Page 23 of Vacation with the Kraken Surfer

"Always," he answered softly, and kissed me like I was the most precious thing in his world.

The ocean through the open door. His tentacles were loose and warm around me, the ink visible on both of us drying dark in the late light. I pressed my fingers to the mark on my shoulder and it held, settled and permanent and mine.

"The words," he said. "I think I know them now."

I waited.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You are the first person in two hundred years who looked at everything I am and moved toward it. Not in spite of it. Because of it." He said it looking at the ceiling, which was where he looked when he was saying things he had been carrying. "I have been — very careful, for a long time, about not wanting things I could not keep. And then you got on the wrong ferry."

I was quiet for a moment. "Thank you for sharing those words with me."

"That is the best available version."

I pressed my face to his chest, to the ink there, to the warmth of him. "Maro," I said.

"But I still like your version: I love you," Maro added.

"I love you, too."

The sun went low.

Tina called us in for dinner —¡a comer!from the lodge door, the universal signal that the evening was ready and we were expected — and down the road in La Boca the fish fry was still going, music through the trees, the low warm sound of the village at the end of a week.

We went in.

The fish market guys were there with rum. The kids had found a second wind from somewhere and were making their case loudly for staying up later. Tino from the bar was arguing pleasantly with Maro about whether the current off the south point had shifted, which it had, and Maro was correct, and Tino knew Maro was correct, and the argument would continue regardless because it had been continuing for years and neither of them intended to stop.

I sat on the dock wall with my drink and I watched all of it and I thought: this is the thing. The whole of it. The rum and the music and the kids and Tina through the window, not watching,watching. The community that had known for a month and had simply been waiting for us to catch up.

Maro finished the current argument — not resolving it, pausing it, the way you'd pause something you intended to come back to in another decade, before he came to sit beside me. His arm around my shoulders. My head on his shoulder, the ink visible where my collar fell.

The music from La Boca came through the trees. The ocean was dark and close. The ink on my shoulder was warm in the evening air. I was sitting on a dock on the wrong island with the right person, and I was fine. I was more than fine. I was, for the first time in a very long time, precisely and completely where I was supposed to be.

I had found the place that felt like home, and his name was Maro.

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