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“Hold up. Torture?” Dylan sat dead straight. “Whose? Yours, his—?”
I swallowed hard.
That part of the story would also not be easy.
In fact, looking back, our love had endured so much.
So, so much heartache and pain and suffering.
God, the suffering.
But I would live it all over again to be with him.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Collins, I’d like to unfold the events as they did in the past.” I gave him a smile, softening my tone. “If I’m going to do this, I’d like to bask in the freshness of new love a little longer, if that’s okay with you.”
I wanted to relive the falling, the wanting, the first touch and stolen kiss and everything else between.
Margot glanced at Dylan before reaching across the short distance between us and patting my knee. Her eyes caught mine, wide and eager. “Tell us everything. I don’t know about Dylan, but I’m not going anywhere. Give me every juicy, delicious detail.”
Settling back against the lacy cushions, I said, “Okay then. Well, I was an impressionable young girl. I was raised a little wild and given freedoms not granted to many. My days were full of sea life and sunshine. My nights were full of watching my parents laugh and love. I wanted so very much to be loved in that way, so I suppose, when Aslan told me that his every breath, from then until his last, was mine, I fell so hard I became his in return.”
I plucked at my floaty dress. “I believed the sea had chosen him to be mine, you see. A shipwrecked boy delivered to me by a pod of dolphins that I’d grown up swimming with. I was just lucky I had kind parents who believed it was their duty as humans to help anyone and anything who needed it. If they’d been anyone else, our story would’ve ended before it’d even begun.”
Dylan wiped his mouth and angled the microphone closer to me. His lips were pursed but he couldn’t hide the light in his hazel eyes. The curiosity to see where this story would go. “You said your parents took him to receive care? That you went back to check on him—with takeout no less—and then you left because of an early start?”
“The hours of a marine biologist are all over the place. Some nights, we’d work until two a.m. studying phosphorus luminescent plankton. Others, we’d get up at dawn to chase the dwarf minke whales or dive on the reef to see hundreds of baby turtles fresh out of their nest.”
“But you were twelve.” Dylan scowled. “You weren’t working with them, surely? What about school and things?”
“I was home-schooled until I finished primary. They tried sending me to school on land, but it never stuck. I’d run from class, stowaway on some fishing trawler, and appear from behind their nets when we were far out to sea, demanding the poor fishermen radio my parents on The Fluke to come get me.”
“The Fluke?”
“Our research boat.” I grinned. “My mother often said she’d doomed them the moment she delivered me in a home water birth. That my affinity with the ocean could never be undone.”
“She was right.” Margot laughed. “I mean, you figured out a way to live underwater. Just like you said that fortune teller prophesized.”
“I don’t think she quite meant I’d one day create a biosphere capable of recycling air, reusing waste, and providing a dry and wonderful home to land-locked humans, but yes. I did. But not without a lot of help from my business partners.”
“I really would like to know more about Lunamare,” Dylan said. “How did you figure out the construction? How do the fields of seaweed work? How do you channel CO2 into energy?”
“Later, Dylan.” Margot waved him away. “Not important. What is important are these two lovebirds.” Planting her elbows on her knees, she rested her chin in her upturned palms. “Go on, Nerida.”
I studied both journalists and let myself sink back into the head and heart space of a twelve-year-old besotted little girl.
“He was there, at our house, when we returned from the sea, the day after we found him. Fast asleep in the driftwood sala that my father made for my mother on their tenth wedding anniversary. He’d raided the veggie garden that I’d been put in charge of, and I distinctly remember being cross at the hole where he’d helped himself to a carrot.”
My eyes no longer saw the beach or the reporters.
They only saw Aslan as I nudged him with my tiny, pink-painted toes, and said—
Chapter Seven
*
Aslan
*
