Chapter 4 #2
“All right?” I asked. Like an idiot.
He grunted, and shot me a sour look.
I rushed over to retrieve my phone, checked to see if Jerry had called again—he hadn’t—and hurried back to Dave’s side.
I sat on the sand, and he immediately arranged himself with his head in my lap, grumbling the whole time.
I stroked him soothingly, working out the tangles from the long, coarse locks that spilled over my cargo shorts and stuck to my wet, goosebumped legs.
He drifted off again. While I hoped it was a natural slide into a healing sleep, I was almost sure he’d passed out. I touched my fingers to his pulse, as if that would give me some indication. All it told me was that his heart continued to pound away at an alarming rate.
I curled my hand around his throat and rested it there.
Not long after he lost consciousness, I heard the thrum of an engine in the dunes behind me. I turned to look over my shoulder as Jerry appeared at the end of the beach closest to the road. He threw up an arm in greeting, and as soon as the borrowed quad bike hit the packed sand, he accelerated.
Dave sat up sharply and grabbed me.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s Jerry!”
Dave frowned and pushed up onto his elbows to eye the rapidly approaching quad bike with suspicion.
“Whoops. Sorry.” Jerry slammed on the brakes, nearly tossing himself over the handlebars, and managing to spray me and Dave with clods of wet sand. “Harder than it looks. Lotta fun, though! I’m definitely getting me one of these.”
“Where are you going to keep it?” He and Marcy had a small, semi-detached cottage in town. It came with a single-car garage that was full of junk and a drive with one parking space they were constantly squabbling over, as they each had a car.
He gave me a winning smile.
“No,” I said.
“We’ll discuss it another time.”
“Nothing to discuss. You’re not keeping a quad bike at my house.”
“To be decided,” he said cheerfully, dismounting with a happy bounce.
“Already decided.”
He winked, ran a quick, assessing look over Dave, and opened the small storage locker at the back of the bike. “Give us a hand,” he said to me.
Dave had flopped back to resting his head on my lap, deciding that Jerry and whatever he was doing could be disregarded, and I lifted it carefully as I eased out from beneath him.
Between us, Jerry and I got the hammock, a small coil of rope, and my bundled-up spare duvet covers out and laid on the sand.
Jerry unrolled the hammock and bustled around to the back of the quad bike with it and the rope. “I’ll hitch this up. You bag him.”
“He’s not fruit,” I muttered as I grabbed the first duvet cover and unpoppered the bottom. I rolled it like a giant sock to make it easier to get on, and knelt by Dave’s tail.
Dave propped himself up on his elbows and cocked his head. He gave an inquisitive hum. When I ignored him, he flexed his tail and slapped his fluke gently across my face.
I swatted it away. “Dave.”
He hummed, one of his low, throbbing siren-sounds.
Usually I enjoyed them. Not right now.
“Jerry,” I said, my cheeks burning. “Can you not?”
Jerry coughed loudly, as if that could cover the noise he just inadvertently made in response to Dave.
His cheeks were even redder than mine. “Sorry. Popped out of me. Is…uh? Wow. That was quite the sound wasn’t it?
I mean, you’ve told me about his sexy noises before, but hearing one is, uh. Yeah. Sorry.”
Dave’s fluke slapped me in the face again. Lingeringly. Tenderly.
Good grief.
I grabbed it and stuffed it in the duvet cover.
I tried to, anyway. It was huge—much, much bigger than I’d realised. I’d seen Dave in his beautiful merman form many times, but we’d always been in the water. Seeing him on land like this gave me a whole other perspective.
“Can you come and help me fold his fin?” I asked Jerry. “This is a two-man job.”
“Yup.” He finished testing the hammock knots and trotted around to join me.
A second later, he was flat on his back, wheezing at the sky.
“Dave!” I yelled. I wrestled his tail off Jerry. He’d smacked Jerry in the face as he had me, but there was nothing teasing or tender about it. It was a sharp bop that had knocked Jerry flat, and he finished it up by dropping the whole fin on top of him. “Rude!”
