14. Carol

14

Carol

Daylight seemed to last longer than it should. The afternoon brought a biting wind, and then a veil of cloud that made everything gray and bright until night sank in with a suddenness that reminded her how isolated they were. The sun was gone, then the last glow of dusk, and outside their little circle of firelight there was nothing but the dark.

It took her breath away. She'd lived in NYC most of her adult life, and of course the city was never dark, but even when she was a kid, out on the boat with her family, the nights hadn't been like this. Here there were no distant signal lights from other boats, or blinking buoys out to sea. No dusty haze of a far-off coastal town or docks.Just their little firelight, and beyond it, the cloud-black night. The air was still chilly, with a constant salt wind, but the smell of woodsmoke and food cooking on the embers turned isolation into cozy comfort.

There were so many things they should have talked about—important, life-changing things—but without speaking a word about it, they both seemed to come to a silent agreement not to talk about any of them. At least, she assumed that was what was happening.

Instead, they talked about the sea.

Moss's voice thrummed, somehow in tune with the waves hushing on the beach. "You were saying you grew up near the ocean, too?"

"My dad worked on a fishing boat most of my childhood. He and a few of my brothers run charters now."

"Sounds like a good job for a family of shark shifters."

Carol laughed. "If they can't find anything exciting for the client's trophy wall, they can at least give them a cut-rate Jaws experience."

"Cut-rate because…?"

"No way my dad would actually let them bite a hole in his boat."

Moss chuckled, and for some goddamn reason, the fact that they were bonding over both their families being so connected to the ocean made her add, "Not that I spend much time near the sea these days."

"No?"

"I—" She licked suddenly dry lips, stalling. What was she going to say? Why had she even mentioned it? "You know. Work, and… everything."

"Life gets in the way?"

"Sure."

How did she know he was looking at her, even without using any of her shifter senses? She grabbed a stick and poked at the fire until he looked away.

Sure. Life gets in the way. You grow up knowing that even though the water is your element, it's a dangerous one.

It just doesn't prepare you for someone to use it as a weapon against you.

Unthinking, she brushed her fingers along the corner of her eye, where the texture of her skin changed so subtly from human to something else.

And Moss was watching her again.

"Maybe spending more time in it would help?" he suggested.

"Help how?" She waved a hand to stop him from answering. She already had her own answer. Help remind yourself that the ocean isn't out to get you, any more than the air is. It's just a place. A place you should belong.

Instead of feeling like you belong nowhere.

"Whenever my head feels like it's in a thousand places, swimming in the ocean always helps. Helped. Helps." There it was again—that strange shadow, half grief, half guilt. "Why not give it a go now?"

She swallowed back a sigh. She had so many excuses for why she'd avoided the ocean since her shark emerged.

And now, one very good reason to go swimming in it.

Two very good reasons. Those blazing distant stars in Maggie's hoard. Lance and Keeley. If she could swim far enough to find them… "You're right."

Even if what she really wanted was to stay here with Moss and eat smoky hot fish and mussels with him in their cave. Guilt plucked at her. She should want to do everything she could to get them all somewhere safe.

Not stay here, away from the real world.

Moss smiled. *Now that the little dragon's asleep. Go out and—*

"Preee eep? Eep? Eep?" Maggie was suddenly, startlingly awake. Moss made an incredulous noise.

"I didn't even mention her out loud!"

"EEP?"

"But you did stop talking. That's suspicious. Besides, Maggie knows that we're always talking about her. What else would we be talking about, if not the most adorable, shiniest, most fire-breathing baby dragon in the world?" Carol grinned at his rueful expression and the suspicion gathering on Maggie's scaly snout as it wrinkled. She booped Maggie on the tip of her snout. "I thought you were going to sleep?"

Moss had sacrificed his shirt as a nest for the little dragon. She'd curled up on it as though his only shirt was the least he could sacrifice for a noble and very shiny creature like herself, and her golden eyelids had started to close.

They were very open now. And now that Maggie had everyone's full attention, she turned her eyes to the fire, casting a woebegone expression at the kelp bags smoldering among the logs.

"You didn't want to miss your second dinner, huh?" Carol wrinkled her nose in amusement. "You're not full up after eating all day?"

"Prrrp!"

Maggie lay as flat as it was possible for her to lie with a round tummy full of shellfish and crooned piteously. She'd stuffed herself with shellfish straight from the sea all afternoon, but Carol got the distinct impression she could easily find a second stomach—or a third, or a fourth—for the delicious smells of cooked food wafting up from the embers.

She needed to get in the water. But after the way Maggie had reacted to her swimming earlier, she couldn't do it while the little dragon was still awake. Carol met Moss's eyes across the flickering fire. "Is there anything we can do to save this poor, starving dragon's life?"

He grinned. "One way to find out."

