15. Adrian
Adrian
H e couldn’t read her. Why was she so willing to accompany them this morning, so early and for such an unpleasant chore? Despite her willingness, she fidgeted with her bag, her eyebrows knitted together as her eyes scanned the dock.
“Maybe you can distract Auggie, and I can fix the boat with a charm,” she said with a nervous laugh.
Seth stopped in his tracks. “Could you really do that?” He narrowed his eyes and cocked his head skeptically.
“Well…” she trailed off with a shrug of her shoulder. “I have a spell for fixing broken glass. I have one for ripped paper. Come to think of it, I don’t have one for mending splintered wood or metal. I’m not very skilled with magic, so I try not to use it at all, to be honest.” With a resigned sigh, she fiddled with her bracelet. Her eyes darted to Adrian for a fleeting moment. “I guess we’re going to have to fix it the old-fashioned way.”
We . She really intended to fix this boat with them.
Clearly, she was a more patient and forgiving person than he was. He wondered if her scientific background gave her a strange desire to do something that, by his measure, was one of the most tedious and back-breaking tasks imaginable. He was dreading this with every fiber of his being, mostly because of the owner of the busted boat. Auggie had given him the creeps ever since he was a little boy.
Adrian had known that he had an innate power over the water from a very young age. It was embedded into his blood. He could swim before he could speak. Before he could even formulate words, he learned how to ask the water for what he needed. Will you hold me up? Will you swell around my feet? Will you come together and fall from the sky?
He could make a wave splash his mother and father when they gave him a bath. One early morning, his father had brought him to the boat. Seth was learning how to tie rope to the cleat, and Adrian was along for the ride, only six or seven years old.
He had been staring absent-mindedly at the water, swirling a stick around with the power of his magic. It was second nature, like twirling a pencil around your finger or tapping your foot. He had sleepily watched the driftwood trace patterns in the water, but when he had looked up, he saw Auggie, aged even all those years ago.
The old man had been staring at him, stone straight, and stuck to the deck like a grizzled statue. Adrian had been caught in the act. He was doing something he was not supposed to do—using his magic out in the open. The old man had pursed his lips and whistled. Sailors were superstitious, probably more than most. Some had luck for the sea—well, many called it luck, but others called it magic.
Water Elementals were part of the folklore, like mermaids or giant squid. All fishermen heard tales of that one family or sailor that seemed to have an uncanny knack, having a way with the water that was more than what was “natural.”
He had seen a flash of realization in Auggie’s eye that day, but he never told his father or Seth what had happened. From that moment on, Auggie seemed to watch them more carefully. It was as if he were waiting for a moment to reveal them for what they were. His family was respected. Hannah’s farm employed more people than any business in town. He couldn’t blame Auggie, though, for being weary and bitter toward them. They had an unfair advantage, and if anyone found out they used that advantage in an already competitive market, it would jeopardize everything.
Lobster is money, and money is easier to come by when you can feel the water speaking to you. At least it used to be.
The old man sat on the stern of a boat ahead, perched on an overturned milk crate.
Seth marched up to Auggie and shook his hand firmly, setting his own toolbox down next to a puddle of glossy liquid on the dock. Adrian hung back a few paces, studying Cori’s face despite himself. She stilled when she saw the toolbox, and for a fleeting moment, her eyes had darkened before golden embers of light surged back into them.
“Hey—” She broke the tense silence, and Adrian jumped at her voice. “Do you think we’ll need to pull the boat onto the lift?” She nodded at the winch and line, connected to the bow.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, scrutinizing the damage. “Most of the broken planks are above the waterline.”
“Well, I can move this old toolbox out of the way, just in case.” She bent down, throwing him a forced smile.
“That’s heavy. Let me get it,” he offered.
They grabbed for the handle simultaneously, and he found his hand clasped over hers, sending a jolt of electric energy up his arm.
Her eyes widened as her hand gripped tighter around the handle. “It’s nothing,” she said briskly as she yanked the toolbox away from him.