“’S okay,” Jerry said, getting on his hands and knees.
“I am so sorry.”
Jerry waved it off. “Now we know he has boundaries. Dave. Dave.”
Dave raised a brow.
“Can I touch your tail, mate?” He reached out cautiously, then said, “Hard no on that,” from under Dave’s fin, which was once again pancaking him to the sand.
Once again, I hauled it off him. “You hold the duvet cover, and I’ll do the touching.”
“Yep. Let’s try that.”
I passed Jerry the rolled-up duvet and he held it ready. After a few false starts, I folded and tucked Dave’s fin away in the king-size cover, and we pulled it up his tail as far as it would go.
“Hang on,” Jerry said, heaved himself to his feet, and trotted off to the quad bike. He came back with a couple of bungee cords. “Thought we could wrap these around his tail once we’ve bagged him, and they’ll help keep the duvet cover up.”
Dave reached up, snatched the bungee cords off him, and threw them into the sea.
“Or not,” Jerry said. He looked at me and lifted his brows.
I scrambled up and went after the bungee cords. I didn’t get far. Dave grabbed my ankle and I hit the sand.
“Goddammit!” I yelled. “Dave! We need those! I know you don’t like rope and shit but…we need them.”
Jerry had hustled back to the quad bike, returned, and now stood just beyond Dave’s reach. He wordlessly held up a couple more cords.
“Give them here,” I said, gesturing.
He glanced between me and Dave. “You sure?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Jerry dropped them in my palm. Dave immediately went to snatch them off me. We had a brief tussle, which he won, but instead of sending them after the first load, he paused with his hands wrapped around my clenched fists and held on for a moment.
Long enough that he definitely felt the fine trembling I couldn’t seem to stop.
He squeezed and released me, flopping back to his elbows with an irritable grunt. He shuffled his tail about, and lay still.
I quickly secured the cover with the cords. It wasn’t a net. It wasn’t a million miles away from one, either. If I wasn’t so tired and cold and worried about him, I’d have been humbled by his trust.
Jerry hopped onto the bike and motored up the beach a few feet while I arranged the hammock long and flat beside Dave. I lay down alongside it and slowly shuffled on, demonstrating what I wanted him to do. I rolled off and gestured at him.
He looked from me to the hammock and from the hammock to Jerry astride the quad bike, then he lifted his gaze in the direction of my house. He sighed.
“Yes?” I said.
Reluctantly, he nodded.
Dragging Dave the length of the beach was the easy part.
Comparatively speaking.
Jerry drove and I jogged alongside the hammock-as-a-stretcher rig, making sure Dave didn’t get bounced off. His dark eyes flickered from my face to the sea and back. He made a few sad noises. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or from being taken away from the water.
Probably both.
Some of the largest gashes opened up and started leaking.
I wanted to yell at Jerry to be more careful, but I already knew that he was only going as fast as he had to.
If he went any slower, Dave’s weight would be impossible to shift, and he didn’t want to stop, especially on the dry, looser sand at the top of the beach and in the dunes.
If the wheels started spinning, we’d dig ourselves into a hole and we’d be well and truly stuffed.
Once we left the sand, Dave’s eyes fluttered closed.
His jaw was clenched tight and his fair skin was even paler than usual.
I’d rather hoped that he would pass out again and be spared the discomfort of being hauled along the road.
He didn’t. He didn’t complain, or make any more sad noises, but he was very much not having a good time.
The road was a narrow, single-track lane. The only people who used it were me, Jerry, the postie, and any DPD delivery guys. Fine, every now and then, maybe I got a pizza delivery from the pub. The odds were great that we’d be able to make it to the house without being seen.
Still, Jerry cautiously accelerated once we hit the old, crumbling asphalt, and I lengthened my stride into an easy lope to keep up. Jerry did his best to avoid the potholes, Dave didn’t get rolled off even once, and at a steady clip, we made it to the house twenty tense minutes later.
That’s when we discovered the flaw in our plan.