“The sex that caused me?”
“This isn’t any of your business. I came home because I knew you were hurting. It seems you’re better now. If you need me, leave a message with your grandmother.” She started toward the French doors.
“Just like that? I lost a baby and you’re going to leave like that?”
“I told you, it wasn’t a baby. And you don’t seem to want me around.”
“I do. I’m sorry. I just…I’m sorry.” I started crying, because I was. I was sorry I couldn’t be the mermaid daughter she wanted, the one that drowned every guy she slept with and didn’t get upset about the babies she lost. Sorry I wanted to go to school. Sorry I wanted to know things. Sorry I couldn’t accept my place with Mother Ocean and live the life she’d lived. “I’m…so…sorry.” I managed to get the words out between huge sobs.
Normally she looked at me and said, “You should be.” That was how our fights usually ended. But this time was different. Maybe because of what I’d experienced tonight, I don’t know; but for whatever reason, she came over and gave me a hug.
“You need to get some sleep. I’ll catch breakfast for you in the morning, okay?”
“Okay.” My voice sounded small, like I was a little girl. But I didn’t mind it, not right now. My head felt strange, my body felt worse, and my emotions were a mess. I let Mom lead me to bed, and when I slept I didn’t dream.
****
True to her word, Mom left me a wahoo that had to be thirty pounds. It was in the fridge, gutted and cleaned so I only had to eat the best parts. There was a note on the fridge door: “Eat it all; you need your strength. I’m with Grandma if you need me.” I didn’t think I could eat it all but after three bites, I realized I was famished.
The fish disappeared, but I still felt hollowed out emotionally. I wasn’t bleeding any more when I took my shower. Looking at myself naked, I saw I looked the same. I still had long blonde hair, sea green eyes, and tan skin. I was still rushing through my shower to make sure I didn’t get a tail. Except now, I’d had sex. I’d found out that anytime I had sex there would be a baby, well at least a pregnancy. I wished I could talk it over with another girl, but the mermaids probably wouldn’t understand my confusion and there was no way any of my dry-land friends could ever know. Thankfully, the one person I wanted to talk to most already knew my secret.
****
Sam pulled me into an empty classroom before I even realized it was him. “Are you okay? Last night, you didn’t look okay. I was worried but the cops wouldn’t let me leave, and when they did it was too late to come by. I called and I texted. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” He looked totally freaked out, so I almost didn’t want to tell him. But I didn’t want to be like my mom either, closed off and full of secrets. I told him about the miscarriage, and about how every time I had sex I would get pregnant. “So that means condoms,” I finally said.
Instead of replying, he pulled me into a giant bear hug. “I’m so so sorry. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have let it happen. How can I help? What can I do?”
“Well, next time condoms and otherwise…I don’t know. I think I’m okay with it.”
“Really?” He didn’t look like he believed me.
“Maybe not one hundred percent okay with it, but my mother tells me it’s normal for mermaids, so I think maybe I need to be okay with it.”
“So you’re a mermaid, huh?”
“Thought you figured that out last night.” I tried to look innocent. I liked it better when he was hugging me and asking to help. Was he going to run away? Freak out?
“You didn’t have a tail last night, not at first.”
“Uh, it takes a little while.”
“And then you changed back to legs in less than a minute?”
“Not really. I mean in theory my tail has to dry, but lately, I think I can control it. I’m not all that great at it yet.”
“Interesting. What color was it?”
“My tail?”
He nodded.
“You didn’t notice?”
“I was busy.”
He tried to play it off but his ears turned pink again. I took pity on him. “Green.”
“What shade of green?”
“Pale green, like the top of ocean water, near the sunlight.” I waited for him to ask the next question but he didn’t. “Seriously? I tell you I’m a mermaid and all you want to know is what color my tail is?”
He laughed, then hugged me again. “You were pregnant last night, maybe only for an hour, but that’s still a big deal to me. And we slept together. So the mermaid thing doesn’t seem like the most important part.”
“Well, it is to me.”
He nodded. “So show me then.”
“Show you?”
“Take me swimming. You know I can’t drown. I mean, I’ll be slow, but it wouldn’t be so terrible, would it?”
“No.” It would be awesome. I’d never had a friend to swim with. Sure, there were other mermaids; but they all lived in the ocean, they didn’t go to school, and they weren’t my friends. Sam knew me. He was part of my life, and now he could be part of my other life. I didn’t have to keep who I was a giant secret anymore. “Let’s cut class.”
“Really? The girl who loves school books?”
“One-time offer, come on! You’re driving.”
He shook his head, gave me a quick hug before we sprinted out to the car. We were halfway to my house when Sam brought up the mermaid topic again.
“So militant feminist Amish is really mermaid?”
“Yep.”
“And your mom wouldn’t have gotten along with Ryan because…”
“Because mermaids kill men. They don’t date them.”
“But she married your dad, right?”
“She said so, but I’ve never seen a marriage certificate.” Marriage was one of the many things Mom refused to talk about no matter how many times I asked. I didn’t know if DelMar was Dad’s last name or hers. Probably his; mermaids don’t have last names.
