“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need a ride somewhere?” The offer slipped out before I could stop it, surprising me. By the looks of it, it surprised him too. I was curious though, and a little worried. There was something about him that looked lost, almost homeless. His shorts didn’t fit, he was barefoot, and he looked as though he could benefit from a few Big Mac meals. Maybe he was on drugs.
“Sure.” He swayed towards me, and I was pretty sure if I blew on him he’d fall over.
I took his hand and led him to my car, holding the passenger side door open for him. He hesitated before he crawled inside and collapsed on the seat. I shut him in and hurried around the front of the car with vague warnings going off in my head that offering a ride to a complete stranger—even one who seemed slightly incapacitated—might not be the best idea. My dad would kill me. He’d tell me to put him on one of the benches and see if I could call someone to come get him.
I slid inside the car but didn’t close my door. I looked over at the recipient of my Good Samaritan routine. His head leaned back against the headrest and his eyes were closed. The knife hadn’t made a clean cut and his hair spiked in uneven lengths on the ends. It hung almost to the top of his shoulders, still too long for my taste. I had this hard and fast rule about guys with longer hair than me, and this guy’s had me beat by an inch or two. As if to remind me of an apparent genetic defect, I tucked mine behind my ear. It reached—barely. I’d never even had a haircut.
Other than the baggy shorts, the only other thing he wore was a necklace. Similar to some I’d seen in Maggie’s shop, the single pearl rested in the crevice at the base of his neck, opaque green and swimming with light and oddly hypnotizing. The pulse in his throat beat at regular intervals, which made me feel better. His heart would be racing if he were on drugs, right?
Deciding I wasn’t in any danger, I closed the door and turned the ignition. I adjusted the air vents, pointing them in his direction, thinking some cool air might help clear his head. I backed out of the parking space and before I could ask, he said, “Take a right.”
His eyes were still closed. I drove for a good two minutes debating whether to find a hospital, though I had no idea where one was.
“What was that back there?” I cast a quick glance at my passenger who, for a skinny guy, took up a lot of space, making the front seat feel cramped. He smelled nice, a fresh salty twang with a bit of sweetness.
“Just some idiots.” He fiddled with the door handle, searching with his fingers until he found what he was looking for. The window slid down and he took a deep breath.
“Yeah, I get that. But they cut your hair?” They hadn’t beaten the crap out of him, though he did have a busted lip, which I thought had come more from the struggle to hold him down. Granted, it had been really nice hair that had made him look like he belonged in some magical realm like Rivendale. But what would a bunch of bullies want with another guy’s hair?
He looked more relaxed, except for his fist kept clenching and unclenching on his thigh, and the features of his face were pinched.
“It’ll grow back,” I offered in reassurance. Give me a lifetime and I still couldn’t grow hair like his.
“What?” He rolled his head in my direction and leveled a focused look on me.
“Your hair. It’ll grow back.” My attention was torn between the guy in the seat and the road in front of me.
He took note of my own short locks. He actually reached out and grabbed some of it between his fingers, giving it a gentle tug. Then his eyes shifted back to my face. He dropped his hand and my fingers loosened their death grip on the steering wheel.
“That’s not the point.” His full lips pressed into a tight line, the muscle in his jaw working.
“What is the point?”
“Now he has it.”
I raised my eyebrows because clearly he wasn’t making any sense. “Is this some kind of game you guys play? Stealing your hair is worth a certain number of points?”
“Something like that.” He shifted his gaze back out the open window. “Where are you from?”
For anyone else that would be a simple question with a simple answer. For me, in that moment, coming from this guy’s perfectly shaped lips, it sounded like so much more. I was technically a tourist, but I didn’t consider myself one. I had been born here, after all, and even though my feet had only touched the Gulf briefly, I felt like a native. Maybe that was wishful thinking on my part.
“Kentucky.” It sounded like some sort of confession.
