Undertow

by J. M. Snyder

  He paused, waiting for a reply that never came. His heart couldn’t be in it—the organ that beat in his chest was only so much muscle and sinew, flesh and blood. The true heart of him, his soul and everything he knew himself to be, that beat beneath the sea, trapped in Merla’s soul cage. Kellen could take him, ravage him, fuck him senseless but no matter how far he thrust into Derek, he’d never find that heart, the one with Tad. That part of him Derek couldn’t even give away if he wanted to because it no longer belonged to him.

  With the sheets in his arms, Derek went into the bedroom’s small bath. There he shoved the sheets into the wastebasket by the toilet, tamping them down into a tight little ball of embarrassed regret, down, down, beating them into submission. They didn’t quite fit and, when Derek stood back, the sheets began to expand a bit, forcing their way out the top of the basket like a wild, white, blooming flower. Derek stepped into the basket, stamping down on them, then turned to stumble into the bathtub. Within minutes, a rain of hot water showered down on him, reddening his skin and washing away the scum of Kellen’s touch.

  Derek stood beneath the spray, letting it sanitize him, cleansing his body and mind. A small voice inside him whispered, See? It wasn’t so bad, being with Kellen again. The world didn’t come to a crashing halt, you didn’t spontaneously combust, no lightning bolts struck you down. Just fuck him and get it over with already, get Tad back. Hell, you might even surprise yourself and enjoy it. You weren’t exactly telling him no earlier.

  A shake of his head splattered water on the shower curtain. No, he wouldn’t enjoy it, he wouldn’t let himself enjoy it. That would be dishonest to Tad, that would be disloyal.

  Who was he kidding? Even looking at Kellen’s naked body was tantamount to betrayal; touching him, fucking him, was downright blasphemous. He had pledged himself to one man, to Tad. That meant the world to him—it defined him, made him the man he was. Without Tad in his life, there was little holding him here—how often these past few months had he contemplated throwing himself back to the sea, drowning to be with the one he loved? Even if sex with Kellen would bring Tad back, how would Derek ever live with himself, knowing what he’d done?

  Knowing that, on some sick level, he’d gotten off on it?

  How could Tad ever trust him again? Hell, how could he trust himself?

  Suddenly the water beating down around him burned. Derek turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub, shivering. Grabbing a nearby towel, he rubbed himself dry with hard, rough strokes that left his skin raw and sore. Back in the bedroom, he yanked open the top drawer of his bedside table, its casters rolling as he tugged. He dumped the entire contents unceremoniously onto the stripped bed, then began to rummage through them, searching for the ring Tad had given him in exchange for his necklace.

  His hands riffled over keys, sea shells, paper clips, pens, unopened condoms, half-used trial size tubes of lubricant, phone numbers scribbled on scraps of paper, receipts, coins…all the detritus of everyday life. An address book held together with a rubber band, a melted tube of lip balm, an empty bottle of sunscreen.

  Amid the clutter was a bundle of love letters from Tad—he’d written them while lying in this bed, scribbling them on pages of his sketch pad and reading them out loud to Derek as they cuddled beneath the sheets. Derek had thought it a cute game and believed Tad had thrown away the letters, or kept them with his sketches, until they began arriving in the mail. When Derek showed the first one to Tad, the thin blush that crept into his lover’s porcelain cheeks was so damn sexy, Derek didn’t even get a chance to open the letter before they were back in the bed making love.

  The letters stopped months ago—the last came in the day after Tad disappeared. Derek recalled sitting on the edge of the bed, silent tears coursing down his cheeks as he looked at the address written on the envelope in his lover’s familiar scrawl. That letter lay at the bottom of the stack, unopened. A piece of twine held the letters together, and Tad’s ring was tied into the knot.

  Derek fingered the ring—handsome, golden, beautiful in its simplicity. A small pattern circled it, slightly raised and polished above the matte gold beneath it. A Celtic design, interlocking slanted S-shapes that resembled the ocean’s waves. When he touched the gold, he felt a jolt of energy course through his fingers.

