Page 51 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I look down at her.

“That does improve it.”

She settles against my side, damp and shivering, and I tuck my arm around her.

Up the hill behind us, a deep mechanical rumble rolls through the dark.

The AETHER dome begins to turn.

I look toward it. Ten years of work, thousands of hours, hundreds of people, all of it finally reaching this moment. In a few minutes, the telescope will open to the sky for the first time.

Neri’s hand slips into mine.

I squeeze it.

I want this. The telescope. The work. Her. Whatever comes after tonight, whatever we have to untangle when we go home, I want all of it.

First light, everywhere I look.

Chapter 19

Neri

I regret nothing.

Everything is the same and yet, nothing is. Same granite island. Same cold ocean on every side. Same man. Except this time I chose to stay, and every morning I wake up in the visitor quarters with Rafe’s arm heavy over my ribs and feel absurdly happy about it.

This evening, the sun is dropping toward the horizon when I slide out from under Rafe’s arm and reach for my bikini. We spent the better part of the last hour tangled together on his bed, and he looks thoroughly content where he’s sprawled beneath the rumpled sheets. When I start piling my hair up, he props himself on one elbow, his hair all messy and adorable, and squints at me.

“You’re vibrating,” he says. “What are you planning?”

“I’m going swimming.”

He sits up a little straighter. “Oh.”

“Witnesses are optional but welcome.” I finish tying up my hair. “Are you coming to watch, or is the famous astronomer only interested in things that happen at night?”

His grin arrives.

The water off the dock is glass-green and shockingly clear, ten feet down to pale sand and waving kelp, the lowering sun turning the surface gold. I leave my clothes folded on a piling, cross the boards in my sensible black bikini past a ferry-crew kid who suddenly finds his coil of rope fascinating, and I stand at the edge in the late-evening light with my heart going hard.

Not fear exactly. Nerves. Excitement.

I dive.

The cold hits hard and the shift comes with ease. My legs merge before I touch the bottom, teal and silver flashing through the green water, my gills opening as naturally as another breath. I turn and kick toward the surface.

Then, for the first time in five years, with people around to see me, with absolutely no reason except that I want to, I swim.

I take the length of the cove at speed with my tail throwing spray, breach like something off a nature documentary, roll, dive, thread the kelp forest with my hair streaming teal into teal, then surface directly under the dock.

The last sunlight comes down through the water in long moving blades. My scales scatter it back. I’m a light show. I’m a commotion. I’m a mermaid showing off in front of her boyfriend, visible from every window on the hillside, and for once I don’t care who sees me.

Every pass, I check the dock. Every pass, he’s there. He leans against the rail, glasses on his nose, watching me with the same open wonder he wore the first morning in the cove.

There’s nothing judging in it. He’s just happy. Happy for me.

I come out when my breathing turns fast and shallow, shift in the shallows, put on my bikini bottom and wade up the dock ladder human and streaming and grinning like a fool. He’s there with a grin that wraps me with more warmth than the fading sunlight. He also wraps me in a cozy, warm towel that feels like pure heaven.