#A Star To Sail Her By|Dr Billy Manderly

[brooklynislandgirl]

Happy Birthday to the person that makes me better.

~*~

"I swear,” she giggles, half tripping on her own feet, “if you dump me in the Koi Pond or the coastal waddah exhibit, I’m gonna be choke mad a’cha.” While there’s laughter in her voice, there’s a subtle undercurrent of nervousness. She’d thought the sticky note ~recycled paper and vegetable-based ink acknowledged, appreciated, and aside~ wishing her a happy birthday stuck to her door, and a little fish bowl on her desk bearing a pretty new friend for Scampi the First, which is legitimately what she named the first purple zebra shrimp he’d given her ~tentatively to be named Umami~ well, what more could Billy really offer her?

She wasn’t expecting him to break into her office a second time, especially not when she was in there, midst typing up her notes on her most recent research paper, A Window to the Seasons, which links how sharks detect the passing of seals via their pineal gland to humans with Seasonal Affective Disorder and how solving one might change or assist with the other. She’s still typing away, not looking up when his hands come around her shoulders and bodily lifts her up. She tries to still reach the keyboard when he shifts them down to her hips and begins pushing her out of her door. It’s the middle of the night, or will be soon, anyway. She’s not expecting company so she’s got on her pyjamas, grey cotton leggings and an oversized Pink Floyd tee-shirt, feet bare even of slippahs ~which he reaches back to retrieve for her~ and tells her that she’s got to play along. After the first few minutes of him following behind her, covering her eyes, she becomes disoriented by the twists and turns. She can tell by the heat and the moisture on her skin that they leave the main facility for a time. At one point there’s a downward slope and another door. The air becomes cool and almost stale again, heavy with the smell of water but not the fresh ocean breeze, or the pools of the outdoor habitats. She can hear dripping and filter pumps. Cocks her head in the artificial dark of his palms and takes a stabilising breath. Finally she reaches up and pulls his hands away, only to hear his words at the edge of her ear, and it makes her shiver as the scene unfolds. A candlelit table reflecting in the glass of the bay tunnel, the secret part that visitors aren’t allowed. There’s been more than once in her stay that they’ve dragged sleeping bags and dreamt under the fish and the reefs, the ocean swell a far better lullaby than anything they could bottle up or prescribe on the mainland. The chafing dishes keep her from seeing exactly what it is he ~with maybe Miranda’s help~ has cooked up, but it’s still very beautiful, as is the single candle on the thing she recognises immediately as hummingbird cake, her favourite, and she has to wonder who his accomplice has been, because it sure isn’t Annie, curling up now off to the side in her dog-bed. There’s a small box next to one of the plates, and she can’t help but side-eye him. “What’s all dis?” she whispers. She was absolutely certain he disliked having her here and that even when they decided to play nicely, they weren’t exactly the best of friends. “Though, I goddah say, dis is...beautiful.”