by Zoe Chant
Conall finished standing. “How long?” he had to ask, still feeling dazed.
“Just a few minutes,” the waiter said with a shake of his head. “But that was long enough, I guess.”
Conall recognized the dark red pools of material on the floor past Gizelle’s chair as the parts of her dress.
Chapter 17
Gizelle ran and ran and ran until her sides were heaving and the lights of the resort were distant twinkles behind her, and kept running until the jungle closed around her.
Finally, she shifted back onto trembling human legs, staggered a few steps, and sank down into the moss to weep.
She’d made a mistake in taking Conall to her safe place. All she had done was prove what an abnormality she was.
She was such a joke as a human.
She was foolish and awkward and ugly and odd and she couldn’t imagine anyone ever loving her.
It hadn’t mattered so much before... before Conall.
She hadn’t wanted to be loved before she’d seen him and realized what love might be.
He was so beautiful and proud, and he moved so easily through the world that baffled her.
She wanted him so badly that it hurt, deep in her belly. She ached for his touch and was terrified of it. She could feel all the hollow places inside that she wanted to let him into, and she was afraid she would crack apart if she tried to open to him.
And to top it all off, she had probably destroyed Lydia’s pretty dress when she ran away.
For some reason, that made her want to cry harder than ever, the hurt pressing against the inside of her eyes, and she was grateful when she felt her gazelle reach out to enfold her.
Wordlessly, the graceful animal offered her distance.
Protection.
Escape.
She didn’t have to be Gizelle, she could just be.
For now, it was easiest just to run.
Chapter 18
Conall woke, surprised that he’d slept at all.
He didn’t feel rested, and he could feel his elk pacing in his head, full of unrelieved need and unhappiness.
He couldn’t stop remembering Gizelle: her slight, sweet figure in that alluring red dress. Her expressive mouth. Her ancient, dark eyes, framed in those long lashes. Her clever fingers tracing patterns in the condensation on her glass.
He groaned, willing his body to stop wanting her. He wondered how cold the showers here got.
She’s here, his elk breathed, suddenly aware, and Conall rolled over to find Gizelle sitting cross-legged on his wardrobe.
“Gizelle,” he said, strangled, as he sat up and pulled a decorative pillow into his lap.
“You were sleeping,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Most people do,” Conall said wryly, and after he said it, he wondered if she did.
“Did you dream?” she asked.
Did it count as dreaming that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, even while he was sleeping?
“I don’t remember.”
She nodded sagely. “There is a lot I don’t remember,” she said. “But I always remember not remembering. I always remember the place with no sky.”
Conall found himself having to watch her mouth carefully. Half of lip-reading was guessing what someone was going to say, and there was no predicting where Gizelle would go next.
“Have you had breakfast?” he asked, not sure how to answer.
“I grazed,” Gizelle said carelessly. “I wanted to see where you lived.” She ducked her head then, and said something Conall couldn’t see.
“I couldn’t see that,” he said, hating the admission.
She looked up in alarm. “I’m sorry! I just...” she blushed, but kept her chin up, clearly with effort. “I just thought maybe I’d show you where I lived.”
Her flush was the most adorable thing Conall had ever seen, and his elk persisted in finding it erotic and wondering if he would be able to make her flush like that while lying on the sheets beneath him.
This wasn’t helping his efforts to not need a pillow in his lap.
“I’d like that,” he said grimly.
To his alarm, Gizelle seemed to think that meant now, and she acrobatically vaulted from the wardrobe, plummeting to the floor to land in a crouch.
Her hair was still braided, but was starting to fray, with loose strands everywhere. She brushed it back and sprang to her feet. “It’s not far,” she promised, skirting away from the bed. She clearly still wasn’t ready to be touched.
“I, er, can’t yet,” Conall said, his voice breaking for the first time since puberty. He didn’t have to hear it to know, and he clutched the pillow closer.
Gizelle’s puzzled gaze, almost hurt, got him partway there.
Thinking about music, about never hearing the songs that he’d loved, that nearly did it.
Realizing that he would never be able to hear the sounds he longed to make her utter was better than the coldest shower he’d ever taken.
He rolled out of bed and dressed swiftly. “I would love to see it,” he said sincerely.
Chapter 19
Gizelle scouted ahead of Conall to her cottage. “Scarlet gave this to me,” she told him, then remembered that he wouldn’t be able to hear her that way. She turned backwards and repeated herself.
Continuing to walk backwards, confident of her path, she added, “Graham let the plants grow up, so no guests will accidentally come see me.”
They were at the very edge of the resort, where the jungle whispered its desire to spread roots and trail vines in to take it over again. It wouldn’t, of course. It respected the resort boundaries that Scarlet enforced. But here, the white gravel path was allowed to overgrow, and Gizelle showed Conall where to duck under just the right branches.
He was bigger than she was, wonderfully bigger, and it was a tight squeeze, but he didn’t complain, following her willingly to her house.
It was one of the little cottages, not a big one like his, but it still had a pretty deck and shining windows.
