Chapter 7 #3
“Hmm. Let’s see.” He strolled through a tangle of slimy kelp gas bladders, pausing to right a toppled hermit crab and shoo off a gull. His shirt rode up over his waistband, revealing a few inches of ink and bronzed, freckled skin.
Surf splashed her feet. Her cheeks flamed and she stepped back.
But—don’t run.
Focus.
“I’ll start us off.” Rubbing at a jellyfish blister, he didn’t seem to notice.
“We met in Monterey. I was here on a photography assignment for MORI. You crashed Erin and Ethan’s bungalow after you caught the doctor screwing a caterer at your wedding shower.
There’s evidence for both those things, right? ”
Flashing lenses, staring eyes.
“Y-yes.”
“Right. Those are the facts. Now let’s make this a meet-cute.
Instead of running into each other inside the beach house, what if we met for the first time underwater?
While we were both diving. Between your midnight plunge and my morning swim, we only missed a real encounter in the bay by about five hours.
And. . .” he snapped his fingers, “neither of us was wearing wetsuits. That’s a good detail.
Also true. Plus: matching each other’s crazy.
There we were in the water, and I was photographing—what? ”
She skidded on a float. “Um, kelp?”
“I was photographing kelp. Like I did today. While you were. . .?”
“Distracting myself from what had happened at the yacht club. I was—conducting pencil tests with the local octopus population?”
“Sure. So that I can answer the question if our interviewer asks: what’s a pencil test?”
This part was simple enough.
“It’s a personality-type field test. A scientist identifies an octopus’s den and acclimates the animal to their presence.
Then the researcher extends a pencil near the entrance.
They monitor the specimen’s reaction. Some octopuses retreat, or ink, or siphon at the object.
Some ignore it. Others try to touch or even grab it. ”
“Or grab the scientist?”
“Or the scientist. Dr. Jennifer Mather—she lost several dive masks to cephalopods during her work in French Polynesia—pioneered the method and distilled numerous distinct personality types from the data she collected. Shy, brave, or curious. Sneaky, sly. Basic traits, which the research subjects expressed in varied degrees. Prior to Dr. Mather’s work, no one had empirically quantified octopuses’ differing reactions to a specific stimulus.
Their individuality. No one had seriously, scientifically considered whether they might be responding not only to pleasure or pain catalysts in their environment, but intellectually to those stimuli. As individuals.”
“Which they do.”
“Yes. That’s why the pencil was important.
For an octopus, it was a neutral item. But each subject reacted to its presence differently.
And. . . did you know that while different species specialize in various kinds of tool use, individual octopuses within a species also have their own distinct camouflage repertoire?
Patterns based on their local environments.
Maybe when we met I was observing one that had learned to mimic a kelp blade’s floating gas sac. Like the two-spot from your dive.”
“Great. That’s confirmed. We were both diving in this kelp forest, and we bumped into each other. The water’s like pea soup. It’s possible that—”
“—you startled my octopus with your camera flash. It inked and—”
“—we saw each other for the first time through the pigment?” Wes flipped his fingers into a facsimile of goggles over his eyes. “I fell in love with my fish-eyed view of you through my mask, and I lost my snorkel mouthpiece. I surfaced.”
“I did too, since the octopus was gone.”
“I apologized for scaring off your subject. Then I got my just deserts when I swam into a bloom of jellyfish on my way back to shore. But here’s the question,” still speaking through his fingers, eyebrow cocking. “Did you help me after that?”
Would she have?
She didn’t need to lie.
“Yes. In the shower at the bungalow. Since I did. The more truth there is to the story, the more believable it will be for the interviewer.” Picking her way along the shoreline while the cool air dusted her lips with salt, it really was easy enough to imagine slipping into the water, down into the dappled marine shadows.
It was easy to believe in her determined absorption with an octopus and a pencil, with her carefully managed breathing, almost as careful as her refusal to think about the yacht club, about Chase and the caterer, about her ring.
