Page 19 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I stand in the wind with my eyes going unaccountably hot.

Shelter. Walls. A roof. The sight of one human roof on this whole green rock hits with a force I didn’t expect. It’s not much, but it’s hope.

“Rafe!” I call as I turn on my heel and scramble down.

I’m down the pitch before I’ve planned the route, ankles be warned, and into the boulder pocket, where Rafe is now sitting and is looking at me with the expression of a man who just woke up on a rock.

“There’s a cottage,” I say, out of breath and bracing my hands on my knees.

I get the entire show. The blink. The refocus. The slow sunrise across the whole face, stubble and salt and all of it, and then he’s up like the boulder ejected him.

“A cottage. A cottage-cottage? Walls? Roof?”

“Yes! Southwest side, in a meadow above a sheltered cove. There’s also a real beach.” I’m talking too fast, enthusiasm is leaking out of my seams. “It looks abandoned, but maybe there are things inside we can use to make a fire.”

“Fire is good.” He’s already radiating enough delight to power a small town, and there’s a stripe of dried salt down his jaw, and his hair has entered a phase unknown to science. He’s adorable. “Neri, that’s the best news we’ve had on this island. Maybe we could even fish on that beach. Some meat would do us good.”

So we leave with our enthusiasm in our back pockets.

The blueberry pocket delivers again, two handfuls each, sharp and dusty-sweet, and Rafe holds up one berry to the light like a jeweler before eating it and pronounces this vintage “cheeky.” I laugh before I can stop myself. It gets away from me entirely, unbudgeted, and he looks so pleased about it that I don’t have the heart to feel bad.

The descent is the forest again, but it feels somehow kinder, the spruce spaced wider, the ground running in long needle-floored aisles downhill. We make real time. The sea flashes through the trees ahead in slivers of hammered silver, and the light down here is green and gold and church-quiet. I’m so excited at the idea of food and shelter that I stop taking the time to look down before placing my next footing.

Which is, of course, when the island collects its toll.

A granite step, needle-drifted, looks exactly like every other granite step I’ve handled today. I load my left foot and the needles slide on the wet stone underneath as soon as my weight presses on it. My foot goes out to the side, and my ankle does something wrong, a specific, structural, wrong-angle give. Pain shoots like a gasp inside my joint, and I’m down on the slope with the forest doing a slow roll around me and a hot wire running up the inside of my leg.

“Neri!” Rafe shouts a few feet above me.

“I’m fine.” It’s out before I’ve assessed anything, and then I touch my ankle and my body files an objection all the way through my teeth. “Okay. Revised finding. I’m not fine.”

He’s already there, kneeling, hands hovering, waiting. Waiting for permission, even now, and something about that undoes me worse than pain. I nod. His fingers work down my ankle through the sock, gentle, methodical, watching my face the whole time. When he hits the spot that makes my breath hiss he stops instantly.

“Sprain, I’d bet, but not a break, you’d be a lot louder.” His voice is calm but his face is grim and his jaw is set. “Can it take weight?”

It can, technically, in the way a grant can technically be resubmitted. Twenty percent, maybe, with a lean. He gets my arm over his shoulders, takes the rest of me against his side like it’s nothing, like I’m carry-on, and we descend the last of the slope in a slow three-legged rhythm, his hand firm at my waist, my dignity somewhere back up the hill with the pine needles.

“For the record,” I mutter, hopping, “This murder-forest has it out for me.”

He chuckles at that, but he doesn’t answer.

And then the trees end, and we’re in the meadow, wild grass to my knees, sea lavender in drifts of purple-gray, and unbelievably, roses, actual roses gone feral in tangled banks, pink-red and reckless, growing over a stone wall like the island kept a garden as a hostage all these years. The air is warm here, sheltered, humming with bees, thick with grass-smell.

And there it is.

Up close it’s small and stubborn and perfect: stone walls a foot and a half thick, low and square-shouldered, the slate roof sagging in one corner but holding, two deep-set windows dark as patient eyes, a weathered door still on its hinges. A keeper’s cottage with nobody left to keep anything, standing in its meadow, waiting.

We stop at the threshold, his arm around me, my arm over him, both of us wrecked and salt-crusted and breathing hard. The door is right there, one push away, and neither of us pushes it yet.

“Home sweet home?” he says.

The word should not fit anywhere on this rock. It goes in like a key.

“Open it before I say something optimistic,” I tell him.

And he does.

Chapter 10