Page 88 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

“Jory,” he asked, needing an answer and fearing on all the same.

“Hmmm?” she hummed against the side of his neck.

“What were you doing by the water the night I… the night you… the?—”

“The night you thought you killed me?”

He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. “Aye.”

She didn’t answer right away, but she didn’t pull away either. If anything, she pressed closer, molding her chest against his.

“I was waiting for my father.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah,” Jory breathed. “To ask for his help.”

“What did you need him to do? To help?”

She sighed.

“I didn’t need his help as much as I needed a favor.”

He waited. Maybe she would elaborate.Please, he thought.I want to know. Why were you down on the beach at midnight? Why were ye nae behind a barred door in the house? Why were ye nae safe?

“Jory?”

Another sigh. “It doesn’t really matter now, I suppose.”

28

Jory clung to him, feeling the hard lines of his body beneath the neoprene. She wanted to tell him everything. How she’d planned to ask her father to make him immortal, to make him like her.

But hewasimmortal now. Without her father. Without her.

She didn’t have an answer anymore. She didn’t have an easy path. She didn’t have an easy anything. Not really. Except for this, holding him, being held by him, feeling the strength of his body surrounding her,keepingher. That was the easiest thing in the world.

But it always had been, hadn’t it?

She had shivered, more from feelings than the cold, but he had insisted they go back, removing the tether from her ankle and strapping it to his own, towing her board behind them as he paddled them to shore. He’d been quiet. Not sullen. Not angry. Just… quiet.

But that wasn’t unlike him either, she was remembering. Sometimes he couldn’t stop talking, his energy nearly like Esther’s in its vibrance and vigor. He’d talk while he worked. He’d talk while they fucked. He even talked in his sleep sometimes. And other times, he was quiet. Contemplative. As if he was trying to figure out how everything worked, to take it apart in his mind so he would know how to put it back together.

She could see him now, taking their situation apart bolt by bolt, trying to figure out how to fix it, how to keep her. How to convinceherto keephim.

He was quiet as they strapped the boards to the top of his SUV. It was only when she was peeling her wetsuit down her body that he finally spoke again.

“Is it like this?”

The question confused her, so out of context.

“Is what like this?”

“Your skin. When you… shift? Is that the word? Is it like peeling one of these off or putting it on?”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s not. It’s…”

Whatwasit like? She’d never had to describe it for anyone. And it had been so long since she’d done it. She shivered with the longing for that feeling, of her skins melding together, of sliding beneath the waves and belonging there.