I’m not sure I want to, with Poseidon in this mood. I have the sense that I’m in trouble with him. A few more steps away. He doesn’t turn to look at me. He’s staring down at a sheet of paper in his hands. I doubt he’s seeing what’s printed there.
He’s as destroyed as I imagine. He has to be. Poseidon isn’t like this, all fury and thunder and bruises under his eyes. I’ve seen him laugh. I’ve seen him play.
I step farther from the pirates and their plans and stroll toward the docks.
It’s like an Escher painting. Wooden docks. Metal docks. Stories and stories of wooden scaffolds and stairs. They go everywhere and nowhere. Men clatter up and down and I can’t look at them too long without feeling dizzy on their behalf. Stairs to nowhere. It’s appropriate for the situation we’re in.
Six men gather around a stack of crates, prying them open and shouting at one another in a way that doesn’t sound threatening, exactly, just rough. Barely constrained by some rule of the shipyard, maybe. Under another circumstance they might punch each other. Their shouts fit seamlessly with the general racket. People hammer things. Weld things. Men yell to be heard over the noise of construction, which rises and falls in waves. The mansion on the cliff is silent in comparison. And cool. There’s very little shade here, other than crisscrossed patterns from the scaffolding, and I’m glad for the sundress.
On the other side of the crates, a dog roots around in a pile of spoiled fish. “Gross,” I whisper under my breath. It’s a thin little beagle, white with patches of black and brown, and it’s filthy.
I look around for the pirate who belongs to this dog, but no one is paying any attention. A beagle makes no sense for a ship’s dog. It’s too cute.
The dog lifts its face from the fish and looks at me, tail wagging. He abandons the fish and trots over. His tail wags harder. He sits, then stands up. Sits again. He’s leaving pawprints in the sawdust. The grime of the shipyard is all over this poor thing. He’s been here for a while, I think, but who would leave a dog like this?
“I bet you’ve seen a lot of pirates lose their minds over their ships, haven’t you?” He huffs at me, panting, and I’ve never seen a dog more in need of a bath. I wrinkle my nose at the smell, then laugh. He’s disgusting, but he’s cute. I keep moving, down toward more docks. The beagle tags along. I’ve never had a dog before. Not even a temporary dog. It feels good to have someone walking with me, even if I doubt this guy is a guard dog.
A man steps off one of the docks ahead of me and plants himself in my path.
The beagle stops wagging his tail.
The man isn’t close enough to touch me, and he’s not looking at me, but cold wariness grips the base of my spine.
I follow the path of his gaze, knowing before I do it what he’s looking at. Who he’s looking at.
Poseidon.
Poseidon, who folds the paper in his hands in half and shoves it back toward the shipbuilder. Nicholas angles himself between the other two men, his hands flying as he makes his point. The shipbuilder’s trying to get a word in, but Poseidon takes half a step back. “This is a real deadline, jackasses. Do you know what that means?”
His voice is louder than the other voices in the shipyard, but I don’t know if that’s because Poseidon is objectively louder, taller, stronger than everyone else or if it’s because he’s the one I care about. I want to listen to him even when he’s pissed and broken. Which he is. Which he hates. Nicholas pushes both hands toward him, not touching him. Backing him down. There are other rules in play here, and Poseidon’s on the verge of breaking them. Poseidon bats Nicholas’s hands away, shaking his head.
I glance back at the man.
He’s not watching Poseidon anymore.
He’s watching me.
Goose bumps run down my legs to my toes. It’s not his muscles or his three-day beard or even the tattoo of a huge kraken down his right arm that scares me. It’s his eyes. They’re flat. Reptilian. Wrong.
All wrong for this place, where most of the men I’ve seen have a purpose. Many of them are probably stressed and stranded, like we are, but they’re focused on repairs and supplies and ships.
I don’t like the way this man looked at Poseidon. And I don’t like the way he’s looking at me.
“Let’s go,” I tell the beagle, and turn away.
“You’re with him?” His voice stops me in place, my stomach twisting. It’s somehow gravelly and snakelike at the same time. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t even want to remember it. I could listen to Poseidon talk for hours. Forever. The sound of this guy makes me want to cover my ears.
And the question...
What does it really mean to be with a pirate? With Poseidon?
It means he’ll protect me. Here on land, in this dusty shipyard with the too-hot sun burning the skin of my shoulders, I can see what it meant to be on the Trident. I can see what it means to belong to Poseidon. The rules of the sea are more powerful than the rules on land. More binding. And what I have with Poseidon is more binding than both those things. He’ll protect me now. He protected me at sea. He destroyed his entire ship for me. Can he ever forgive me for that? For being the person who made him lose his ship? I’m beginning to think not.
The beagle paces at my feet. He doesn’t like this guy, and neither do I. But he asked me a question. “For now,” I answer. “I’m with him for now.”
His eyes narrow. It doesn’t make them look less flat, or less threatening. “Wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I won’t get hurt. No one messes with Poseidon.” I lift my chin despite the shiver prickling all down my back. Stand up tall.
An ugly sneer curls up the corner of his mouth. “If that were true, he would still have a ship, wouldn’t he?”
Another shout rises from where Poseidon is with Nicholas and the shipbuilder. It comes down quickly. Nicholas must be trying his best to keep things under control. But this man’s words, and the terrible tension between Poseidon and Nicholas and this entire process, confirms something for me. Something I’ve been trying not to look at too closely out of guilt.
He’s lost more than the Trident. He’s lost more than his command. He’s lost his sense of safety. The certainty he always had before came from the sea, but it also came from his ability to be on the sea. To move over it. To escape. He could keep his crew safe there because he had security.
That’s the heart of being home. You’re safe there. You’re secure.
Until you’re not.
Once, in his quarters on the Trident, Poseidon told me about his childhood. He let me touch the thin, almost-invisible scars on his back. That’s what my foster father was like. I was so focused on that, on his past pain, that I didn’t fully hear what he said next. My brothers were foster brothers. We weren’t raised to be close.
The pieces come together like pearls sliding down a string.
He told me after he saved me, after he brought me back to the Trident, after I found a box of edibles in his room and ate all of them. He told me because he didn’t think I would remember.
I was with my mother before. We were together. We were happy.
They were happy, and then he was taken, and then there was his foster father. He was safe, and then he wasn’t. My heart breaks for him. He was the only one who would have remembered what that was like. He told me that too. His brothers don’t remember their families. He remembers his.