Chapter 19 #2
“Better than good,” he contradicted her, and she snorted. He kissed her again and rummaged for a pair of glasses while she popped the cork. “But in the meantime, where are we off to today?”
“Hmm.” She clinked their fizzing flutes, sipped. Her tongue moved toward a single gleaming drop on her lip. “Well. . .”
Brrrriiinng!
This time, it was Wes’s phone that interrupted them:
Incoming Call: Monterey County Courthouse
He cursed, but couldn’t ignore it. “Hello?”
“Am I speaking with Wes Monaghan?”
“Guilty.” If he couldn’t send the clerk to voicemail, though, he could certainly keep kissing Isabel. He caught her champagne droplet on his own tongue.
“Mr. Monaghan, you have an appointment scheduled on September twenty-sixth with Judge Cruz of the Monterey County Superior Court to legalize a marriage between yourself and one Isabel Wright. However, you requested to be put on a standby list in the event of an earlier appointment becoming available. I’m pleased to inform you that Judge Cruz has had a cancellation this morning.
If you can submit all necessary documents to the county clerk by nine-thirty today, we can issue your marriage license and Judge Cruz will be available to officiate at ten o’clock. ”
Ten?
The bungalow’s clocktopus pointed to just after eight.
A flight to San Jose from his parents’ house outside Detroit took five hours, minimum. Adrian had landed at LaGuardia yesterday. Erin was currently in the air en route to Cape Canaveral. . .
But he just lifted an eyebrow at his fiancée.
Okay, her fingers circled. Yes.
“Ten o’clock is great.”
“Confirmed.”
Call Ended
“Right,” he resumed to Isabel, silencing and pocketing his phone against further interruptions, smiling so widely that he could taste the sunshine.
He stroked a finger over her ear to tuck back her wild and silky hair, then wandered down her jaw, his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth.
“We have two hours until we’re due at the courthouse.
You had something else you wanted to do today, didn’t you? ”
“Yes.” She turned her own smile into his hand. “I want. . .”
“. . . to swim.” Isabel returned her champagne glass to the counter. “I want to go swimming in the bay with you. I want to take our octopus with us.”
“Oh.” Wes’s fingers quieted on her cheek. He raised an eyebrow. “You want to. . .”
“She’s dying. And—this won’t fix anything,” she admitted.
She burrowed deeper into his palm to still the sudden sadness shivering in her lips.
“But it’s what I can offer her. Wes, I don’t want her to fade away in a tank.
I want her to experience the ocean again, even if it’s only this one last time. ”
Slowly, he nodded.
So they discarded denim and cotton for water-resistant nylon.
Wes removed the aquarium’s weights and Isabel scooped their pale little creature out of the halimeda and coral, away from discarded shells and toys, into her hands.
A wet dribble marked her passage to the door, under the driftwood gate with its crystals chiming in the cool sea air, across Tide Avenue to the stony, sloping sand.
A salt crust on the rims of the tide pools itched her bare feet. Her eyes itched, too.
She wouldn’t cry yet.
This is good. This is right.
Smiling against her tears and the sun, she waded into the surf.
She stepped over the bubbles of clams breathing beneath the silt, pushed through freezing foam as the ocean gushed up past her knees.
When her skin prickled and her lungs clenched with animalistic protest, she didn’t stop.
She shuffled farther, deeper. Wes exhaled a profane yelp (“Jesus with jalapenos!”) beside her as the currents struck his stomach—and then the kelp-slick waves were swallowing her thighs, her hips, her ribs.
She kicked off the substrate. Fronds skimmed her ankles.
She extended her arms toward the horizon.
And in her hands?
In her cradling palms, with the sea lapping through her fingers—brine, plankton, prey, danger, life—the octopus stirred.
Sadly faded, a shell of herself when she’d never had a shell’s protection to begin with, instinct nevertheless raised a shudder of papillae across the two-spot’s white, slack skin.
A quiver darted through her hydrostatic muscles.
Her fourth arm flexed. The dark bar of a pupil appeared in one cloudy eye.
Flash—a scintilla of electric blue. Then a flush of opalescent pink.
Instinct, or joy. Suction kissed Isabel’s knuckles, exploring her and the ocean waves.
Another flex came, another blush of excitement.
Recognition.
“Wes, look, she’s. . .”
But of course—even now and despite her condition, their octopus (Thalassa, mercurial goddess of the sea) gave them no warning.
One moment the mischievous creature was pliable and rosy in her hands, basking under their wonder within the swell of the kelp forest, beneath the wide, radiant sky. The next?
A spout of water jetted up Isabel’s nose.
“Gah—”
“Argh!”
A second blast from her siphon caught Wes squarely in the mouth.
It choked off his awe with a gurgle—and that propulsion also swept the two-spot out of Isabel’s hold.
Impish Thalassa drifted just beyond their reach: savoring the mild warmth of sunlight on her skin, pivoting in the tide with lucent grace, blowing an impenitent bubble.
She stayed near them while they snorted and sputtered, however, while they righted themselves in the soft swells with forage fish flitting between their legs, while they undulated through octopus time in the water.
Her dominant eye remained turned on them as her arms tasted and curled, sampling her new environment, her homecoming.
. . and when she finally sank down into the embrace of the kelp to anchor herself within the fronds and stipes, her argent irises closing, a last bubble rising to the surface—despite the burn in her nose and under her eyelids, somehow Isabel could still smile.
It’s all right.
She anchored her own body to Wes and let the tears come.
This is right.
And it was. . .
“Good?” he murmured sometime later against her wet hair, when the tide had drawn them out of the kelp forest, back toward the beach and the Monterey Courthouse. Sand shimmered over their feet. His mouth warmed the cold waves and sweetened their salt.
Good? It really, truly was.
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, because she—Thalassa. . . I’m glad we could give her a choice. To stay or return to the sea. I’m glad that she got to choose. Like we did.”
“Like we had a choice about. . . us?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe you had a choice, Buttercup.” The corner of his mouth twitched into a sudden dimple.
Sunlight sparked off his earring and the glimmering droplets in his eyelashes.
He shook his head, showering them with more iridescent seawater.
“If I’m being honest, I don’t think I ever had a choice.
Or a chance. Right from the start, from that very first night, when you were more interested in a fish tank than a naked stranger in your beach house, I knew—”
Knowing Wes Monaghan, she had a good idea of how his sentence would end.
She couldn’t resist the bait, though. She didn’t want to. “Knew what?”
His smile was unrepentant and beautiful. “That I was a sucker for you.”