Moss plucked the kelp bags from the embers. Firelight danced on the pale scars on his hands, but not as nimbly as his fingers danced on the smoldering-hot seaweed. He'd harvested the bull kelp earlier, while Carol and Maggie watched from the beach. Carol curious, Maggie suspicious. The kelp leaves were thick and rubbery, and Moss showed her how to separate the two edges, pushing her hand into the leaf to create a pocket. He'd stuffed them with shellfish, stuck long sticks through the open end to hold them shut, and nestled them in the embers to cook.

And now… Carol narrowed her eyes. Moss's movements were as practiced and easy as ever, but there was something different. A tightness in his shoulders. A watchfulness in his eyes.

Was he nervous?

"It smells good," she said, and some of the tension around his eyes eased. Holy shit. He was nervous.

The kelp had been a sallow green when it went into the fire; now the bags were dark and crisped, almost falling apart. Moss tsked as one of them broke open, dripping salt-smelling juices. He handled the next one more carefully, reserving the liquid in one corner of the bag and passing it to Carol.

"I'm not even going to try to reduce that into anything like a sauce, and we don't have any bread to mop it up with, but… have a try?"

There was no trace of anxiety in his voice. It was all in the corners of his eyes and the half-inch his shoulders went up. Tiny clues she never would have noticed if she hadn't spent the whole day staring at him every time she thought he wasn't looking.

She lifted the charred seaweed to her lips. It smelled like smoke and sweet, fresh shellfish and the ocean. The first sip almost burned her tongue, and it was everything she'd loved about the ocean and let herself lose since that night she first found her inner shark.

Tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked and winced away from them, and Moss's voice was a clatter of regret. Her eyes were still squeezed shut as she tried to wave his apologies away.

"Sorry, I should have said, it'll be hot—"

"It's not that. It's delicious. I mean—it was hot." She blinked again, testing, and her eyes cleared without any tears falling. "I knew it was going to be hot. I just watched you pull it out of the fire!"

"But you're—"

She sniffed and surreptitiously wiped her nose. Not that she could be particularly surreptitious, with Moss looking right at her. It probably made her next words—"I'm fine"—sound like a lie.

But they weren't.

"Really," she said. "It's great. It—reminded me how much I miss this sort of thing."

"Good, but good in a way that hurts?"

She hesitated. "…Yeah. Here. It's probably cooled down enough now."

He tried it. "You know, I might not have done such a bad job with this meal after all." She must have made some sort of noise—a snort of laughter, not well enough covered up—because his eyes flicked to hers, dancing with amusement. "What do you reckon? Should we risk the shellfish?"

"Pree EE!"

It was the best meal of Carol's life.

The kelp bags gave the shellfish a smoky tang that made her mouth water. Mussels, oysters, clams—bite-sized pieces of the sea, briny and chewy and delicious. They'd held some oysters aside because they were always better raw, Moss said, and Carol had to agree, especially when eaten with a mouthful of smoky juices from the kelp bags.

Maggie gorged herself until she fell asleep again from sheer fullness. Carol flip-flopped between following her lead and feeling self-conscious about eating so much in front of someone else. There was only so much she could do to hide what quick work her teeth made of the tender shellfish.

Then she remembered how nervous Moss had been, offering her the food he'd made, and it seemed wrong not to stuff her face.

Later, with the rubbish buried and the fire burning high again, it would have been a good chance to plan what they were going to do next. Instead—this was turning into a habit—Carol was watching Moss.

And he watched her, his eyes hooded.

"Too late for a swim?" he asked.

It wasn't the breeze that made her shiver. He was right. Maggie was asleep, so now was the perfect time to do what she'd intended earlier and explore the oceans around their little island.

But that would ruin this moment. And this moment was almost perfect. She just had to not touch it, or think about it too hard.

She licked her lips. "Maybe tomorrow?"

The fire crackled. The ocean sighed. It was the busy silence of a world that held only them, and she wanted to hold on to it the same way Maggie wanted to steal a shard of sunlight.

"You look like you're a thousand miles away." Moss's voice whispered over her thoughts like the waves on the sand.

"I'm right here." What did he see that made him want to keep looking at her like that? Maybe the firelight was being kind. Flickering over her monstrous parts, giving an illusion of what she would look like as a normal person. "And being here doesn't feel like a disaster anymore. We're alive. So are Lance and Keeley, and if they're okay, the rest of my team probably are as well. They'll find us. We'll be okay."

"You don't mind that I haven't ravished you?"

Her entire body turned to fire.

"Oh, well, y-you know," she stammered. "Being out here—stuck on an island, babysitting a dragon, picking bits of seaweed out from our toes…"

Probably any other shifter's inner animal would have forcibly transformed at this point so their human stopped talking, but Carol's shark was as MIA as ever, and her mind was completely empty except for her own brain helplessly screaming at her to shut up.

