Chapter 15 #2
But if the pain had leached from her body, it must have exited through the sinkhole of exhaustion under her sternum.
Migraines always left her tired, and this had been a horrible episode.
The worst since she’d started taking Ceretobicin.
Somehow, though, despite the freezing swells and her biting and her nails, Wes remained with her, uplifting her so that her exhaustion was a release instead of a drowning, holding her safe, staying at her side even now that he’d seen. . . her.
She was limp. The confession slipped out.
“I haven’t told you why I don’t like cameras.”
“Huh?” Of course, he was confused. “Buttercup, you—you don’t need to. . . especially not—”
Isabel ignored him; she couldn’t have halted these words any better than she could have held back the tide.
“I was almost adopted out of care when I was young. Six years old. But they sent me back to the federal home after my first migraine. I didn’t know what was happening to my body.
They didn’t know, either. I was scared, and I scared them.
They tried to help, at first. To comfort me.
They told me I was all right. But I wasn’t.
The pain didn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop screaming.
Over and over. . . There was no blood, so they thought I was acting out.
Wanting attention. Misbehaving. They tried to make me be quiet.
I bit them. That was when they took me to the hospital. ”
“Isabel. . .”
“The doctor put me in a paper gown. Sat me on a cold metal chair. I’d fallen out of bed when the migraine started, and she photographed the bruises for my file.
But the flashes, the blindness—I thought the pain was returning.
I was scared. Shaking. She just told me to sit still.
She asked the adults what had happened to me, why I’d lashed out.
She didn’t ask me. I don’t even know if I could’ve explained it.
But she didn’t ask. When she eventually diagnosed me with allodynia—with whole-body nerve pain from migraines—she told the adults.
Not me. Like I wasn’t there. Like I couldn’t hear them talking.
Like I couldn’t hear the parents saying that it didn’t matter why I’d acted the way I had that night, that I was dangerous, was.
. . So they were sending me back to the system.
But I could hear. I heard everything. The doctor agreed that with this new diagnosis, I’d be difficult to manage in a private home. That I was better in government care.”
“But you weren’t dangerous.”
She exhaled. “No, I was so scared. . .”
Wes’s breathing beneath her hitched, paused. Then, “Are you scared now, Isabel?”
Laughter, heat, wanting.
Danger.
She opened her eyes to answer him. He deserved that much.
Moon radiance, kelp, salt—and all around them, tiny bioluminescent creatures illuminated the swells with a sheen of glimmering, evanescent blue.
She turned to him. Treading water with her, Wes.
. . glowed. An aurora of plankton constellations painted his naked arms, dotting his cheekbones with stars.
Beautiful.
She should be afraid.
She wasn’t. She was only tired. And desperately, helplessly, incandescently grateful.
“I’m not scared.” Her whisper rose off the waves.
She followed it, righting herself. Then she reached for him.
She reached for the swirls of gleaming light that articulated the knot and compass inked on his chest, for the seawater in his eyelashes.
Maybe it was the current or a single kick that urged her closer, narrowing their distance until there was none, until her arms were around his neck.
Maybe she was delirious in the cathartic aftermath of her pain, too; this time she didn’t fight against the pressure of the tide or her own yearning.
She should have, probably.
But she was too tired to pretend, and Wes was here.
Still here.
“You stayed,” she told him.
“Yes.”
She smiled. Not for a camera. Not for an interviewer. Just for him. She pressed her mouth to his.
“Isa. . .”
His startled breath parted her lips. She nodded, their noses skimming, glittering moisture trembling between them.
Yes. So he didn’t draw back. But neither did he draw her nearer.
Instead. . . instead, he answered her pressure with equal quiet force, unhurried as the sea.
She asked for more. He gave. Her fingers twisted through the hair at his nape.
When her mouth opened, so did his. She explored the warmth of him, sighing soft with pleasure, taut with longing.
His tongue soothed the bitten curves of her lips.
Tenderly tracing her desires, he followed her into and through this moment—minutes. . . time flowing with the waves.
Always following.
Was he afraid of scaring her away?
As if anything Wes did could scare her.
She was only in danger from herself. . .
It might have been an hour later that their heels brushed sand, that the sea washed them to shore.
Wes carried Isabel to the dark bungalow.
He dried her hair, wiped salt from her skin.