“But she has to understand that it happens.”
“It?”
“People fall in love.” He looked out the window when he said it and I noticed the tops of his ears were pink.
“And is that what we’re doing? Falling in love?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled the car into our driveway and parked. He pulled me closer to him, brushing his fingers down my cheek. “I hope so.”
“Then you really need to come see my reef.”
“I’m about to. There’s only one problem.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t have a swim suit.”
I laughed at him. “We’ll swim naked.”
It was hard not to watch him get naked on the beach, hard to keep my eyes on the ocean or the sand, on something other than his body. I watched him in quick glances though, seeing the smooth skin on his stomach, the hair on his legs. His skin looked tan in the sunlight, a soft brown I wanted to touch. He walked into the water for a few steps then ducked down, letting the waves cover him.
“Warm enough?”
“Doesn’t matter: hot, cold, as long as it’s salt water I’m happy.”
“I hope that’s not the only thing you’re happy about.” I dropped my shorts and underwear on to the sand and watched his eyes light up.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” I raised my eyebrows at him.
“I want to watch you get your tail. Where should I be?”
“You’ll see from there,” I laughed. But then I walked out to where he was, and let my legs drift in the water in front of me. “Are you watching?”
He kept his eyes on my legs and nodded.
I hadn’t really watched the way it happened since I was a kid, it was my tail, not magic. But with him watching, I thought about it, about the way the skin turned color from tan to light green. A second later, the green had depth. It sparkled. Then the color seemed to shift. It wasn’t a change in color, but in t
exture, from smoothness to scales. If you weren’t looking at the seam between my legs, you’d never realize it was changing too, smoothing out until no one would ever find where my right leg ended, and my left leg started. The whole transition from legs to tail went faster now that I knew I was in control. It took a minute, maybe two.
“Amazing.”
“Thanks.” I blushed at his astonishment. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? That you don’t need to breathe?”
“Positive. I’ve stayed under for three hours before without any problems.” He put his hand out, reaching for mine, but then he stopped. “How fast do you swim?”
“Really fast.”
“Then I have to do this before we go.” He reached over and stroked my tail, his hand gliding over the slick scales. “It feels so strong.”
“Because it is. No one’s ever touched my tail before.”
“Thanks for letting me be the first.” He leaned forward and kissed me, gently, like I’d given him some great gift. Then again, maybe I had. “Ow!”
He jerked back and yanked his hand off me.
“How bad is it?” I cringed at the sight of his hand dripping blood.
“That’s my magic trick. See the cut?” My scales had sliced deeply into his palm. “Put it in salt and…” He dropped his hand under the waves. I saw the water wash the blood away and I realized that he’d stopped bleeding. When I looked again, the cut was gone. “Voila.” He held his hand up for me.
I took it in my own hand, looking for a mark, a line, some indication that it had been there; but there was nothing. No way to tell that I’d cut him a second ago.
“That’s pretty amazing.”
He shrugged and said, “It’s who I am.”
“Let’s swim.” I grabbed him by the shoulders before he had a chance to say anything and dove into the water with him the way a mermaid was meant to. My reef started miles away from the shore, but we were there in a matter of minutes. I’d gone fast, loving the feel of the water flowing through my gills. When I stopped, pulling us down the thirty or forty feet to the bottom of my reef, I looked at Sam. I’d pressed him up against me during our swim; but now that I wasn’t focused on swimming, I noticed a thousand little things about him.
Suddenly, I wanted him. I wrapped my tail around him, pushing his body beneath mine. Knowing he would be okay and I wasn’t hurting him made it better, a thousand times better. I kissed him, letting air into his mouth, my tongue playing with his. He kissed me back, but then I felt his hands on my chest pushing me away. He was strong, but my tail was stronger. I held tight, but he stopped playing and gave me a hard shove. I ended up ten feet away on the ocean floor, looking at him as he shook his head.
He tried talking but his voice didn’t work under water the way mine did. He made an angry thumbs up sign and another second later our heads were above the waves, floating.
“What the hell?” I demanded.
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Not without protection. I’m not hurting you that way.”
That stopped me. I was ready to get angry, to get mad at the way he’d shoved me, but he was right. I was only thinking about how much I wanted him, not about what happened last night. I didn’t want to go through that again. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
“Okay.” I shook my head, looking for more water to clear up my thinking then realized I was out of the water. Fresh air across my gills wouldn’t help me think. “You’re right. I got caught up in…things.”
He laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I’ll keep my hands to myself for the rest of the day. I promise.”
“What about that tail? It’s pretty strong.”
I splashed him with it, letting the big wave of water smack him in the face. “How’s that for an answer?”
“Very funny.” He swam over to me. “What else is there to see around here?”
“Let me show you.”
I took him down about half way, and let him swim next to me as I pointed out the shape of the reef. It came out of the ocean floor in a lollipop shape, an almost straight line and then a circle. In the center of the ring of coral was white sand. I’d slept there more than I’d slept in my bedroom when I was young. The line of coral coming out to that spot was high enough to be a wall, fifteen feet tall and thick. The top almost curved like a bowl turned upside-down.
