Page 14 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Fire's a fantasy tonight. No dry anything, no tools, no light. Shelter and shared heat, that's the entire menu.

"Okay, Nerissa.” I get up. My knees have opinions and a searing pain shoots through my legs as I stumble slightly. I ignore the pain, and I keep my voice easy, like this is a fieldwork hiccup. "Here's the thing. We need to get out of the rain and we need to get out of the wind. You’re already hypothermic and I’m not too far behind you.”

I point to a spot further up the slope.

“There's a hollow up under that ledge, out of the wind and out of the rain. We're going to wedge into it, and we're going to share body heat.”

She pinches her lips at that, but she doesn’t protest. She’s a smart girl. She knows I’m right.

“We’re going to be miserable until sunrise, but we’ll survive.”

She looks at the six feet of gravel between us. At the black hollow under the ledge. At me. The armor's still up. But underneath it she's doing the same math I did.

"Okay," she rasps.

She doesn't take my offered hand. She walks herself up the beach on her own two feet, swaying like a sailor, and folds herself into the lee of the ledge. When I settle beside her she goes stiff, but the cold makes the decision for both of us, she doesn’t move when I press the length of my entire body against her. Or when I put my arm around her shoulder to snuggle closer.

Beside me, in the dark, her teeth chatter and her small hands fold into fists in the fabric of my sweater.

We’re still here. Both of us. Alive.

It's the only data point I've got, so I hold it.

The sea sounds hungry. The dark is total.

It's going to be a long night.

Chapter 7

Neri

I wake up, which means I'm alive, which is the good news. This is also where the good news ends.

Everything hurts in my body, in alphabetical order. Ankles, back, clavicle, the works. I'm folded into a granite hollow like a letter crammed back into the wrong envelope. My clothes are that special kind of damp that has given up on ever being dry, and there is a large, warm astronomer attached to my entire left side.

At some point in the night, apparently, professional distance froze to death, and my body crawled toward the only heat source on this island and stayed there. His fleece is under my cheek. His arm is around my shoulders. He's still asleep, head tipped back against the rock, glasses askew, stubble coming in gray at the jaw, breathing slow and even. His other hand is curled around the strap of my life jacket.

Like even unconscious, he kept a grip on me.

I file that in the dark, deep pit where I keep things I refuse to have feelings about. I'll deal with it later.

I extract myself one vertebra at a time, and the morning does its reveal. It doesn’t take long as I can’t see more than a few feet in front of my nose.

Fog. Total, biblical fog coats the world, the kind that erases the concept of elsewhere. The world is reduced to about three feet of wet gravel, the black suggestion of rocks, the sound of surf that's calmed overnight from murderous to merely vast, and white in every direction, white with no shadows, no sun, no up or down.

My mouth tastes like low tide. And that's when the thirst introduces itself properly, not politely, both hands, a full-body dryness with a headache riveted to the back of it. Right. It’s been roughly twenty-four hours since I took my last sip from the coffee thermos. The math on that gets bad fast.

The other math is already bad. I've been doing it since I opened my eyes, because my brain has never once let me have a slow morning.

Behind me, gravel shifts. Rafael comes awake the way golden retrievers do, instantly and completely. He gets to his feet and I swear I see him shake himself like a dog. Well, maybe not, but he might as well for all the puppy-level optimism that paints over his face.

"Okay," he says. "So it wasn't a dream. I had a whole thing ready where last night was a dream."

Ugh. Of course he would joke at a moment like that.

"The fog's real too. Before you ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."