“What about this one?” Nyx asked, holding up one that readLet me Tentacle You.There was a rainbow-colored jellyfish on the front, and I just lost it laughing, even while I reached my hand out for it. I added one that readHug Me, I’m Clingy,and he doubled down by presenting me with one that depicted a jellyfish riding a sea turtle.
“We’re going to have to act this one out again,” I said as he passed it over.
I wound up with six new tank tops before we left the booth, every one of them with a jellyfish on it. Hey, maybe that could be my new warning sign: tentacle-covered t-shirts. I was already ahead on this whole building a new life adventure, considering that most of the old tank tops I’d come to the island with had been ratty and only good for sleeping in. I was all smiles when we left that booth, only to have everything crash down around me when we turned down an aisle and encountered a booth filled with long, flowing wigs, some of them styled in spirals to resemble jellyfish tentacles.
Sinfully Sexy Jellyfish Curlsthe sign above the booth read.Seduce them with your tentacles.
“And this,” I snarled as I turned to find another aisle, “is why I dyed my hair.”
“Shit, Kekoa, is that really a thing?” Nyx asked. “People being attracted by your hair instead of being warned off by it?”
“Pretty much, it’s a whole fetish. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been offered money to let someone jerk off with my hair.” I replied, whispering the last part in a low hiss because I hated having to tell him that and didn’t want to accidentally offend anyone walking past.
“What the hell? I feel like I’m completely out of the loop. I’ve never even heard of anything like that,” he said as he lengthened his strides to keep up with me. “I’m sorry.”
“At least you not knowing about it means I don’t have to worry about you being into it too.”
“Hey, all we ever wanted was to find our mate. We never had any desire for them to be one species over another; we just wanted to find them. Find you. Now that we have, yeah, I think we might need to educate ourselves on jellyfish culture and this whole fetish thing because it seems like even my mom doesn’t know anything about it, or I doubt she’d have suggested we talk to you about letting your hair go back to its natural colors.”
“I wondered what prompted that conversation,” I said. “You didn’t seem to care before.”
“We were too caught up in, well…”
“Rolling each other in the sand, yeah, I was too,” I admitted. “Looks like we’re getting the hang of the conversation part, though.”
“And it only took until the fourth date.”
“Which is a vast improvement from our third,” I pointed out.
We laughed as we wandered past stalls filled with cured meats, dried vegetable flakes in an array of canisters, and smoked fish, until he guided me toward a booth with shelves filled with Mangas.
“Whoa.” For a moment, all I could do was stand there and stare at the colors, titles, and wide array of Pop Dolls that adorned the shelves.
He gave my hand a squeeze before he turned it loose, and I got lost in stacks and rows of colorful books and some of the most amazing artwork I’d ever seen. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nyx with his phone pressed to his ear, then I went right back to focusing on the shelves and picking out some things to read. Now I was really grateful for that cart, because I exited the store with the two titles I’d planned to pick up along with six others that would certainly have grown heavy after a while if I’d had to carry them. Settling them in beside my tank tops, I was reminded that pants might be a good idea, since I was down to a pair of jeans and swim trunks until we finished washing and drying what we’d salvaged from my motel room. We probably should have at least started a load before we left this morning, but after yesterday, we’d just been eager to get to the beach.
#adultingfail. Oh well. Sometimes it was just that way.
“Thank you for introducing me to my favorite booth; my wallet will never forgive you,” I said as he held out his hand.
The crowd had grown some since we’d come in, and it was already packed then. I took his hand, not just because I didn’t want to get separated from him with no clue how to get back to their, well, I guess it was our house now, but because I was already starting to fall in love with walking beside him that way. His hand not only kept me grounded in a building filled with way too many things I wanted to check out, but it was also a connection to one of the people who was coming to mean the world to me.
Guess there was something to be said for the whole clingy tentacle thing.
“Lani called,” he said, leaning to speak in my ear.
Pressed up close to him, we created a momentary roadblock that people were forced to maneuver around.
“They are going to be able to start earlier than they expected, which means he’ll be home by eight at the latest. He’s lookingforward to sprawling out and watching a movie with us after dinner, which I told him we’d already picked up. Needless to say, he’s ecstatic and asked if we’d grabbed something for dessert, so I told him we’d snag some gourmet popcorn before we headed home to go along with our movie.”
“They sell gourmet popcorn here too, holy shit.”
“Yup, somewhere; I always forget where the booth is at,” Nyx said. “He also asked me to bring home pickled papaya, which is not as easy to find as he seemed to think when he sends me to look for it.”
“I’m beginning to sense a pattern.”
“Oh yeah, you’ll see, Lani is unlike anyone I’ve ever known,” Nyx explained. “We probably would have lost touch if he hadn’t been the most persuasive pen pal in history. He wrote actual letters, like, that he sent through the mail. It’s the only time in my life that I ever received mail that wasn’t an advertisement or a bill. He kept up such a constant stream of texts and videos that he finally convinced me that the distance between us when we moved away from here was only miles that didn’t mean anything.”
“And he was right.”
