I stopped walking. There was a man on the beach.
Except.
He wasblue.Not somehow tanned-blue, not blue in the way of bad lighting — genuinely, specifically, beautifully blue, the exact blue of deep water in afternoon light, the blue the cove had been doing through my window all morning.
My brain said:blue man, note that,and moved immediately to the rest of him, because the rest of him was more than okay. He was large. Built like something that lived in the ocean and had for a very long time, broad shoulders and strong arms and a chest and stomach that told a story about a body that never stopped being used. Long dark blue locs pushed back from his face. A shell necklace against his collarbone. Board shorts, black with small flowers on them. Bare feet in the black sand.
And at his lower back, resting on either side of him, easy and completely unself-conscious, were two tentacles. Moving in slow absent circles in the sand, like fingers drumming on a table.
My brain ran its process:blue skin, large, tentacles, board shorts, currently applying surf wax, tentacles.I let the processcomplete. I waited for the part where I did something useful like leave or panic.
That part didn't come.
What came instead was:fine, then.The specific equanimity of someone who had been awake for twenty-two hours and then slept hard and eaten well and was now looking at a blue man with tentacles on a black sand beach and finding that her reserves of not-fine had simply run out. There was nothing left. I had used it all on the ferry.
I walked over.
He looked up.
Dark eyes — almost fully dark, the color of water that went down a long way. Sharp cheekbones. And when he looked up at me his mouth curved, just slightly, just enough to show the edge of something that was white and pointed and very slightly not human.
He looked at me with an expression doing a very controlled job of not being one. Whatever, or whoever, he had been expecting, I wasn't it.
I decided to force conversation. “Any good cafes around here?” Nevermind the fact that I just had pretty decent, albeit very sweet coffee with Tina.
"There is coffee at the bar in La Boca," he said, after a pause exactly one beat longer than normal. His voice was low and unhurried and had the quality of something that had made a settled peace with silence — deep, warm, slightly formal, like language learned from very old books.
I looked at the board, the wax, the tentacles making their slow circuits in the sand. "What about breakfast? Tina's bread was incredible but I feel weird asking for it every morning."
A beat of consideration. He was measuring me, I realized. "The bar also has food that’s decent," he said, with the full gravity ofa complete and considered verdict, and I laughed. It surprised both of us.
"Sorry," I said. "That was just — really honest. I work in HR, so I don't get a lot of that."
The very corner of his mouth did a thing. "What is HR?"
"Human resources. It means I'm professionally responsible for other people's problems."
He considered this. "That sounds," he said slowly, "like something a person would volunteer for by mistake and then not know how to leave."
I stared at him. There must not be a lot of HR people on tropical islands.
"Is that not accurate?" he said.
"It's extremely accurate," I said, "and I need you to know that no one has ever said it that clearly to my face before. I’m Marisol, by the way.”
"I’m Maro. Tina's grandmother named me," he said, after a moment. "After a fisherman she had loved. The fisherman showed up without warning and never explained himself properly." A small pause. "She found this familiar."
"So you're named after a fisherman," I said.
"I am not named after anyone." Very even. "I tolerate the sound."
"The sound beingMaro."
"The sound," he said, "being an approximation arrived at over several decades of what I can only describe as willful mispronunciation of something that does not translate into any human language at all."
Ok, well he’s quite the weirdo. Human language? Tentacles? My brain decided to ignore these facts and just let it be. I settled into the sand while he finished waxing his board.
He surfed, and I watched, and I was going to be honest with myself about the watching.
