Chapter 12
“MORI’s lab facilities are some of the best I’ve seen.
Everything is very clean. The tanks are designed for enrichment, as well as research needs.
Did you notice the bat-ray pool? How the staff had buried clams for the rays to hunt?
” The exterior doors swung shut behind them, almost catching Wes on his heels—but not Isabel, striding toward Baby nearly as quickly as her words came, ponytail whisking between her shoulder blades.
Her assessment of the institute blew back to him on the evening wind.
“Now I find it surprising that the octopus doesn’t camouflage.
The majority of the aquariums here incorporate textures, materials, and colors representing real oceanic habitats.
Substrate and live rock. Algae. It’s a well-designed lab. ”
“No blank barrels.” He unlocked the Jeep.
“No.” She paused, a sandal suspended on the running board. “At least I don’t think so. Not in any of the areas that we toured—which seemed to be most of MORI. But I couldn’t gauge the environment in the two-spot nursery tank. Hopefully, I will tomorrow.”
“Once we get you some boots.”
“Yes.” Her fingers drummed against her knees while he pulled out onto the highway. Her gaze shifted between Baby’s speedometer and the dashboard clock. “Whatever’s available in a thrift store tonight will be fine.”
He’d observed earlier that Isabel was exactly as patient as their octopus. But hopefully not as destructive.
Self-destructive.
Not while he was here.
Currently, being here meant browsing ancient VHS tapes, buyer’s-remorse vacation jewelry (no diamond rings, plenty of puka shells), and heel-worn shoes at Branches Resale Shoppe, a secondhand store that smelled faintly like mothballs and Chinese food.
Isabel edged among stacks of flatware propped up on boxy nineteen-eighties electronics to reach a women’s clothing rack.
She extracted jeans, a few plain shirts and camisoles, and a couple of snap-button flannels.
She didn’t try any of them on. She topped her pile with a baseball cap and nodded at the boots that Wes dangled for inspection.
“Are these your size?”
“They’re close enough.” She took a pair of socks from a basket marked “Free,” which she poked into the boots and added to her mound at the register.
“You find everything okay?” A clerk in purple glasses began scanning the tags.
“Yes, thank you.”
Isabel planned to stuff the toes of those beat-to-hell boots with balled-up socks, didn’t she?
Shit. She’d probably had plenty of practice with that, with fitting herself into castoffs, into unwanted spaces, navigating around people who took up more than their fair share of oxygen. Even when she didn’t have to.
Not with me.
“Isabel. . .”
“They’re good for their purpose.” She shouldered her retail bag. “It’s fine.”
For now, he modified mentally as he drove them to the beach house.
The octopus was waiting.
Suckers plastered to the siding of the aquarium, her dominant eye fixed on the door, the two-spot’s body dappled with excited and coruscating flushes of crimson when they entered the living room.
In an instant each eager arm was waving a coral spike or a binder clip, an oyster half-shell or a pill bottle.
At least she hadn’t managed to dismantle the tank’s new protein skimmer, or expel chunks of live rock onto the couch.
“You can almost see a tail wagging,” Wes said.
“Both octopuses and dogs can follow a human’s pointing finger. They recognize individual faces, too.”
“Then they’re smarter than some people. Lots of people.” He kicked off his boots and waved back at the octopus. “But the question is: is she actually happy to see us? Is she whining about dinner being late? Or is she playing cute because she’s done something naughty that we don’t know about yet?”
Isabel lined up her sandals on the doormat, deposited her thrifted haul near his duffels, and came to crouch beside the tank.
She moved her fingers against it, tracking the creature’s gestures and being tracked herself.
Her breath fogged the glass in a ghost of a smile; her sharp, steely focus from MORI and the secondhand store softened a fraction. “All three, maybe?”
“Right. But—seriously, what are we going to call her? So we have a name to shout when she overflows her aquarium.”
Just like that, the brightness dimmed from Isabel’s mouth. “I already said. . . at the Seattle Aquarium, I called the subjects—”
“—by their tank numbers? I remember. But she’s not a research subject anymore. We can do better than C-190.”
“It’s not—”
“Think about it.” Then, changing the subject and ducking into the kitchen, where he grabbed a prawn and a few sea snails from the refrigerator, before rejoining the two-spot and Isabel at the tank, he continued, “Whatever happened to our girl in the lab, I bet she gave as good as she got.”
