Page 12 of What Happens in Hedone

“Did it just change color?” Her companion hung over the bowl, completely absorbed in the cuttlefish. The sight charmed Effie more than anything he’d done yet.

“They are masters of disguise. Watch.” She poked the cuttlefish with a finger and a blaze of orange rings rippled over its skin. The creature propelled itself backward, hitting the side of the bowl and squirting ink again. Inside the cloud, it turned brown and completely disappeared.

“What a skill that is. To blend so well with your surroundings.”

Effie sat back on her heels. “You speak as if you have some knowledge of the practice.”

He stared at her a moment before schooling his expression. She sensed his guardedness was a habit, an adaptive trait, yet he kept letting it down around her.

“You, Miss Iphigenia, pay very close attention to the world around you, I think.”

No one had paid her such a compliment in her life. “Effie, please. But I do not know your given name,” she said shyly. She ought to, given what she meant to do to the man. She’d decided on him already, but every gesture, every word, made her more and more certain.

“Jay.” He stirred the water in the bowl, watching the cuttlefish change color again.

“Just Jay?”

“John, after my father, but my mother calls him Jack and I was Baby Jay. Are you going to keep it?”

“No one has published a study on cuttlefish, to my knowledge. I could release a memoir on the subject, as Richard Owen did on the pearly nautilus.”

“Have you published anything before, Miss Iphigenia?”

“Effie,” she said. “And nothing that has circulated beyond my schoolmates. I live in Bath. No one cares much for the white-tailed crayfish or pondweed produced by our lovely Avon. Besides, I do not think I could bear to be introduced as a lady naturalist. As if I were an amusing oddity, like a trained monkey.”

“An insult indeed. I should hope that would not be the case.”

The corners of his mouth quirked up, as if he were holding back a laugh, and that absurd sense of space filled her chest again. She longed to make him laugh, as he did her. Why did it feel like this man she had known for one day understood her, when family who had known her throughout her entire life did not?

“Are there any women excelling in your field?”

“No.”

“My point.”

He settled on one haunch, lowering his leg, while his other hand still dangled over his knee. She could reach out and take his hand. He might squeeze her fingers again as he had the previous night.

“But that is because my field is dull. There is no cleverness to it, no discovery. At best we refine the tools or hit upon a way to improve a formula, or a firing process, or a bond⁠—”

“What is your occupation?” At last, a way she could ask without seeming too abrupt.

He leaned back slightly, as if bracing himself. “I make bricks.”

A tradesman. Not of her class at all. No wonder there seemed such a solidness to him, that rugged quality, as if he were familiar with hard work. This explained the rough spots on his hands as he’d slid them alongside her face when he kissed her. He was a man who used them to craft things, build things, make things. Things that lasted.

He was perfect. “That is fascinating,” Effie said sincerely.

“Not many think so. They want their bricks available when they are ready to build, and that is far as the interest extends.”

Effie crossed her legs and rested her chin on one fist. Her mother would have fits at such a posture, but she was with Jay. A man who stood barefoot in the water to study mud, who kissed as if the world were ending and it were the last thing he would ever do.

“Is there a trick to making bricks? I confess I’ve never considered the process.”

“There is no trick needed here. Brighton is surrounded by brick earth. That is clay that need only be dug, tamped into molds, then dried and heated as is. No lime, no sand, no additives required—I beg your pardon, I must be boring you.”

“I will say when you are boring me.” She smiled, and she liked how his face changed at her expression. How his gaze dropped to her mouth.

Was he imagining kissing her again? All the more likely he would agree to her proposal if so. Her belly fluttered as if she’d swallowed damselflies.