Lost at Sea
Chapter 24

Her fingers lingered against Jasper’s legs as they pulled him out of the water. A part of him hoped frantically that she would change her mind and yank him away from them, but he knew she was right. Their worlds could not overlap any longer.

The sailors were obviously all young and inexperienced. However, he was grateful for the towels and the food. He shivered violently as soon as he was brought onboard, but they wouldn’t believe him when he told them it had nothing to do with the temperature.

“Why were you out there?” They all asked. Again, and again. It was all they seemed to want to know.

“My ship sunk,” he’d say every time. It was never enough.

“Where is this ship headed?” He inquired once between bites of food.

“Lisbon,” one of the men replied, and Jasper felt his heart shatter all over again.

“Have you any parchment?” He asked. “And charcoal?”

For hours, Jasper sat on the deck and drew her. His Eleanor. The way she was before, with her elegant cheekbones and long eyelashes. Then darker, more menacing. More shadows in her cheeks, darkening her eyes, sharpening her teeth. A naked torso, a long serpentine tail that coiled beneath her to keep her afloat and level. Scale after scale went into that tail, layering perfectly to capture the armored look to it. He struggled with every feature, every barnacle that clung to her porcelain skin. And yet, when he finished, he was still so completely in love with the monster on the page.

“Whoa,” one of the sailors, Robert, had said when he looked over Jasper’s shoulder. “You’d think that drawing that sort of beast would be bad luck.”

“She’s beautiful, in her own way,” Jasper murmured.

“Yeah,” Robert chuckled, “-but definitely not the human way.”

Jasper only smiled, because he knew that she would have torn his throat out for that. He stared back down at the drawing and paused. With a moment’s hesitation, he began to add the familiar pieces of who Eleanor was before her transformation. The smattering of freckles across her nose, the sweet quirk in her lips when she talked, the way she curled her fingers into her palm when not in use. Bit by bit, the creature in the paper became a little bit less mystical and much more... believable.

Maybe it was insane, but Jasper longed for that cove. The sun peeking out shyly through the hole in the top and the dancing reflections of the water on the walls. Despite the constant uncomfortable fear he’d lived in, he was going to dream of that place for the rest of his life.

The rest of his life? Jasper stopped and squinted up at the impossibly blue sky. How much longer could he last knowing that his Eleanor was even more unreachable now than when he’d thought her dead?

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