Plenty of Fish by Josh Lanyon

Author:Josh Lanyon [Lanyon, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short story, gay romance
Publisher: JustJoshin Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2017-03-30T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Come on. Come on, Blair…

Finn’s heart beat out the tense seconds as he knelt in the silt and stone beside the hole in the side of the hull.

You can do it. I know you can do it. You have to do it.

Three minutes of air remaining in his tank, which meant Blair, who always chewed up oxygen like wildfire, was out and had been for…too long. If he made it—he has to make it; I’m not going without him—thirty feet per minute. One foot every two seconds…eighty feet to the surface. Do the math.

No. Don’t do the math. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t leaving Blair.

There. Movement in the passageway before him. The sheen of something sleek and dark streaking through green shadows.

He leaned in, peering into the darkness.

Blair.

God. Blair. Finn reached out, giving him a thumbs-up. I’m here. You’re almost home.

Blair stopped.

No. No. No. What the fuck are you doing?

Did he not see? Did he not understand?

Yes. He saw. He understood. Blair was wriggling, fighting to get free. His tank was jammed on something.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This is not happening.

Finn shoved in through the opening as far as he could go, stretched, stretched still farther, feeling his suit snag on sharp metal as he grabbed for Blair’s quick-release strap. He yanked. The buckle held, then snapped free. Blair’s tank tumbled away—and Blair shot out of the opening in the hull on a startled stream of bubbles.

Finn grabbed for him, tearing open the buckle on Blair’s heavy weighted belt.

Blair was trying to speak around his regulator, the words desperate and unintelligible.

Finn hung on to him and kicked hard off the bottom. He finned for the surface in powerful thrusts, hanging on tight to Blair to keep him from rocketing up through the water.

Blair started to struggle, heaving with the effort of not sucking in water. Finn clung tighter.

Hang on. Don’t panic. We can do this.

He scrabbled for his regulator, passing it to Blair, praying Blair wasn’t too frantic to understand.

No, Blair got it. He grabbed the regulator with both hands, drawing in one…two…desperate breaths, while Finn exhaled, still propelling them toward the surface.

Okay, buddy. I know. But we’ve both got to breathe.

Blair hauled in another greedy breath before, with almost heroic self-discipline, he shoved back the regulator—remembering in time to expel his breath.

Finn took two sparing inhalations—was there any real oxygen left in his tank?—passing the regulator back to Blair.

Blair’s green eyes were huge. They seemed to fill his mask. Sure, they’d practiced this as kids, but in reality, it was one of the hardest maneuvers around. A Buddy Breathing Ascent meant each of them had to repeatedly remove the regulator—which right there meant risk drowning—and do so while coordinating their ascent at a non-lung-rupturing rate.

There was a reason this was considered a last recourse.

Eighty fucking feet. It might as well be twenty thousand leagues. They were never going to make it.

Blair fumbled the regulator back to Finn. As the pressure around them dropped, Finn’s tank released a final gust of air.

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