"Is it really fun?"
He looked up at her, grinning. "Is it fun painting Inga's nails?"
"Of course!"
"Well, I don't think I'd have much fun with that, but this is fun for me."
"You don't know until you try," Lucy said, waggling her painted fingertips at him.
"Neither do you," he pointed out.
Lucy giggled, and that sound made his chest flutter with joy. He could easily imagine spending the rest of his life making her laugh.
With that, he made a decision. "Here, stow this back in the toolbox," he told her, handing up a wrench. She obeyed quickly, and Eren wiped his hands on the grease-stained rag tucked through a belt loop and scrambled up out of the bilge. "I think it's time to put the old girl through her paces. Dad and I have done a lot of work over the last couple of weeks, and she's running like a dream. Want to take a trip out to Dane's island and see how she flies?"
Lucy nodded, although she glanced up at the sun standing overhead. "Do we have enough time?"
"Sure; we can easily be out there and back before dark if we don't stay. And if we need to, we can sleep on the boat."
"Oh, right! I forgot you carry your bed around with you. It's like being a turtle."
"A turtle?" Eren laughed. "More like a floating RV, I'd say."
Lucy poked out her tongue. "I like turtle better. Do we need to take anything?"
"Yeah, we may as well bring a picnic lunch and some of those cookies Dad baked yesterday. We've also got a spare water pump I was thinking about taking out to Dane to pump water from the spring so he doesn't have to haul it in buckets."
"He's a really good friend, isn't it?" Lucy asked, trotting along beside him as they headed up to the house.
"The best," Eren said. "He saved my life."
"Really? How—"
Eren held a finger to his lips. Lucy nodded and shushed. They had reached the door.
It felt, as always, strange keeping secrets like this from his family. They had always shared everything. But he couldn't share someone else's secrets with them.
Between my secrets, and Dane's, and Lucy's, we need a whole library for all our issues.
"Hey there!" Inga called. She was doing homework for her correspondence university classes on the couch. "Going out?"
"Taking the boat out." Eren started slapping together sandwiches, while Lucy began filling a Ziploc bag with cookies. "Gonna show Lucy some of the coast."
"Oh, that's great!" Inga winked. "Don't come back too early, now."
"Don't you start," Eren grumbled, his cheeks heating.
"If you spend the night, I don't think anyone is going to send a search party."
"Stop it."
"That berth is definitely big enough for two."
"You know she's right here and listening, right?" Eren growled. By now he could tell that he was pink to the ears.
He and Lucy filled a cooler. If Inga thought it was a lot of food for two people, she didn't say anything. And, in fact, she probably didn't think anything of it. Bear shifters had correspondingly huge appetites.
Eren dug the spare pump out of a storage room, while Lucy grabbed a few things from her room in case they stayed out overnight, and they lugged everything down to the boat.