Page 21 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I stop on the path and look at it for a second, that gray thread going up soft against the evening, and something enormous and unscheduled moves through me. Hope, stubborn and bubbly, fills my entire chest cavity.

I’ve often been accused of being an incorrigible optimist. Of disregarding the dangers and the negative sides of things. But right now, standing with my arms full of food and the prospect of a full belly, I can’t find a fault in it.

We’re going to be okay tonight. Let tomorrow bring what it brings.

Inside, the cottage has changed states. Firelight everywhere, shadows breathing on stone, the musty smell already losing ground to woodsmoke and warm rock. She's still in the chair, foot up on the second chair. The fire is burning with smug cheerfulness, blazing hot and bright, casting a red glow over Neri’s pale skin.

"First strike," she says, before I'm even through the door. "The char-cloth took on the first strike."

"Of course it did. All that thing needed was a stern look from you and it got down to business.” I unload the haul onto the table: mussels, onions, a fist of mint, the rhubarb I picked on a hunch. "Dinner deliveries have begun. I'd like to formally apologize to the ecosystem, I took everything that wasn't bolted down."

And then I get my second education of the evening, because she takes over.

She goes through the mussels one by one, quick expert fingers, tap-testing the open ones, discarding the ones that don't close, the cracked ones, the suspiciously light ones, a triage so fast it looks like card-sharping.

"Closed or closes when tapped, keep. Open and lazy, dead, toss. Smells wrong, toss." She debeards the survivors while she talks with her thumb and a knife I assume she found somewhere. "Rinse them in the fresh water, they'll spit their grit. Then fill that pot with seawater and we’ll put all this to a boil.”

I do as she says. By the time I’m back with the pot filled with fresh water, she’s done cleaning the mussels. We let them soak in the freshwater for a good thirty minutes, or however long we can bear to wait. I’ll bet it’s not thirty minutes.

Then I toss the freshwater along with the grit, rinse the whole thing once more and fill it with fresh seawater and it all goes on the fire. Soon, the cottage fills with a smell that reorganizes my nervous system. I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry in my life before. The onions are going soft in mussel steam, salt and sweet and mineral, mint torn in at the end.

We eat at the thick-legged table by firelight, out of one pan with two forks she found in a drawer and boiled on principle, a hill of blue-black shells growing between us. Neither of us talks for the first ten minutes. There's just the fire, and the small clatter of shells, and the sea keeping its low murmur down past the meadow.

"Okay," she says finally, wrecked hair gone copper-and-teal in the firelight, cheeks flushed, pointing her fork at me with lethal seriousness. "This was the best meal of my entire life.”

I laugh at that and I’m rewarded with another true smile from her. For a moment, I forget to breathe as I stare at her. Her teal-copper hair wild and tangled, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed. She’s so beautiful, so ethereal, I’m almost afraid to blink and discover she was just a mirage.

“Duly noted. This is the best compliment I ever received from a lady after taking her to dinner.”

She laughs, tired and real, and the firelight plays on her face like the hands of a lover, caressing that porcelain skin in a way that makes me jealous. I catch myself rubbing my fingers together, wondering if her cheeks are as soft as they look.

The complete inappropriateness of it shocks me, so I stand and turn towards the bed.

I take the blankets from the chest and carry them outside to shake them out, nearly choking on the dust. I keep going for longer than necessary, but I need some distance to get a grip on my thoughts.

It’s only the nerves. It’s what getting stranded on a desert island does to people. Just don’t let it get to your head. Nerissa Marsh is definitely not interested in you.

The self-scolding works. Somehow. Not very well, but reminding myself that I’m at least a decade older than the mesmerizing beauty waiting for me inside the cottage calms me down.

I’m back in control when I come back inside and drag the iron frame near the hearth, where heat can actually reach it. I’ve already dragged the mattress out, but I layer the frame thick with folded wool, a pillow engineered from bundled grass. It ends up, if I say so myself, close to cozy.

Then I build the second nest, the floor one, by the fire, two blankets and a pile of grass for my head. I'm arranging it with real hospitality-industry pride when I feel her watching and look up into narrowed eyes.

"You're a foot taller than me,” she says. "The bed's yours, I fold smaller."

"You have one working ankle.” I put the last fold in the blanket and stand. "Neri. Take the bed. Let me have this. It's the only chivalry I've got the budget for."

She stands too, up on her good foot, steadying on the table's edge, and she's close, so close. Her chin is set for battle but her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere with no armor.

"You keep doing things for me.” Her voice is a whisper. “Why?”

"I contain multitudes.” I joke because I don’t trust myself right now. Not when her eyes are on me like that and her mouth is plump and pink and inviting. “It's mostly baked goods and stubbornness."

"Muffins. Water. Food. The bed." Her escaped hair is a halo of firelit chaos, and she has a smudge of ash on her jaw shaped like a comma. And I have never in my adult life wanted so badly to be holding something so I could do something with my hands. "I keep waiting for the catch.”

“There’s no catch here,” I say. “Unless you count the mussels, but they didn’t put up much of a fight.”

Then she kisses me.