He stared at me for a few seconds as though I were an extra piece in a completed puzzle and he was trying to figure out how the hell I fit.
“Not likely.” He made one of those snort-laugh sounds that had nothing to do with humor. “This is good. You can stop here.”
“What? Right here?” I had been driving for about five minutes and there wasn’t much around. On one side of the road was a sign that read “Deerfoot State Park,” and I could see a stretch of empty, pristine beach in the distance. The other side of the road was all scrub oaks and pine trees. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” He barely waited for me to slow down before he jumped out, which I was surprised he could do. The door slammed shut and he took off at a slow jog in the direction of the beach.
“You’re welcome,” I said to no one because he was gone without so much as a backward glance. I kept the car at about twenty-five miles an hour so I could keep an eye on him. Where was he going? He ran straight for the water, diving under an incoming wave. I waited for him to resurface. Waited some more and still I didn’t see him. I was pretty far away though, so I must have just lost track of him.
I turned the car around and headed back the way we had come.
Lips of an angel.
The words sang themselves through my head, which was weird. I didn’t even like that song.
* * *
I dreamed about him that night, the boy with Return to Paradise eyes. In my dream the sun shone brightly, reflecting in tunnels of light under the surface of the ocean, the emerald water so clear it seemed I could see for miles. I swam through the shafts of sunlight as the water glided over my body, heading farther and farther into the open ocean, as though I were born for this one thing. This was my home, the place I belonged. And in the depths of that place I saw him, the flash of his green eyes, golden hair floating behind him in the current of his movements.
I swam faster to meet him, but the faster I swam, the farther away he became, until I lost sight of him all together. I was alone. The water turned on me then. Tentacles snaked their way up from the bottomless deep, and wrapped around my ankles, slithering their way up my calves. I tried to swim for the surface but those deadly threads held me in place until they finally sucked me under and I was lost in the deep dark.
I woke up choking. It was as if the tentacles of my nightmare were wrapped around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I shot up in my bed, hands grasping at my neck, chest tight as I tried to pull air into my lungs. It wouldn’t come, no matter how my mouth gulped like a fish out of water. I reached frantically for the switch on the lamp but only managed to knock it over. It crashed to the hardwood floor. I fumbled to get out of the bed, but my legs were tangled in the sheets. I kicked them off as dark spots danced around the edges of my vision. I didn’t know where I was going until I staggered through my open door and onto the balcony. I gripped the rail to keep myself from falling over. An angry wind whipped through my hair and just like that, my nightmare released me. I sucked in big gulps of air. The effort burned and at the same time brought relief. Thunder rolled in the distance. A jagged flash of lightning sparked the night sky.
Movement from the beach caught my eye. Someone stood on the shoreline, a lone shadow amidst the foaming waves. A chill stole up my spine, raising the hairs on my arms. Thunder clapped so loud it shook the house and lightning strobed over the Gulf. I blinked through the brightness, and when I looked back down the shadow was gone, making me question
whether I had seen anyone at all.
I went back into my room, shut my door, and slid the lock in place.
Six
Noah
I had never regretted saving anyone’s life until yesterday. It happened on occasion. A swimmer got caught in the undertow. A surfer cut a little too close to the pier. A drunk asshole decided to go swimming with a ten-foot alligator. Thanks to Jax Harrison, there’s a saying around here that goes something like, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets eaten by an alligator.”
Well, I’d saved Jax from being eaten by an alligator, and he’d never forgiven me for it.
Up until that night, we’d been sort of friends. But Jax’s daddy was rich. He owned a bunch of shit around here and Jax liked the idea of being the Big Kahuna. By saving Jax—in his twisted mind—I’d made him look like a wuss. As if he preferred being dead. Or minus an arm.
And now that asshat had my hair.
It was the unforgettable image of him slinging the tail of it over his head that had drawn me out of bed this morning. It was the sound of his mocking laughter that fueled my run. And as I pushed myself through the last twenty meters, legs pumping in tandem with my heart, I kind of wished I’d let the gator have him.
