Page 73 of Sucker For You

“That’s fair.” He didn’t challenge her.

“But not a fish,” and maybe. . . maybe because he’d shared the history of his scars with her, the story came readily. Or maybe she just wanted Wes to know? Or to warn him. “I wouldn’t get a tattoo of anything from the ichthyology zoological branch because they—they called me acold fish. The other children. The guardians, too, when I was quiet. They thought I wasn’t listening. They said I had adead fish stare.”

“Little bastards.” She braced for his anger. To her surprise, Wes only scoffed. “People called you acold fish, so you went into marine biology? That’s some impressive resilience. Or—retaliation?”

“. . . what?”

“You’rehilarious. Sneaky and tough and smart.”

Baffled, she blinked. “Are you referring to me, or the octopus?”

“For a compliment like that? Don’t make me choose,” he said, just as the two-spot squirted them both through her funnel. “God damn it—”

It was too easy to laugh then, the catch in her throat softening.

But wasn’t that all right? Sharing questions and secrets, laughing moments—these were all in service of their immigration interview for her visa. What if the agent asked her about Wes’s scars? Or asked either of them about her theoretical tattoo choices? What if the interviewer inquired how Wes looked while grinning in the rattan lamplight with water glimmering on his chin and in his eyelashes? What if they asked how it felt to converse through taste and color and texture with an octopus into the dark hours, until the bungalow’s novelty clock readHigh Tide, until their fingers were ringed with suction kisses,prune-like and numb? Until they gently pinched each other to gauge their circulation?

“Does this hurt?” He pressed his thumb and forefinger into the web between hers.

“No.”

“Can you feel it?”

She could.

And his smile, too.

*

On Wednesday, Isabel averted a possible headache with one of her Ceretobicin capsules and took another shift at MORI—where she arrived to find a sign reading “Keep Out” taped on the door to the computer lab.Interesting. It wasn’t the most intuitive place to perform experimental vivisections. But this notice signified the only restriction of access to lab spaces that she’d encountered at the institute. She’d find a way or an excuse to slip inside the room soon; whatever the chances were realistically, she still had to be certain there weren’t any octopuses hidden away and hurting there. Isabel mulled over ideas for an inconspicuous entry into the computer wing while she and Wes returned to the beach house and traded turns in the shower. (As she stripped off for her time under the water, she didn’t think about him standing naked beneath the spray.She didn’t.)

Once they both smelled less like fish, Wes drove them past Old Fisherman’s Wharf to the west end of Monterey’s historic Cannery Row, paid for off-hours weekday parking, and meandered into the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

“Two adults, please.”

Isabel bought their tickets.

“Christ, I should’ve said I was a senior.” He stuck a colored visitor dot to her clean flannel (they’d visited a laundromat on Tuesday) and his graphic shirt:Pick Your Submersible Unicorn Fighter!with art depicting a face-off between a marlin and a narwhal. They walked under a suspended gray-whale skeleton, skirted the sea otter enclosure, and followed signs toward the aquarium’s Kelp Forest exhibit, before edging into the dim recesses of the giant Pacific octopus tank. A placard gave the majestic cephalopod’s name as “Mr. Nice I-Spy.” “With all my sun wrinkles, do you think I could pass for a fresh seventy?”

He was joking, of course.

Squatting beside the glass, laughter in his voice and a smile fanning the fine lines beside his eyes while he studied fragile pink sea urchins, their lumpy purple cousins, and a lazy rockfish, scanning the aquarium’s crevices of marine stone for a hidden predator? He was so beautiful.

“—can’t see! Where is it?”

“I don’t know, kiddo,” from a harassed father, handling a stroller with one hand and gripping a toddler with the other. “Maybe the octopus isn’t home right now.”

They wheeled and whined away.

A staff member reprimanded a young couple who seemed more interested in photographing their kisses with flashing phones (violating aquarium policy) than in spotting the cephalopod. They groused, but moved on.

Isabel and Wes remained, watching. . . until from the corner of the tank, with a burst of kinetic speed, a suckered arm appeared. It reconstituted from its camouflage among the stone and urchins, flashed red, and lashed out to punch the circling rockfish in the head. An eye blinked open against the glass.

A boy clutching an otter plushie behind them screamed.

They shushed the screamer and caught each other’s excited glances—but the octopus’s arm was already fading back into invisibility against the rocks, the eye evanescing into raised, mottled papillae in a perfect replica of a sea urchin. The creature’s flush of enthusiasm dissipated.

“He’s bored,” she said.