Chapter 9 #2
Though she left the tip of one arm suctioned to Wes’s thumb, the juvenile’s false eyespots flashed and she extended her seven other tentacles across the aquarium to wrap around Isabel’s fingers.
She was very dexterous. But the width of the tank was still a long reach for a young octopus.
She pulled hard at them both to ease the tension in her body, drawing their hands toward each other with irresistible force.
Toward—and then, with a yank of impatient arms, together.
Beneath the water, Isabel’s palm against his was warm.
Instead of jerking back from their contact, his fiancée froze.
Her frown arrested in a ridge over her nose.
But as the inquisitive two-spot left delicate suction kisses along her thumb?
That frown slowly softened, melted. A smile parted her lips on a soundless gasp, her eyelids fluttering over a shine of awe.
. . When she raised her head after a minute, an hour, or an eternity of octopus-time, when her fingers twitched and her hooded gaze acknowledged him again, her joy was blinding.
His pulse roared in his ears; her radiance left him breathless.
Stupid, too.
Wes’s unoccupied, un-octopused hand reached toward a strand of salt-crusted hair falling loose over Isabel’s temple.
Slowly. Very slowly. His knuckles almost grazed her cheek.
She remained so still as he trapped the silvery wisp between his fingers, soothed it back behind her ear.
His thumb whispered against her heartbeat humming in her throat.
It was nothing but an accidental, feather-light collision of calluses and skin—but an inhale shuddered across the aquarium.
Hers, or his? Did her focus dart down for a moment, toward his mouth?
Closer.
He was no more than an inch distant from brushing his lips over hers, from sating his impulsive, unthinking, almost overpowering desire to taste and explore the enigma of Isabel Wright, to know her with the same intense, sensory intimacy that the octopus now possessed of them both, when:
Splash!
A cold spout erupted from the reef tank to hit Wes squarely in the nose.
“Ah!” Isabel lurched away, gasping. Water streamed from her eyelashes.
“What the h-hell—” He swore and coughed at this painful saline injection into his nasal cavities. Snorting hard, swiping a palm that should have been cradling Isabel into a kiss over the water running down his chin, he narrowed his stinging eyes at the aquarium.
The octopus wriggled her siphon at him.
Playful, unrepentant.
“Jesus, peanut butter, and jelly.” He mopped his face with his rash guard. He snorted again—but this time, somehow irresistibly despite his salty, tingling irritation, with laughter.
What had Isabel said about cephalopod personality types?
Shy, brave, or curious. Sneaky, sly.
Sneaky and sly.
The two-spot had swiveled upward the flexible, funnel-like tube that protruded from her mantle, and squeezed a breath of water through the hose. Choosing her moment for maximum chaos—he hadn’t imagined that brief shiver of Isabel’s eyes over his mouth—she’d soaked them.
He poked a finger into one of the octopus’s suckers. “You little devil—”
“—fish.” Isabel’s voice was suspiciously muffled behind the hem of her turtle-printed sarong, which she’d raised up to dry her face.
Now she released the wet fabric. Her ears were pink, but she gave him the facts.
“Octopuses were once called devilfish. They aren’t devils or fish. Just misunderstood.”
“What? Did I misunderstand that jet she sent up my nose?”
Her lips trembled, almost as if she were stifling her own silent laughter.
Though when the two-spot gave another tug at her fingers, she turned away from him, back toward the tank.
Her attention dropped to its devious (not devilish) occupant.
A rogue drop of water slipped from the corner of her mouth to her chin, down to puncture the barrier between air and fluid with a tiny, musical plonk.
From below, the octopus blew bubbles in answer.
“We don’t always know why they turn their siphons on other fauna in their environment.
It’s difficult to assign motivations without anthropomorphizing them.
Which it’s important not to do. Octopuses aren’t like humans.
Researchers have to remember the distinction between our two species’ behaviors and needs, and not compromise our ability to interact appropriately with them.
That’s why I referred to the specimens at the Seattle Aquarium by their tank numbers. Not names.”
C-189, she’d called her snacking subject, when she’d shown Wes her lab video at Loulou’s.
Not Marcellus McSquiddles or Kali.
Maybe she’d already labeled this octopus C-190.
Here he was, a grown man who called his Jeep Baby.
“R-right.” He cleared a hot, rough itch from his throat. Swallowing did nothing for the flush burning up through the jellyfish blisters on his neck. He wasn’t embarrassed, though. Definitely wasn’t thinking about how that water droplet had clung to Isabel’s lips. “But—if you had to guess why?”
“It could be play. Irritation. Hunger. Or fear. Also,” despite the blush lingering in her ears, her scientific parsing of the octopus’s behavior was precise, “possibly jealousy. I can’t say for certain.
As you noted, she’s clearly familiar with being handled.
Dr. Jennifer Mather has documented intelligent play behaviors between individuals in many cephalopod species.
Between octopuses and humans, too. Some of these behaviors indicate what we’d consider a sense of humor. ”
He snorted a third time. As if in answer, the octopus blew a bubble ring. “She’s definitely a prankster. Soaking us was funny to her, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”
“Was it funny to you?”
“Game recognizes game,” he said lightly. Or tried to. He rubbed a hand over his too-warm nape. “I’ve seen common octopuses punch parrotfish in reefs off the Maldives. So she could’ve gotten us worse. . . Why, though? Was this funny to you?”
Less lightly, he couldn’t help wondering: what would happen if he touched a finger beneath Isabel’s chin? If he raised her rosy face again? If he narrowed their distance as he’d done just a few minutes earlier, when her focus had slipped to his mouth and her breath had caught between parted lips?
Fine, so he was thinking about the damn water drop.
But she took his question seriously.
“No.” Isabel’s flush faded. Her gaze lifted from the tank, but it was direct, no trembling eyelashes or hazy gray rain clouding her attention. “No, nothing here is funny. Something’s very wrong with this octopus. I suspected as much in the bay. But now?”
Shit.
There went the mood.
He tried to apologize.
Isabel ignored him. She extended her hand deeper into the tank, attaching another set of suckers to herself before elevating the two-spot’s ductile arms a few inches above the surface. “Have you noticed the texture of her skin where she’s regrown her third, fourth, and fifth arms?”
On an ordinary wild octopus, identifying deviations from the normal in base skin texture would have been impossible.
But relaxed in Isabel’s palm, with the horned protrusions of her papillae smoothed flat, this creature still wasn’t camouflaging.
The scars where she’d lost her arms were visible in high contrast—and they were surgically perfect.
No chomping moray or fishing-line tourniquet could have produced such precise aberrations.
Needle punctures were visible at the base of each tentacle.
“These scars, and her lack of both camouflage skill and situational awareness in the open water? An octopus hatched in a research facility wouldn’t have had an environment where she could hide.
She would’ve been raised in a barrel or a tub or a sump, with nothing to mimic.
Camouflaging is a learned behavior. It’s not instinctive.
Which. . .” Isabel paused. “Which means that she can’t be a wild octopus. She came from a lab.”
Fuck.
“You mean they experimented on her.”
“Yes.” Her caress over the two-spot’s mantle stilled. “And she escaped.”