Chapter 13
Racing back through driftwood spars on the beach, the Nice to Sea You! gate smacking closed behind them, they burst into the bungalow together.
“Jesus, cheese, and crackers!” Laughing, Wes collapsed into the basket chair.
Isabel switched on a lamp. She perched on the arm of the couch, hugging their picnic towel while rocking in a golden glow spilling from the light, laughing with him—and, God, her laugh was wonderful: bright as sunshine on sea foam, musical as a wind chime, sprinkled with ticklish huffs through her nose.
How could he complain that the gull had interrupted their teetering, tender moment by the shore, when she was laughing like this?
He almost didn’t care that the bird had made her laugh, not him.
She was laughing at the octopus now too, pushing off the cushions and approaching the tank.
She quirked her mouth at the two-spot’s impatient arms plastered to the glass, at suckers prodding the mesh lid.
“She must be bored with the rockscape already. Bored enough to imitate these polka-dotted throw pillows. But—no, she’s right.
It’s feeding time. Octopuses can eat up to four percent of their body weight every day,” she added over her shoulder.
“She doesn’t want a sandy leftover sandwich, right?”
Isabel’s cheek dimpled with a smile. She shook her head. “You already know that answer.”
He waggled his eyebrows while he heaved himself up and strolled into the kitchen for the octopus’s meal—earning his own breath of laughter from her.
Good start.
But: what if they hadn’t needed to start over?
If that gull hadn’t dived at them, what would his camera have seen on the beach?
With Isabel’s thumb tracing his lower lip, he hadn’t been paying attention to lighting and lens angles.
Not at all. He’d been wrestling against an inappropriate, unruly, delicious impulse to suck her finger into his mouth, to soothe the roughness of her bitten nail with his tongue.
. . Yes, he’d forgotten about his watching Nikon.
Had she?
However, the two-spot demanded his—and Isabel’s—full attention when she waved her shrimp through the currents of her tank a minute later.
Her skin was patterned with deep, stone-speckled purple and flecks of white, her arms clinging to their fingers while another limb crept toward Wes’s watch stowed out of her reach on the credenza.
Isabel was quickly so absorbed in the beguiling, intimate wonder of octopus time that she likely wouldn’t have heard Wes if he’d asked her about—honestly, anything.
Which was probably for the best. Their hands brushed in the water, and she didn’t draw back.
He kept quiet.
By the time she surfaced, the bungalow’s kitschy clock had edged toward High Tide.
He’d be in the water in about eight hours.
She’d start her inaugural shift of chopping, mopping, and spy-hopping at MORI.
When he said as much, Isabel’s smile rose from the aquarium in acknowledgment or amusement.
But it sank just as rapidly. Her nod was brisk while she replaced the tank’s lid.
“Will you report on any unusual animal behaviors that you see in the bay or Elkhorn Slough?” she asked him.
“As long as you call me if anything weird happens during your shift? Deal.” Strapping his waterproof diving watch back on, he raised his wrist. “My phone will ring on this, and I can breach to answer.”
“Should we share contact details?”
They swapped devices to enter their information.
Wes didn’t snoop through her phone after he double-checked the letters in his name.
Not noticing the volume of her missed calls and unread texts, though?
That was impossible. Even while he saved himself as a favorite contact, another notification multiplied her unopened messages into triple digits.
The sender was muted.
It didn’t take a genius to guess who was hounding her.
“Isabel, you—you don’t need a reason to call me. Call about anything. Not just about MORI. Any time.”
“I. . .” A second notification came through as he passed back her phone; her mouth slanted into a frown, her answer fading.
I will.
I won’t.
Why not?
“Chase is still trying to get hold of you, isn’t he?” Trying to touch her, when she so clearly didn’t want to be touched. “Is it getting worse?”
“Yes.” Wincing, Isabel bit her lip. “But only because I’m being a coward.”
“He’s being an asshole.”
One shoulder lifted and she pocketed her device. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Not tonight.”
Not ever.
Before he could say something idiotic like that out loud, she continued, her feet shuffling in the carpet, “Would it be helpful for us to exchange a few messages and calls? About MORI. Or other things. For the interviewer?”
Thank God.
“Yeah, it would. So—get ready. Because you’re getting a goodnight text from me today,” he warned her. “For the interviewer.”
