Gizelle gave him a puzzled look. “Fly? Like Bastian? Where will it go?”
“It will pass quickly,” Conall amended. “It will be Christmas before you realize.”
“But I realize now!” Gizelle countered.
“You just need something else to do,” Conall suggested, tracing her bare arm with a finger.
“Oh,” Gizelle said, then, “Oh!” as Conall bent and kissed her neck. “I can think of something,” she said slyly. “But Tex is always chasing people out of the bar for trying to do that here.”
“Let’s not make him do that,” Conall chuckled. He gathered up his laptop and stood, offering Gizelle his hand.
She eagerly took it, fingers sliding into his like they belonged there.
They do belong there, his elk reminded him.
Chapter 37
“You have your own pool,” Gizelle observed much later, standing on Conall’s porch.
“It’s a Jacuzzi,” Conall explained, after she had repeated herself looking at him. “Have you ever been in one?”
Gizelle shook her head, gazing do
wn at the blue water. It smelled... different than the saltwater pool. She dipped a hand into it, but when she bent her head to taste it, Conall stopped her.
“It won’t taste good.”
Gizelle paused, considering the advice. It was probably good advice. She let the water trickle out through her fingers like rain... like dark rain. Dark red. No, bright red. Like blood.
“Gizelle?”
Gizelle bit the moment in half and was back on Conall’s porch. The water in the little pool was blue again. “Can I try it?”
“You can,” Conall said skeptically. “But I’m serious. It’s pretty nasty tasting.”
Gizelle laughed. “Not tasting it. Swimming in it.”
“Swimming is an overstatement of what you can do in it,” Conall cautioned. “But we could sit if you liked.”
Gizelle was already stripping off her dress and climbing up on the steps next to it.
“Do you want the bubbles on?” Conall asked, pulling off his own shirt and stepping out of his pants. He was looking too hard at her face, like he really wanted to be watching the rest of her but thought it would be rude.
Gizelle liked bubbles, so she nodded, then leaped back with a shriek when the little pool gave a rumbling roar and erupted into a volcano of froth and foam.
Conall was quick to slip the switch off and quicker still to come across the deck to her. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “We don’t have to have them on.”
She was trembling, something she only realized when his arms came around her and they were solid and still. “Why would people do that?” she asked in horror.
“It feels good,” Conall explained mysteriously. “It relaxes muscles and makes people feel better.”
“That’s absurd,” Gizelle said flatly. She could not imagine that sitting inside a blender was relaxing.
“They’re off now,” Conall reassured her. “We don’t have to turn them on.”
He coaxed her back across the deck and up the steps, then let go of her hand to sink down into the water. There were still a few foamy swells of bubbles along the edge and Gizelle poked at them cautiously before she put first one, then a second foot into the tub.
It was warm, like the saltwater pool never was. And it was swirly.