Page 73 of A Line in the Sand
“Max Miller. Did you just make a dad joke?” Molly poked him gently in the ribs. “You must really be invested in those seahorse babies.”
He held his finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart. “A little bit, yes.”
She laughed. In the distance, Max could see the teams lining up at the beach access and Sam issuing instructions for their test. A thought crossed his mind, one that he’d been tossing around for a while and trying not to act on.
“Speaking of infant sea life,” he heard himself say, “are you busy tonight around ten p.m. onward?”
Smooth. Real smooth.He was trying to ask her on a date of sorts, and he couldn’t manage to avoid mentioning marine biology.
Molly studied him for a moment and her lips curved into a promising smile. “The only thing ordinarily on my agenda at that time of night is sleeping, but what did you have in mind? I’m intrigued.”
“Would you like to babysit the turtle nest on the beach by our houses with me? The hatchlings are due to arrive soon.” Max cleared his throat. Why did he feel like a teenager trying to invite a girl he liked to the prom? He was suggesting she join him for a quasi–work-related activity.
On the beach…
In the moonlight.
His chest clenched as he waited for her to respond. Then a loud cheer erupted on the other side of the beach, dragging their attention to Bingo the pug, sitting completely still—goggles and all—in the exact spot where Max had put one of the sample tins that contained sand from the turtle nest.
“Look!” Molly grabbed onto Max’s arm. “He did it. Bingo alerted!”
They looked at each other, eyes wide and frozen for a split second, until Molly threw herself into Max’s arms.
It was almost too much—her softness, her scent, her joyful energy—like trying to hold sunshine in his hands. Max closed his eyes and held her tight, until she finally backed away to meet his gaze.
The dizzy smile on her face changed into something more private, like a secret she’d been holding onto just for him. “And yes to tonight. Let’s babysit a turtle nest together.”
Max felt himself exhale. “It’s a date.”
***
“Just calm down,” Molly told Ursula as they walked down the steps of the cottage toward the beach below. The ocean looked inky-black under the night sky. The moon hung high overhead, shining bright like a pearl. “I don’t know for sure if this is a date.”
Ursula scrambled her paws so fast that they almost ran right out from under her. Down on the sand, Max held up a hand and grinned. Molly’s stomach fluttered, beating with the excited wings of a thousand summer butterflies.
Okay, maybe it was a date. Max had said so himself, after all. Molly just didn’t want to get her hopes up about anything. Her track record with dates wasn’t exactly stellar, and with discovering Ursula’s special talent, the birth of the seahorse babies, and the enormous success of today’s training test, so many miraculous things had happened lately that she knew she had to be headed for a fall. The good luck streak couldn’t last forever.
Being a professional mermaid, Molly thought a lot about luck, probably more than most people. She liked to memorize fun facts and myths about mermaids to help create her narrative when talking to the guests, especially the kids. She knew that for every legend about mermaids being harbingers of good luck, there was another, darker myth that said mermaids were cursed. They were temptresses who liked to toy with sailors’ hearts and lure them off course.
Molly had never felt like much of a temptress, but sometimes she wondered if luck and good fortune worked like the tides. Nature was full of patterns. It was one of the most beautiful and mysterious things about science—the fivefold symmetry of a starfish, the perfect swirls in a seashell, ripples in the wet sand that perfectly mirrored one another. Like the ocean ebbed and flowed, it only made sense that bad times would be followed by good, and so on and so on.
She’d been waiting so long for the good times to come again that she’d almost given up. And now that they were here, she was almost afraid to breathe lest they slip through her fingers.
Every single dog had alerted at class earlier today. Every. Single. One. Skippy, not so much. But Molly was happy to give the search cat a pass. She’d had real results to plug into the grant proposal, and she’d been so excited to get the numbers in place that she’d finished the paperwork and sent it off early, just an hour ago. And now her toes were sinking in the sand as she walked toward Max with her heart in her throat—on adate.
“Hi, there,” he said, looking more like his sand sculpture lookalike than Molly had ever seen him before. He wore khaki shorts that were a little frayed at the edges, and one of his regular white button-downs but it was rolled up at the sleeves and unbuttoned a few inches, so she could see the hollow of his throat.
Molly liked this loose, relaxed version of Max. Quite a lot. It made her feel things…volleyball-type feelings.
“Hi.” She swallowed hard as he bent down to rub Ursula’s belly. “This was a great idea. I’ve never seen a sea turtle nest hatch before.”
Max stood and pointed toward the nest they’d marked off that was situated farther up on the dunes, directly between their houses. “I was thinking that one might have been laid earlier than the others. The sand up there looks really natural and undisturbed. But of course, there’s no guarantee. Odds are we’ll sit out here all night long and nothing will happen.”
That didn’t sound so bad, frankly. “I think I could live with that.”
His eyes met hers, and Molly forgot about luck and grants and all the silly things she’d let get in the way of getting to know him better. She even forgot about The Tourist. Life before Max had come to the island felt a million miles away.
“Same here.” He held out his hand.
