"Bats die all the time, Jeremy." That was Christa's perspective. She didn't want me to take this internship in California. She wanted me to go backpacking through Europe with her. But she said it: bats die all the time. They don't stop for your vacation.

We traveled opposite directions when the semester ended, and she broke up with me when her plane landed at Heathrow. She's been sending me drunk pictures ever since. Tonight it's a blurry shot of a make-out in Budapest, so I guess she's having fun. The guy in the photo doesn't look enough like me that I'm flattered. I don't have anything to send back.

It's three in the morning in Budapest. I checked. It's six p.m. in California. The barracks I live in have undrinkable water, grainy satellite TV, and cell service that only works if you stand on the gray boulder in the parking lot between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. And then there's Cassidy Vorchak. Cassidy, much like Christa, couldn't care less about bats, but she wants an impressive resume when she applies to law school. She's spending the summer educating the public on white-nose syndrome, crawling through caves, and drinking to keep the boredom at bay. Well, I drink. Cassidy listens to podcasts about the LSATs and takes notes on legal pads because she's a literal kind of person. I could send Christa a picture of Cassidy, I guess. She'd eat her heart out.

Cassidy's the prettiest girl I've ever seen. She also hates me. There's still hope for one of those things to change.

** ** **

I've been told I'm a polarizing guy. My nose has been broken a couple of times, but I have great teeth and a smile that makes girls feel like they're being seen for the very first time. Direct quote from my grandmother, and she's not the type to lie.

Cassidy showed up to our internship with a boyfriend at the other end of a telephone number. He liked to call once a week, never between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., and would stay on the line for less than ten minutes. She dumped him after a month, which meant that one of the three women living in the barracks was now single. The other two are old enough to be my mother, not to mention married and unmoved by my charms. They stay here to avoid a three-hour weekday commute, and go home on the weekend.

Both are lovely, but they can't hold a candle to Cassidy.

I didn't make a pass at her after she dumped her boyfriend. I just told her she looked lovely before we started the trek into 5 Mile Cave. Cass glared at me and stopped wearing makeup after that.

It's not like mascara matters when you're in a cave, and she still looks nice. But I don't say that, because she doesn't like compliments. At least not from me. Cassidy doesn't like anything from me. I've offered her dinner, and beer, and board games, and an illuminating lecture on white-nose syndrome, because as I said before, she really doesn't care about bats, and she should know something.

She doesn't talk to me at work. She shuts the door to her room at the end of the day, only coming out to microwave those sad plastic frozen meals that people resigned to dying alone eat.

That is not the kind of meal Cassidy ought to be eating.

** ** **

The caves we work in are lava tubes, which means they suck. They range from comfortable ceiling heights that require no contorting down to ceilings so low you do an army-crawl and bruise your entire body on the knobby cauliflower cave floor.

Cassidy panics in the middle of an army-crawl, and even though the cave is less than a foot in height she has four feet of room on either side. She could sidle to her right and then forward, but she doesn't.

"It's like Tetris," I joke, trying to get her to catch up.

She groans from deep in her throat like a wild animal. The good news is she can't move fast enough to attack me. The bad news is our boss, Jack, is well ahead of us, and it's up to me to get Cassidy out. This would be fine if she didn't hate my guts.

"Hey, Cass, move to your right. I came out that way," I call out. The cave has opened up again so that I can kneel without bashing my head in on the stone, which is a welcome relief.

I peer back into the passage, where I can see Cass in my headlamp's light. Her own headlamp is pooling light at the tip of her nose, where she's resolutely staring at the stone.

"Cass?"

"Shut up, Lincoln." She tries to build distance between us by using my last name. It doesn't work.

"Jack's getting ahead." Cass is competitive. Maybe if she hears our boss and his arthritic knees are leaving us in the proverbial dust she'll move.

She clicks her helmet against the ground in front of her in a slow, hypnotic rhythm for a moment, and then stops.

