Page 24 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

I push on my toes and I kiss him.

Soft, once, deliberate, his lips parting in surprise. It isn’t like the cottage kiss, wild and impulsive. His hands tighten a breath on my face and then I step back.

I hold his eyes while I toe off my ruined shoes, strip the salt-stiff sweater over my head, step out of the wrecked trousers, down to my sports bra and underwear. Nothing romantic about any of it, my knees are bruised and my hip is scraped and I don’t care. Still, his breath goes uneven and he doesn’t say one word, doesn’t move one inch, just watches me.

I turn around and I walk into the sea.

Ankle-deep, the cold climbs along my shins like a question. Then knee-deep. The sand shelves away soft and pale under my feet, and the water is slate and silver around me. The pull is not a pull anymore, it is a roar, it’s five years of longing with their interest compounded, and I am shaking, both hands fisted, water to mid-thigh.

I stop reaching for the switch.

That’s the thing I do differently. In the end, the whole secret was this: I stop reaching. I stand in the Gulf of Maine at the turn of the tide and I let go of the door and the room and the reaching, all of it. I just let go.

Here. I’m here.

The ocean takes me at my word.

It comes up from the soles of my feet like dawn comes up, warmth where there should be cold, a loosening in every seam of me. The water goes bright, the whole cove blooms silver-green with a light that is coming from me, from my skin.

It’s the world’s easiest yes, and my body remembers.

My tail takes the last of the light and throws it back teal and rose and burning, scales sliding over me like a held note resolving. My gills open silk-easy on my neck, and I go down into the dark cold glass of the cove, but the dark isn’t dark, my eyes were built for this, and the cold isn’t cold, nothing was ever cold in the water. I hear the whole island underwater, the mussels ticking on their ledges, the sand hissing in the tide-turn, the vast slow talk of the swell against the outer walls, the sea whispering the same words it’s been all this time in my sleep.

There you are.

I answer with my whole body.

I don’t come out for a long time. I am aware, distantly, in the way you’re aware of the moon in the sky, of time passing, of the stars wheeling up over the cove, of a fire kindled small and stubborn on the beach, of a shape sitting beside it, wrapped in a wool blanket, keeping a watch with a total absence of complaint.

I breach and spiral and dive. I take the outer channel at speed and come back. I float on my back in the middle of the cove with the entire length of me silvered in starlight. And I cry. I cry for my mother, who held my hands in the swell, whose half of me was here the whole time, waiting under my sternum with the patience she always had.

I lose myself to the water. The sky goes gray, then pearl, then faintly, foolishly pink.

I come in with the small waves, and the shift back is as easy as the shift out. The sea sets me down on my own two feet in the shallows like a dance partner at the end of the song. Human legs, dripping, wrung out, scrubbed new. My legs shake. My gills seal to silk seams on my neck. The dawn air is freezing and I could not possibly care less.

He’s exactly where I left him, and he stands up at my approach and comes down to the waterline with a blanket open like wings.

Wool and woodsmoke and cedar close around me. He rubs my arms through the blanket, and his face, in the pink light, is wide open, awed and wrecked and sleepless.

Then he kisses me, salt and all, morning and all, and it’s the cottage kiss and the beach kiss compounded, and I feel it in the soles of my brand-new feet.

“You stayed all night,” I say, when there’s air in my lungs.

“There was a mermaid in the cove,” he says. His voice is gravel and wonder, and his thumb traces once along the seam on my neck, reverent, like it’s the best thing he’s ever been allowed near. “I wasn’t going to miss that for sleep.”

The laugh comes up through me from somewhere that’s been closed for so long, I’ve forgotten it was there.

And because I’m new, because the water’s still running off me and I can feel my own pulse in the tide, I ask the question straight, with a courage I didn’t even know I had.

“So. Are you going to run away this time?”

He grins. It goes all the way into the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, nerdy and sure and slightly feral, dawn catching in his glasses, and he pulls the blanket tighter around me, flattening my body against him. He’s warm and tall, all hard planes and masculinity. The push of an erection presses against the cold, wet skin of my stomach and another tide rises inside me, but this time, it’s hot and burning, spreading from that spot between my legs.

“No,” he says. “I’m done with that.”

This time, it’s him who kisses me.

Chapter 12