Chapter 13 #2
He helps me find it on the next movement. And the next. The pleasure rises fast now, gathering low and tight until my rhythm starts to break. Rafe is breathing just as hard beneath me, his control fraying visibly.
“I’m close,” I whisper.
His eyes lock on mine.
“Me too.”
Something about knowing we’re going there together makes the last of my restraint disappear.
I move faster.
His hands clamp around my hips, holding me steady through every motion. My glow floods brighter over both of us, blue-white light spilling across his chest and the blankets and the walls of this absurd little room.
The pleasure crests.
I cry out and fold forward over him as the second orgasm rolls through me, sharper than the first, my whole body trembling around him.
Rafe follows almost immediately. His hands tighten on my hips and my name leaves his lips, low and broken, as he pulls me against him and shudders beneath me.
For a few seconds neither of us is capable of anything except breathing.
Then his hands soften. One slides up my spine while the other stays at my hip, holding me there as though there is nowhere else he wants me.
I let my forehead fall to his shoulder and listen as his heart pounds against mine.
And for the first time in maybe forever, I am completely relaxed in a man’s arms.
His heartbeat slows beneath my ear.
Mine follows. And that’s when it happens. Because apparently happiness is dangerous when you give my brain enough quiet to examine it.
He traces lazy circles over my shoulder and I close my eyes. I catch myself doing the one thing I haven’t permitted in years.
Imagining after.
It arrives fully rendered, that’s the horror of it.
A kitchen. Some kitchen, any kitchen, mainland, morning, French press on the counter because he’s insufferable about drip coffee.
Me at a table covered in someone’s papers, his or mine.
Sunday. Two phone calls to make, his mother, my father.
A full moon on the calendar circled in his handwriting, because he’d be the one who’d circle it, he’d have it in his calendar.
Swim night, and a coast within driving distance, and him on the beach with a thermos while I shift and swim with all the other mermaids.
I stop the thought there. I want this life. I want him and the kind of life that comes with a man like him. A good man. A decent man who does indecent things to me and makes my entire body sing like a well-tuned instrument.
The realization lands so cleanly there’s nowhere to hide from it.
I want mornings with him. I want to know what he burns when he gets distracted cooking. I want to find his glasses in stupid places and hear him complain about my coffee and swim under a full moon knowing he’s waiting onshore.
I want a life.
With him.
And the old voice inside my head clears its throat. It doesn’t shout. It never shouts. It asks, perfectly reasonable:
And you think he wants this, too? You think he wants to be seen with a mermaid nobody?
There it is.
There is an entire world, back on the mainland. This island ends.
Eventually there is a boat. A rescue crew. A dock crowded with people who know exactly who Rafael Vasquez is.
On the mainland he is the Halloway Chair in Astronomy, the man with a telescope attached to his name, the face in the university press releases, the person senior scientists cross rooms to greet. He has tenure. Authority. Money. A career so established that one bad story would barely dent it.
And I am a second-year postdoc in his department. No, not just a second-year postdoc. A mermaid.
The difference between us has been invisible out here.
On the island, he’s Rafe. He digs clams and harvests mussels. At Halloway, he’s the Chair.
My stomach tightens.
Nobody would have to accuse him of anything. Nobody would have to say the ugly part aloud.
They would look at us and do the arithmetic.
How long has this been going on?
Did he help her get that opportunity?
Was the paper really that good?
Did she sleep her way into the room?
The questions would attach themselves to me far more easily than they ever could to him.
That’s the part Rafe would never understand. Not because he doesn’t care. Because nobody has ever looked at his success and searched for the man he slept with to get it.
The thought is ugly enough that I open my eyes.
He’s still there.
Warm beneath me. Half asleep. One hand moving lazily over my back like touching me has already become something his body does without instruction.
For a few seconds, the fear retreats.
This is real too. None of that disappears because he has a title.
The voice with the clipboard waits.
Patient.
It has one last question.
And when the island wears off?
My throat tightens.
That’s the question underneath all the others.
Not whether I want him. I do.
Not even whether he wants me now. I know he does.
It’s whether this version of us survives the real world.
Whether Rafe looks at me the same way when there are colleagues in the room. Whether I can stand beside him without wondering what everyone thinks I traded to get there. Whether something this good can remain ours once the rest of the world gets an opinion.
And beneath all those reasonable fears is one smaller, meaner one that doesn’t bother pretending to be professional.
Men like him have choices.
Girls like me don’t get to keep men like him. Certainly not mermaids. Pretty, lovely, stupid little mermaids.
There.
The sentence I’ve been trying not to find.
I hate it immediately. I hate that some part of me believes it.
I press my face into his shoulder, breathing in warm skin and cedar and the last trace of woodsmoke.
Not now.
Whatever waits on the mainland can wait there.
Rafe is here.
His heartbeat is steady beneath my cheek. His hand is warm against my back. For the first time in years, I am happy, and I refuse to dismantle it before breakfast just because my brain found a new catastrophe to model.
So I put the fear away.
Not gone.
Just somewhere I don’t have to look at it yet.
“I can hear you thinking,” he murmurs into my hair, half-asleep and cheerful about it. “Enormous racket. Like a hard drive from the nineties.”
“I’m not thinking. I’m basking. Learn the difference.”
“My mistake.” He kisses the top of my head, untangles himself by degrees, groaning about his back, and gropes around the floor for his glasses and his trousers. “Bask. I’m going to resurrect the fire and see if the tide is low enough to harvest some mussels.”
The bed gets noticeably colder when he leaves it.