"I don't want to do this. I'm going to back up and see you at the entrance."

I train my light on her and see her try to wriggle backwards. She hits her head with a thump and a groan.

"C'mon Cass, at least come out here where it's wider and turn around."

"I don't want to," she says into the stone, her voice muffled.

"If you come out here, the other branch out is way bigger," I say. I don't know if it's true, but not knowing means I'm not lying.

She makes that animal noise again, which sends a shiver down my spine.

"You're gonna freak out the bats," I tell her.

She minimizes her groan, and whispers, "I hate the bats."

"I know."

"I want to go home. I'm cold, and I'm wet, and I'm sick of caves."

I sigh, leaning down to peek at Cassidy again. She hasn't moved, and I can't hear Jack anymore. He's probably in the next open space, taking notes in the red light of his headlamp about how incompetent we are. It doesn't matter to Cassidy, but it matters to me.

"Turn off your light," I tell her.

"What?"

"Just do it."

I'm surprised when she does, and I follow suit, dumping us into total darkness. This is what the universe will look like when all the stars burn out. This is nothingness.

"Why am I doing this?" she asks, but her voice is already softer. There's something about the darkness that takes off the edge.

"To forget you're in a cave. To forget you're in a place. Just take a second and breathe."

Cassidy doesn't answer, and all I can hear is my own breathing, so I focus on that. My eyes strain to see anything, bits and blobs of imaginary neon lights flashing in front of me.

"Ok," Cassidy's voice comes through the darkness. "I'm coming out." She clicks her headlamp on and starts crawling. When she reaches me, she kneels in the small alcove.

I stretch my arm out ahead. "The map says it only gets better."

She furrows her brow to glare at me, blinding me with her headlamp, and turns to head in Jack's direction. I follow behind her. I think she likes the thought of me staring at the soles of her boots the whole way.

** ** **

"Wake up." Cassidy's standing in my doorway dressed for work, her helmet and headlamp in hand. The hallway light silhouettes her, and she throws the helmet onto my bed. I sit up and stare at it, realizing it's my helmet, the one with the Park Service logo nearly scratched off.

I glance out the window. It's still pitch black outside.

"What's happening?" I rub my eyes and rest my feet on the ground. It takes me a minute but I stand and stretch. Cassidy shifts in the doorway, and I grin. I'm in boxers and it bothers her. Good.

She gestures to my dresser and starts to walk away. "Just get dressed. We have to work."

I find her on the cell phone boulder when I'm dressed. She's sitting on it and staring at the sky. She doesn't tell me to leave, so I sit next to her.

"That's the Milky Way," she says.

The stars are knockouts tonight, but I don't say anything. It usually just pisses Cassidy off, and I'd rather she stayed in this weird zen state. Even if it means we're going caving in the middle of the night, which she should know is a pretty stupid idea.

We'll probably cross paths with a skunk.

"Bats," I say, watching a swath of stars blink out of existence and back again.

Cassidy keeps her eyes on the sky, nodding. "Yeah, they're out."

"So where are we going?"

She jerks her eyes away from the sky and looks me over, her face nothing but shadows.

"Here," she says. "What kind of moron would go out there at night?"

I shake my head, emitting a low whistle. "Touché."

It doesn't make sense, but she smiles anyway.

** ** **

Cassidy starts to talk to me at work. Jack still thinks we're incompetent. We stop whenever the caves narrow and turn off our lights, taking a meditation minute in between surveying the bats for signs of disease.

She doesn't say anything important, or nice, or flirty, but she talks. Sometimes about her podcasts, or an amicus brief that really turned her on, which I always have to bite my tongue over because it makes me want to laugh. I don't know why. She gets so animated talking about that stuff, even in the dark.

I'm not one to talk, since I want to save bats from a fungus.

