19. Chapter 19
Neri
I regret nothing.
Everything is the same and yet, nothing is. Same granite island. Same cold ocean on every side. Same man. Except this time I chose to stay, and every morning I wake up in the visitor quarters with Rafe’s arm heavy over my ribs and feel absurdly happy about it.
This evening, the sun is dropping toward the horizon when I slide out from under Rafe’s arm and reach for my bikini.
We spent the better part of the last hour tangled together on his bed, and he looks thoroughly content where he’s sprawled beneath the rumpled sheets.
When I start piling my hair up, he props himself on one elbow, his hair all messy and adorable, and squints at me.
“You’re vibrating,” he says. “What are you planning?”
“I’m going swimming.”
He sits up a little straighter. “Oh.”
“Witnesses are optional but welcome.” I finish tying up my hair. “Are you coming to watch, or is the famous astronomer only interested in things that happen at night?”
His grin arrives.
The water off the dock is glass-green and shockingly clear, ten feet down to pale sand and waving kelp, the lowering sun turning the surface gold.
I leave my clothes folded on a piling, cross the boards in my sensible black bikini past a ferry-crew kid who suddenly finds his coil of rope fascinating, and I stand at the edge in the late-evening light with my heart going hard.
Not fear exactly. Nerves. Excitement.
I dive.
The cold hits hard and the shift comes with ease. My legs merge before I touch the bottom, teal and silver flashing through the green water, my gills opening as naturally as another breath. I turn and kick toward the surface.
Then, for the first time in five years, with people around to see me, with absolutely no reason except that I want to, I swim.
I take the length of the cove at speed with my tail throwing spray, breach like something off a nature documentary, roll, dive, thread the kelp forest with my hair streaming teal into teal, then surface directly under the dock.
The last sunlight comes down through the water in long moving blades. My scales scatter it back. I’m a light show. I’m a commotion. I’m a mermaid showing off in front of her boyfriend, visible from every window on the hillside, and for once I don’t care who sees me.
Every pass, I check the dock. Every pass, he’s there. He leans against the rail, glasses on his nose, watching me with the same open wonder he wore the first morning in the cove.
There’s nothing judging in it. He’s just happy. Happy for me.
I come out when my breathing turns fast and shallow, shift in the shallows, put on my bikini bottom and wade up the dock ladder human and streaming and grinning like a fool.
He’s there with a grin that wraps me with more warmth than the fading sunlight.
He also wraps me in a cozy, warm towel that feels like pure heaven.
“Any notes,” I demand, teeth chattering, ecstatic.
“Ten across the board.” He rubs my arms through the towel, kisses my salty temple.
I look up at him. “Good.”
“Very good.”
We end up at the end of the dock in the last of the evening light, me in the towel, him cross-legged beside me, the boards still holding the day’s warmth beneath us, my hair dripping. Eventually I say the thing that has been sitting in the back of my mind since I checked my email last night.
“So I got an email last night,” I say. “The program committee wants my talk in the spring colloquium series. And Delgado at Scripps wants to, quote, discuss my trajectory.”
Rafe goes still for half a second before he smiles. “Those are both excellent.”
“They are.”
“What are you thinking?”
I pull my knees up under the towel. “I’m thinking we need to talk about work.”
His expression gets more serious. “Okay.”
“If we really do this, I need my career to stay mine. I don’t want favors. I don’t want you making calls or finding funding or putting your thumb on anything because you love me.”
“I wouldn’t.” His mouth twitches. “But I might think about it very supportively.”
“Rafe, I’m serious.”
“I won’t.” The humor leaves his face. “I mean it.”
I nod. “And if Scripps turns into an actual offer, I might take it.”
That one is a harder pill to swallow. I see it. His jaw tightens for a second before he looks out across the water.
“California is far away,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I don’t love that.”
Something in me loosens at the admission. Not because I want him unhappy, but because he isn’t pretending this is easy just to make me feel better.
