and then followed the string back out.”

“If only I had my pack. I had a rope in there.”

I grin. “I think we’re in a modern day labyrinth and the cairns and arrows are our string. We’ll find our way out, just like Theseus.”

“Mmm. So, did Ariadne and Theseus live happily ever after? Isn’t that how these stories go?”

I’m silent for a moment. Then, “Well. They sailed off together. But then, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on a deserted island and married her sister instead.”

There’s a gasp and then Veronica starts to laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me. There were jerk players in Ancient Greece? Don’t tell me I’m Ariadne and you’re Theseus. I’ll leave your butt in this freaking maze.”

I start to laugh. I feel her move behind me, she swats at my thigh. I reach behind me and catch her hand, then I maneuver around so that I’m on my back and she’s on top of me. The tunnel is three foot high, plenty of room.

I hold her in place and she squirms against me.

“I’m not Theseus,” I say. “You’re not Ariadne.”

“Obviously,” she says and she stops squirming.

“But we are using Daedalus’s string, it’s our cairns, and we will get out of here.”

“Obviously,” she says again. “Besides, I don’t have a sister.”

“And if I were Theseus, I’d never leave you,” I say. “If you led me out of a labyrinth and saved my life, I’d have to be insane to let you go.”

“Insane, or a player,” she says.

My mouth twists. What will she say when she finally sees my face? Learns my past?

“What if I was?”

“But you aren’t.”

My heart thuds painfully against her. I squeeze her to me. “No. But other people said I was. Most everyone believed I was.”

“Who didn’t?”

“My family.”

“Well. There you go.”

Her hair falls over my cheek and I rub it between my fingers.

“What happened to Ariadne?” she asks.

I think back to the story. “She married a god. Dionysus.”

“The god of wine and partying?”

“That’s right.”

She snorts and lays her head on my chest. “What was the appeal? He sounds like a bigger player than Theseus.”

“I don’t know. I imagine he loved her.”

She’s quiet for a moment and then she reaches up and runs her hand over my chin. “So, I guess it all worked out after all.”

She presses a kiss to my mouth and I savor the taste of her and the feel of her. She feels so good that there’s a sound in my ears, almost like singing. Except…

She pulls away. “Do you hear that?”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

She scrambles back and I right myself. We start back down the passage, making our way over the rocky terrain. As we go, the sound becomes louder. It’s an echoing of voices, whispering and then gurgled laughter. It sounds almost, but not quite, human. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. I don’t know what’s ahead of us. Maybe it is a minotaur, or some other animal that lives in the depths of this dark cave.

Veronica is quiet behind me. Neither of us speaks as the noise grows louder. I let my watch light fade. The air moves faster and I feel mist hit my face. The voices are gone, instead we’re surrounded by a rushing noise. I reach overhead and realize that I can stand. I step up and stretch. I light my watch and hold out my arm. Behind me, Veronica gasps.

The blue light catches and reflects off sprays of water floating through the air. A fine mist, like a cloud swirls around. Veronica steps forward and takes my hand.

“It’s a waterfall,” she says. “An underground waterfall.”

We step forward to the edge of a small, swiftly moving stream. It’s a foot wide, and the water cuts deep into the white limestone. I hold the light over the stream and follow it up the slope. Ten feet up, there’s a curtain of water running over the milky flowing stone of the cave wall.

“How high is it?” Veronica asks.

I hold my watch as high as I can. The waterfall glows in the light as far as I can see. The chattering, gurgling voices come from the water running over the stone and falling through cracks and holes and rock formations.

“I don’t know,” I say. “At least twenty feet.” The light of the watch ends far below the top of the waterfall.

I put my hand into the waterfall. It runs through my fingers and feels like cold silk, the current pushes my hand lower.

“Do you think anyone has ever seen this before?” Veronica asks.

She reaches into the falls and lets the water run over her hands. I tangle my fingers with hers. We listen to the cacophony of the waterfall, the song of the mist, and the tinkling music of the droplets falling from the stalactites.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I hope so.”

That would mean someone has been here before, and left again. But also that someone else has experienced this wonder. I hold up my arm again and try to reflect the light off the water’s surface. The waterfall empties into a stream that leads to a small shallow pool. It glows a clear azure, as pure blue as glacier ice. Stalactites and stalagmites crowd the room twisting up and around and glowing with crystalline light.

“It’s like another world,” Veronica says. There’s awe in her voice.

I try to see her face. Her expression. I catch the brightness of her hair, it’s light brown or blonde. Her skin is pale. Beyond that, the light’s too dim. But in this room, with the mist floating around us and the chorus of voices from the waterfall, I wonder if I’ve dreamed her.

