Chapter 5: Legs

He was tall.

That was the first thing, and it was an unfair thing, because he had been a face in a chat window for two years.

He stood dripping on the boathouse boards, bare as the day he was born, silver-grey from throat to ankle.

The blue lines ran down his ribs.

His legs were long and a little unsteady.

He braced one webbed hand against the Marigold's hull and looked down at himself with open interest.

Gus turned all the way around and faced the wall.

"I'm going to go see about the tug," he said.

"I'll come help," Maya said, in a very strange voice, and followed him out.

The door banged.

I stood there holding a towel I did not remember picking up.

"Hello," Velun said.

"Hello."

"I told you I could do this."

"You told me in month four. I thought it was a metaphor."

"It is not a metaphor. It is knees."

I made myself look at his face.

It did not help, because his face was the thing I had been in love with since a rainy night two years before.

"Here," I said, and held out my father's wool blanket.

He wrapped it around his hips, clumsily, and looked at me.

"It costs me," he said.

"I can hold this shape four hours. After that my skin dries and splits."

"Then I have to go back under."

"Four hours."

"I wanted to stand in front of you."

"You could have waited until the shed wasn't full of my relatives."

"I did not think I could wait."

He crossed the floor slowly, and I realized he was shaking.

"Are you cold?" I said.

"Everything is too dry. Everything is too loud. The air is thin and your heart is very quick."

"Can you hear my heart?"

"Sorcha. I can hear it from the dock."

My face went hot to the roots of my hair.

I reached out and laid my palm flat on his chest.

He was cool and smooth and under it something pounded as hard as mine.

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