When We Believed in Mermaids(32)
“What?”
“I have to think how to say it.”
I smile, knowing what the struggle is. “Take your time.”
“I thought only teenagers surfed?” he says, instead of saying, Aren’t you too old for that?
“Well done.” I crumple my napkin and drop it in the paper bag they gave us, offer it to Javier. “I started surfing when I was seven years old.” I think of Dylan standing behind me on a longboard, his hands in the air beside me in case he needed to catch me. He never did. “It’s in my blood.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not really. I mean, I guess it is a little, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I do. Have you ever tried?”
“I have never had the opportunity.” He leans backward against the bench, one arm along the top, the fingers of his right hand warm behind my shoulder blade. “What do you like about it?”
I cross my legs, lace my hands around my knee, and look toward the water. I think of my palms skimming the water, the taste of salt on my lips, the board shivering under my feet, Dylan offering encouragement—there you go, that’s right, you can do it. “It’s exhilarating to get a wave just right, ride it a long way. You don’t think about anything. Just that.”
For a moment, he’s silent, his eyes resting on my face. His fingers touch my back, edge along the bone, and it sends an alert through my body, 100 percent chemistry, which flickers and brightens the longer he simply looks at me.
“What?” I say at last.
“Nothing.” He smiles. “I like to look at you.”
I smooth a hand over my hair, liking his regard but also slightly tongue-tied, which is unlike me. I’m often the pursuer in these things, since men can be intimidated by my profession, my height. I drop my hand to my lap and look back at him. At his brow and his powerful nose and the opening of his shirt, where I can see his throat. In the sunlight, I reassess his age upward. At first, I thought he was early forties, but now I think it’s more. Midforties. Maybe even slightly older.
It doesn’t matter. As I look, the light touch on my back combines with the steady, clear regard to give me a sense of expansion, as if the field of my energy is stretching out, trying to find the edge of his. It warms me, and I think of that study that says you can fall in love with someone by looking into their eyes for thirty seconds.
I don’t fall in love, but I think I’ll remember this moment long years from now. His hand moves, open palm against my neck, thumb light against my earlobe.
Who knows how long we stay like that, both of us captured? A voice announcing our ferry brushes against it but doesn’t kill it, like a spiderweb still clinging to fingers. He takes my hand as we board, and I’m glad of the touch, grounding me, connecting me to him, him to me.
“Upstairs?” he asks.
For one moment, I think of how bad my hair will be when the wind and humidity have their way, but I nod, and we take our seats in the open air, in the bright sunshine of New Zealand. As naturally as if we’ve been together a hundred years, Javier picks up my hand and laces his fingers through mine. And even though it’s a little sweaty and I’m not really the hand-holding type, I let him.
Chapter Ten
Mari
Rose and I have flipped six houses together. She’s a sturdy, busty black-haired millennial who wears her hair very short. Her uniform is T-shirts with ironic sayings, jeans, and vintage Doc Martens. Her boyfriend wears a man bun in his curly hair and a thick beard that obscures what I am not sure is a particularly interesting face, but he’s good to her, and that’s really the only thing that matters.
We meet at Sapphire House midmorning, and she’s squealing and oohing all the way through, much the way I did, but she’s even more knocked out over the wood than I am. Her father runs a lumberyard, and she knows every variation of wood available in New Zealand and then some. With awe, she traces the inlays along the walls of the foyer and names the varieties of wood in the stairs, the banister, the framing, the doors. “My dad’ll go blimmin’ mad for this.” Her accent is as thick as they come, peppered with Maori slang, and when she talks quickly, I have a hard time deciphering her words.
“I thought of him,” I say. “I wonder if he knows anyone who does tile work.”
“I reckon he does.”
Our process is smooth after so many jobs. She starts work in the first room to the left of the front door and heads clockwise around the main floor with a stack of Post-its and duct tape in three colors, moving with surety through the rooms, tagging everything in a pattern we’ve developed over the years. She has a master’s degree in furniture design, and I can trust her to know the difference between junk and antiques worth exploring; this particular era is her favorite. She makes furniture herself in a shared studio space with a handful of other artists, and they sell a lot of it in Napier, where an earthquake nearly leveled the city in 1931. When it was rebuilt, it was all done in the Art Deco style, which was very up-to-the-minute, thus the inhabitants of the town wanting furniture. Eventually I’m going to lose her to the furniture, but for now she’s invaluable.
While she works on the main floor, I head upstairs with a kit of the same materials and start in the bedroom. Settling my box of tape and Post-its on the bed, I open the French doors along the balcony and then step out to admire the view—my view. The sea is dark and unfriendly this morning, waves slapping the shore almost petulantly, and I smell a storm. I am as close to the sea here as I was in our house by the cove, where the window of the bedroom I shared with Kit hung practically over the cliff. If you stuck your head out, you could see straight down the rocks below, the little cove with its stairs off to the right, the harsh rocky shore curving into infinity to the left, all the way to Big Sur and, farther still, Santa Barbara and then LA.