Chapter 15 #3
Maybe she was too busy scrambling eggs to protest.
And he’d actually spotted her toothpaste perched on the bathroom sink.
They fed Thalassa after breakfast—her white-speckled arms took a single shrimp and let two sea snails fall; the octopus was apparently no more inclined to wake up than Wes had been—before cranking Baby (engine inspected, gears tweaked) into motion with a newly lusty roar for their drive to Moss Landing.
Wes swiped past an influx of messages on his phone from his siblings at a stop sign, and asked Isabel to pick between the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
Then he merged onto the highway. Misty light danced against the windshield as they headed north.
The sea breaking its frothy fingers against the beach was calm.
Much calmer than Erin and Adrian’s texts.
But he’d deal with their questions about his ringless fiancée and the fallout from yesterday’s boardwalk adventure later. At least neither of them seemed to have squealed on him to his mother yet. If they had, he would have received about a hundred calls from Lori Monaghan.
Instead: “Wish they all could be Canadian girls!” he sang out of tune, until Isabel switched over to the Beatles’ “Octopus’s Garden”. “Good choice. Maybe I’ll find it today. You never know.”
Smiling and humming along, she didn’t protest at that, either.
She even let him walk her into MORI.
“Bye,” with another little smile as she badged through the lab door.
He didn’t care if Brianne caught him grinning in the lobby like a fool.
He grabbed his stabilizing weight vest from Baby, plus his Nikon, a strobe, and a laminated sheet of species.
He shuffled out into the water in his fins.
C-old, cold! Colder than his aggressive Antarctic fantasies.
But now the chill contained a sense-memory: last night.
It ignited heat in his stomach, thighs, and cheeks while he kicked through the surf and by a raft of otters, then flipped down into the kelp.
Click: a moray eel snapped at a crab through the sunlit murk.
A sea lion swam past in a pillar of bubbles.
The chatter of migrating whales vibrated against his ears.
They were too distant for even his teleconverter to capture.
A bat ray winging through the rocky holdfasts beneath his fins wasn’t.
So: click. Its venomous stinger swept by.
When a few moon jellies drifted his way, Wes stroked out of their path.
His skin tingled with recollections of pain.
And again: heat.
Capable fingers roving over his shoulders in the shower—and then, last night: her hands in his hair, her body and her lips pressed to his, breathing in time with the undulating water, the warmth of her exhalations in his mouth.
His grin widened.
This time, smiling was a problem; the snorkel mouthpiece escaped his teeth. Water flooded his tongue, startling him into a violent coughing fit that forced him to kick for the surface. He surprised a pair of kayakers as he broke through the kelp.
“What the—”
“Nice day for it, right?” Sputtering, blowing out a spout of moisture and laughter, he waved at them, flipped up his dive mask, and tapped his watch. “Text Isabel Wright.”
Wes Monaghan (voice-to-text)
Did you steal my respirator? Because you just took my breath away.
He waited, snapping photos of an otter snacking on a green crab. Then:
Isabel Wright
You’re messaging me with jokes from your dive watch?
Wes
Yeah.
Isabel
Oh.
Isabel
MORI has a sheet of “fun” ocean facts up in the break room. It says: What has eight arms and tells the time?
Isabel, sending him jokes?
Wes
What?
Isabel
A clocktopus.
He snorted a stinging spray of seawater. “Jesus Christ.”
Grabbing his mouthpiece through a salty chuckle, he left the otter for the tourists and swam back down into the kelp.
Click: a thin, balletic cormorant fishing for rock cod.
Click: two Dungeness crabs locked in a territorial battle, unaware of the slow approach of a dogfish.
Click: only a squiggle of ink remained to indicate the presence of a California two-spot octopus after it vanished into its den in the substrate, a surfperch clutched in one arm.
Thalassa had been polka-dotted with pale patches again today, hadn’t she? Had she eaten her shrimp?
He couldn’t remember, had been distracted by Isabel. . .
But a flash of silver demanded his full focus a few minutes later as he stroked through heliotropic fronds and stipes, cataloging species.
Because: another shore bait ball?
He kicked hard, streaking toward the movement, his camera raised.
Click, click, click.
Clouds of sand and beach grit billowed across his Nikon.
Pursuing the turbulence, he raced pelicans and a young sea lion through the bay’s shallow currents.
Ten feet of water. Seven. Five, barely a dozen yards offshore, visibility blurring until he had no choice but to surface or risk smacking face-first into the outlying tidal rocks.
He swiped at his mask, blowing detritus through his snorkel tube, slapping away a gull.
His lens was greasy. So was his skin. The waves were murky and the air stank.
Disgusting.
Standing in the waist-deep surf, his camera useless and the bait ball—or whatever it was—gone (no live fish now, just scales and oil, smithereens of waste), he frowned at the Private Property signs that closed off a row of defunct fishery buildings up the beach.
Was this the same spot where he’d seen a bait ball last time?
He raised his watch, planning to check his coordinates.
Before he could:
Incoming Call: Isabel Wright