Call of Water (Madame Tan's Freakshow #1) - Marina Simcoe Page 0,73
sat in the café, alone. Unlike any time before, though, I thought about it without any hurt or bitterness.
I used to believe Zeph had stood me up because we didn’t click. That he didn’t like me enough. That he had made a promise in the heat of the moment then decided not to bother.
Yet there he was, staring at me across the table with the same craving in his eyes with which I would normally gaze at a dessert. His interest was obvious. Even without the speech he had given me in my mom’s basement, I knew he cared.
“Ivy.” He reached across the table, taking my hands in his. “Move in with me.”
It was so unexpected, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
“You want us to live together?”
“Yes. It has to be somewhere on the water, though.”
I remembered the dream he had shared with me that night in Paris.
“By the sea.” I smiled.
“Exactly. You were considering moving to Paris once. Could it be an island in the sea somewhere, instead?”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter. Choose any one.”
I pondered that idea for a few moments, thinking about the island of St. Vincent I’d visited with my parents as a child. They’d already been going through some troubles in their marriage, and that trip must have been one of their many attempts to re-connect. But I was eight, on vacation with my still intact family, and the world had seemed wonderful. I’d loved snorkeling with colorful fish and running on the black-sand beaches. The volcanic sand, heated by the sun, burned my bare feet, and I ran to the water as fast as I could, screaming in pain and laughing at the same time.
“I went to St. Vincent once,” I said to Zeph, smiling at those memories. “It’s in the Caribbean Sea.”
“The Caribbean would work. It’ll put some distance between us and Ghata’s bracks.” He squeezed my hands tighter. “I’ll feel much safer by the water. I can protect you better there, too.”
My head was spinning both from the excitement of a future with Zeph and from how fast it all had been happening lately.
“When do you want to move?” I asked.
“As soon as I’m done in France. But I would love for you to fly there now.”
“Now? Like, right now?”
Talk about moving fast!
He nodded. “I want you far away from here, the sooner the better.”
“I’ll have to get ready first...” I blinked, trying to catch up. “There are things I still need to do here.”
“Like what?”
I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again.
There was no apartment for me to worry about. I had my most essential things already with me, packed in the duffel bag in the car. Because of the trip to the police, I had all my IDs on me, even the passport. There was nothing left for me to do in this country. I could leave right away.
Zeph must have read it from my expression.
“As soon as I’m done in France,” he said. “I’ll come straight to you. As long as you’re in the water, I’ll know where to find you.”
NO MATTER HOW HARD I’d tried to make my crème brûlée last longer, eventually the dinner came to an end.
“The lake can’t be far from here,” Zeph said as we walked back to the car.
He stopped by the passenger’s door, taking my hand.
“Not far.” I squeezed his fingers in mine. “Just down this—”
He stopped me with a kiss—sudden, hot, and desperate. It stripped me of any shred of composure I had struggled to maintain all evening. The moment he let me come up for air, I pleaded, “Don’t go. Not yet. Just another night...a couple of hours?”
Holding me tight, he buried his face in my neck, rocking us both side to side in the wind.
“Please,” I begged, then exhaled a humorless laugh since he hadn’t answered. “Obviously, I’m not a siren. My call is not that hard to resist.”
“Yet you’re impossible to let go,” he groaned against my skin. “I don’t want to leave.”
I glanced at the six-story hotel building next to the restaurant we had just left.
“Stay.” I wrapped my arms around his middle. “You’ve asked for another night with me. Let it be this night. Let’s make some new memories.”
Chapter 26
ZEPH
The moment Ivy unlocked the door of the hotel room, he shoved it open, dragging her in.
“Thank you for dinner,” he rasped, kicking the door shut.
“It was my pleasure...” she half-whispered, finding the edge of his hoodie, then taking it off over his head. The