Page 5 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

She’s on the program as our Future of the field speaker. Based on that paper, it’s an accurate billing of her competence.

I look at her the way you’d look at an encrypted signal, because that’s what she is. Everything about her is closed. The bun is closed. The blazer is closed. The posture says approaching me has consequences. But her face is not closed at all. It’s doing something complicated at that laptop, worry and fierceness and something underneath I can’t name from here, all of it live, all of it visible, like watching lightning through a curtain.

A person who broadcasts everything, working that hard to jam the signal.

I have spent my whole life being told I make things look easy. Nobody who says it means I haven’t put in the work over a decade of panels, but fine, I know what they mean. Doors open when I lean on them. I smile, I make people laugh and things smooth over for me.

I am looking at someone who has clearly decided to become a battering ram instead of a sweet talker like me.

She looks up. One second. Two. Bright blue eyes, and I get the full voltage of whatever’s behind that curtain.

Say something normal, Vasquez. You’re her department chair. You’re a professional.

I find that I’ve been standing here holding my backpack for what is now definitely too long.

I go with the smile. The regular one, not the press one, just, hey, colleague, big day, we’re on a boat, the ocean is nice.

She reaches into her bag, takes out a pair of headphones, puts them on, and goes back to her screen.

Not earbuds. Headphones. The big ones. The kind you wear to signal to the entire world that you’re not available.

Fergus fires up the diesel, and the Belle shivers under my boots like something waking up. I stand there on the deck, freshly and thoroughly dismissed, grinning at the back of a laptop like an absolute fool.

Okay. Fair enough. Today’s about the telescope anyway.

Carl gazes at me from the wheelhouse with infinite cosmic compassion.

“Don’t say it,” I tell him.

Billions and billions of stars in this universe, and I get seated next to the one that doesn’t want contact.

Chapter 3

Neri

My stomach has been composing a formal complaint for the last hour.

The missing granola bars are haunting me like vengeful ghosts. I can see them. Six of them, peanut butter and chocolate chips, stacked next to the fruit bowl in a neat little tower of foresight and betrayal. I packed a backup laptop battery. I packed a backup of my backup of my talk. I packed a lint roller for my blazer.

I failed at packing the one item that would make this little trip actually agreeable.

The Belle thrums along through a light chop, engine vibrating up through the deck planks and into my bench and my teeth. I’ve read the same sentence of my speaker notes eleven times. Biosignature detection is not a promise, it is a probability. Great sentence. Love that sentence. Would trade that sentence for a saltine.

I am acutely not aware of Dr. Rafael Vasquez, the resident Golden Retriever of this trip, who has been rummaging in his backpack for the past five minutes. I’m also not aware of how unfairly handsome the man is, tall and athletic, with just a touch of grey around the temples.

And I’m super, duper not aware of the frequent glances he shoots me, accompanied by wide, blindingly white smiles that fade after he realizes I’m not looking. Because I’m not looking. Really. I have headphones on precisely so that nobody, no matter how tall, dark, handsome and nerdy, mistakes me for available conversation. The headphones aren’t even playing anything. They’re just decoration.

I shake my head, then glue my eyes to my laptop screen and decide that I will not be paying attention to anything else for the rest of this boat ride.

Then the smell arrives.

Butter. Sugar. Some kind of berry situation, warmed over. It crosses the distance, waltzes straight through my defenses, and takes my stomach hostage in one move.

My stomach growls loudly enough to be heard over a marine diesel. I feel it more than hear it, a full seismic event, and I hunch over my laptop like it can muffle the sound of an earthquake. It doesn’t and it’s embarrassing.

“That was impressive.” A warm voice sounds just in front of me. Well, technically, just above me. “Was that you or did we hit a whale?”

I look up, perfectly aware of how ridiculous I am, hunched over my laptop with my headphones on my head and my stomach growling.