Chapter 20 #2
We go over the side of the skiff together.
The cold hits me and I gasp. Orvik wraps his arm around my waist and his warmth bleeds through the chill the way it always does, his gills fluttering, his bioluminescent patterns blazing bright in the water.
My own marks answer—the permanent lines along my arms and neck glowing blue-green in the salt water, the pearl pulsing warm at my throat.
We float in the cove, lit up like two deep-sea creatures, and Rumple finds us.
He swims circles around us. Fast, joyful, showing off. He dives and surfaces and dives again, bumping my hand with his nose the way he's done a thousand times in the rehabilitation pool. I laugh and the sound carries across the still water and bounces off the cliffs and comes back to me.
Then the other seals come. They slip off the rocks one by one, drawn by Rumple or by curiosity, sliding into the shallows where the water is calm and the light is warm.
Rumple swims toward them. He circles once, twice.
A large female bumps noses with him, the seal equivalent of an introduction, and Rumple bumps back, and just like that he's part of the group.
He swims away from me, toward his colony, and I let him go.
That's the job. You show up. You do the work. You give them what they need. And then you open the gate and you watch them become what they were always meant to be.
I float in the cold water with Orvik's arm around me and my patterns bright and the pearl warm and still at my neck and I watch a seal I rescued become part of the ocean again.
We float in silence for a while as the seals play in the shallows and the afternoon light turns the surface to gold.
"Jackie," Orvik says. His voice is quiet, the low rumble that means he's thinking about something that matters. "Are you happy?”
I twist around in his arms to face him.
“What do you mean?”
"I mean, do you have everything you need to be happy?" His arm tightens around me. "Not what I want. Not what the center requires or what Chase or Sylvie or anyone else expects from you. What do you want?"
I let the question sit. It's a big question, and it deserves better than the first answer that comes to mind. I float in the cold water with his warmth around me, and I think about it honestly.
"Can I ask you something first?"
"Always."
"Could you see yourself living somewhere other than on a boat?"
His tentacle hair drifts around us in the current, slow and relaxed.
"I would be the happiest man on earth anywhere you are," he says. "I would live in a desert with you if you asked me to. A dry, landlocked, waterless desert. I could survive on morning dew and your smile."
I laugh. A real laugh, the kind that fills the soul and makes Orvik's patterns flare bright with satisfaction.
"I would never do that to you," I say. "But do you think you’d like to live in a human house someday?" I trace a pattern on his wet shoulder. "My beach house, more specifically. We could adapt it to kraken taste if you want."
He pulls back just enough to look at my face. His eyes are dark and deep and searching and the patterns on his skin are pulsing in a rhythm I know by heart now.
"Jackie Durand," he says. "Are you asking me to move in with you?"
I splash him. Full palm, right in the face. Salt water hits his tentacle hair and it snaps outward in surprise. The look of offended dignity on a seven-foot kraken who just got splashed by a human woman is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
He grabs me and pulls me against him. His mouth finds mine, and he kisses me in the cold water of the cove with the seals playing around us and the afternoon sun warm on the cliffs above.
The kiss is salt and cold and heat all at once, his tentacle beard curling against my jaw, and I melt into it the way I've melted into every kiss he's given me since the first one on that dock.
When he pulls back, I'm breathless and grinning and my heart is so full it hurts.
"Yes," I say. "That's what I want. That's what Jackie Durand wants. You, in my house, with my terrible insulation and my too many bookshelves and my ceramic seal with the chipped tail. All of it. I want all of it with you."
Orvik looks at me for a long moment. His patterns blaze. His tentacle hair reaches for me the way it always reaches for me.
"Then I will spend the rest of my life making sure you have exactly what you want," he says. "Starting this weekend."
"This weekend?"
"I don't own much. A kraken travels light." The corner of his mouth lifts. "I’ll need to renovate your bathroom, of course."
"My bathroom," I repeat. “Why?”
"So we can take showers together."
"Oh my God."
"It's a cultural need, Jackie."
I'm laughing so hard I nearly go under. He holds me up, steady and warm, his face entirely serious except for the light in his eyes and the glow on his skin.
In the shallows, Rumple barks once. A farewell or a blessing or just a seal being a seal. The colony swims with him, accepting him, and the cove is full of life and light and the sound of the ocean breathing.
Rumple is where he belongs. And so am I.