Usually her trouble was tripping over her words! Where was her stutter now, when she might really need it?

"I, er, um," she said, panicked and hoping to jump-start her speech impediment by example, "I mean, it's not exactly the height of romance, is it?"

He sat back, easing himself into a comfortable position against the sloped wall of the cave. Surely it was a total coincidence that the position showed off his bare chest in all its magnificence? "So it's the height of romance you need? Good to know. What would that involve, exactly?"

Any remaining thoughts erupted into static.

"What do you think?" she managed to say.

"Hmm. Height. I'm thinking… Ferris wheel?"

"You're going to take me to a fairground? Isn't that a bit high-school movie cliché?" This whole thing was so ridiculous, a bubble of laughter rose in her throat. Wait. Oh no. Was it ridiculous? Was he being serious? Was he… making a joke but a serious one?

Was he flirting ?

Moss leaned forward. The bubble of laughter evaporated.

"Or a mountaintop. A snowy summit so high you look down and see clouds beneath you. And I'll prepare the best meal you ever had. Something perfectly suited to snow, and air that tastes like the sky. And you."

She didn't say anything. She couldn't. She was trapped in the spell of his words, the firelight spilling over his body, and the vision he was weaving.

Something dark flashed behind his eyes, and he looked away. "Course, that's for further down the track. Don't want to start too big and have nowhere to go, you know?"

"Ferris wheel it is."

"It could break when we're at the top, and I'll have to offer you my jacket to keep warm." He looked down at himself and sighed. "That's what I got wrong here. Didn't even bring a jacket on our weekend away on the deserted island. No wonder things have gone upside down."

"I should be offering you my sweater," she said absently, letting the words wander out of their own accord while she gazed at him.

"Hmm?"

"Aren't you cold?"

"Do I look cold?"

That sounded like an invitation to look. So she did. Not that she'd really… stopped looking… at any point, but this was deliberate looking. More… looky.

Wow, she thought, internally rolling her eyes. This IS just like a first date. But who needs to drink too much to feel loopy when you can just be sleep-deprived and overwhelmed instead?

"Well?" Moss sounded smug. Shoot. How long had she been staring at him? "Do I look cold?"

God dammit, he looked smug, too.

"I can't tell from here," she said. The words melted off her tongue like chocolate. "I'll have to come closer."

The fire crackled softly as she walked around it.

Moss tipped his head up invitingly. "Is that close enough?"

"Almost." She sat down, her legs melting beneath her. She'd never been this graceful in her life.

"Now?" Moss's voice was low, the murmur of waves on the shore.

She leaned closer. "Maybe."

He smelled like something she had no name for; something distant and mysterious, masculine and tantalizing. His breathing was slow, but the thunder of his heartbeat—he was pretending. His body was responding to her closeness the same way hers was to his. Quickened pulse. Heat coursing over his skin.

But what about his mind? His heart? Not the heart she could sense thumping away, his life like a silver ghost to her extrasensory powers, but his feelings.

She searched his eyes. Every time she looked at them, she found something new. The way the firelight reflected gold, like trapped rays of sunlight. The flashes of shadow that deepened the rich brown. And—

Tiny glimmers of light, green and blue and purple, like the bioluminescence she'd heard about but never actually seen in person.

"What…" she murmured.

Moss's expression softened. "I am sorry," he said. "About the lack of ravishing."

Fireworks went off in Carol's mind and body, but she was too hypnotized by his eyes to notice. Which wasn't ideal, she had to admit, once her body prodded her enough to pay attention.

Oh.

Ohhhh.

Heat flooded through her. The embarrassing, betraying glow of her blush—and something deeper. A glow no one could see, suffusing her entire body.

She licked her lips. Right now wasn't a good time, was it? That was why they were talking about it. Because now was a bad time. Because they needed to wait for snowy mountaintops, or a date at the fairground, because… because… reasons.

So if her body could just calm down for oooone moment…

"D-don't worry about it," she managed to say, only stumbling slightly over the words. "We've got the rest of our lives for all that, don't we?"

"What if we don't?" He hesitated, shadows pooling in his eyes. "Or what if the rest of our lives isn't a long time?"

Her breath caught in her throat. The strange metal bird shifters, the attack on the plane, the half-dream, half-nightmare tentacles that had boiled out of the ocean and grabbed her as she fell—and everything that had happened before that. At work. With Briers, and years earlier…

A memory surfaced, cold and clinging. The ocean wrapping itself around her, sapping the strength from her body, crushing the air from her lungs. Her desperate plea for someone, anyone to help her, as the water that had been her playground since childhood became the enemy.

She'd had so many escapes already. What if the next time, she didn't make it?

Moss touched her face gently. "Don't mind me. I'm just gloomy because I couldn't cook you a feast on a mountaintop—"

She didn't let him finish.