The Black Pearl continued on her way. One night it was unnaturally foggy and Jack and Gibbs both had to throw their navigational skills together. The climate was becoming more tropical and Jack knew he was nearing his destination.

Rachel tried to make friends with her lot. Jack Sparrow obviously wanted to find out something about her origins – should he be successful, she could also benefit from it and get a clue about her mother. Too often, she had wanted to know who she had been.

The crew was friendly towards her, as they had been the last time. On the evening of the day of her planned wedding, she stood on the deck as she frequently did, taking in the colours that the sunset painted on the sea. Part of her was extremely happy not to have been in Port Royal.

At this moment, she actually enjoyed her stay on the Black Pearl a little. Rachel closed her eyes contentedly as the wind picked up and did not notice Jack approaching her.

"She's smiling!" he said in mock surprise, drawing attention to himself.

"Not in your presence any more."

"Liar."

Not even this rudeness erased her smile, and Jack made himself comfortable at the railing, leaning back against it.

Rachel sighed.

"What?" asked Jack.

"That there." She held out her arm and Jack turned his head to see what she meant.

"In my tongue, it's called horizon," Jack said, unable to suppress his own in the face of her permanent smile.

The outstretched hand dropped, Rachel looked down briefly to hide her smile.

Curious, Jack turned and rested both arms on the railing. She was in a peculiar mood. Almost as if he couldn't upset her with anything he said.

"I mean the colours. Sunsets over the sea have different hues than elsewhere. In England, I didn't live right by the sea. It wasn't too far away, … but now I can watch it every day. It's incredibly difficult to capture the colours and the atmosphere properly."

Her eyes lit up as her hand gestured again towards the horizon, trying to make clear what she meant.

"Draw?"

"Yes, and those darn beautiful sunset colours are my personal Achilles' heel."

"The sunrise doesn't cause any problems?" asked Jack, only to find she was just immune to ridicule.

"No more."

The first conversation in which she talked openly about personal matters. Apart from the one time when she had drank rum after the dice game …

Jack listened to her talk about drawing. Her fascination with it held him captive. If he had given a preliminary opinion about Rachel, he would have claimed she was far too reserved to be able to really develop deep devotion to a subject. He learned that this did not correspond to reality and changed the preliminary opinion.

During all the time she was talking, she was looking almost exclusively at the horizon, and the enthusiasm on her face was as evident as the passion could be heard from her words.

She bounced back and forth and sometimes tripped over her words, that's how fast she wanted to communicate. Neck and décolleté were covered in rosy spots.

Only when Jack asked questions that made her think or that surprised her did she look at him.

Sometimes the corners of her mouth twitched upwards in a fleeting smirk.

Their conversation continued into the night before it slowly died down.

Jack was just thinking about going to his cabin when her elbow landed not-so-gently against his side. He raised an eyebrow.

"Do you know this constellation?" asked Rachel, extending her neck a little and stretching a finger towards the sky.

Jack eyed her sceptically. All evening he had found nothing, not in her voice, words or posture, that could be construed as hostile towards him and that made him suspicious. Sudden changes in behaviour were always suspicious.

Rachel nodded her head at him when he didn't answer for too long for her taste.

Everything was a question of perspective – Jack was almost certain of that. Tonight he had had to change his image of Rachel more often, and she had made him curious. Curious about which topics, which incidents, could still bring out this liveliness in her.

He tilted his head in her direction, his gaze fixed on the point in the firmament that her finger was trying to pinpoint.

"It's been a few years since I last leafed through an almagest*," he said, trying to discern which of the umpteen stars she meant exactly.

He wanted to show off, but Rachel was too absorbed in the night sky.

"There, that chain." Rachel moved closer to the railing, holding on with the hand that was not pointing to the sky, and stretched. As she did so, she stood on tiptoe, as if that would bring her outstretched finger closer to the stars and makes it clearer exactly which ones she meant.

Jack leaned back a little to look at her more closely. He didn't like what was quietly knocking at the surface of his consciousness at that moment. All bloody evening he had casually savoured her company, and she managed to carry the feeling even further now.

That was not bad. What was bad was that he liked it and couldn't bring himself to deliberately upset or embarrass her. This was new territory for him.

He was much better able to deal with her polite reticence, her initial fear of him or her stubborn dislike. All something he could counter with irony, jibes and other verbal attacks.

He would simply test how steadfast and honest her unconcern was, and whether he could not make her find her rejection of him again. More with deeds than with words, he wanted to try.

Where exactly was she pointing? This inconspicuous image, which he hadn't noticed for a long time because the stars didn't really stand out.

"Eridanus," Jack said tonelessly.