After we explored the coral, I showed him the wildlife. The eels that stuck their heads out when I came by, the bright tropical fish darting in and out of the rocks. At the cleaning station dozens of tiny fish swam in and out of the mouths of other fish, living off the little pieces of old food they found there. The cleaner fish tried to taste every hair on Sam’s head. He liked them for the first few minutes, then pushed them away like they tickled.
It was hard being underwater with him, being able to talk about things and have him nod or shake his head but not reply. A few dolphins came by, and we sank to the bottom to watch them. The pod moved fast, swimming around us. They looked familiar, like they might’ve been the same pod that swam with me the night I took Mara home. Thinking about her in this place changed the mood for me, and I pulled my tail to my chest, wrapping my arms around it and resting my head where my knees might’ve been.
Sam saw my mood change and put his arm around me. He kissed me to comfort me, a gentle kiss. When I kissed him back I wanted it to be about comfort, but it only took a few more kisses for me to forget about the promise I made not to push him into sex. My body seemed able to jump from normal to lust-filled in no time at all. I struggled with it, kissing him and feeling my tail move as if it had a mind of its own. It was wrapped around him in a second, pressing him into the sand. I expected him, half-wanted him, to shove me again. Instead, he pushed us both up off the ocean floor. We drifted toward the surface, still close but not kissing. It helped clear my head so that when we talked, my first words weren’t crude but honest.
“I’m sorry. I am trying to fight it.”
“Maybe we could try something else?” He cradled me, the two of us drifting in the water.
“What else is there to try?”
He stroked his hands down my sides to the top of my tail. The skin gradually changed to scales there, a few on my belly, and then getting closer together until there was no skin left.
“Careful. Some of those are sharp.”
“I remember.” He stroked them a little, tracing them with his hand. Instinctively my tail wrapped around him, gripping just a little. The muscles moved and the scales opened. “So that’s how it works.”
I might’ve nodded, I might’ve moaned, but mostly I was too caught up in how good it felt to answer. Before long the movement of his hand made me scream into the waves, but the minute it ended, I worried about him, and pushed us to the surface. “Are you okay? Can you breathe? Are you—?”
“Shh. I don’t need to breathe, remember?” He held on to me. We floated together in silence for a while, my head resting on his shoulder, my tail keeping us from going too far.
“That was…it was…” and I didn’t know what to say, so I went with, “Thank you.”
He smiled and kissed me, his fingertips resting on my chin. “Anytime.”
“I never thought someone could do that. I mean, because of my scales,” I whispered, not sure how much I should tell him. I didn’t want to scare him, not now, after he’d made me feel so good. “Normally the scales are dangerous to men, slice their legs off. Not that it matters. Other mermaids aren’t really into the legs anyway.”
“Well, they might not be, but I’m happy to keep mine.”
“I’m glad you did. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You didn’t.” He looked deep into my eyes for a long minute. “Haven’t you ever tried any of this on dry land?”
“No.” I shook my head, and thought about it. “I get legs and all the other parts, but pretty much when I start getting into things, my first thought is to head to t
he water.”
“So it might work?”
I blushed, and then thought about how silly it was to blush when he’d just done what he’d done. “Maybe, we should try it.”
“I’m free tonight.”
He sounded so eager that I laughed. “Me too.”
“How far out are we?”
“About five, maybe six miles?”
“We should go in. It’s getting late.”
His words reminded me that there was a world around us, one with school and homework, and all those other things that didn’t seem important now that I learned what he could do with his hand. Still, the afternoon sun reflected off the water with a bright glare. It probably was time to go in.
“Swim on the surface, or under the water?”
His grinned so widely it looked like it might hurt and he replied without hesitation. “Under.”
I grabbed him the way mermaids had grabbed men for a thousand years, binding his body with my arms around his chest, and propelled us forward with my tail. I swam for speed, loving the way it felt, glad that I could kiss him, deep under the waves, and not worry that he’d die in my arms.
****
We were a few minutes from shore when I brought him up to the surface to ask a question. “Are you hungry?”
“I’ve been in salt water all day. I’m good.”
“Okay, hold on. I’m going to catch myself some dinner.”
I left him treading water and turned around to fish. I wasn’t in the mood for anything in particular, so I grabbed the first snapper I found and headed back to him. I found him under about ten feet of water watching me. With a grin, he pointed up.
On the surface, he complimented me. “You’re beautiful when you fish.”
“Really?”
“Fierce and lovely.”
“Also hungry. Come on.” We made it to shore in a bit of an awkward swim, his arms around my waist, the fish in my hand. I tossed it on land, letting it flop a bit while I pulled myself on to the still warm sand. With one hand on its mouth, I turned it over and bit into the belly.
“Yuck. That’s raw.”
“So?” I didn’t stop eating. Between the sexy stuff and swimming, I’d gotten hungry.
“You’re supposed to clean the guts out first.”
The Mermaid and the Murders Page 13