Chapter 4
Rafe
The clouds to the southeast have spent the last hour organizing.
That’s the word for it. Not gathering, organizing.
An hour ago they were a smudge on the horizon, the kind of thing you’d never notice unless a lobsterman’s knee had put a cold spot between your shoulder blades.
Now they’ve got structure, a long slate shelf of it, and the light out here has gone the color of an old nickel.
The waves have picked up enough that Carl Sagan is nodding gently against his lashings like he agrees with something.
I don’t love it. I’m not qualified to not love it, my entire meteorological résumé is “checked an app twice,” but I don’t love it.
And I really don’t love what’s happening at the stern.
Nerissa Marsh has been back there since she walked away from me, and for the first hour she did exactly what you’d expect: laptop open, spine straight, radiating do-not-approach in every band of the spectrum.
Fine. Message received, twice now. I’ve been up at the rail doing my own version, which is running the keynote in my head and losing my place every time I get to the part where I thank people, because the list of people is ten years long and I keep seeing faces.
But for the last twenty minutes, her laptop’s been closed.
She’s just standing there. Both hands on the stern rail, still as a stanchion, watching the water.
Not the horizon, not the clouds. No, the mermaid is watching the water, her beautiful, delicate features closed off.
It’s like she’s reading something printed on the waves.
And her face, the quarter of it I can see, has a certain lightning-through-a-curtain thing going on, except the curtain’s slipping, and whatever’s behind it isn’t just worry.
It looks like listening. It looks like a person being told something, slowly, in a language she’s not fluent in.
I watch a swell pass under us, and her knuckles go white on the rail, and that decides it. She doesn’t want me to coddle her and make small talk, fine.
I won’t bother her with small talk, but I’m the department Chair and it’s my prerogative to do a wellness check on her. Well, I’m pretty sure HR would disagree, but I’m still going over there.
I fill a cup at the galley sink, climb back up, and walk aft along the rolling deck with my free hand on the rail. I know bringing a mermaid water to drink while on a boat is a silly excuse to check in on her, but I’m not always a clever man.
“Hey. Hydration delivery. It’s ship’s law, I don’t make the rules.”
“I’m fine.” It comes out flat and fast, blade-flat, before I’ve even finished the sentence. She doesn’t turn around. “You can go.”
Okay. Noted, and honestly, after the muffin summit went down in flames, expected. I set the cup in the holder by the cleat anyway, and I’m two steps into a tactical withdrawal when she calls out to me.
“Sorry. That was rude of me and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.”
Her voice is thin and strangely musical, but also sad. Longing. It sends a shiver down my entire body, from the top of my scalp to my heels.
I stop dead in my tracks and turn to her.
She’s turned halfway, one hand still welded to the rail, and up close the curtain isn’t slipping, it’s gone.
Her face is doing something I’ve only ever seen on grad students mid-defense when the committee finds the flaw in their dissertation: a person working very hard to keep standing on a thing that is moving underneath them.
Her eyes flick to me, bright blue like the ocean on a sunny day, mesmerizing in ways that make my belly churn and my knees feel like I’ve just run a marathon.
Mesmerizing. Yes. That’s the right word for how beautiful Nerissa Marsh is.
Her lovely, oval face is framed by that glorious teal hair, falling in graceful waves around a skin that could be made of porcelain.
Her mouth, perky and full, is pressed in a thin line, but even then, it has this soft, vulnerable quality that pulls my gaze like a mirage.
I realize way too late I’ve been staring at her lips and I cough, shaking my head like I’m a cat about to throw up a hairball. Very attractive, surely.
And so very inappropriate. I’m her colleague. More than a colleague, I’m her department Chair. There are a number of big no-nos in academia, and a department Chair being attracted to a postdoc in his department is definitely on the list.
Well, she’s technically not my employee. I have nothing to do with the funding for her research or her contract. But it’s still inappropriate.
Then that fascinating gaze goes back to the water. I don’t even know if she noticed how I stared at her mouth like a creep.
“It’s fine,” I say, and keep it easy, and don’t come closer. “Boats make a lot of people nervous. Fun fact, the word ’nausea’ comes from the Greek for ship. Sea-sickness is etymologically the original sickness.”
Nothing. Not even the eye-roll, and she strikes me as someone with a well-developed eye-roll.
“What do you see?” I ask.
Her jaw tightens. And she says, so quietly the engine nearly takes it, “The water’s wrong.”