Sand kicked up behind me, sticking to the sweat on my back. My lungs screamed for me to stop. It was too much, too soon, but I kept going. It wasn’t so much that Jax had taken my hair, it was that she’d been there to witness it—a nameless chick from Kentucky with silver eyes that had looked at me like I was some stray dog she’d picked up on the side of the road. It had been like throwing gasoline on the fire of my humiliation.
Even though I wanted to puke, I dropped to the ground and knocked out a hundred push-ups—slow and grueling and in the end I spilled my breakfast. I didn’t care. I would do this every day until I was back to full strength. A repeat of yesterday was not going to happen.
My weakness was the consequence of my prolonged stay in the Deep. My body had grown so accustomed to breathing water that I felt anemic on land. Our bodies were perfectly adaptable to the Deep. Blood and oxygen flowed smoothly in a perfect blend that made swimming hundreds of miles easy. But on land, air seemed thin, like a lander being at a high altitude. That’s basically what I’d had yesterday, a breather’s version of altitude sickness.
I snatched my bottle of water out of the sand and downed it as I walked back to my house. My family had lived on this land for generations. When I was a kid, it’d been considered the middle of nowhere. There’d been a quick shop and a few small beach bungalows scattered around, but other than that, the only people who had lived out here was us. For the most part, we’d been able to live in relative obscurity.
It’s not like we were exactly out of the closet as a species, but we did our best to keep a low profile and not make an issue of our differences. Most of the locals were cool with the idea of us. The fact that we existed added a little mystery and notoriety to the community. They saw our gills and webbed feet as quaint and harmless, and that’s the way we wanted to keep it. They didn’t need to know there were other differences we preferred to keep secret. Abilities they might be tempted to exploit. Like the fact that I could swim to Mexico and back in less than twenty-four hours. Or that my bruised rib and busted lip, courtesy of Jax and his idiot friends, had healed by the time I had reached the beach behind my house. And that four-hundred pound tire my brother and I flipped—I could flip one handed.
Not that there weren’t those that did know those things about us. Marshall knew. And two years ago he had spent a whole afternoon convincing my brother and I that we could be real-life badasses in service to our country. He’d convinced us we could be superheroes, like the Aquaman poster hanging on my bedroom wall. And we’d been full enough of ourselves to believe him.
I didn’t believe in anything anymore.
* * *
When I reached the house, I went straight for the garage and slid the door open. Careful not to get sand on her, I peeled the cover off Betty. Betty was a turquoise green, 1977 Ford Bronco. White trim, hard top, mint condition. She had belonged to my dad, and when he passed, my brother and I had inherited her. She was a beauty. Neither of us had driven her much; she barely had thirty thousand miles on her and most of those had been put on her by my mom.
We had taken what my dad had called a camping trip when I was ten and Jamie was twelve—my family’s version of a road trip. We’d packed Betty up with tents and supplies and sent my mom on her way with a map of the places to meet us in places we knew others like us lived. Small pockets of us were scattered all along the coastline. The three of us—my dad, Jamie, and I—traveled by water. We took a tour of the peninsula, swimming the panhandle, stopping first at St. George Island then down to Venice, through the Keys, and up the east coast and back again. We’d camped on the beach, mostly in state parks. My dad had given me my first real knife. I’d killed my first shark on that trip.
It had been the best two weeks of my life.
My dad died in an accident a year later while trying to fix a leak on one of the oilrigs he managed. We had maybe driven Betty two dozen times since. I guess she was all mine now.
“Noah?” The sound of Jeb’s voice saved me from sinking further into what used to be.
“In here.” I pulled the cover the rest of the way off Betty and stroked my hand down the length of her hood before bunching the cover up and throwing it in a corner of the garage.
“You’re a hard man to find.” Jeb held out his hand. I had a hard time meeting his eyes when I grabbed it.