They removed Wes’s dive weights from the lid of the aquarium. Questing suckers instantly ensnared them. The octopus stole the shrimp in seconds and tried to unfasten his watch, until he bopped a finger between her eyes. She retaliated by squirting him. He blew a raspberry at her.
“She probably flooded at least one room. Took watches and rings. Injected someone with venom.”
“They deserved it. Whoever they were. Are.” Undistracted and unamused, Isabel shook her head. “She won’t have been the only one, either.”
“No.”
“The two-spot researcher from Saturday’s tour was at MORI again this afternoon. Dr. Solomon. Did you see how she reacted when I approached the nursery tank?”
“Hmm?” He hadn’t. He’d been aware of the lab’s spiky, toothy, venomous animals.
He’d compared Isabel’s sandals with the staff’s protective boots, gloves, and goggles, too.
But if he could conjure a vague outline of another woman by the cephalopod tank, his memory offered no identifying characteristics.
Weird.
Or. . . not weird, if he was very truthful.
Because Isabel had been there.
Isabel, glowing with excitement and wonder and determination, diving head-first into her investigation.
What the hell would she do to the person—or people—or even a whole institution—when she found who’d hurt their juvenile two-spot?
That’ll be something to see.
His voice was gravelly with inconvenient fantasies when he managed, “Y-yeah. The octopus researcher.”
“She was brusque on Saturday. More so today. The facilities manager called her a cold fish, and I—I thought. . .” But Isabel trailed off.
Her frowning focus returned to the octopus.
Their guest was extracting a sea snail from its shell, while holding the shrimp loosely in her third arm.
Maybe she was saving the prawn for a nighttime snack.
Forethought and future planning.
Wes knew he would have failed the marshmallow test.
Since they had their own future plans to discuss, however, he replaced the tank’s lid after a minute, wiped his wet hands on his shorts, and reminded them both, “We’ll have to schedule a few dates in between our Moss Landing work shifts.”
Isabel’s gaze briefly flicked away from the octopus, over the streaks he’d left on his thighs. A freckling of color dusted her cheekbones. “Yes. For the interviewer—and the photographs.”
He nodded.
“Uh. How did today’s picture from Old Fisherman’s Wharf come out? Was the angle all right? The lighting? I don’t know if the focus. . .”
Her focus had been perfect. He didn’t need any evidence beyond the memory seared deep into his body to prove that.
But since she was waiting for his answer, rising up from her crouch at the tank with her balance shifting from foot to bare foot, nibbling at her lip with her eyes down again and her cheeks warm, he retrieved his Nikon.
He brought up her snap on its digital viewing screen.
“See?”
Honestly, the picture wasn’t in focus: overexposed, blurred, its angle suboptimally low.
Still: perfect.
She’d captured them not during their second kiss, but in the breath before it. Her face was flushed from the fantastic, unexpected, seductive danger of their first attempt at intimacy, her gaze hooded against the sunshine. His fingers were immortalized in the act of tilting up her chin.
It had happened too fast, both of them rattled.
The rasp in her throat, the bolt of desire in his gut.
She’d caught this perfectly imperfect moment, though. She’d frozen it in time and preserved it for their visa interview. For afterward, too, when he was anchored at a pier halfway around the world with the Nauti Lass and she was—wherever she wanted to be. Doing whatever she wanted to do.
Whatever that was.
Safe, even happy.
Without him.
“Seems like I’ve got competition in the candid photography market,” he started, before he said something stupid.
Or did something stupid: her exhaled breath whispered against his neck while she studied the viewfinder, with a light tang of salt and sea wind.
“We don’t look staged. You’ve done a good job with the composition. Maybe you should take all our photos.”
“I-it was accidental. I might’ve had my eyes closed.”
She did, or almost.
When he chanced a look at her here, now, daring to shift just an inch sideways to bring her into view.
. . her eyelashes with their glitters of salt were half-masted again.
A hint of rain in her irises glimmered, unsettled, roving over the photograph in an intent analysis of—what?
Her lips were softly open. Close enough for him to breathe her in more fully, to taste her breath, to remember the cool, alkaline sweetness of her mouth.
As if he’d forgotten how she—
No, be normal about this!
“It’s a solid first shot. But we’ll need more.
” With trouble heating in his stomach and thighs, he stepped back quickly to power down his camera.
Greenland sharks, penguins—think about cold things.
Striving for casual, but sounding hoarse to his own ears, he said, “So—have dinner with me now? We could give that picnic a second try.”