“Wrong how?” I frown, then look up at the ominous line of fast darkening sky.
“It’s the interval.” Her hand makes a small motion and she makes a frustrated grimace. “The swell period, it’s … it’s the rhythm. It’s wrong for this forecast. It’s too long, and the sound is too deep. Maybe we should turn around…”
She stops. Shuts her mouth, then shakes her head.
“Never mind. I’m not a meteorologist.”
“No,” I say slowly, “but you’re a mermaid. Aren’t mermaids attuned to the ocean?”
It’s either the wrong words, or the right ones, because her whole body flinches shut, drawbridge up, and I could kick myself.
But here’s what I can’t stop looking at: she isn’t fibbing.
Every line of her face is certain. Terrified of her own certainty, fighting it like a hooked fish, but certain.
I’ve spent twenty years around people having hunches, I’ve had three good ones myself, and I know what a real signal looks like coming through a person.
And this mermaid is certain that the water is wrong.
I don’t need any other hint.
“Stay here,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
I turn away and walk to the wheel, where our captain, Fergus, has one furred hand on the wheel and one holding his pipe at the corner of his mouth. When I ask him what he makes of the sky, he doesn’t even glance at it.
“Making good time,” he says. “We’ll have you under your dome with an hour to spare.”
“And the storm? Dr. Marsh thinks it’s got more behind it.”
Captain Fergus laughs.
Not the wonderful harbor-shaking laugh from the dock.
A different one, smaller and wider at the same time.
He pitches it loud, loud enough to carry out the wheelhouse door, down the deck, all the way to the stern, where Nerissa stands, staring at the water.
It makes me want to stuff a rag in his large, open mouth.
“The opinions of a half-mermaid!” he booms. “Forty years I’ve run this water, professor.
Forty years, every weather God ever invented, and I’ll tell you what I know.
Seals read the sea.” He thumps his barrel chest. “Selkies most of all. We sleep in it, we hunt in it, it talks to us the whole way down. And I’ll be seal-blind before I take storm advice from a half-mermaid who rode to my boat in a taxi.
Half, mind you. The half that reads water must’ve gone to the other side of the family! ”
And he laughs again, delighted with himself.
I don’t say anything for a second. I’m watching her back go stiff and her shoulders hitch higher. She doesn’t move, doesn’t turn, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d flinched.
Something in my chest goes hot and simple.
“Turn the boat around,” I say.
Fergus blinks. “Beg pardon?”
“Turn it around. Or into harbor, whatever’s nearest, Port Clyde, wherever.” My voice is low and my tone sharp. I don’t use it often, but I’m done dealing with this man. “Bill me for the whole charter and the day rate and the fuel.”
“Professor,” Fergus starts, “there’s no call for this.”
“Humor me,” I say. “You’ll be getting paid to be wrong.”
And I mean it. Every word. I’d set fire to the whole gilded afternoon based on my trust in her knowledge of the water.
But it isn’t the captain who answers.
“No.”
She’s in the wheelhouse doorway. Spray-damp, chin up, and her face has been wiped clean of everything, the certainty, the fear, all of it zipped into a flat cold calm that took visible effort to put on.
“No?” I say. “I thought you wanted to turn back.”
“It’s an evening system.” Her voice is even. Too even, perhaps. “I trust our captain. If he says the storm won’t reach us, then the storm won’t reach us.”
She takes a deep breath, sets her shoulders square and digs the hook of her blazing blue eyes deep into my soul.
“We are not blowing up the most important week of either of our careers over a feeling. I’d like to get to the island, Dr. Vasquez. I have a talk to give.”
“Nerissa,” I say carefully. “You just told me the water was wrong.”
Something moves behind her eyes, deep under the ice, some enormous shape turning over. For one second I think it’s going to surface.
Then Fergus chuckles, warm and vindicated, and says, “There’s a sensible lass,” and the shape goes down and doesn’t come back.
“I’m going to review my slides,” she tells the space between us, and walks out, down the deck, and plants herself at the stern rail with her back to all of us, facing the water.
Fergus gives me a look that invites me to share a moment about the moods of mermaids. I hold his gaze until his whiskers do something embarrassed, and then I go back out on deck.
The door clicks shut somewhere behind me. When I glance over my shoulder at Nerissa, she has her laptop open on her lap, but she’s not looking at her slides.
She’s watching the ocean.