Another laugh exploded out of her. “Hey, is that my scarf?”
“Yes and yes, my precious mate.” Moving with a surprising amount of grace, Emory pulled himself across the floor to where she stood. He pressed a hard kiss to the outer curve of her thigh.
That delicious, squirmy feeling returned, alongside the heavy, bubbling lurch of her magic. Clementine’s knees threatened to buckle under the onslaught, but she managed to cover up their knocking by simply kneeling there in the doorway.
“You little thief,” she teased, daring to reach up and stroke the bit of sodden silk she could see peeking out from beneath his dense black strands. “And I don’t remember saying you could move in.”
Emory tipped his head into her hand. His eyelids lowered as she began to stroke his hair with delicate touches. “You said you didn’t want our night to end. Now it won’t.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Isn’t it?” He gave her a long, searching look. Clementine opened her mouth to answer, but found that the words wouldn’t come.
A normal person wouldn’t allow a man to justmove in.A normal person would date for a reasonable amount of time before mutually agreeing upon the right moment to cohabitate. A normal person would set hard boundaries, learn their new partner, take their time before making any big commitments.
But I’m not normal.
Clementine tried to imagine sending him away. She tried to picture him sleeping in his cove all alone, to see herself doing the same thing every day and night. She tried, but no matter how she altered the picture, she couldn’t make it feel right. Them being alone when they had this…somethingbetween them wasn’t right. It just wasn’t.
Do what feels right, when it feels right.
A smile curved her lips. At the sight of it, Emory’s expression lit up with a boyish joy that knocked the wind out of her.
Her voice came out a little watery when she murmured, “I guess I should help you unpack.”
“After I rinse off,” he replied, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I need to protect your soft skin from too much salt.Thenwe will fix up our cove.”
After pressing a swift kiss to her lips, he turned to pull himself down the hallway. Clementine watched him go from her place on the floor, gobsmacked by the kiss, by everything. He was nearly at the bathroom door before she noticed something that had been obscured by the great fall of his hair the night before. A large silver loop dangled from the tip of his fin, just below a distinctive notch.
Emory’s dorsal fin waspierced.
Huh,she thought, recalling the fin she’d seen cutting through the water right before she got home.That fin wasn’t pierced.
ChapterFifteen
Clementine hadno idea how much she hated living alone until she was no longer doing it.
She’d come to enjoy silence, particularly from a psychic pressure perspective, but she didn’t like livingalone.Not really. Not as much as she told her family, and not as much as she’d told herself.
Living with Emory wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course, especially when one considered the fact that she hadn’t exactly anticipated a new roommate, but it was alwaysfun.
Despite her initial enthusiasm for the idea, shehadeventually begun to worry that she’d made a mistake. What if it turned out that she and Emory were completely incompatible? She hardly knew him. What if she’d just thrown open her doors to a terrible person who’d take advantage of her in some way?
The anxieties came in flashes — bright bursts of worry that happened in the quiet moments when she was alone with her thoughts. But as the days and then weeks passed, those warning flashes dimmed. True, there was a lot a person could only know with the passing of time, but even so, she felt like weeks of constant company was a solid basis for intuition.
Her anxiety said that the shine would come off the proverbial apple. The fun would die down. Eventually she’d realize that Emory was just a man, that she’d actually miss having the house all to herself, and that her budding romantic and sexual feelings would die when his presence became mundane or even an annoyance.
That didn’t happen.
It was an adjustment, certainly, but not a hard one. The worst parts were figuring out how to change things around the house to accommodate his needs and discussing household boundaries. Her bed frame was removed, allowing Emory to more easily get in and out of bed each day, and she’d stored all the chairs away in the attached garage, since they never took their meals anywhere but the coffee table.
Since it turned out Emory was a bit of a packrat for odds and ends — things he collected from the ocean, trinkets he traded for, and so many craft projects in rope and wood and seaglass — she’d enforced a strict rule on clutter in their living spaces. Decorations and momentos could stay out, but his other treasures and craft projects, which happened to make up the bulk of hisimportant things,were contained in the spare bedroom she hadn’t known what to do with.
Beyond that, it proved to be the most natural thing in the world to fit their lives together. Their sleep schedules didn’t perfectly align, so it never felt like they were constantly hovering over one another. While Emory napped off and on throughout the day, Clementine went about her normal routine of hikes, reading books, cooking, as well as reporting on various things like the weather and the seabird population for her job. They spent time together mostly in the evenings, when she made dinner and before Emory left to do all his merman things, like hunting, trading, and guarding their territory, as he put it.
They talked constantly, and usually well into the night. It was a rare evening when Clementine didn’t fall asleep almost mid-sentence. She might have grown self-conscious about how much she talked, if only Emory didn’t regale her with stories just as often as she did to him.
They were endlessly curious about one another. Often they’d be speaking about something mundane, only to end up going down a rabbit hole of discovery about one thing or another. Her simple explanation that her family mostly spoke Spanish at home had somehow transformed into a many hours-long language exchange wherein they discovered she had a small talent for the whistling notes of Emory’s mother tongue but that he somehow couldn’t figure out how to roll hisr’s.