  Quickly he broke the twine and slipped the band onto the ring finger of his left hand. It slid into place like the missing piece of a puzzle; Derek’s skin prickled, his hair stood on end, as a shockwave of raw emotion raced through him. This was his talisman now—this ring tied his blood to Tad’s with a power more ancient than the sea and his people, a force stronger than the ocean’s temper or the waves’ pounding surge.

  The power of love.

  Chapter 6

  Though merrows were attracted to shiny objects such as trinkets and sunken treasure, anything that sparkled when the sun dappled beneath the waves, they avoided unrefined metals such as pure gold or silver. Such noble metals somehow reacted with the otherworldly quality of their flesh, filling them with an odd energy as old as the Earth itself, making their blood run cold. Touching the metal could blister their skin, and Derek had heard some soul cages employed gold locks to ensure no one else could steal away the human life already taken.

  The first gold Derek ever touched was the ring Tad gave him on their tenth anniversary. He could close his eyes and recall that moment in time with such clarity, it was as if he relived it all over again. The two of them in the living room, their nakedness covered by blankets, Derek sitting back against the arm of the couch with Tad stretched out between his legs. His lover leaned against his chest, head tilted to expose the smooth curve of his neck as he looked up at Derek. Their bodies were still warm and damp from making love—Derek held Tad tight, as if unwilling to ever let him go, and the way his lover fit so snuggly against him made his heart swell until he thought it just might burst. He felt an unusual desire to do something special, to give Tad something more than just his body or his heart, to give him everything he could without holding anything back, but he didn’t know what else to offer the man who had already lay claim to every single part of him.

  With a sigh, he’d wrapped his arms around Tad’s narrow shoulders and rested his head against his lover’s own. Something small shifted across the cleft of his collar bone when he moved; looking down, he saw the talisman he still wore around his neck, the small red shell battered over time but almost luminescent in the shadows created by their bodies. Derek sat back, reaching behind him to untie the cord knotted around his neck.

  Tad watched, silent, as Derek draped the cord around his lover’s neck and fastened it with an almost reverent air. The shell fell into the hollow of Tad’s throat as if it belonged nowhere else. His fingers strayed to touch it, tender, his eyes wide. “I know what this means to you,” he whispered.

  “It means I’m yours,” Derek replied with a kiss on his lover’s forehead.

  A slow smile spread across Tad’s mouth, strengthening as he looked down at the talisman between his fingers. Then, without another word, he leaned forward and reached over the side of the couch. Derek’s arm tightened around Tad’s waist to keep him close, but after a moment or two of rummaging around out of sight, he sat back, a small box concealed in his hand. “What’s that?” Derek wanted to know.

  Tad’s smile turned shy; his cheeks flushed a bright shade that rivaled the color of Derek’s hair. “You don’t have to accept it,” he mumbled, fiddling with the black velvety box he held. He opened it, snapped it shut before Derek could peek inside, then turned it over in his hands to pick at the small metal hinges on the back. “It’s just…this is sort of the way we promise to love each other, here. Not like your talisman or anything—it’s nothing magical like that—but it’s kind of me saying I want…”

  He trailed off, unsure. Running a finger along Tad’s temple, Derek tucked a stray strand of hair behind his lover’s ear and prompted, “What?”

  “I want you,” Tad whispered. W
hen he looked at Derek, earnest love shone in his eyes like twin stars. “This ring is my talisman to you, Derek. It means I love you, and I always will.”

  Derek held his breath as Tad opened the box. The ring sat on a small, black, satiny pillow, the gold brilliant against its dark setting. Though he was no longer a merrow—and, with his talisman in Tad’s possession, he’d never be anything more than human again—he was still tentative about taking the ring. But Tad watched him, waiting. He reached out and brushed his finger over the polished metal.

  He felt a faint zing! that tickled through him like a tiny electric shock. When he took the ring from its box, his skin tingled from contact but it wasn’t unbearable. “Left hand,” Tad instructed as he guided the band onto Derek’s ring finger. “Wear it on this finger. Supposedly the vein runs straight to the heart.”

