She squints at the object. It’s about thirty feet away, moving on the waves. A cloud shifts from the moon and for a moment the light finds the object. It’s a face. A human face, its mouth open in a howl, someone in the water and oh God she opens her mouth to scream but suddenly there are arms around her and a warm mouth on her cheek and she turns to find Brodie there, and when she turns back to the person in the water they’re gone.
“Miss me?” he says, careful to keep his voice low.
She finds she can’t speak, she’s breathless and dizzy with confusion. She points wildly in the direction of the head she saw just a moment before, she saw it, someone was in the water, she saw their face and their hair, it was a man, but Brodie isn’t paying attention and within a moment he’s pulling her across the rocks to the beach.
IV
They sit holding hands in a cave that’s situated farther along the bay. Like an optical illusion, it’s hard to see on account of the striations of rock. The first time Brodie showed her the cave she thought he’d vanished.
“Perfect smoking spot,” he says, lighting a cigarette. She lights hers, and they watch the tide push forward and drag back just a few feet away. She loves how safe she feels with him. Just minutes ago she was terrified, wrung out with fear. And now he is here, and she is shielded from all the monsters in the world, emboldened by his desire for her.
He’s a couple of years older than her and has the body of a footballer, she thinks. The body of a man. He’s over six foot tall, has dark black hairs on his belly, and has to shave his face every day. She loves his voice, his hands, the planes of his face, the back of his neck. His smell.
They sit on a ledge in the rock, smoking and kissing. She tells him about the human head she saw bobbing in the waves and he laughs so hard that she laughs, too, and suddenly the whole thing is hilarious. The fear leaves her, and they talk about music （Marilyn Manson, Massive Attack, and Rage Against the Machine are mutual favorites）， films （both liked Reservoir Dogs and Reality Bites）， and their families.
“My mum’s last boyfriend was a pig,” she says. “But she’s left him now and is flirting with this new guy. Finn.”
“He’s a good guy, Finn.”
She frowns. “Really? My mum always goes for assholes, so I figured he was part of the club.”
“He’s got this rewilding project going on, it’s pretty major.”
“Rewilding? Is that something to do with those evil fairies that people apparently tied to the sycamore trees and cut their hearts out?”
She says it in a dry tone, and he grins. “He’s restoring the old forests that used to grow on these islands.”
“What do you mean, ‘restore old forests’？ A forest can hardly disappear, can it?”
“Anyway, we were talking about something else.”
“Assholes?”
“Ah, yes. Parents. Mine argue all the time. Think they’ll split soon.”
“Who would you live with?” she asks. She’s guessing he’ll say his mum. She’s met her. Overweight, always tired.
“Dad,” he says without hesitation.
“Really?”
He nods, stares into the darkness. She senses emotion gripping him.
“What about you?” he says. “How come you chose to live with your mum?”
“Oh,” she says, not realizing he isn’t aware of this whole chapter of her life. “My dad’s dead.”
“Sorry.”
She tells him about Sean, how nobody seemed to recognize that his death might affect her, like, at all, because he wasn’t her biological father. “But he was my dad,” she says, her throat burning with anger and tears pricking her eyes. “I called him Dad. He was going to adopt me. But nobody gets it. They were all so terribly sorry for Mum, Clover, and Luna. But not me.”