Conall started to go to the door, but Gizelle stopped him. “I never go in,” she said. “It’s too echoing inside. Too much space. And the door shuts too tightly.”
Instead, she led him around back to the outside shower. It was under the eaves of the house, walled on three sides, with a wide door that she never shut.
Conall did not fit in it very well, especially since he was trying very hard not to accidentally touch her. When she sat down, he sat opposite from her. He had very nice pants that probably weren’t good for sitting in the dirt, but he didn’t complain.
“This is where I come when it’s too noisy for me but not noisy enough for my gazelle,” she told him.
She was glad that Conall didn’t ask her to explain that. He just nodded sagely. Maybe his elk was the same way, she thought hopefully.
She showed him her treasures; the brochures she picked up from the lawn, and the sea shells that guests sometimes left near the pool. She rarely went to the beach herself—the sand was too soft to run in.
There was a flower she had picked, and hidden from Graham. It was wilted now, but still velvety soft. Scarlet had given her a book, but that was before Gizelle had known that water was bad for books; it was now sadly wrinkled and some of the ink had run.
Scarlet hadn’t scolded her, but she also hadn’t let Gizelle take any more books.
Gizelle put everything on the ground between them, not wanting to accidentally brush Conall’s fingers. If he touched her, she wasn’t sure what would happen, but she knew that just the idea of it made her breathe harder, like she did before panic choked her and she had to run.
And she didn’t want to run.
Conall treated everything with grave admiration, though Gizelle knew that some of it was worthless.
“This is my favorite thing,” she said, putting her last treasure between them.
“What is it?” Conall asked, picking it up. It was a twisted and broken bar of steel with dangling elec
trical wires, bent like it had been torn with a great force.
“It was the lock on Neal’s cage. He gave it to me,” Gizelle told him, remembering.
She didn’t want to remember that.
Neal had left.
“No one will ever put you in a cage again,” Conall said, and he said it like Neal had, fiercely.
Gizelle realized that she had backed up against the shower wall. “Give it back,” she said faintly, but he was looking at the lock, not at her.
He didn’t hear her, she told herself. It wasn’t that he was ignoring her. He wouldn’t ignore her. He wouldn’t leave her.
Her gazelle was nuzzling in her ear, trying to calm her, but panic was rising, as sure as strangers, and everything whispered.
She saw an opportunity as he turned the lock in his hands, to safely snatch it away. For an awful moment, he instinctively held it, and she had to tug at it and she could almost feel his fingers, they were so close.
Then he opened his hand and the lock was hers again and she could retreat to her side of the shower.
“No one will ever hurt you again,” Conall repeated.
It was better, with the heavy weight of the lock in her hand. Gizelle could catch her breath again, like she had roots and could drink the earth once more. “This is the heart of my hoard.” She tucked it back away underneath the shower shelf.
“You’re... a dragon?” Conall looked understandably confused.
Gizelle shook her head. “No. But if I were, this would be it.”
She got to her feet. “Come on, I’ve shown you my hoard. Now, the rest of the island.”
Chapter 20
Conall at several points wondered if Gizelle honestly meant the entire island.
The tour she led him on was a completely different experience than prowling the resort the first evening. They didn’t spend any time at all at the sites labeled on the brochure, and very little time on the marked paths. One of their routes went right out into the jungle, over tangled roots and following no sort of trail that Conall could identify whatsoever.
They even hiked along the tree-tangled ridge of the island to the abandoned compound on the other end, staying to the edge of the overgrown lawn.
“That is where the cages are,” Gizelle said calmly. “I come visit sometimes.” But she didn’t offer to show them to Conall and he didn’t know if he should ask to see them. “I don’t eat the grass here,” she said, and then they turned and hiked back through the jungle to the resort along a completely different route.
“I don’t like the beach,” she said, leading him to one of the lawns that overlooked it. She had to repeat herself when she remembered to look at him while she spoke. “The sand is too hard to run in. But the grass here is delicious. Graham says it has to do with the salt water spray and the sun that it gets and the kind of soil. He says even less than you do.” She added that last with a thoughtful look. “Did losing your hearing make you talk less?”
She was still better at keeping her face in view when she spoke than many of Conall’s friends had been after months of reminders.
They had felt so awkward about interacting with him that after a few failed attempts at staying in contact, Conall hadn’t bothered. “I’ll call you,” they always ended a conversation, forgetting that a phone call was useless.
Conall had to laugh and he wondered if it sounded as humorless as it felt. “I guess it did,” he said honestly. “I wasn’t what you’d call chatty before the accident, but since it happened, talking can be a challenge. People don’t remember to look at me, and I can’t tell what I sound like. It’s easier being quiet.”
“I think you sound nice,” Gizelle said swiftly. “You have... sort of a fuzzy voice. Like a cat.”
Conall decided to take that as a compliment. “Thank you?”
“We don’t have any cats here, unless you count Travis and Graham and” (undoubtedly-not-) “Wrench and” (probably-not-) “Brick. No domestic cats. Except sometimes guests, but you aren’t supposed to pet the guests.” She sounded wistful.
