Page 18 of Goldilocks
Austin’s gaze darted to Sam’s boat, skittering across the painted hull – which had begun to wear away along the water line – and then his silver eyes fixed on the ocean. His expression hardened. Sam wondered if Austin was afraid of the water. He wondered if the last time he’d been out on the sea was when theInfinitetanker sank.
“I have pots laid just the next bay over in Curlew. I could do a trip to them and back. It would probably be about an hour, tops.”
Austin’s nose twitched, and his face jerked suddenly away from the ocean. “Fuck off,” he said, but a waver in his voice eroded the venom of his tone. He turned on his heels and marched away from Sam, lifting trembling hands to bury in his pockets.
Sam watched him walk away, knowing better than to chase after him. Clearly, he wasn’t someone Austin had any interest in talking with, and if he was set against him, then Sam wouldn’t do any good trying to calm him down.
He only wondered as he reached his boat why Austin knew what he looked like or knew who he was.
Sam climbed onto his boat and switched on a lantern as he opened the main cabin. He found his folder of paintings on the ground right behind the door, and he snorted when he picked it up and saw that the unfinished one was on top. Sam put it aside and went back outside to untie from the dock. He drove out into the flat ocean, cutting through the midnight-black sheet as the brisk Baltic air rushed inside the cabin.
Sam waited until the village was a mere blip before easing off the throttle. He dug through his trunk and found another sweater to pull on and then switched off the engine, the lights, everything, and dropped anchor. A three-quarter moon hung in the sky, providing enough light for Sam to go without the lantern.
By the time Sam dug out his fold-out chair and table, there was a stirring in the water. A ripple that grew closer on a direct path to Sam’s boat. Devil’s approach had never before been so obvious.
His face appeared through the railings. His shining eyes of gold narrowed, and his top lip quivered as if ready to sneer. That top lip went still, and his eyes relaxed as he saw that rather than the schoolbooks Devil usually found Sam setting up, it was his sketchbook instead.
Sam grinned. “My brother got me paints. Golden ones.” He showed the top page, the one he’d been dissatisfied to leave unfinished yesterday. “Would you model for me?” he asked.
Devil chirped, and with nimble ease, he hauled himself from the water and perched on his railing. Water ran down his bare shoulders, and he raised a hand to his wet hair. His cherubic curls always turned to waves when damp, and despite Devil clearly not liking that, Sam thought it looked just as good as when his hair was dry.
“It’s okay,” Sam said, seeing the merman frown. “I’m finishing this painting, so I only need to see your tail. Can you pose the way you did here?”
Devil peered at the sketch and then arranged himself, right down to the same arch in his back and the position of every individual finger.
“Perfect.” Sam already had his table and chair in the spot he wanted, so he sat and began.
In a mere hour, Sam had the stars above him and the unfinished painting that had been nagging at his mind completed. It was better now than it could have been yesterday. Moonlight illuminated the scene, and Sam ended up painting over the completed parts with washes of blue and dark hues to match the new image before him. Sam kept the painting to himself as it dried, immensely pleased with the result.
Once it dried, he approached Devil and leaned against the railing with him, offering out the painting. Offered out another hour of admiration right into the merman’s hands. “I could probably paint you blind at this stage,” Sam noted, watching Devil’s expression carefully as he took the sheet.
Devil chuffed. Huffed again a few moments later and finally released a pleased hum. Sam grinned. He liked it too.
“Moonlight suits you,” Sam said.
Devil handed Sam back the painting, and, surprising Sam, he bent down. When he straightened, he held a box. Devil rested it on his tail and jutted his chin at Sam, indicating toward the box.
Sam tilted his head, scanning the foreign object. It was ebony-coloured wood, polished and shining, about the size of the sheet in his hand and twice that in depth. “What’s this?” Sam asked. It definitely didn’t belong to him. It also didn’t look like Devil had dredged it from a shipwreck or the bottom of the ocean; it was far too clean.
Devil jutted his chin again.
“Is it for me?” Sam replaced his painting on the table and ran his fingers along the smooth wood. It wasn’t even wet…How did Devil get it onto the boat dry? A simple metal latch secured the round lid. Sam unclipped it and lifted the lid.
Cold radiated from the box, and the moonlight illuminated a sea-glass-green bottle resting upon large, uneven chunks of cut ice. Surrounding the bottle was a mountain of scrubbed, unopened oysters, and nestled away was one over-large lemon sliced in two pieces.
Sam examined the spread. “Are you sharing with me?” The oysters were a speckled grey. Large for Irish varieties, but the right colour. Sam picked up one of them and tapped the shell with his fingernail; the two halves snapped shut, the centimetre of space between the edges disappearing. “I should have a knife here somewhere I can use to shuck them.”
Devil reached inside the box and, from beneath the ice, tucked flat to the edge of the wood, pulled free a knife. The blade shone like silver steel, dead straight for the length of Sam’s pointer finger before tapering into a uniform point. All the edges were sharp. The handle seemed to be made of the same wood as the box, and it was smoothed down except for regular grooves in the wood for fingers to fit. It was the perfect size for Devil’s hand.
“Would you like to eat them now? Let me just get this set up.” Sam hooked his foot around the leg of his folding table and dragged it across the deck. He let the box balance on Devil’s lap long enough to clear away his supplies and then placed it there. “I should have two cups inside we can use.” He lifted out the bottle to examine it. Through the glass, he could just about make out carbon dioxide bubbles rising, so he assumed that, at the very least, Devil hadn’t brought him a bottle of seawater. There was no writing of any kind on the glass, and it was only when he turned it at an angle that an embossed engraving on the rim caught his eye. Even if it had been English, chances were Sam would have greatly struggled to figure out the words, but he was reasonably sure that it wasn’t lettering he was familiar with. The curves intermixed with harsh lines vaguely reminded him of the lettering from his classes on Roman architecture, but even in the height of his stubbornness, Sam hadn’t been stupid enough to actually sign himself up for any classes on ancient languages.
“What does this say?” Sam ran his thumb over the engraving.
A low growl grumbled from Devil. Sam’s gaze lifted from the bottle to see Devil rubbing his throat with an expression of vexed irritation.
“Wait,” Sam said quickly. “You don’t need to try to speak. Connor told me it took Adonis a while to adjust and that it could hurt. Don’t force yourself.”
Devil’s grumbles ceased, and all that was left in their aftermath was a put-out expression of discontent. Sam waited long enough to make sure he didn’t try to speak again, then replaced the bottle in the ice and went to fetch the cups. Two cups lived on the boat with Sam. They were old and chipped, but a glaze had kept the painted image on them intact even after years of use. Sam picked out his one, which had S-A-M written in the messy scrawl of a ten-year-old trying to paint on the curved surface of a cup. His had a paintbrush painted on it. The second one hadD-A-D in the same terrible brushmanship and was illustrated with a blob of brown and red, a tiny black dot and two thick brown lines that Sam had declared a robin when he’d given it to his dad. As Sam wiped them clean, his gaze snagged on a third cup nestled in the back of the drawer.