Page 36 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Girls like me don’t get to keep men like him. Certainly not mermaids. Pretty, lovely, stupid little mermaids.

There.

The sentence I’ve been trying not to find.

I hate it immediately. I hate that some part of me believes it.

I press my face into his shoulder, breathing in warm skin and cedar and the last trace of woodsmoke.

Not now.

Whatever waits on the mainland can wait there.

Rafe is here.

His heartbeat is steady beneath my cheek. His hand is warm against my back. For the first time in years, I am happy, and I refuse to dismantle it before breakfast just because my brain found a new catastrophe to model.

So I put the fear away.

Not gone.

Just somewhere I don’t have to look at it yet.

“I can hear you thinking,” he murmurs into my hair, half-asleep and cheerful about it. “Enormous racket. Like a hard drive from the nineties.”

“I’m not thinking. I’m basking. Learn the difference.”

“My mistake.” He kisses the top of my head, untangles himself by degrees, groaning about his back, and gropes around the floor for his glasses and his trousers. “Bask. I’m going to resurrect the fire and see if the tide is low enough to harvest some mussels.”

The bed gets noticeably colder when he leaves it.

Chapter 14

Rafe

I’m up before the sun, which is standard for me.

Neri is still sleeping, nestled in the tiny bed under the wool blankets. I have no intention of disrupting her rest. As for me, sleep has been eluding me since the sky turned a deep blue, at what I guess is about four a.m.

Because it’s Sunday.

I’ve been keeping count on the cottage doorframe, one small scratch each morning with a nail. Very maritime, very authentic. Neri says all I’m missing is scurvy and a parrot.

Seven scratches last night. Which makes today the eighth day. Which makes today inauguration day for the AETHER telescope. An inauguration that will come and go without me.

Life goes on, I guess.

I keep turning that sentence over, looking for the pun. There’s supposed to be one. There’s always a pun; the worse it gets, the faster they come. My grad students used to gauge exam season by them. I’ve been sitting on this log for an hour and I haven’t found a single one.

Ten years. All those sleepless nights working on grants, too busy to build a life of my own or to maintain a relationship. The winter the funding died and I flew to four capitals in nine days because if I could just get everyone back into the same room, smiling, maybe nobody would notice how close the whole thing was to collapsing.

Every panel. Every hearing. Every version of “Rafael will handle it.”

And Rafael handled it.

Again and again. Being the affable, reliable one is a skill. Somewhere along the way, it became a job.

And the finish line was today, and I’m not even there to witness it happening.