Another dimple twitched beside her mouth. Isabel replaced the octopus’s dive weights, offered Wes use of their bathroom for a quick shower and an even faster brush of his teeth, and told him as he emerged in his terrycloth robe, “Yes, please send the text.”
“Great.”
With that, the bedroom door closed behind her.
Listening to the singing of water in the pipes from the shower as it switched on again, he grinned, tossed off his robe, and flopped onto the couch in his boxers to review the Nikon’s pre-jellyfish photo roll from Saturday and tonight’s time-lapse pictures: a bobbing otter pup, a pelican tussling with a cormorant, a grouchy sand dab.
No almost-kiss by the waves. But despite the low light levels on the beach and a slow camera shutter speed, his lens had managed to snap the seagull’s attack on their picnic.
The Nikon had caught them leaping off their towel, their mouths blurred and wide with surprise.
Snorting, he ported the image onto his phone.
Then he opened Isabel’s new contact.
Wes Monaghan (voice-to-text)
G’night. Sleep for real—and don’t let the seagulls steal. (Sandwiches, dreams, whatever.)
He followed up with his fuzzy image of the gull.
Photo Sent
He waited while the shower drizzled off, and while Isabel—probably—stepped out onto the bathmat.
He went on waiting while he imagined her toes curling in the nubbly fibers (already damp with his own footprints) as she patted a towel over her flushed cheeks, stomach, and thighs, then rifled the cloth through her hair, matting it into a wet tangle that had his fingers kneading the couch’s afghan blanket, itching to smooth those silvery strands and tease the fine wisps kissing the nape of her neck—
No, get a grip!
He held himself to an impatient patience as she twisted up the towel on her head, slipped into her own robe (lace panties underneath, or plain white cotton? No, stop it), and padded into the bedroom. She’d check her phone in a minute.
Her huff of surprise—or maybe it was another sweet burst of laughter?—came quickly.
Whichever it was, the noise plucked hard at something not-at-all sweet in his groin.
She hadn’t locked her door.
He dropped his head back onto the armrest, his groan fighting against another smile.
He wouldn’t get up from these couch cushions.
He sure as hell wasn’t going to knock on that door.
He returned to his photo roll and deleted a few hundred images off the Nikon’s memory chip.
He forced his brain to focus on framing angles and levels of light saturation.
On brainless plankton, too, counting their almost-invisible specks.
. . and eventually—eventually—sometime around two o’clock he’d managed to wrestle his shots into order and his body temperature down.
Between clicking from one cloudy picture of purple urchins to the next, he blinked awake to Monday’s daylight.
The bedroom door was still closed; their octopus hadn’t slithered over to crank open its knob overnight in a daring escape from her tank.
In fact, she was still sleeping within a nest of her own arms in the coral.
The bungalow’s shellacked clock pointed to Sunscreen: five in the morning.
So Wes retrieved his camera from where it had gotten wedged between the couch cushions, grabbed his photography bag, and stepped into the kitchen to start the kettle.
He piled cleaning sprays, lens ports, and strobes onto the counter, plus a laminated sheet of Monterey Bay species.
Then, while water pattered on the stove, he pulled his hair into an elastic, popped in his earbuds to review an audio transcript of his MORI project, and got started on equipment maintenance.
Assignment (50 dive hours, 1,500 high-resolution images): photographer will document the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute’s ecological restoration work in the Monterey Bay marine forest region, with supplementary documentation of the intertidal zones as appropriate.
Private property restrictions must be observed.
Fauna of interest: Enhydra lutris nereis (com.
: California sea otter), Aurelia aurita (com. : moon jellyfish)—
The rash discoloring his shoulders, back, and calves twinged.
—Octopus bimaculoides (com.: California two-spot octopus).
“You’ve got the paparazzi on your trail,” he called to the octopus, just as Isabel stepped into the kitchen.
She stopped, eyes wide and dipping down, then very quickly away from him. “Um.”
Shit.
A jolt of adrenaline pummeled his stomach.
He was still in his boxers, and shirtless.
Not that she hadn’t seen him bare-chested and mostly bare-assed before.
But this time she was wearing slouchy jeans belted under her sweatshirt.
A flannel collar peeked out against her throat, work boots swung from her shoulder by their laces, and her hair was braided back and threaded through a baseball cap.
She had a small smear of sunscreen under her right ear.
So competent. So damn beautiful.
Boxers were totally inadequate for containing his body’s response.