No, she’s real. And I know one thing for certain.

“You’re beautiful,” I say.

She laughs and flicks a spray of water at me. “You can’t even see me. You have no idea what I look like.”

“I know exactly what you look like,” I say.

She grabs my hand and we move through the cavern. I shine my light at the ground so we don’t trip or fall into an unexpected gap.

“Alright, what do I look like?”

“You’re about five foot seven. Slight but athletic.”

“That’s easy, what else?”

“You’re strong. It’s in the way you stand. Straight and assured, with your chin tilted up like you’re ready to take on the world.”

I touch the line of her jaw, and her chin is tilted up just like I described.

“How did you—”

I continue.

“You have a soft mouth, a kind mouth, but you bite your bottom lip a lot because you’re always thinking, trying to work out what to do next.”

I rub my finger over her lip and feel the contradiction of softness and strength. She pulls in a breath and her lips soften under my touch.

“When you walk in a room, people notice you and respect you, but they like you too, because you have a kind smile and warm eyes. Your skin is sun-kissed, because you love the outdoors, and you take the time to appreciate nature. And your fingers are calloused because you climb, but also because you work hard at everything you do, whether it’s surviving in a cave or building a business from the ground up. You’re strong, soft, sweet and determined. Like I said, beautiful.”

She’s silent for so long that I wonder if I’ve said too much. Gone too far, too fast. But then she relaxes against me.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

“I guess you do see me.”

I press her into my side and breathe in the scent of her. I close my eyes and imagine us together, outside of this cave.

“Do you think…” She pauses.

“What?”

“When we get out of here, that this will fade? That we only feel this way because of the circumstances? Supposedly, I have a soul mate. I don’t want him. Ever. But…you know, people get close in extreme circumstances, and then when it’s over they don’t ever see each other again. And…Erma, the soul mate seer, she’s never wrong. If we keep this up, keep getting close, it’s likely we’re setting ourselves up for heartbreak.”

My chest clenches and her words send a jolt of fear through me.

“I don’t agree,” I say. “It won’t fade. What I feel for you…”

“Yes?”

“It won’t fade.”

She takes my hand. “I know.”

“Tell me about this psychic again. And your soul mate.”

We pick our way through the cavern, wordlessly agreeing to find a path forward. We’re going to make it out of here, and Veronica’s fears won’t come true. I feel certain, just as I felt at age nine when I knew I was meant to work with computers the rest of my life, that we’re meant to be together. We fit.

“He’s like my dad,” she says after a moment of silence.

“He’s not the right guy then.”

I feel her nod. “He’s wealthy and he throws his money around. Uses it to lure women in. Instead of using a cute daughter, he uses wealth to buy women.”

I have an uncomfortable itch between my shoulder blades. This schmuck sounds similar to the man I was trying to become.

“No redeeming qualities?”

“None. Not a single one. He repulses me. There’s nothing he could say or do to make me want to be with him.”

I roll my shoulders and try to alleviate the feeling between my shoulder blades. I’m not the man she’s talking about. Thank God. If I were, I’d deserve her rejection.

“What if he reforms? Falls in love with you and becomes a better man?”

She snorts. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. He’s either a player, a wanna-be player, or a good guy. And he’s not a good guy.”

“But your friend’s aunt says you’re supposed to be together?” I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around this psychic-predicting-soul-mates situation. “And she’s never wrong?”

I feel Veronica shrug. “Doesn’t matter if she’s right or not. I decide my own fate.” She pokes me in the side, “I’ll never be with him, I promise.”

I let out a long breath. “Good. If you do, I’ll remind you of your promise and make sure you keep it.”

“So sure of your appeal?”

I smile. “No. But we’re in a cave and you don’t have much choice. It’s either me or the rocks.”

We’ve circled the cavern and found the only passage out. We stand before it and take it all in. From what I can see, it’s two sheer rock walls, about two feet apart leading across a chasm. I drop a rock and count the seconds.

“Forty-four feet,” I say.

We have to wedge ourselves between the walls, suspend ourselves over the chasm, and climb across.

There’s no other exit, except the passage we came out of.

“Forward?” asks Veronica.

I think about what going forward means. Maybe we die. Or we find a way out, Veronica sees who I am…maybe leaves me. Or she finds her soul mate and decides on him after all. Or we stay together, spend the rest of our lives together. My heart beats against my ribs. That. That’s what I want.

She’s the one.

“Forward,” I say.