Page 18 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Last night the cold made the decision and we obeyed it. Tonight she pauses, one second, visible in the gloom. And then she chooses it, turns her back and fits herself against me and pulls my arm over her like a blanket. I hold very still, the way you hold still when something wild sits down next to you on purpose.

Her hair smells like salt and rain and, underneath, improbably, faintly sweet, like coconut, like sunscreen in the summer.

"Your heart's loud," she says, half-asleep already.

"It's had a big day," I answer.

A tiny chuckle escapes through her nose.

The stone gives back its stored sun for an hour and then quits. The wind talks itself hoarse overhead. Somewhere below, all around, the sea keeps the island like a moat, and tomorrow there's a summit and whatever the summit shows us. None of that is what's keeping me awake.

What's keeping me awake is the way her gaze went down to my lips when we stood so close to each other, all I had to do to kiss her was lean in.

I'm in so much trouble.

Chapter 9

Neri

I surface from the best sleep I’ve had in five years to three facts, arriving in the worst possible order.

Fact one: I am warm. Genuinely, deeply warm, wrapped around a large heat source like a barnacle with tenure.

Fact two: the heat source is Rafael Vasquez, still asleep, breathing slow, and I am not merely adjacent to him. I have colonized him. My leg is thrown over his. My face is in his neck. I have, at some point in the night, executed a full landing over his body.

Fact three concerns the precise location of my right hand.

My hand is on it. It’s resting on it. There is absolutely no scholarly way to phrase where my hand is, palm-flat, fingers stretched and proprietary.

His crotch. That’s where my hand is. On his crotch, cupping a spectacular erection.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I don’t jerk away. Jerking away wakes people. What I do is a slow-motion bomb-disposal retreat, one gram of pressure at a time, breath held, while my entire body ignites with a blush I can feel in my ears, in my scalp, possibly in my gills, which would be a new and terrible discovery about mer-biology.

Then I finally extricate myself from my embarrassing and compromising position, just in time.

Rafe makes a low sound and shifts, and I achieve a personal-best distance of three feet in less than a second. I arrange myself into the posture of a woman who has been awake for hours, thinking about geology.

He doesn’t open his eyes immediately. His arm sweeps the needle-floor where I was. Something about that small blind searching does a thing to my sternum that I refuse to look at.

Out. I need out, air, altitude, a task. The summit is right there, one scramble up the last pitch, and the morning haze is already lifting off it, which makes a perfect cover story: someone responsible should assess the view. I leave him sleeping and take my burning face up the rock.

The last stretch is hands-and-feet work, granite still night-cold under my palms, and then the dome rounds off and there’s nothing above me but sky, and I stand up on top of the island into the wind, and the whole world reports for duty.

Ocean. Everywhere, to every horizon, blue-gray and glittering, no mainland. This is a confirmation of every grim slide in my deck. But that’s the far field. The near field is the island, laid out below me like something on a bench waiting to be analyzed, and I turn slowly, cataloguing, because this is the first data set I’ve had in days and I am starving in more ways than one.

East, the balds we crossed, rolling silver-gray, the seep crease visible as a green seam. North, the island’s spine drops off into cliffs, sixty, eighty feet of sheer granite with white surf chewing the bottom of it, the whole seaward side one long wall. Bad coast. No landings there, ever. And on the far northwestern bluff, out near the island’s west end, something that stops my sweep cold: a ring.

A broken circle of stone, low, tumbled, unmistakably geometric against all this unplanned wilderness. Not nature. Nature doesn’t do circles at that scale. Somebody built something out there once, long enough ago that it’s a ruin, and the sight of it rearranges the entire island in one stroke. People lived here. This rock held humans, held them long enough for them to stack stone in circles, which means it held them alive, which means water and shelter and some way to make it work.

And then I turn southwest, and I see it.

Below the summit the forest runs down the leeward slope and opens, halfway to the sea, into a meadow. An actual meadow, green-gold, tucked into the island’s sheltered armpit, and in it, at the back edge where the land rises, small and gray sits a cottage.

Stone walls. A roof made of dark slate that seems to be holding from the distance. Below the meadow the land steps down to a crescent of pale beach between two granite headlands, calm as a held breath, the surf there a gentle white lace instead of teeth. A sheltered cove. A landing. The polar opposite of the murdering coast we washed up on.

This is exactly what we need.