Page 53 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

We still have to tell the department. People may still gossip. I may end up taking a job three thousand miles away. None of those problems disappeared because we got back together.

But we don’t have to end us before any of them happen.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay.”

I stick out my hand. “Then I think we’re agreed.”

He looks at the hand. He looks at me.

Then he takes my wrist and pulls, and I come across the space between us laughing, and the handshake becomes something with absolutely no dignity whatsoever.

The kiss starts as a joke and stops being one fast. His mouth is warm against mine, salt still on my lips, his hand sliding into my wet hair, mine fisting his shirt. The dock boards are warm under my knees and his other hand finds the bare skin at my waist under the towel. When we finally break, both breathing like swimmers, his eyes are dark and his voice is husky.

“To be continued. After.”

“After what?”

The grin goes nerdy and secretive at once, the worst combination, my favorite combination.

“After dark,” he says. “I have a thing to show you. I’ve been saving it.”

I glance toward the western horizon. The sun has almost disappeared.

“Convenient.”

“I planned that extremely well.”

“You had no idea I was going swimming.”

“Please don’t ruin this for me.”

We stay on the dock while the last strip of orange fades from the water. I pull my clothes over my still-damp skin, Rafe disappears long enough to retrieve a thermos, and then we head up the hill together.

By the time we reach the dome, the sky over Marlin has done its full unspoiled performance: no mainland glow, no moon yet, the Milky Way slung shore to shore, stars in quantities that make the word ridiculous.

The dome stands against them like a risen pearl. He badges us in through the side door, nods to the night operator, and leads me up the stairs onto the observing floor, into the huge cool curved dark that smells of new paint and cold metal.

AETHER fills the room the way a whale fills water. Quiet, enormous, alive; the dome hums somewhere in its bones.

“We’re mid-commissioning run,” he says, so quietly I almost have to lean toward him, “and the queue is mine for forty minutes.” He stops. In the dim red light his face is nine years old and forty-two at once. “I wanted the first eye on it to be yours.”

My chest goes warm. “Rafe.”

“Come on.”

The stairs to the instrument deck ring softly under our feet. The slit is open overhead, a canyon of stars in the dome’s dark curve, and the telescope moves when he commands it with a sound like a held breath, tons of glass and steel swinging smooth as water, hunting, settling, locking on.

“Saturn,” he says. “Everyone’s first should be Saturn.”

I bend to the eyepiece with my hair still stiff with salt.

And oh.

It hangs there in the black, tilted and ringed and impossibly clear. A real world, gold-brown and serene, its rings sharp around it. I’ve seen photographs my entire life. I know what Saturn looks like.

I was not prepared to see it like that.