We exchanged back slaps, which helped clear the sudden lump in my throat. Jeb was a good guy and a better friend. Jamie had been gone over a year but the loss was still fresh. It’s weird how the people who meant the most to you were the hardest to face when grief gnawed at you. And for some reason my wounds felt raw and festering.
“Good to see you, man.”
“You too. It’s been a while.” I leaned against Betty and crossed my arms in front of my chest, doing my best not to flinch under his direct gaze.
“You all right?” he asked, a loaded question that deserved a straight answer.
Jeb had been Jamie’s friend too. He as much as anybody knew the cost of my brother’s death. He probably would have come with me to search for him if I had asked him to.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be fine.” For the first time since the day Marshall showed up with the news my brother was missing, it felt like the truth.
“Well, since Jamie’s not here to tell you, you look like shit.” He smiled, but his eyes held an inquisition. No surprise there. I’d turned myself into some kind of unofficial experiment. I’d been where no man had gone before, at least not any that we knew or had any firsthand knowledge of.
“So I’ve been told.” I was starting to get a complex.
Of course we had all heard stories of the occasional loner who took off into the Deep to see how long they could stay without going crazy. Most lasted a few weeks, a couple of months at most. Something always drew them back—readily available food, sheer boredom, hot showers, sex. I sure wasn’t going to admit that for me, it had been a girl I didn’t even know. Plus, the way Jeb was looking at me, I thought I was proof of the old adage “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
“What brings you out here?” I picked through one of the shelves for the car wash kit. Betty was about to get a long overdue bath. And the busier I stayed the less time I had to think.
“Besides checking on a friend?”
That stung. Jeb had never needed a reason to come over before and he didn’t need a reason now. He’d lived here half the time when we were kids. I was being a jerk. I wasn’t going to be able to get away with all this emo crap with Jeb around. He’d call me on my bullshit in a heartbeat.
“I’ve got a favor to ask,” he said. “A big one, considering your run-in with Jax.”
I gave the ceiling an exasperated sigh. “How did you know about that?”
>
Thanks to Jax my hair was now at a normal shoulder-length. For most of us, the speed at which our hair grew was a nuisance. Mine required a bi-weekly encounter with a pair of scissors. Jamie had kept his short and had cut it almost every day, unlike Jeb, who liked to flaunt it. He said he wore his long because it drove the girls crazy, and maybe that was true. They did seem to always have their hands all over it and him. But I thought it was his way of shouting, “Suck it,” to all the landers.
“You know Jax. Nothing’s worth doing unless the whole world knows about it.” Jeb stepped a little too close to Betty and I shot him a warning glance. “I know. Not too close.” He was still dripping salt water.
Jax’s daddy owned the local aquarium where Jeb worked. I hated the place. Somehow I just didn’t think it was right to keep wild mammals in captivity and force them to do stupid tricks for food.
“I’m guessing this has something to do with me stepping foot into that prison.” I lugged the bucket, sponges, and wheel brush out to the hose.
“I could use your help with Ellie.”
I heard the censure in his tone. Jeb’s philosophy was different than mine. He figured if they were going to have an aquarium, there ought to be somebody there who understood the animals, someone besides a landlubber. He viewed himself as an ambassador of sorts, and I could see his point, which was why I offered my services when needed. Jeb was good with girls. I was good with dolphins. A trait I’d been teased mercilessly about while growing up. Tribes used to follow me around like I had tuna coming out of my ass. Dolphin Boy, I’d been called. Until I’d learned to deliver a knockout punch.
“What’s wrong with her?” I squashed the sting of guilt. Ellie was a bottlenose dolphin and she’d kind of been my project before I'd abandoned her. Unlike the other inhabitants of the aquarium, she hadn’t been captive born. She’d been taken from her tribe while swimming in the Choctawhatchee Bay and hadn’t been handling captivity very well.
Waterborn (The Emerald Series Book 1) Page 4