She eats dinner with me a few times. I can't make anything fancy, but I bet a quesadilla tastes awesome after those depression-in-a-tray dinners. She sips on a beer and watches summer shows on the grainy satellite feed. She doesn't get mad when I laugh at people falling off those giant marshmallows. She laughs too. Sometimes she'll still glare after laughing—like she's remembered I'm in the room, or she's afraid I'll find her ten years from now at her high-powered New York office and tell her coworkers she watched America's Newest Strongest Bestest Dumbest Falling-at-Things Competition.

But then she'll laugh again. And if I offer her another beer, sometimes she says yes.

Progress.

** ** **

There's a month left of work and Jack is sick of our faces. He has a safety meeting to attend and he sends us back to 5 Mile Cave alone. He says we need an update, but we both know he thinks it's one of the few places we won't get turned around and die in an unmapped lava tube.

I don't think I'd die, but I can't guarantee Cassidy won't try to kill me, so I don't mind his precautions.

Cassidy's wearing a side-braid that's going to look really dumb when she takes her helmet off, but I compliment her because it looks nice now. She doesn't glare at me. She blushes and then, impossibly, glares at herself. She forgot to hate for me a second, which feels like a victory.

We start the trek through the cave, Cassidy with the paperwork. I shine my headlamp at the different sleeping bat colonies, and we confirm there's no sign of the disease. We run into some amateurs in one of the larger caverns. They've bought all their gear at the gift shop. They have never been in a cave east of the Rockies, so we congratulate them on not spreading white-nose and move on.

Cassidy carries the map and directs us to a branch I don't remember. It's hard to tell anything apart, but I've been in 5 Mile a lot. I follow her lead and squeeze through, pushing off the stone with my feet to move forward.

The passage gets narrower and narrower, but not so terrible I can't keep moving. Just bad enough that I wonder whether Cassidy really wants me to get stuck in a cave forever, but that's when the stone opens up again. I clear the passage and wait for Cassidy, listening to the sound of her scraping forward.

I crawl ahead until the cave is almost tall enough to stand in. There's a natural bench in the lava tube, and I sit on the cold stone, focusing my headlamp's beam in Cassidy's direction. She emerges from the passage and clambers toward the bench, joining me. She sits and pulls her gloves off, breathing into her hands.

"Cold?"

She nods. I take my gloves off and offer them to her, though they're just like hers. She shakes her head and just holds her hands forward. I take them in my own, which are warm, and hold her hands like we're in prayer until she takes them back.

Cassidy removes her helmet and leans back against the cold stone. Her headlamp shines against a spot on the cave's other wall. I dim my headlamp and glance at her. Her hair has worked out of its braid and frames her face in weird, asymmetrical waves. I take my helmet off, too.

"Your hair looks dumb," she says. I chuckle and bite my tongue. Cassidy is a cactus, and kicking one will only leave you with needles in your foot.

"Turn off your light," she says.

I glance at her to see whether she's serious. Her eyes shine in the dim light, her mouth curved upward in a faint smile. I click it off, and she follows suit.

We're wrapped in the darkness. She finds my hand and holds it. The neon lights in front of my eyes seem to fade. I hold her hand as long as she lets me, trying to focus on my breathing, even though holding her hand makes it strange, shallow and fast.

"You can kiss me, Lincoln."

I laugh low in the darkness. "I can't even see you, Cass."

I feel her rest her chin on my shoulder.

"You've always seen me, stupid."

I turn, feeling like an idiot, tracing the air until I find her jaw, tracing her jaw until I find her mouth.

Kissing her in the darkness is like discovering a new sense, and I lose myself in it. I wrap my fingers into her unraveling braid, my hands warm against her cold neck, and she runs her cold hands over my body, finding the hem of my jacket and slipping them against the bare skin of my stomach in an earth-shattering but unsexy move.

She touches me to get warm, and she kisses me to see in the darkness.

I kiss her because she's a different kind of light.

**  **  **

Word count: 2482

Cover image by Kenny Louie, kwl on flickr, "End of the Tunnel." Modified under Creative Commons license 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/