I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Lesson One

Abbie refuses Barrows's ultimatum in front of the staff and moves in with Margie, teaches Jet to ask instead of take, and wakes to news that Barrows has netted a girl in the north cove.

I closed my hand around the watch so hard the buckle bit my palm.

"Where did you get this?"

Jet tipped his head.

"The sea gives me things."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the true one."

"It was on my wrist. In the north cove. Nine years ago."

He looked at the closed fist, and then at my face, and something went very careful in his.

"Then the sea kept it for you," he said.

"Who are you?"

He sank until only his eyes were above the water.

Then he was gone, and the pen was just black water and cut net.

I sat on the float until my teeth chattered.

He still had my field watch.

I walked home to my station room with my father's watch in my wet fist and didn't sleep at all.

At seven, the mess hall smelled of burnt toast.

Every one of them stopped chewing when I walked in.

Barrows stood at the coffee urn with the postdoc beside him and a laptop open on the counter.

"Good morning, Abbie," he said. "Come and see."

On the screen, a grainy gray figure knelt on the holding pen with a knife.

It was me.

The camera on the light pole had caught every stroke.

The net bulged, and the figure cut, and the water churned, and then she was pulled in.

The angle never showed what pulled her.

"Forty thousand dollars of net," Barrows said. "And the only lead we've had in nine years."

"You'd have killed it."

"So you saw it."

The whole room leaned in.

I looked at the screen, at the dark water where Jet had been.

"I saw a seal," I said. "A big one. It was drowning in your net."

The postdoc snorted.

Barrows took off his glasses and polished them on his fleece.

"Your drives," he said gently. "Every hydrophone file, every backup, on my desk by noon. Or I call the state police and show them this."

The room was dead quiet.

A tech, a kid who borrowed my headphones every week, stared hard at his eggs.

"No," I said.

"Abbie."

"They're my files. My equipment. My nine months. Call whoever you want."

I went to my room, packed one duffel, and walked out the front door with every drive I owned zipped inside it.

Nobody stopped me.

Margie's truck was idling at the end of the station road, orange bibs on the seat beside her.

"Get in," she said. "I've got a room over the bait shed. It stinks of herring and it's yours."

"I can't pay much."

"You can pay in telling me why that bastard's going around saying you stole a whale."

"It wasn't a whale."

She looked at me sideways all the way to the east shore.

The room over the bait shed had a sloped ceiling, a hot plate, and a window on the water.

It did stink of herring.

I loved it before I put the duffel down.

That night I sat on Margie's dock with my headphones on and my father's watch beside me on the planks.

At eleven, the water by the ladder went flat and smooth.

Jet came up the ladder on two legs.

Long pale legs, dripping, and the rest of him just as bare as the legs.

I yanked my headphones off.

"Oh my God."

"You said I need a name," he said. "You didn't say I need trousers."

"Everybody needs trousers!"

"Stay there," I said. "Do not move. Do not walk up to that house."

I ran into the bait shed and came out with an armful from the box Margie kept by the door.

Her ex-husband's things. He'd left in a hurry two winters ago.

Jeans, a flannel shirt, a hooded sweatshirt that said GANNET ISLAND VOLUNTEER FIRE.

Jet put the sweatshirt on first.

Then he tried to put the jeans on over his head.

I took them away from him and held them out right.

"Legs go in here."

"Only at night," he said. "From dark to light I can walk. In the day the sea takes them back."

"Great. So you'll only be naked part-time."

He buttoned the jeans wrong and looked pleased with himself.

Then he held out my field watch.

"I took it," he said. "You said I give back."

I strapped it on.

"Good. That's lesson one. Real lesson one. You ask. You don't take."

"Ask what?"

"Anything. You want to hold her hand, you ask. You want her watch, you ask. You want to drag her into a harbor, you definitely ask."

He sat beside me on the planks, close, smelling of salt and cold.

"May I keep your father's watch safe for you, then?" he said. "Until you want it."

"No."

"All right."

He didn't touch it.

"Tell me about her," I said. "The one you want to court."

He looked out at the water a long time.

"She's brave," he said. "She's loud. She swears at the weather. She smells of diesel and coffee."

I thought about it.

Then I looked up the hill at Margie's kitchen window, where Margie was shouting at a ballgame on the radio.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, Jet. Okay. She's divorced, you know. Two winters."

He frowned. "Who?"

"Never mind. We'll work up to it."

At five, Margie's VHF crackled through the floor of my room.

A man's voice, breathless, on the working channel.

"Station boat to the station. We're dragging the north cove. There's something in the net."

A pause full of engine noise and shouting.

"It's a girl."

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