As she grappled with the full weight of the box, it dropped to the ground, spilling its contents. Cori’s face paled when a tattered extension cord fell to her feet.
“Well, that looks dangerous,” she said, her voice in a slightly higher register. “I have a new one up in the office. I’ll just grab it.” She locked eyes with him for a moment, before running briskly toward the building like a scared mouse, the cord clenched in her fist.
As he stood alone on the dock, he inspected the pool of gasoline on the decking, gleaming with iridescent mischief under the stern. He bit back the feeling of suspicion that rose within him, but he couldn’t shake the memory of Cori’s eerie behavior from the night before.
They set out on the task at hand, methodically removing the boards from the damaged portion of the boat. Cori returned shortly, gaining a few gruff nods of thanks from Auggie as she presented him with a new extension cord.
It wasn’t long before the men were dripping in sweat over the miter saw, Cori handing them new boards from the dock that she had carefully measured up against the damaged ones. Adrian pulled his polo shirt off as the sun blared down on them, and he couldn’t help but notice Cori’s cheeks flush as she diverted her eyes away.
Something primal flared inside him at her response, but he pushed it aside.
She watched and worked alongside them with bright-eyed attention, asking how they were intending to overlap the boards to assure weatherproofing. She made a clever suggestion about the water seal that made Auggie raise his eyebrows. The old man smiled at her, growling out an approval.
After they applied the first coat of paint, Cori grabbed her bag. “Well, I should probably take off and get some work done,” she blurted.
“I thought my brother had promised to show you how to steer the sterndrive,” Seth returned. Adrian glared at him, but his brother flashed him an impish smile.
“Oh, right. I’ll gather my stuff, then,” she said. Another flush rose on her cheeks as she left them to retrieve the keys for Anne’s boat. Auggie whistled softly into the air as he watched her walk toward the office.
“Not too often you meet someone who looks like that who has half a brain for boat building,” the old man chuckled.
Adrian felt his hand clench on the saw, his knuckles whitening with tension.
“Well, she’s a scientist,” he ground out. “It’s not a shock that she knows how to do something as simple as nailing boards together.”
Seth cleared his throat as Auggie chuckled some more, handing Seth a beer from his faded cooler.
Adrian watched Seth plug the new extension cord into the outlet and head toward the boat. Auggie sat down on the milk crate and cracked open the beer, one foot in the pool of gasoline. The cord dragged into the pool as Seth trailed it back to the boat. As it powered on, a sense of dread rose in Adrian’s chest, but his brother worked on. Unfazed and unharmed.
As Auggie and Seth worked on, Adrian stared at them, a chill sweeping over his skin. If Seth had used Auggie’s extension cord, they may have set a fire. An electrical fire. Cori’s hunch and her strange obsession with the extension cord didn’t make any sense at all. Unless it wasn’t a hunch. Unless it was more than that.
He patted himself dry with a towel and pulled the pale blue cotton polo back over his head as he made his way along the dock toward Anne’s boat.
Cori was there, head bent over her tackle box, assembling one of the electronic trackers Anne used. He and his family helped Anne frequently. It took only moments for Adrian to guide the tracker to just the right depth in the water.
It looked as though Cori had taken the gadget apart and put it back together again. Her laptop was open to a spreadsheet, as she cross-referenced a map of the harbor. The midday sun was high in the sky, and Cori’s sweatshirt was tied around her waist, her hair cascading over her sun-kissed shoulders as she bent over her work.
She was so distracted she didn’t notice his approach. She startled, a nervous smile on her lips. “Fixing the boat is taking a little longer than Seth expected?”
“He underestimated how much damage his massive skull could inflict.” He shrugged, rolling his eyes. The air around him was lighter, energized even, at the prospect of getting out on the water, but something inside him felt heavy.
She was hiding something.
“The sterndrive doesn’t seem too different now that I am looking at it up close,” she said. “I know the in-drive is more contained, but this shouldn’t be too difficult to get a hang of, right?”
