Moss had sacrificed his shirt as a nest for the little dragon. She’d curled up on it as though his only shirt was theleasthe could sacrifice for a noble and very shiny creature like herself, and her golden eyelids had started to close.
They wereveryopen now. And now that Maggie had everyone’s full attention, she turned her eyes to the fire, casting a woebegone expression at the kelp bags smoldering among the logs.
“You didn’t want to miss your second dinner, huh?” Carol wrinkled her nose in amusement. “You’re not full up after eating all day?”
“Prrrp!”
Maggie lay as flat as it was possible for her to lie with a round tummy full of shellfish and crooned piteously. She’d stuffed herself with shellfish straight from the sea all afternoon, but Carol got the distinct impression she could easily find a second stomach—or a third, or a fourth—for the delicious smells of cooked food wafting up from the embers.
She needed to get in the water. But after the way Maggie had reacted to her swimming earlier, she couldn’t do it while the little dragon was still awake. Carol met Moss’s eyes across the flickering fire. “Is there anything we can do to save this poor, starving dragon’s life?”
He grinned. “One way to find out.”
Moss plucked the kelp bags from the embers. Firelight danced on the pale scars on his hands, but not as nimbly as his fingers danced on the smoldering-hot seaweed. He’d harvested the bull kelp earlier, while Carol and Maggie watched from the beach.Carol curious, Maggie suspicious. The kelp leaves were thick and rubbery, and Moss showed her how to separate the two edges, pushing her hand into the leaf to create a pocket. He’d stuffed them with shellfish, stuck long sticks through the open end to hold them shut, and nestled them in the embers to cook.
And now… Carol narrowed her eyes. Moss’s movements were as practiced and easy as ever, but there was something different. A tightness in his shoulders. A watchfulness in his eyes.
Was henervous?
“It smells good,” she said, and some of the tension around his eyes eased. Holy shit. Hewasnervous.
The kelp had been a sallow green when it went into the fire; now the bags were dark and crisped, almost falling apart. Mosstskedas one of them broke open, dripping salt-smelling juices. He handled the next one more carefully, reserving the liquid in one corner of the bag and passing it to Carol.
“I’m not even going to try to reduce that into anything like a sauce, and we don’t have any bread to mop it up with, but… have a try?”
There was no trace of anxiety in his voice. It was all in the corners of his eyes and the half-inch his shoulders went up. Tiny clues she never would have noticed if she hadn’t spent the whole day staring at him every time she thought he wasn’t looking.
She lifted the charred seaweed to her lips. It smelled like smoke and sweet, fresh shellfish and the ocean. The first sip almost burned her tongue, and it was everything she’d loved about the ocean and let herself lose since that night she first found her inner shark.
Tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked and winced away from them, and Moss’s voice was a clatter of regret. Her eyes were still squeezed shut as she tried to wave his apologies away.
“Sorry, I should have said, it’ll be hot—”
“It’s not that. It’s delicious. I mean—itwashot.” She blinked again, testing, and her eyes cleared without any tears falling. “I knew it was going to be hot. I just watched you pull it out of the fire!”
“But you’re—”
She sniffed and surreptitiously wiped her nose. Not that she could be particularly surreptitious, with Moss looking right at her. It probably made her next words—“I’m fine”—sound like a lie.
But they weren’t.
“Really,” she said. “It’s great. It—reminded me how much I miss this sort of thing.”
“Good, but good in a way that hurts?”
She hesitated. “…Yeah. Here. It’s probably cooled down enough now.”
He tried it. “You know, I might not have done such a bad job with this meal after all.” She must have made some sort of noise—a snort of laughter, not well enough covered up—because his eyes flicked to hers, dancing with amusement. “What do you reckon? Should we risk the shellfish?”
“Pree EE!”
It was the best meal of Carol’s life.
The kelp bags gave the shellfish a smoky tang that made her mouth water. Mussels, oysters, clams—bite-sized pieces of the sea, briny and chewy and delicious. They’d held some oysters aside because they were always better raw, Moss said, and Carol had to agree, especially when eaten with a mouthful of smoky juices from the kelp bags.
Maggie gorged herself until she fell asleep again from sheer fullness. Carol flip-flopped between following her lead and feeling self-conscious about eating so much in front of someone else. There was only so much she could do to hide what quick work her teeth made of the tender shellfish.
Then she remembered how nervous Moss had been, offering her the food he’d made, and it seemed wrongnotto stuff her face.
