Chapter 3
Marisol
Things looked better this morning.
I woke to actual birds singing their fully unrehearsed opinions at six in the morning outside my window.
The ceiling fan turned its slow circles.
The cotton coverlet was exactly as soft as it had been when I fell into it eight hours ago.
And through the window aimed at the cove, the water was a color of blue that looked like someone had turned the saturation up on the entire ocean just for today.
I lay there for one full minute and just let it be nice.
Then I remembered the ferry fiasco and got up.
Tina had coffee on the terrace and fruit and a dense sweet bread that tasted like coconut and honey and the specific warmth of food made by someone who had been cooking for a long time and knew what they were doing.
I ate all of it. The sun came over the jungle at the top of the cliff. The birds settled.
I had my second cup in peace, watching the water, thinking that maybe this week wasn't going to kill me after all — and then Tina came to collect my plate and mentioned, completely casually, that “Maro will probably be around today.”
"Who's Maro?" I asked.
She gave me a look that contained an entire explanation she had decided I would work out myself. "You'll see," she said, and went back inside.
Sure. Fine. Mysterious island person. Everything was fine.
***
I found the path to the beach without needing to ask, which I counted as a win. The black sand started at the bottom of the path where the vines grew low and tangled against the cliff face, and the view opened up wide.
I stopped walking. There was a man on the beach.
Except.
He was blue. Not somehow tanned-blue, not blue in the way of bad lighting — genuinely, specifically, beautifully blue, the exact blue of deep water in afternoon light, the blue the cove had been doing through my window all morning.
My brain said: blue man, note that, and moved immediately to the rest of him, because the rest of him was more than okay.
He was large. Built like something that lived in the ocean and had for a very long time, broad shoulders and strong arms and a chest and stomach that told a story about a body that never stopped being used.
Long dark blue locs pushed back from his face.
A shell necklace against his collarbone.
Board shorts, black with small flowers on them. Bare feet in the black sand.
And at his lower back, resting on either side of him, easy and completely unself-conscious, were two tentacles. Moving in slow absent circles in the sand, like fingers drumming on a table.
My brain ran its process: blue skin, large, tentacles, board shorts, currently applying surf wax, tentacles. I let the process complete. I waited for the part where I did something useful like leave or panic.
That part didn't come.
What came instead was: fine, then. The specific equanimity of someone who had been awake for twenty-two hours and then slept hard and eaten well and was now looking at a blue man with tentacles on a black sand beach and finding that her reserves of not-fine had simply run out.
There was nothing left. I had used it all on the ferry.
I walked over.
He looked up.
Dark eyes — almost fully dark, the color of water that went down a long way. Sharp cheekbones. And when he looked up at me his mouth curved, just slightly, just enough to show the edge of something that was white and pointed and very slightly not human.
He looked at me with an expression doing a very controlled job of not being one. Whatever, or whoever, he had been expecting, I wasn't it.
I decided to force conversation. “Any good cafes around here?” Nevermind the fact that I just had pretty decent, albeit very sweet coffee with Tina.
"There is coffee at the bar in La Boca," he said, after a pause exactly one beat longer than normal. His voice was low and unhurried and had the quality of something that had made a settled peace with silence — deep, warm, slightly formal, like language learned from very old books.
I looked at the board, the wax, the tentacles making their slow circuits in the sand. "What about breakfast? Tina's bread was incredible but I feel weird asking for it every morning."
A beat of consideration. He was measuring me, I realized. "The bar also has food that’s decent," he said, with the full gravity of a complete and considered verdict, and I laughed. It surprised both of us.
"Sorry," I said. "That was just — really honest. I work in HR, so I don't get a lot of that."
The very corner of his mouth did a thing. "What is HR?"
"Human resources. It means I'm professionally responsible for other people's problems."
He considered this. "That sounds," he said slowly, "like something a person would volunteer for by mistake and then not know how to leave."
I stared at him. There must not be a lot of HR people on tropical islands.
"Is that not accurate?" he said.
"It's extremely accurate," I said, "and I need you to know that no one has ever said it that clearly to my face before. I’m Marisol, by the way.”
"I’m Maro. Tina's grandmother named me," he said, after a moment. "After a fisherman she had loved. The fisherman showed up without warning and never explained himself properly." A small pause. "She found this familiar."
