Missing was complicated by the least of standards. It denoted truths of love, wanting, sorrow, things Jo had not deliberately avoided but simply grew beyond, the way flowers need larger pots once they've found fertile soil. Lives spent at sea, where loss was inevitable and tragedy lurked over the crest of each wave, was a choice that carried the expectation that attachment was distracting at best, and perilous at worst. But she wasn't a ship, or a statue. She'd known love, and she'd faced loss. Tear stains on a dress long shed and burned. Any affection she felt for Zarin was met with understanding and respect. Jo adored everything he was, even if his presence was impermanent. "I know," she assured him, keeping her voice quiet, as if not to startle him. "You show it, though."
The figurine fit in his hand like it'd been carved exactly to settle into each groove and hill of his palm. A warmth budded and bloomed in the center of her chest, spreading like ink through water onto her face. He was right, in a sense - her penchant for knowing things often preceded people's own knowing of themselves, and the ability to surprise and delight was still a treasure somewhere in the part of her heart that remembered being a little girl. His joke of jealousy sprouted a laugh in her belly, and she shrugged. "Normally I wouldn't challenge her on any matter less than life or death," she teased, "but when it comes to staking claim on your heart, I'll take my chances."
She regarded him with a tenderness reserved for memory and story, fiction by any other name, and yet as real and as tangible as the salt in the sea air, the wind that carried the sails. Perhaps that was a kind of love, the wind that set the ships offshore, never to claim them, or cage them. If he were a ship, it was her duty to become the wind, if it was his desire to head for each new horizon. He caught her eye the way a child might capture a firefly, and she willingly landed in his palms. A flicker of light between them, a safe haven, and a smile that spoke of a promise upon every return. "Maybe that's the idea."
With practiced precision and an ease that normally wouldn't have thought to have matched, Jo took a single step toward him, lifting onto her toes to press a soft, chaste kiss on the warm plane of his cheek. Just as seamless and deliberately as it seemed to happen, she swept around him, popping up onto the rail to sit and watch him work, a weightlessness about her. "Go on, I've distracted you long enough. I'll look on as you work like it's the theater. Maybe you can narrate for me, so I'll feel a bit less like a ghost and more like your assistant." She grinned, playful and light. "Or maybe you can tell me stories of everything you've been up to while you've been away."
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