“I don’t think—that’s not a particularly sound scientific comparison.” I tug my hand, tempted to fold my arms across my chest in petulance, but Miller’s thumb scores a line across the back.
Angling his head, he asks slowly, “You don’t think I could be the dinosaur?”
“Seeing as you aren’t 250 million years old and, you know, aren’t part of a diverse group of terrestrial reptiles—no, I don’t think you could be.”
He blinks, slow, and his mouth curves up at the edges with a singular, rough word. “Rawr.”
“Did you just—” I start, but a snort of laughter drowns out any words. “I’m sorry, did you just ... growl or like ... rawr at me like a dinosaur might?”
Cringing, he scrubs a hand through his hair. “Regretted it the second I did it.”
I try not to, but I keep laughing. I can’t stop, actually. They’re mostly gasping snorts, tears burning the edges of my eyes, but I don’t slap my hand to my mouth to cover it up. I keep mine in his, our fingers interlaced—maybe the roots of me I grew, and the finally awake roots of him, poke up through the soil towards the sunlight.
And when we decide to race up the steps, a bit like children too, my thumb taps across the back of his hand, right in the middle of the M. My own Morse code, thrown out there where I hope Matthew can hear it, telling him even though I’m so sorry I’ll never get to know him, I’m so glad that because of him, I got to know Miller.
I do love theDangerous Lagoon. I loveRay Bay. I even love theKelp Forest, but I think my new favourite place in the whole aquarium is standing side by side with Miller, watching the jellyfish.
They drift along, lazy, plumes of tentacles and oral arms dragging behind them in bright, beautiful colours, illuminated by the glow from the specialized LED lights placed along the bottoms of the floor-to-ceiling tanks.
Children have come and gone, sprinting around and pushing their faces to the tanks—but for some reason, we’ve sat side by side on a bench, shoulders and thighs brushing like ghosts against each other’s skin, just watching.
Miller tips his chin. “They old too?”
“Mhm,” I say quietly, scared to disturb them even though we’re separated by inches of glass. “Oldest multi-organ animal on earth, actually.”
“No way.”
Nodding, I bump my leg against his. “They’ve existed for somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred millionyears.” I shift, angling towards him, and when my knee rests where the ridge of his thigh muscle dips to meet the stretching tendons of his calf, he takes a heavy swallow. That tightens my throat, too, but I lean forward, whispering, “Some—Burgessomedusa phasmiformis—have fossil evidence from 505 million years ago. They were drifting around long before the dinosaurs, and somehow, they survived all five major mass extinction events.”
He glances at me, the column of his throat working when his eyes watch my mouth as I spell out the words. But navy eyes flick up to mine, and he looks at me a bit in awe. “How do you know so much about jellyfish? Aren’t you in charge of ... vertebrates? And they don’t look ... particularly spiny.”
“They aren’t.” I shake my head. “They’re invertebrates. Imani knows all about them. We have an extensive collection actually, at the museum.”
The corner of his mouth tugs up. “Her big passions in life are jellyfish and baseball, then?”
“Well, the second one is newfound, but we’ll see where it leads. Who knows, maybe she starts over and tries her hand as a ... baseball statistician.” I lean forward, wrinkling my nose. “Do they have those?”
“Yeah.” He gives a slow nod. “They do. We’ve got, uh, analysts. They do a lot of math.”
Smiling, I wave a hand. “Great, she’s excellent with numbers. I’ll be sure to let her know she has a solid backup if, you know”—I tip my head towards the jellyfish—“the jellyfish and all the other invertebrates go poof.”
“Poof,” he echoes quietly, and for some reason, I feel the singular word and the way his mouth moves all the way down the column of my spine. He might even lean forward, too, an almost imperceptible amount—I can only tell by the way the shadows shift across his face, but he takes a hard blink, and pullsback, clearing his throat. “So, uh.” His hand lifts towards the jellyfish circling the tank. “The aquarium.”
“The aquarium,” I repeat. “Thank you. I know it’s ... stupid—”
“It’s not.”
“And just for kids—”
“It’s not.”
A soft smile warms my face, and I give him a tiny shrug. “Well, I was told it was childish.”
“Not by a very reliable source,” he mutters with a poorly restrained eye roll.
“We went ... when I was a kid. My dad used to take me, and I just—” My shoulders dip. “It always made me feel happy, to be surrounded by all these other living things.”
Miller shakes his head. “It’s not ... weird, to want to do things you associate with a happy childhood memory. Look at Matty, we played cars as kids, and he started buying every single one he liked.”
