Her lips twitched a faint but agreeable smile at his suggestion, recognizing it for the considerate course of action that it was. Her own reaction to his arrival had not been the most pleasant, after all, and it was possible her discomfited demeanor had left her newfound neighbor with a figurative bad taste in his mouth. Determined to make a better second impression on him than perhaps her first had been, she eagerly followed his lead, nodding a greeting as they closed in on the group.
"Hello," she called, one thin hand raising to wave at the group. One scantily clad reveler threw her an answering wave, but it went unnoticed. All Karin's attention was swiftly drawn away from him, from his friends, from the fire itself. Her eyes were drawn instead to the waves, where in the foamy surf a pair of eyes gleamed out at her. Slowly they winked: First one eye, then the other, like a sleeping cat languidly beginning to wake. Karin's lips parted, but no words would come. She kept walking, measuring her steps against Dominic's pace, praying he would not see, that they would pass beyond that terrible sight and soon it would fall well behind them. But then a second pair opened alongside the first, black pupils following their progress as they moved down the beach. Terror gripped her: She wanted to ask if he had seen, if she herself was hallucinating now, but she was more afraid of the answer than the question itself.
Her fear only deepened as she looked to the friends on the beach, still laughing and prodding at the fire, oblivious to anything at all out of the ordinary. Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall.
"No," she said, too late. She was speaking too quickly; she could not hide the tremor in her voice. The scent of sulphur filled her nostrils, choking her every breath. "Your job sounds interesting. I should really start following your work. Fee and I both prefer finding local businesses, you know? Restaurants and that sort of thing." She swallowed hard, but the lump in her throat would not budge. The forms in the water, however, did; she saw their shapes beneath the waves, shadowed bodies cutting through the tide, keeping an even pace with the pair. "So many soulless big box places these days..."