Page 36 of Sucker For You

He didn’t agree.

After a frowning moment, however, when a second surge ofspray crested into the pool to liberate its fish, Wes braced his palms on his knees and pushed to his feet. “What if I give our story a try? I’m damn sure I can come up with something better than hospitals, old salami, and creeps with cameras. How about a whirlwind—or whirlpool?—romance? If you’ll help me with the details.”

“What details?”

“Hmm. Let’s see.” He strolled through a tangle of slimy kelp gas bladders, pausing to right a toppled hermit crab and shoo off a gull. His shirt rode up over his waistband, revealing a few inches of ink and bronzed, freckled skin.

Surf splashed her feet. Her cheeks flamed and she stepped back.

But—don’t run.

Focus.

“I’ll start us off.” Rubbing at a jellyfish blister, he didn’t seem to notice. “We met in Monterey. I was here on a photography assignment for MORI. You crashed Erin and Ethan’s bungalow after you caught the doctor screwing a caterer at your wedding shower. There’s evidence for both those things, right?”

Flashing lenses, staring eyes.

“Y-yes.”

“Right. Those are the facts. Now let’s make this a meet-cute. Instead of running into each other inside the beach house, what if we met for the first time underwater? While we were both diving. Between your midnight plunge and my morning swim, we only missed a real encounter in the bay by about five hours. And. . .” he snapped his fingers, “neither of us was wearing wetsuits. That’s a good detail. Also true. Plus: matching each other’s crazy. There we were in the water, and I was photographing—what?”

She skidded on a float. “Um, kelp?”

“I was photographing kelp. Like I did today. While you were. . .?”

“Distracting myself from what had happened at the yacht club. I was—conducting pencil tests with the local octopus population?”

“Sure. So that I can answer the question if our interviewer asks: what’s a pencil test?”

This part was simple enough.

“It’s a personality-type field test. A scientist identifies an octopus’s den and acclimates the animal to their presence. Then the researcher extends a pencil near the entrance. They monitor the specimen’s reaction. Some octopuses retreat, or ink, or siphon at the object. Some ignore it. Others try to touch or even grab it.”

“Or grab the scientist?”

“Or the scientist. Dr. Jennifer Mather—she lost several dive masks to cephalopods during her work in French Polynesia—pioneered the method and distilled numerous distinct personality types from the data she collected. Shy, brave, or curious. Sneaky, sly. Basic traits, which the research subjects expressed in varied degrees. Prior to Dr. Mather’s work, no one had empirically quantified octopuses’ differing reactions to a specific stimulus. Their individuality. No one had seriously, scientifically considered whether they might be responding not only to pleasure or pain catalysts in their environment, but intellectually to those stimuli. As individuals.”

“Which they do.”

“Yes. That’s why the pencil was important. For an octopus, it was a neutral item. But each subject reacted to its presence differently. And. . . did you know that while different species specialize in various kinds of tool use, individual octopuseswithina species also have their own distinct camouflage repertoire? Patterns based on their local environments. Maybe when we met I was observing one that had learned to mimic a kelp blade’s floating gas sac. Like the two-spot from your dive.”

“Great. That’s confirmed. We were both diving in this kelp forest, and we bumped into each other. The water’s like pea soup. It’s possible that—”

“—you startled my octopus with your camera flash. It inked and—”

“—we saw each other for the first time through the pigment?” Wes flipped his fingers into a facsimile of goggles over his eyes. “I fell in love with my fish-eyed view of you through my mask, and I lost my snorkel mouthpiece. I surfaced.”

“I did too, since the octopus was gone.”

“I apologized for scaring off your subject. Then I got my just deserts when I swam into a bloom of jellyfish on my way back to shore. But here’s the question,” still speaking through his fingers, eyebrow cocking. “Did you help me after that?”

Would she have?

She didn’t need to lie.

“Yes. In the shower at the bungalow. Since I did. The more truth there is to the story, the more believable it will be for the interviewer.” Picking her way along the shoreline while the cool air dusted her lips with salt, it really was easy enough to imagine slipping into the water, down into the dappled marine shadows. It was easy to believe in her determined absorption with an octopus and a pencil, with her carefully managed breathing, almost as careful as her refusal to think about the yacht club, about Chase and the caterer, about her ring. The consequences of it all. Imagining her dismay at the cephalopod’s flight, before likewise startling at the appearance of another diver through theclouds of mucus and melanin? Also easy. She would have exhaled in surprise, pillars of bubbles streaming to the surface—which she would have followed, her heart beating hard and her lungs compressed with missing air and adrenaline—only to lose her breath a second time when Wes flipped up his mask and smiled at her through the ribbons of kelp sliding down his face, his eyes crinkled against the spraying surf, or with laughter. . .

This, she could do.