Page 86 of One Adult, Please

"Good perimeter check?" he asks.

"Very thorough," Beck says before either of us can answer. "They checked everything. Joel's shirt is also buttoned wrong, but I'm sure that's unrelated."

Joel looks down. One button off all the way down. I'm going to die of embarrassment in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, which is a stupid way to go after surviving this long.

"I was helping Grace with the fish humidity," Joel says.

"The fish humidity," Grant repeats.

"Yes."

"In the tunnel."

"Where else would the fish humidity be, Grant?"

Grant nods slowly. "Fair point."

Beck loses it. Full laughter, doubled over, hands on his knees. Grant's small warm smile gets a little warmer. Joel squeezes my hand and doesn't let go.

I look at the three of them, and I think: this is the thing I didn't know I was looking for. This is the reason I jumped the hip gate.

21

THE DOLPHIN BREASTPLATE STAYS ON

BECK

Iknow what happened in the tunnel yesterday. When two people walk out of a room looking like they've been hit by the same beautiful truck, you don't need a detective's badge to solve it.

I'm not jealous.

Jealousy is for people who think something was theirs and got taken. Grace wasn't mine. I had proximity. Banter. I had the way she renamed my world in the first thirty minutes.

But I didn't make a move. Joel did.

Not jealous. It's more the feeling of standing on a platform watching a train you didn't know you wanted to catch pulling away from the station, and you didn't miss it because you were late, you missed it because you didn't know you were at a station until the doors closed.

That. Whatever that is. I'm that.

That was yesterday. We went back to the crime boat before dark, ate dinner, and pretended nothing had changed. Grace slept. Joel didn’t. I reorganized the weapons rack, reorganized the dessert armory, and eventually passed out surrounded by evidence that I handle feelings like an overcaffeinated warehouse manager.

This morning, we start rebuilding the barricades that worked for me but won’t protect four people and a small, poorly governed zoo.

"This whole section needs to come down," Joel says, examining the queue-railing wall I built across Mythic Frontier's main avenue. "The gap at the bottom is a vulnerability. The railing joints aren't welded. Under sustained pressure from a group, this collapses inward."

"Then we unbuild the wall," Grace says, arriving behind us with a tote bag full of tools that she insisted on carrying and that is visibly too heavy for her. "We take it apart and then we build a better one. A group wall. We're four people and two round friends and an angry pirate bird and Kevin."

"Kevin doesn't need a wall."

"Kevin doesn't respect walls, which is exactly why Kevin-proofing is a structural requirement."

We start unbuilding.

Joel and I handle the structural work. Grant is at the perimeter with Captain, doing a sweep.

Grace is carrying a board. The board ends extend past her arms on both sides, which means she can't see where the board ends. It hits the barricade. It hits a lamppost. It hits Joel in the back of the shoulder. He doesn't react because Joel has developed a physical tolerance for Grace-related impacts and absorbs them into his structural integrity.

"Sorry. Sorry, the board is long."