He looks back at me. “But if it’s the right job for you, we’ll figure it out.”
“You’d be okay with that?”
“I’d miss you.” His answer is immediate. “A lot. I would complain theatrically about airports and time zones. But I’m not going to ask you to turn down something you earned because it’s more convenient for me.”
My eyes sting unexpectedly.
“And I’m not asking you to give up AETHER for me.”
“Good. Because she’s very large and difficult to relocate.”
I laugh. He reaches over and takes my hand.
“We don’t have to know everything today, Neri.”
That might be the most reassuring thing he could have said.
We still have to tell the department. People may still gossip. I may end up taking a job three thousand miles away. None of those problems disappeared because we got back together.
But we don’t have to end us before any of them happen.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
I stick out my hand. “Then I think we’re agreed.”
He looks at the hand. He looks at me.
Then he takes my wrist and pulls, and I come across the space between us laughing, and the handshake becomes something with absolutely no dignity whatsoever.
The kiss starts as a joke and stops being one fast. His mouth is warm against mine, salt still on my lips, his hand sliding into my wet hair, mine fisting his shirt.
The dock boards are warm under my knees and his other hand finds the bare skin at my waist under the towel.
When we finally break, both breathing like swimmers, his eyes are dark and his voice is husky.
“To be continued. After.”
“After what?”
The grin goes nerdy and secretive at once, the worst combination, my favorite combination.
“After dark,” he says. “I have a thing to show you. I’ve been saving it.”
I glance toward the western horizon. The sun has almost disappeared.
“Convenient.”
“I planned that extremely well.”
“You had no idea I was going swimming.”
“Please don’t ruin this for me.”
We stay on the dock while the last strip of orange fades from the water. I pull my clothes over my still-damp skin, Rafe disappears long enough to retrieve a thermos, and then we head up the hill together.
By the time we reach the dome, the sky over Marlin has done its full unspoiled performance: no mainland glow, no moon yet, the Milky Way slung shore to shore, stars in quantities that make the word ridiculous.
The dome stands against them like a risen pearl. He badges us in through the side door, nods to the night operator, and leads me up the stairs onto the observing floor, into the huge cool curved dark that smells of new paint and cold metal.
AETHER fills the room the way a whale fills water. Quiet, enormous, alive; the dome hums somewhere in its bones.
“We’re mid-commissioning run,” he says, so quietly I almost have to lean toward him, “and the queue is mine for forty minutes.” He stops. In the dim red light his face is nine years old and forty-two at once. “I wanted the first eye on it to be yours.”
My chest goes warm. “Rafe.”
“Come on.”
The stairs to the instrument deck ring softly under our feet. The slit is open overhead, a canyon of stars in the dome’s dark curve, and the telescope moves when he commands it with a sound like a held breath, tons of glass and steel swinging smooth as water, hunting, settling, locking on.
“Saturn,” he says. “Everyone’s first should be Saturn.”
I bend to the eyepiece with my hair still stiff with salt.
And oh.
It hangs there in the black, tilted and ringed and impossibly clear. A real world, gold-brown and serene, its rings sharp around it. I’ve seen photographs my entire life. I know what Saturn looks like.
I was not prepared to see it like that.
A sound comes out of me that is suspiciously close to the one I made over his muffins.
“There she is,” Rafe says softly, and he does not mean the planet.
I stay at the eyepiece until my eye waters.
He shows me a double star, gold and sapphire, and a globular cluster like spilled salt frozen mid-fall, and the whole time his hand rests warm on my shoulder, steady and familiar.
On the island, he stood beside me while I found my way back to the ocean. Tonight, he gives me the sky.
“Okay,” I whisper, straightening at last, still staring up through the open slit. “Your sea’s almost as good as mine.”
“Almost,” he agrees instantly.
I smile and bend to the eyepiece again.
I’m keeping every single piece.