"So you're named after a fisherman," I said.
"I am not named after anyone." Very even. "I tolerate the sound."
"The sound being Maro."
"The sound," he said, "being an approximation arrived at over several decades of what I can only describe as willful mispronunciation of something that does not translate into any human language at all."
Ok, well he’s quite the weirdo. Human language? Tentacles? My brain decided to ignore these facts and just let it be. I settled into the sand while he finished waxing his board.
He surfed, and I watched, and I was going to be honest with myself about the watching.
I had told myself I was sitting at the tideline because there was nowhere better to be, the sand was warm, I'd left my Kindle in my room. All of this was true and none of it was the reason.
The reason was that watching him in the water was one of the more extraordinary things I had ever seen.
He paddled out through the break and the water opened for him.
The waves adjusted, not dramatically, just a small inevitable shift, like a conversation finding the person who understood it best. He sat in the lineup and waited with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time and did not mind.
When the swell came, he caught it and rode it all the way to the sand, his tentacles trailing behind him in the white foam, and they caught the light the same way his skin did — that specific deep blue, luminous in the spray — and the whole thing was so genuinely beautiful that I forgot to pretend I wasn't staring.
He paddled back out and did it again.
On the fourth wave he caught me watching.
I knew because the fifth was different — a small unnecessary flourish at the end, technically unremarkable if you weren't trained to notice what people did when they thought they were being observed, and I had been trained to notice that in the numerous health and safety training sessions I’d endured over the years.
He showed off for me. The ancient kraken with dark eyes and a shell necklace showed off on a wave because I was watching.
Maro came in after forty minutes, shook the water from his locs — they were heavy with it, dark and streaming, and tucked the board under his arm.
I noticed there were more tentacles hidden amongst his dark locs, moving of their own free will like Medusa.
The tentacles settled back against his lower back, easy and present.
We started back toward the path without quite deciding to, just both moving the same direction.
The black sand was heavier than white sand, dense underfoot, and I was thinking about the cliff, which was why I didn't see the soft spot where the wet met dry. My foot found it anyway. I pitched sideways.
I grabbed his arm.
He didn't move. Solid as something that had never once been displaced, and I caught myself against him and looked up and started to apologize.
And then I saw his forearm.
The ink bloomed from under my hand in real time.
It was dark blue, spreading from the point of contact outward, slow and deliberate the way watercolor moved in water.
Something traveling from inside him, finding the surface.
The pattern was beautiful: organic, fractal, like the map of something that went very deep.
I watched it spread to the inside of his wrist and I held on a half-second longer than I needed to, watching it happen.
He stepped back just a little too fast. "It happens," he said, before I could find anything to say.
I looked up at him. He was looking at the middle distance with the composed expression of someone who had a lot of practice deciding what to show.
"Does it hurt?" I said.
"No."
"It's beautiful," I said.
He looked at me then — directly, fully, for just a moment — and something moved behind his eyes that he didn't let reach his face. "It is involuntary," he said.
"It's still beautiful."
The ink at the edges had begun to fade. He looked down at it, then back at me. I let go of his arm and we walked the rest of the way to the path in silence.
I stopped. The tentacle was right there on the sand beside him, its tip making that slow absent circle. I had been thinking about the tentacles since last night on the terrace when I had decided not to. I had been, if I was honest, thinking about almost nothing else.
They were warm. I knew they were warm — warmer than the air, warmer than his hands had been on my arm. The ink had bloomed when I touched his skin. I wanted to know what happened when I touched them.
I reached out and touched it. Just: hello. Are you there? What are you?
It was smooth and warm. At the very tip, where my fingers rested, a faint texture like something designed to hold on gently if it wanted to. The surface was alive under my fingertips in a way I felt all the way up my arm.
It curled toward my hand.
Just the tip, just slightly — a small involuntary reaching-back, something moving toward warmth before it had permission to. And then it stopped. Went completely, absolutely still.
I looked up.
He was motionless in a way I had not seen anything living be motionless before. Looking at me with those deep-water eyes and an expression I couldn't read at all, not even the edges of it. His whole self simply waited, very carefully, to see what I would do.
I smiled.
My fingertips were warm where I'd touched him. Warm in a way that wasn't fading.
Neither of us said anything. I went back to my room.