  With the ring snug on his finger, Derek could almost believe he felt the power of the gold pulse through him, echoing the beat of his heart. To show his thanks, he pressed his lips to Tad’s in a hungry kiss.

  * * * *

  After Tad was gone, the ring provided a constant reminder of what he’d lost that hurt Derek to dwell on it. He would catch a flash of gold from the corner of his vision, in the mirror as he combed his hair or reflected off the window of the car, and a rush of emotions would sideswipe him, threatening to drown him in its wake. It often caught him unawares, and could blacken his mood swifter than a summer squall blowing up along the coastline. At one particularly low point, he took off the ring and tied it to Tad’s letters. Though he thought of it often, he resisted the urge to open the drawer.

  Months later when he put the ring on again, his reaction to the metal surprised him. Standing by his bed, wearing nothing but a towel, his body still drying from the shower, Derek felt energy coursing through him and fought to pull off the ring again. But his skin was damp, his fingers swollen, or hell, maybe the ring had shrunk with time, he didn’t know, but once it was on, it refused to be removed. The gold burned his skin like a band of solid fire sizzling around his finger; heat radiated from it, warming his hand and racing through his veins—it surged up his arm, through his shoulder, heading for his heart.

  He plopped down on the bed to pick through the junk from his drawer and found an old, half-used jar of petroleum jelly. But his wet hands refused to grasp the lid; as he struggled to open it, his left arm began to ache from the burning sensation pulsating up its length, curling into a fist at his elbow, punching the muscles in his shoulder with a dull pain that beat in time with his heart. He felt flames lick down over his chest and gave up on the jar to tug at the ring again. It hurt, oh, God, the gold, it hurt as if it were eating him alive…

  Then the feeling disappeared.

  Derek didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe—he sat on the edge of the bed, every nerve of his body waiting for another onslaught of pain, but faint echoes in his arm were all that remained. There was a heaviness in his chest, a strange density that felt as if the gold had traveled through his skin and blood to fill up his heart. Stupid, he knew, but as he massaged the center of his chest, he couldn’t get the troubling sensation to go away. On his left hand, his finger throbbed like a bothersome tooth and, when he glanced down at his hand, the band was still tight around his finger, almost too tight. An experimental push didn’t budge it. The gold seemed to have fused with his body, becoming one with him.

  Then he noticed the change in the color of his skin. The hairs on his left arm had burnished, singed darker than the pale coppery hair on his other arm, and the flesh had tanned to an almost golden shade. Derek followed the path the pain had taken, over his shoulder, down to the center of his chest—his entire arm had darkened, and his chest was marked in an uneven pattern, the left side darker than the right. As he watched, the glow spread a few inches in every direction, then a few more, farther, as if tanning in the rays of a small, invisible sun. Where his skin changed, the hairs growing from it darkened into a reddish gold. Warmth spread in the wake of that impromptu tan, raising beads of sweat on Derek’s brow and upper lip. With the back of a trembling hand, he brushed them away.

  Still the gold continued to spread through him, discoloring his skin, covering him like an armor forged by the sun.

  * * * *

  By the time he dressed, Derek looked like he had four months ago, when summer was just getting underway and he hadn’t hidden himself from the rest of the world. Skin once sickly pale now took on a healthy, tanned appearance. He almost didn’t recognize the strong, lean, sun-kissed legs that stepped into a tight black swimming bikini, and when he pulled on jeans to cover those legs, the tan feet poking from beneath the denim looked like they belonged to someone else, not him. Someone confident, someone alive. Someone determined to take back what had been stolen from him.

  So maybe they were his.

  He pulled on a battered T-shirt, then took one of Tad’s old flannel shirts out of the closet and shrugged it on. He sat down on the bed again and untied the twine that bound the love letters together. He fastened the piece of string around his neck, giving it enough play so the bottom of the makeshift necklace hung below the collar of his shirt. At first glance, Kellen might think the twine held Derek’s talisman, which would buy him some more time…

  Until the shirt comes off, he thought.

