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“Guilty as charged.” I laughed. “See you in a little bit.”
I felt Ceph’s presence coming near again, and turned to smile out toward the ocean.
“This is the last of them, little pearl,” he said, parting the black square of water to hand a final ROV over—it looked like it’d been stepped on by Godzilla, and sand had scoured almost all its paint off. I guessed it was the oldest of the lot. “Doctor Pearl,” he then said, correcting himself, after I dropped the ROV into my line.
“I was teasing.” I liked him having a nickname for me—I just wasn’t ready to tell him that quite yet. I stood up and took the gloves off my hand. “I think seven of these might work. I’ll try to dock them to my tablet before dinner.”
“But you will eat?” he asked, and I felt the press of his concern.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I could only barely feel my fingers. How did he live out there? “You should go eat too, Ceph.”
“Taking care of you fills me.” He said it like it was the world’s most simple explanation—and then he did something unfamiliar on our ’qa.
He panicked.
I felt a wave of anxious energy from him as he tried to explain. “I apologize. That thought was not for you.”
I stared at the black square where all of his life was. Out there. Without me.
But he’d called me his “little pearl” more than once before now, there was the way he’d held me at the site—and then he said things like that?
If I didn’t know better, I’d start to assume that Ceph liked me.
I’d guessed the structure was a spaceship with fewer clues.
“I think we need to have a talk, Ceph,” I thought out at him.
There was quite a long pause, and then he agreed. “Yes. I suppose we should. But it can wait until after you eat. Enjoy your dinner,” he said, and then I felt his rapid departure.
chapter 25
CEPHARIUS
What in the depths had I been thinking?
I had a feeling that I’d just ruined things with Elle, which was why I’d swum so far away I could only barely feel her.
I knew I had come on too strongly. She’d only been beneath the waves for maybe two of her air-days, and now she was frightened. I could feel it when she was staring out at me.
She liked me, yes, but not to the degree that I liked her.
That I wanted to care for her.
That I would now yearn for her, until the end of my time.
I inhaled and exhaled deeply, sending up soft clouds of silt all around.
Something about being soft with her at the wall earlier had tricked me—made me think that we were closer than we were. Or maybe it took two-legged longer to feel a mating? Had I ever heard of any stories of their mating one another? There were trickles of love stories all over Elle’s mind, but none of them were real, they were all movies, books, or her TV.
And none of them called it what it was.
But they didn’t use the same word we did—and they didn’t have the same concept.
Other monsters understood, I knew, having conversed with them before.
