The Reef

was, essentially, useless.
    “Matthew.” Tate crouched in front of him, took his hands and wrapped them around a cup of coffee. “Come in and sit down.”
    He shook his head. Because the coffee was in his hands he lifted it and sipped. He could see that her face was still pale and glossy with shock, her eyes red. But the hand she rested on his updrawn knee was steady.
    In one terrifying mental blip, he saw her hurtling through the water toward the jaws of the shark.
    “Go away, Tate.”
    Instead, she sat beside him, draped an arm around his shoulders. “He’s going to make it, Matthew. I know it.”
    “What, are you a fortune-teller now, on top of everything else?”
    His voice was cold and sharp. Though it wounded, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s important to believe it. It helps to believe it.”
    She was wrong. It hurt to believe it. Because it did, he jerked away from her, got to his feet. “I’m going for a walk.”
    “I’ll go with you.”
    “I don’t want you.” He whirled on her, letting all the fear, the guilt, the grief explode into fury. “I don’t want you anywhere near me.”
    Her stomach quaked, her eyes stung, but she held her ground. “I’m not leaving you alone, Matthew. You’d better get used to it.”
    “I don’t want you,” he repeated, and stunned her by putting a hand just under her throat and pushing her against the wall. “I don’t need you. Now, why don’t you go get your nice, pretty family and take off?”
    “Because Buck matters to us.” Though she managed to swallow the tears, they roughened her voice. “So do you.”
    “You don’t even know us.” Something was screaming inside him to get out. To keep it hidden even from himself, he pushed her. His face, inches from hers, was hard, cold, merciless. “You’re just out for a lark, taking a few months in the sun to play at treasure-hunting. You got lucky. You don’t know what it’s like to go month after month, year after year and have nothing to show for it. To die and have nothing.”
    Her breath was hitching now no matter how she fought to control it. “He’s not going to die.”
    “He’s already dead.” The fury died from his eyes like a light switched off and left them blank and flat. “He was dead the minute he pushed me out of the way. The goddamn idiot pushed me out of the way.”
    There it was, the worst of it, out, ringing on the sterilized hospital air. He turned from it, covered his face, but couldn’t escape it.
    “He pushed me out of the way, got in front of me. What the hell was he thinking of? What were you thinking of?” Matthew demanded, spinning back to her with all the helpless anger rolling back into him like a riptide. “Coming at us that way. Don’t you know anything? When a shark’s got blood it’ll attack anything. You should have headed for the boat. With that much blood in the water, we were lucky it didn’t draw a dozen sharks in to feed. What the hell were you thinking of?”
    “You.” She said it quietly and stayed where she was, backed against the wall. “I guess both Buck and I were thinking about you. I couldn’t have handled it if anything had happened to you, Matthew. I couldn’t have lived with it. I love you.”
    Undone, he stared at her. There had been no one, in his whole life, who had said those three words to him. “Then you’re stupid,” he managed, and pulled unsteady fingers through his hair.
    “Maybe.” Her lips were trembling. Even when she pressed them hard together, they vibrated with the power of her roiling emotions. “I guess you were pretty stupid, too. You didn’t leave Buck. You thought he was dead and you could have gotten away while the shark had him. You didn’t. Why didn’t you head for the boat, Matthew?”
    He only shook his head. When she stepped forward to put her arms around him, he buried his face in her hair. “Tate.”
    “It’s all right,” she murmured, running soothing strokes up his rigid back. “It’s going to be all right. Just hold on to me.”
    “I’m bad luck.”
    “That’s foolish. You’re just tired now, and worried. Come in and sit down. We’ll all wait together.”
     
    She stayed beside him. The hours passed in that dream state so common to hospitals. People came and went.There was the soft flap of crepe-soled shoes on tile as nurses passed the doorway, the smell of overbrewed coffee, the sharp tang of antiseptic that never quite masked the underlying odor of sickness.