He retrieved the sheets she’d kicked off the mattress and tucked her into them, her soaked silk slip discarded, her body boneless in a threadbare cotton shirt taken from a duffel bag.
His.
“Sleep,” he murmured.
“Stay,” she said.
For now.
He didn’t argue. As he settled on the far side of the mattress, his fingers stroked once through her hair drying on the pillow between them. He repeated, “Sleep.”
“Yes.”
She did.
Sunlight pierced the fog and the beach house’s stained-glass windows to jab his eyelids. Grimacing, Wes attempted to roll away from that sharp glint, to burrow into the couch cushions and his afghan, back into sleep—only to find himself immobilized where he lay, anchored in place.
“Uh?”
He squinted down his nose at the weight splayed across his chest and hips.
Had Thalassa escaped her tank? Divers had drowned when wild octopuses latched onto their snorkel masks and accidentally suffocated the humans with their curiosity.
Maybe she’s bored with shrimp, and that’s why she’s not eating much? He blinked, trying to focus.
The pressure shifted. “Mmm. . .”
He wasn’t on the couch. This wasn’t an octopus on his chest, either.
Isabel.
Plastered over him like an exhausted, unconscious sea star, she dug her elbow into his ribs when she extracted her squashed nose from his neck, huffing to breathe more easily through a snarl of hair caught in her relaxed, half-open mouth.
Her cheek came to rest on his shoulder. Wes exhaled a silent grunt of pain and surprise.
But he willed himself to remain motionless beneath her.
Cold, cold, think about cold things like Greenland sharks—penguins—icebergs.
Very cold things. At least he was wearing his boxers, and she was asleep. Drooling, which tickled.
But: don’t move.
Except his watch would inevitably buzz soon.
Isabel would wake up. They’d get out of bed, separating.
They had to. Their octopus would be restless, and Monterey Bay’s creatures in both the water and the lab waited for no one.
He couldn’t stop it. His watch, or Isabel, or the octopus.
But just for this minute, though, and then the next one.
. . he still didn’t shift under her body.
He breathed with her and thought of polar plunges to stifle the burn in his groin, breathed through this moment of trust after so many days of her prickly reserve, of not understanding where he’d gone wrong.
She’d probably retreat back into her protective, cerebral shell as soon as she woke, her heavy softness coiled away, defensive and fascinating and untouchable again.
But maybe, just maybe—not after last night?
Stay. . .
Maybe.
He couldn’t know, so he waited for Isabel to show him, continued to exhale with the weight of her sleep and her calm.
And that sweet agony of anticipation didn’t last nearly long enough.
A few minutes later, her sleep-stuck eyelids flickered.
She spat out her hair. She moaned and raised a hand to her neck.
When she massaged a crick there, she drove her other elbow into his stomach for balance.
He tried not to grunt. But she’d caught him in the middle of an inhale.
“—ooof.”
Instantly she tensed. She blinked. Her chin shot off his salivadamp shoulder. She blinked a second time, unfocused. Then:
“I. . . I’m sorry, that’s—” Wincing, flushing, Isabel dabbed at the wet patch on his skin.
He just smiled at her. She hadn’t sprung away with sharp spines and averted eyes. “Morning, Buttercup.”
He wasn’t sorry at all. Hopefully, she actually wasn’t, either.
“M. . . morning.” A dimple trembled beside her mouth as she wiped her cheek. “Um, what time is it?”
His watch buzzed before he could prevaricate.
So Isabel took her turn in the shower; he watched her inch off the mattress, sidling into the bathroom while modestly stretching down his borrowed shirt.
Not that she needed to: it dwarfed her, the sleeves dropping off her shoulders almost to her elbows, the hem grazing her thighs.
But with the sun beaming tantalizing curves and shadows through that old, thinning cotton: shoulder blades, the knobs of her spine, a dart of illumination between her legs—
Groaning, he flipped onto his stomach until the bathroom door closed.
Cold: the temperature of Antarctic bottom water.
Only after he’d breathed down his stubborn heart rate did he pad out to check on the octopus, belt his terrycloth robe over his boxers, and start breakfast. When they swapped spots ten minutes later, with Isabel brewing tea and buttering toast, Wes scrubbing off salt and sleep and the memory of her thighs tangled with his under a chilly deluge, he emerged into the bedroom to find the mattress immaculate and his loaned shirt folded on the couch outside.
He shook his head and tossed it back toward the bed.
“Keep it.”