The thing was, he wasbeautiful.In the direct sun, on the water, with his locs wet and pushed back and his hands easy onthe oars and his tentacles resting at his lower back, visible above the waistband of his board shorts, he was the most beautiful thing I had ever been six inches away from, and I was doing an exceptional job of pretending to find the cliff very interesting.
"Twenty minutes," he said, reading the water. "Along the face and in through the arch."
"Great," I said. "Twenty minutes. Good."
He rowed.
I looked at the water instead, and that was when I saw the shadow.
Moving under us. Keeping pace with the boat — large in the way that the deep end of a pool was large, in the way that looking down from a great height was large. Below the surface, through the clear green water, I could see the shadow of tentacles. Many of them, moving in slow easy curls, dark and vast and entirely unhurried. The rest of him. What he actually was.
My body's response to this information was:yes, and?
I looked at the shadow — at the slow deliberate beauty of it, moving with us through the clear water, enormous and entirely at ease — and I felt something I was going to go ahead and name as fascination, which was adjacent to several other things, which I was also filing for later.
The cliff's shadow fell over us, cool and sudden, and I looked up and there was the arch.
I had pictured sea caves. I had not picturedthis.
The arch opened into something like a cathedral — thirty feet of volcanic ceiling overhead, the walls curved in and smoothed by centuries of water, the air close and still and smelling like salt and deep stone. The sound in there was something I had never heard before: close and amplified in a specific way, so that the boat bumping the wall came back twice as loud and my own breathing felt like it belonged to someone right beside me.
The water glowed. The light was being let it out slowly, cold blue-green, and everywhere something moved through it the glow bloomed outward and faded. I trailed my fingers over the side and the water lit up around my hand, a soft spreading pulse of cold light, and I moved them back and forth slowly just to watch it happen.
"Oh," I said.
"Yes," Maro said. He dove in from the side of the boat, letting out a sigh of relief in the salt water.
I looked at him and I looked at the water and then I looked at him again, and here was the thing: in this light he was different. On the beach he was blue and large and extraordinary. In here he wascorrect— the right color for the place, like the cave had been made with him in mind. His tentacles had drifted out under the boat and I could see them below the surface in the phosphorescent dark, moving in slow easy curls, and below them the deeper shadow of the rest of him, vast and unhurried, and I felt the thing I felt looking at the ocean at night: something so much larger than me that my scale simply stopped being relevant.
It was, without any qualification, gorgeous.
"You're beautiful," I said. "The whole of you," I said, because I had said it and I wasn't taking it back. "Down there. I know you probably don't—" I stopped. Started again. "I'd guess most people don't say that."
He looked at the water, at the shape of himself moving in the depths, and then back at me. Something in his expression was doing something I hadn't seen on him before. Not vulnerable, exactly, he was too old and too deep for that word, butopenin a way he usually kept very locked. "No," he said. "They do not."
"Well," I said. "It's true."
I leaned over the side to put my whole hand in the phosphorescent water, because I wanted to see what it lookedlike around my full hand. The boat tipped. His hands caught me at the waist — both hands, and then the tentacle, one curling warm around me from behind, much warmer than his hands, and suddenly his face was very close and we were not moving.
"I wasn't going to fall," I said.
"You were," he said.
"Okay. Maybe a little."
He started to pull back.
But, something in me that had used up all its interest in responsible distance saidnovery clearly.
"Don't," I said.
He stopped.
"Don't," I said again, quieter. Not complicated. Just true.
He looked at me for one moment that had a great deal of weight in it. Then he pulled me in instead of back, and his mouth found mine, and he kissed me with everything he had.
He was unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with hesitation. He had all the time in the world, and he intended to use every second of it. I felt that promise in his hands—warm, certain, and possessive on my hips—moving with the patience of a creature that had decided to ruin me thoroughly and was going to enjoy cataloging exactly how he did it.