That surprised a real laugh out of him, and Gizelle smiled slowly in reply. “I like it when you laugh,” she said.
“Then I shall endeavor to laugh as often as possible,” Conall told her gravely.
She almost laughed herself then, and leaned so close that Conall thought she was finally going to touch him, but she didn’t quite.
Then she was turning away, possibly saying something that Conall couldn’t hear.
He followed her, sorely tempted to catch her swinging braid and use it to pull her into an embrace.
From that lawn, they went to another at the exact opposite end of the resort by the most circuitous route. This one was outside the resort gates; soft groomed mounds of grass rose from the jungle to meet the stone wall.
They contemplated the Shifting Sands Resort sign.
Gizelle traced one of the esses, then turned to him and said, “I like letters. I can’t wait to learn to read.”
Reading would certainly simplify her life. Or possibly complicate it, given the strange rabbit-hole that was the Internet.
“Have you thought about what you want to do next?” Conall had to ask, thinking about the warning Bastian and the mermaid had given him. He couldn’t imagine Gizelle in Boston, any more than they could.
She looked at him, big eyes under long innocent eyelashes. “After I learn to read?”
“With your life. Forever.”
She will be with us forever, his elk said confidently.
But where did that put them?
Her eyelashes might be innocent, but Gizelle’s eyes were fathomless and ancient. “Forever is an arbitrary point in time,” she said grimly. “And I’ve already been there.”
Conall had no answer for that.
Fortunately, she continued, voice light again. “I would like to be useful,” she said. “I want to do something that helps Scarlet the way she’s helped me. I tried helping at the bar but I dropped all my glasses and bottles. And Chef won’t let me help in the kitchen.”
“What do you want to do?” Conall pressed. “For yourself. What’s something that you like to do?”
Gizelle blinked at him, as if it had never occurred to her before. She was close enough that Conall could have touched her without trying. It took conscious effort to keep from reaching out to her every few moments, to brush the loose hair back from her face, or just to see if her skin was as warm in the sunlight as it looked.
“I like to run,” she said slowly. “And I like it when Scarlet reads to me, so I think I will like reading.” Her eyes widened with a sudden thought. “Will you read to me?” she begged.
At that moment, Conall would have read her the Boston phonebook in one sitting. “Anything you’d like.”
Gizelle pointed at the sign.
“Shifting Sands Resort.”
She pointed at the smaller sign.
“Authorized Guests Only. No Predation.”
Gizelle all but dragged him back down into the resort, dancing ahead of him and gesturing enthusiastically every time he paused. They stopped at every sign. Some of them she had memorized, mouthing along with him.
She made him read the entire staff bulletin board, including notes about shifts in the restaurant that referenced someone named Breck who was surely the waiter-who-wasn’t-Brick and repair notes for Travis and Wrench, confirming that as an unexpected name. Graham must be the gardener with the machete.
“I want my name to be up there,” Gizelle said, once Conall had puzzled through all the handwritten comments and baffling assignments.
“You don’t want to go somewhere else someday?”
Gizelle had to repeat her reply, because she glanced away the first time. “Where else is there?”
“The whole world out there,” Conall said. “Paris, maybe? America? Africa? Great Britain?”
“Boston,” she said flatly. “You want to know if I’d go to Boston.”
Conall rapidly re-evaluated
her. Again.
“I have a business there,” he told her. “An... important business.” But even as he said as much, he had to wonder.
He had poured himself into his business when his music career came to a crashing halt. He’d built it from a niche novelty business into a global chain, expanded it into clothing, and diversified it overseas. Time had run a cover article on him that hung, framed, in his office. He hadn’t read the article after the lengthy interview, but he knew it had lingered poignantly over his disability and his shattered promise as a musician.
Lemonade from lemons, everyone praised him. The elk antlers that twisted into Celtic knots framing a guitar was one of the most respected logos in the modern high end instrument and supply industry today.
Now he was thinking about throwing it all away to live on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere, filled with the strangest people he had ever met, for a gorgeous wild woman who wouldn’t even let him touch her.
And he was seriously considering it.
Chapter 21
Gizelle looked at Conall in consternation.
Scarlet had shown her photographs of Boston. It was big, and busy, and full of people and buildings and streets and she didn’t have to be told that it would be loud.
“Scarlet doesn’t even think I should go to the mainland,” Gizelle tried to explain. “I don’t want to go to the mainland.” Was Boston on the mainland or was it on another island? She had looked at maps with Travis, as he tried to explain how Alaska wasn’t an island even though it was shown surrounded by water. Was Boston like that?
She wondered if she could go to Boston. She wanted to follow Conall, but the whole idea of a city made the urge to flee rise in her throat.
She didn’t realize she was shaking until Conall reached for her, and she jumped back, just out of his reach. His hand fell back to his side.
“I’m not asking you to come to Boston,” he said firmly.
“Not now, or not ever?” Gizelle asked suspiciously.