Page 108 of Sucker For You

“Thank you,” she nodded. Then she was gone, her baseball cap and her beat-up boots and her reckless, gorgeous courage vanishing into the ocean institute.

Fuck.

She was counting on him to do his part, however. He grabbed his duffel and hauled his gear across the parking lot, down through the grasses and mussels to a stretch of beach with visibility into MORI’s rear windows. These panels overlooked the bay; tidal plants craving sunlight flourished in shallow tanks by the glass. But that same clear view from his vantage pointmeant that he was equally visible to anyone inside the institute who might be watching the beach. So he rigged a tripod facing the surf as a decoy and took his time snapping a few establishing shots with a teleconverter. Normal, casual, not even a little suspicious. Gauging angles and glare off the kelp and the tide, he gradually moved his focus away from the water, inch by inch up the sand, and to MORI.

Yes: there were the marine plants by the windows. Behind them, human figures in waterproof boots studied data tablets, lugged buckets past recessed pools edged with Caution tape, fin-tagged incoming specimens, and monitored the salinity in a maze of seawater supply pipes.

The illumination in his shots was poor. The ambient light outside was much brighter than the institute’s interior. But these utilitarian images weren’t meant to win him any prizes. He scanned his viewfinder sideways, ignoring the splash zone that was an otter pup’s swimming lesson with a wader-clad scientist. . .searching. . . and—

There she is.

Rolling on her sanitary protective gloves, Isabel dumped a mass of mackerel from an industrial refrigerator onto a worktable. With a snap of elastic over her elbows, she nodded at an IT tech exiting the computer lab, then greeted Jiang (who was busy rolling up the day’s ration of squid burritos on the same bench), and began to cut apart her fish. Wes wasn’t the only one watching her. At her hatching station nearby, Dr. Solomon ignored a tentacle twitching toward her braid through her tank’s bubble curtain while she observed Isabel haul buckets of feed to the leopard shark enclosure. Even at a thousand-yard distance, the scientist’s frown was unmistakable.

Brianne’s entrance was, too.

Smiling, waving a hand and her Stanley cup at the lab’s Friday staff, she circulated around the facility with a tablet and stylus, evaluating sockets and drains as she ran a routine maintenance inspection. That, or a check on who was at the institute today and wasn’t so myopic about their research that they might notice when she stole an octopus later. She had the nerve to greet Isabel.

Maybe Isabel answered her.

Wes couldn’t tell, not when his fiancée was mangling a mop head in its sloshing bucket and a pink-haired retiree—Sabrina?—was passing in front of his lens to squirt antiseptic soap into the water. He couldn’t hear, either.

All he could do was watch.

Wait.

Which he did.

He took a swig from his Nalgene, blew grit from his viewfinder, and stamped sand from between his toes. He saw Isabel chop up a second load of mackerel, then smile at Mehar. More mopping, and pushing a cart of delousing powders around the quarantine biofarm. More chopping, side-by-side again with Jiang, who was now washing algae for a sea turtle recovering from its collision with a boat’s outboard motor. Isabel’s mouth moved in conversation. She heaved a new bucket to the leopard shark tank. The toes of her too-large boots stopped just past its Caution stripes.Splash: fish chunks tumbling into eager jaws.

He kept watching, and fended off a gull.

He refocused his lens against the midday light.

He shooed the gull a second time.

He photographed a blubber-bound harbor seal sneezing itself awake from its nap on the beach.

When someone exited the lab onto the balcony for a snack-and-coffee break, he pretended patient interest in a mussel until they returned inside.

Then his watch vibrated:

Incoming Call:Isabel Wright (call recording)

He answered instantly.

Her flannel-muffled breathing whispered across the line; she must have the phone capturing audio from the front pocket of her shirt. With grit in his teeth, sunlight burning through the sunscreen on his neck, Wes couldn’t stop grinning—not even when Isabel joined Brianne by the windows, where the facilities manager was checking power to the aqueous plant nurseries.

She’d called him twice now.

Build-me-up Buttercup, actually calling.

A good pattern. A better habit. . .

“May I hold that for you?” Isabel was offering to take a water bottle balanced in the crook of Brianne’s elbow. But she didn’t wait for an answer, before continuing, “And—did you see the news today? The Cephalopod Sentience and Welfare Act was just signed into law.”

Oh, you pretty liar.

“What?” The facilities manager fumbled her hold on two fraying cables.