He approached the tiny boat and stepped onto the deck of the vessel with heavy boots. “You turn it the same way.” He showed her, steadying the gears as he held the key in the ignition. The motor sputtered to life beneath their feet, the water surging around them. “Why don’t we pull out of the harbor?” he suggested. The breeze kicked up around them as the tiny yet powerful boat crept through the water.
She carefully steered the boat though the maze of docked and moored vessels, gauging the response between the steering column and the speed of the motor.
He scrutinized the way her fingers easily grazed the switch, knowing just when to flip the gear. “You know exactly how to sail a sterndrive, don’t you?”
Her eyes flared with golden flecks of light as a guilty smile played at her lips. “No. I’ve always had a natural way with boats, I guess.”
He swallowed a lump in his throat. Another lie .
The coast snaked upward to the east just north of town as he pointed out landmarks that he liked to use to guide his boat home.
“You don’t have an onboard GPS?” she asked him, as she tracked her position on the screen.
“We’ve never really needed one,” he said with a shrug. Other teams had used them, but the more experienced families, especially the ones who had been fishing off the coast of Farley for generations, usually relied on the tried and true landmarks. The lighthouse to the north, the markers on the marina at the Farley Center, and the rocky island to the south made an almost perfect equilateral triangle.
“What’s on the island?” she asked. Goose bumps dotted her bare arms as she pulled her sweatshirt up around her shoulders, the crisp wind intensifying the farther offshore they traveled.
“Mostly brush, one small cave, a few abandoned fishing cabins at the cove, and rock on the periphery,” he explained. “Seth and I go out there every once in a while to camp, but it’s too windy most of the year. We don’t go as much as we used to.”
He smiled to himself at the memories of camping with his brother as teenagers and the times they had stolen beers from his dad’s cooler.
“You can only dock on the north side, the rest of the island has too steep of an embankment. It only takes about twenty minutes to hike it, end to end.” He saw her shiver as her gaze swept over the desolate island. “Mainers call it Cetus Island,” he continued. At this, her gaze shifted to his face, amusement playing on her lips. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing’s funny,” she said, biting her lip. “That’s just an interesting name for an island, that’s all.” She pursed her lips together, crossing her arms, a laugh breaking free.
“The island’s shaped like a whale if you look on the map.” He spread the map out, smoothing the corners. “It’s named for the constellation of Cetus, the sea monster. Have you heard of it?” Now he was laughing, and he didn’t know why. Nothing about the island, or its name, had seemed amusing to him before.
She smiled, scrunching her nose as though she had told herself a secret joke. “I’ve heard of it.”
“Damn it,” he thought. She was adorable.
The late afternoon light dipped over the coast, the warm rays reflecting in sharp angles over the tops of the towering evergreens onshore as they swayed. The motor quieted as they bobbed on the water.
Despite the water growing colder underneath, every droplet around them drank in the golden warmth from the sun, swelling with heat and magic.
The light glinted off the golden bracelet around her wrist, and before he could stop himself, he reached for it, turning the little sun over in his fingers.
Her hand stilled, but she didn’t move away.
He traced a slow line toward the moon and the star that circled her hand, stopping over the delicate skin of her wrist, memorizing the lines of her palm as he turned her hand over on his own.
“You said the bracelet was blessed with a charm for luck?” he asked.
She nodded, her lips parting as his fingers grazed her wrist. The wind picked up, tossing a wavy strand of hair over her eyes.
He lifted his other hand automatically to brush away the strand of windswept hair, and he ran his fingers softly through it as he tucked it behind her ear. The boat was almost still now, as he traced the line of her jaw. She didn’t move. Didn’t pull away.
He wanted to etch into his brain the way her face looked in the golden light. Even though he had seen her for the first time only yesterday, he felt like he had spent a lifetime looking at that face. Every curve seemed familiar, as if it was part of a dream he had only just now remembered.
The electric energy within him surged to life as the boat swelled underneath them, the water rising and bending to his will. She leaned forward, the shift under the boat narrowing the distance between them, as the golden embers in her eyes flared to life.