The consequences of it all. Imagining her dismay at the cephalopod’s flight, before likewise startling at the appearance of another diver through the clouds of mucus and melanin?
Also easy. She would have exhaled in surprise, pillars of bubbles streaming to the surface—which she would have followed, her heart beating hard and her lungs compressed with missing air and adrenaline—only to lose her breath a second time when Wes flipped up his mask and smiled at her through the ribbons of kelp sliding down his face, his eyes crinkled against the spraying surf, or with laughter. . .
This, she could do.
He grinned at her now as he’d grinned in her imagination, thumbing a speck of sand off his chin.
Or—maybe it was too easy.
A swell of warmth flushed her cheeks again.
She ducked her head, dropping to her heels beside another tide pool, evaluating the rough angles of the rock for barnacles or evidence of tool usage.
Octopuses had been observed employing empty clam shells to break the protein byssal threads that attached mussels to their boulders.
But if the evidence was here, she didn’t see it.
She couldn’t focus on the task. Not with Wes’s shadow across her neck.
“How’d you help me in the shower? The interviewer might ask.”
Ink, steam, the texture of his body under her fingers.
She thrust her hands into the pool. Her knuckles knocked into a sea urchin’s spines. She took comfort in the disconcerting, distracting sensory change for a moment, the water icing her own skin, steadying her breath before she tackled his question—and that smile.
“I—”
Then her phone vibrated.
It vibrated so violently that it buzzed itself from the rear pocket of her trousers. Isabel barely caught it before it splintered on the rocks, the device’s illuminated pixels swimming under her wet fingerprints.
Maybe she should have let it crack.
New Message: Dr. Chase Meyer Jr.
Suddenly, here was a different question.
“Are you going to answer him?” Wes’s grin was gone.
“I. . . I haven’t read the text yet. I don’t know what it says.”
He ignored her reluctance and her deflection. Instead: “Are you going to tell him?”
Are you going to tell him about this?
About us.
If she explained—confessed—to Chase that she was canceling their wedding, there would be no retreat from that decision.
She would have made a final choice. Right or wrong, it would be done.
If she cut him off, stopped trying to correctly manage her reaction to, and fix, last night’s situation at the St. Francis Yacht Club, she’d have put her complete trust in Wes Monaghan.
A man she’d known for less than a day. This stranger.
She would have committed herself to a terrifying, rash, and maybe even brave choice and—
Buzz.
A second message appeared under her thumb.
Appeasements and apologies with Chase were safe.
She knew their benefits and consequences.
Nothing about Wes was safe. Not his fantasies, not his profanity, not his welltraveled stories, not his quick, bold laughter—everything as transparent as glass, as a rock pool without a tide.
The responses of her own body weren’t safe, either, not with her pulse beating hot and hard now from a brutal cocktail of anxiety, vertigo, and pure, visceral awareness. Her mouth tasted like copper.
And he was waiting.
But she frowned at a third message notification on her screen and the audio call that followed. If Wes could wait, why couldn’t Chase?
Why shouldn’t he?
So she didn’t answer. Instead, she sent the man to voicemail. Then Isabel muted Chase’s number and twisted off his ring.
Just today, maybe she could have this quiet.
Not forever. She knew that. Eventually, she’d have to answer him.
Today, though?
“Nothing,” she said. “For now, I’ll tell him nothing.”
“It’s what he deserves.” Wes’s smile reemerged more swiftly than the sun had parted Monterey’s fog.
So bright, so easy, like summer. He nodded at her bare finger.
“But also, for now, we’d better check our cereal boxes.
Maybe one of the prizes inside could be a replacement for you. Or at least a ring pop.”
“A ring pop?”
“You never know, do you?” He gestured for her to join him in hiking back up through the sand and shells to the bungalow.
Could there really be a ring pop in a cereal box? Something sweet and lucky hidden away just for her?
Maybe.
She followed him.
Maybe, somehow, it would be all right.