  He shook that away. He might fool Kellen, yes, but there was still the very real issue of how he’d enter the water to rescue Tad. In his human form, salt water was an abhorrence to him—he couldn’t swim, and the moment the water covered his head, he’d drown. It would fill his arms and legs like lead, pulling him to the sea floor; how often had he heard the stories of merrows who dared return to the deep without their talismans? Nothing scared a guppy more than the thought of drowning—it’d be like a human unable to breathe in air. The sea was their god, their element, their way of life. Those who gave that up willingly were not welcomed home—the ocean was a harsh, cruel mistress, as merrows and humans alike had discovered over time, and those who turned their back to her once found her unwilling to forgive. Whole cities were flooded at times by her rage, entire populations washed out in the wake of her fury.

  Derek was not conceited enough to believe he’d fare any better when he returned.

  Yes, his body had responded to the gold in an unexpected way, but he refused to hope it would do more than give him the sexy new tan. It was probably an allergic reaction, something brought on by a mix of stress and whatever mystical properties might still remain in his blood. The fact of the matter was, despite how much he might hope otherwise, a merrow couldn’t just create a new talisman. The object was given to them early on by the sea itself, and nothing could replace it. One merrow couldn’t use another’s talisman—each was unique, personal, a gift given by the ocean to be treasured and kept. Passing his talisman onto Tad had been more a show of his promise to remain on land than anything else. It wouldn’t turn Tad into a merrow, nor give him merrish abilities. In giving it away, Derek had reduced it from a talisman to a mere token, as non-magical as Tad’s ring.

  But maybe there was a bit of magic in the gold after all, some remnant of Tad’s love for him, trapped within the precious metal. Maybe the ring had become a talisman of sorts—not one that could protect him from the water, no, but a physical object that might help keep him focused on his lover, protect his mind during Kellen’s unwelcome tryst, lock his emotions away during the sex, and bring him that much closer to rescuing Tad.

  * * * *

  Derek found Kellen in the living room, stretched out on the couch, naked. The length of his uncut dick pointed up from a thick patch of dark blond hair to lay across his upper thigh; his ankles were crossed at one end of the couch, his arms in a similar position above his head. The television was on but that seemed to be the extent of the merrow’s technical knowledge, because the channel was set to one of those shopping networks and the woman on the screen was raving about a selection of suede handbags. Still, Kellen stared at the screen, fascinated.
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br />   For a moment Derek stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched his old friend, remembering a time when he himself had been just as amazed at the flickering images on the TV.

  Then he thought of the finger fuck in the bedroom, and how his body had betrayed him with this man, just for a spot of sex. He couldn’t allow himself to sympathize with Kellen, no matter how innocent his laughter might sound, or how harmless he might look lying on the couch. This man kept Tad from him. This man alone stood between them. Whatever friendship they might have shared once no longer existed because of that little fact. Derek wouldn’t let himself forget it.

  Crossing the room, he snatched up the remote from the coffee table and clicked off the TV. Then he snagged a blanket from the floor and tossed it over Kellen to cover his nakedness. “We wear clothes here,” he pointed out.

  Kellen glanced back, his smile dissolving at the hard glare in Derek’s eyes. “Don’t know why,” he grumbled, kicking the blanket away from him. “Damn suffocating things.”

  “Get dressed,” Derek replied. When Kellen didn’t move, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and let out a loud, exasperated sigh. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Kellen started to reply but Derek held up a hand to silence him. “You’re no longer calling the shots, Kellen. Much as you’d like to think you are. I know I played right into your hands earlier—”

  A smirk crossed Kellen’s face, one Derek chose to ignore. “It was a mistake bringing you here,” he admitted. His voice raised dangerously. “But I want Tad back. You can’t just keep him like some abused pet. He’s mine…”

  Derek stopped himself before he started yelling. Taking a deep breath, he ran his thumb over the ring on his finger, earning himself a jolt of energy that fizzled through his hand. It boosted his confidence and gave him the strength to continue. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he announced. “I need proof. You say you’ve got Tad, fine. But before I do anything else with you, before I let you do anything to me, you need to prove to me he’s alive. I won’t be fucked over, pardon the pun.”