Rachel sank back to her feet and looked scrutinising at Jack, who was standing some distance behind her.

"Ptolemy – antiquity," Jack said quickly this time, as if the two words were a confirmation of the name he had given earlier.

"You have read the Almagest? A pirate who knows about ancient astronomy?"

She had been listening after all and turned to him. There was genuine interest in her eyes before she lowered her gaze and smiled.

"You impress me, Captain Sparrow," Rachel said in a put-on undertone meant to confirm her admiration.

Jack had had enough. You didn't open this kind of game if you didn't want to elicit a reaction, and if you did, you had to learn that it was an impossibility.

He shoved back towards her with a grin on his face. Her eyebrows drew together slightly and she focused on the sky again before Jack came to a halt close behind her.

"Eridanus – not a chain, but a river," Rachel said, looking at the constellation.

Jack tilted his head. "Thought it was supposed to be a snake."

"No, no. The river in which Phaeton, the son of the sun god, fell after Zeus killed him."

"Why did he kill him and how?" Jack wanted to know.

"With lightning. Because he partially scorched the earth when he took his father's sun chariot – an accident."

Jack nodded and then shrugged his shoulders.

"There's a snake somewhere, too. The ancient Greeks, unlike us pirates, were wildly imaginative when it came to naming things."

"What's that called?" asked Rachel, pointing again to several stars.

Jack narrowed his eyes. "Orion. You didn't get him right."

Without making a fuss, Jack took her hand in his. Cautious, Rachel turned her head in his direction, but he ran her hand towards the stars and drew her attention back to the sky.

"You forgot that one, and that one … it belongs to the river that looks like a snake. I'm not sure whether I can believe you with this information. Eridanus starts here … see? Right at the foot of Orion."

To adjust his eye level to hers, Jack took another half step towards Rachel. His breath hit her neck and Rachel shuddered. Jack grinned.

He continued to guide her hand, telling her all the names of the stars he could see, while she listened to his voice, frozen and looking up.

"What were the names of the last two?" whispered Rachel.

Jack repeated himself and continued.

He couldn't know that she was too occupied with his left hand, which was suddenly at her waist.

The incessant roar of the waves seemed to be momentarily drowned out only by the throbbing blood in her ears. One feeling chased the other and intensified her sensations at the same time.

She could no longer make out the horizon for a long time. There was no line where the sky leaned on the sea. Only the stars indicated where above was, and the warmth that gathered under the fingers around her waist brought the certainty of being firmly on the ground.

The moment was frozen. No past casting a deafening echo on the present. No future shrouded in mist, luring and frightening her. Carefree and fearless, this moment belonged to her.

Freedom – that's what some kind of it had to feel like. Rachel breathed in the cool air deeply, and only then did she realise how she had been holding her breath. As if it would carry the moment away on resumption.

It was Jack, however, who really unfroze the moment. The well-read rogue who had helped to bring her to this inspiring state.

How long he had stopped speaking, Rachel could not say. How long her hand, which he had held clasped and with which he had just shown her the stars, hung loosely at her side, she could not say either.

Jack released the grip, his fingers creeping first over the back of her hand and then along between her fingers. His touch was gossamer.

Rachel lifted her gaze back to the night, the skin on her arms tingling as she tried to control her increasing breathing. Jack's fingers hooked onto her hand, and as he did so they ran against her thigh with interested pressure. Rachel swallowed and avoided the touch slightly.

He had mastered the art of hiding his impertinent actions behind charm.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him looking at her face and tried to read in it how far he could go. Had he just ruined the moment on purpose because he didn't want her to feel that way in his presence? That would mean he was playing with her more honestly than she had given him credit for.

But he would need a great deal of empathy for that and he didn't have it. More likely, he had wanted to take advantage of it while she had been frozen in that incomparably vivid coldness and … Rachel turned her head over her shoulder towards him.

She had already learned to read his face a little. Sometimes she could see what was going on inside him – when he was careless. When he dropped the walls, which he painted at will depending on the situation, to show what he wanted to show.

The roguish grin played around his lips and made his eyes blaze. Rachel could not maintain eye contact and she lowered her head with a smile.

Jack stepped back from her and took his hand from hers.

"Welcome to a world where the air I breathe is mine, love," he whispered against her ear, his warm breath brushing against it.

She shuddered and closed her eyes again. Jack strolled to his cabin and in the candlelight of an oil lamp she could still make out him winking at her as she watched him go.

Rachel stayed at the railing, raised her eyes to the stars again, sighed and then had to smile herself.

*Almagest = Compendium from antiquity on astronomy. The representations are based on the Ptolemaic world system, and it included 48 constellations.