Chapter 9
“Don’t care,” Jerry said calmly. “You’re still wrong, I’m still right, and there’s still no point in you working yourself up into another one of your tizzies, because the only thing you’ll do is make yourself sick. It’ll all come right, you wait and see. Now. Give me your arm.”
“You’re wrong, I’m right, and no. You can’t have my arm.”
He sat there at my kitchen table with my blood pressure monitor in front of him, and fixed me with his beady little stone-green eyes. “I’ll tell Marcy you’re looking peaky.”
I huffed over to the table and dropped into the chair opposite him. “Give me the cuff. I’ll do it.”
“No. Arm.”
“Jerry.”
“I will sit here all day. It’s Sunday. I don’t have to work.”
“For god’s sake, Jerry. I’m fine. My blood pressure is fine. You can stop fussing.”
“Yep. Roll your sleeve up.”
This was what came of confiding in people. They thought it gave them the right to get all up in your business.
I rolled up my sleeve and stuck out my hand. “Let me do it myself.”
Avoiding eye contact, I went through the familiar routine, slipping the cuff around my arm and waiting with pinched lips while it tightened until I felt my pulse banging unpleasantly in my inner bicep. The cuff gave a little wheeze as it deflated. We both leaned forward and read off the pressure.
I winced.
Jerry’s nostrils flared with disapproval.
“I’ll step up the yoga, for fuck’s sake,” I said.
“Damn right you will. I’m sending Charlotte over to make sure.”
“Jerry, no.”
Charlotte Barnes, Jerry’s oldest daughter, was the spitting image of her mother.
She was small and delightfully round, with bouncy brown curls and rosy cheeks, and she took absolutely no shit whatsoever from anyone.
She was also a yoga instructor. I’d hired her for some private sessions when she started her business a couple of years ago, to help her get things going.
It took me six months, some serious hours logged on the mat, and a double high five from my doctor for getting my blood pressure down and consistently steady before I realised it had been a set-up.
I wasn’t helping her. She was helping me.
And she’d given me a discount.
“Please stop threatening me with your family members,” I said.
“What about Biscuit?”
“Biscuit, I’ll accept.”
Biscuit was Jerry’s featherbrained cocker spaniel. She had two goals in life. The first was to attach herself to Jerry. The second—and only if Jerry wasn’t around—was to find the nearest human being and sit on them.
I kind of loved her, actually. I could confirm that having the uncomplicated company of a small furry idiot was excellent for lowering blood pressure. It took a lot less effort than being put through your paces by a yoga enthusiast with no mercy, that was for sure.
My heart situation was manageable. I didn’t even get all that stressed these days. Why would I? I had a home I loved, in a place I loved, with…fine. Good friends I loved.
And Dave.
My merman soulmate, who’d nearly died in the tentacles of a kraken somewhere out there in the wild ocean, and I’d never have known what happened, and would have spent the rest of my life waiting for him to come back.
My beloved, who for the first time since Jerry and I had found him washed up on the beach years ago, didn’t want me.
Nothing to be stressed about at all.
Three mornings later, I came out of my little front gate and, instead of treading the well-worn path down to the beach, I turned right and walked along the headland.
Long lines of tangled gorse followed the ragged curve of land, which dropped off at a dangerously steep angle to plunge into the sea below. The path was set back from the very edge, but even so, I wouldn’t chance it on a blustery day.
Today wasn’t a blustery day.
Today was a perfect day.
It was as if the damp and miserable weather had just been waiting for Dave to show up before it got its party clothes on.
Only instead of romping around outside and making the most of it, first of all we’d been stuck in the house while Dave’s wounds healed up, and then he’d fucked off, and now here I was in my shorts, t-shirt, hiking boots, and bad mood, trudging along and every now and then shooting a dark glare over at the glorious, uncaring blue sea.
I had no idea what the hell Dave was playing at.
Had he gone?
I didn’t know. I didn’t think he had, but…I didn’t know.
After being cooped up with me for days, had he realised that he was just not that into me?
Hands fisted in my pockets, I kicked a large chunk of rock out of my way. It skipped along the stony, rutted path and disappeared over the edge. A couple of seconds later, I heard a faint and distant splash.
I didn’t know.
If you’d have asked me two months ago, I’d have said with the utmost confidence that, yes. Dave and I were solid.
We were together.
It was long term.
We were securely into our happily-ever-after years.
I wouldn’t have had even a flicker of a doubt. He loved me and I loved him. I’d have bet Jerry’s life on it.
And that was saying a lot.
I liked to swan about congratulating myself on being an independent man, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t stupid, or oblivious.
The reason I could handle being alone for six months out of the year while waiting for Dave was because I wasn’t, in fact, alone.
I had Jerry.
And now I had doubts.
There was so much—so much—that I simply didn’t know about Dave. Perhaps I was taking a lot of things for granted that simply might not be true for a merman. Things such as a love like ours was permanent.
Things such as the ever-after part of happily ever after.
I turned to stare at the sparkling expanse of deep blue rolling out and out and out before me. On the horizon, a distant freighter stacked high with colourful shipping containers was moving so slowly, it appeared frozen.
Maybe for Dave, it wasn’t permanent.
Maybe mermen loved passionately, intensely…
…and temporarily.
The next day, which made four whole days since I’d last seen him, I wandered down to the beach, drawn to the sea as I always was.
I’d intended to walk along the headland again, having taken a small amount of admittedly petty satisfaction in shunning the shore, but by the time I realised where I was, I already had the sand beneath my boots.
Once or twice, I’d wondered if being bonded to a merman had done something to me.
I’d always loved the sea. It was why I’d come to live in Lynwick in the first place. There was a difference to the way I loved it now, though. There was a depth, a resonance, an extra dimension. I didn’t just want to go down to the shore. It wasn’t anything as simple as a preference; it was a pull.
A call I couldn’t resist.
I went down to meet the frisky surf, hair tossed into my eyes by the even friskier offshore bluster. The cold wind slapped great handfuls of yellow foam clean off the caps of the waves and sent them skating past me up the dark, wet sand.
I walked the full length of the beach, all the way down to the cluster of rocks at the far end where the sand ended and the land jutted out into the sea. It was significantly warmer once I was in the shelter of the rocks and, after all that bluster, almost eerily quiet.
Leaning my arse against a rock that topped me by a good two feet, my wind-chapped and freezing hands tucked in my pockets, I heaved a sigh.
The initial hurt and upset over what had happened in my bedroom had faded somewhat. The confusion remained.
While I understood that Dave had needed to get back to the sea, I didn’t understand why he was staying away. I didn’t understand how he could stay away, when I ached for him.
The sullen grey sky was lightening, the dull pewter gaining a soft, pearly lustre.
At this time of year you could start out wishing that you’d worn gloves and a hat, and by the time you returned home you were sweating and stripped down to your t-shirt.
There was a reason I favoured zip-off cargo trousers.
I could start off in boots, thick socks and trousers, and return barefoot in shorts.
I moved on to wander through the rocks, stepping over gleaming green tangles of bladder wrack and pausing now and then to inspect the rock pools as the tide continued to draw in.
The last rock before the point where the beach ended in a solid cliff up to the headland had the largest pool of all.
I bent over, hands on my thighs, and stared into the placid water.
Instead of barnacles and seaweed, or a crab and some left-behind fish, I saw myself.
It wasn’t my reflection.
It was a jarring collection of angles and light, my image shattered apart like a migraine.
I was made up of shards of shifting colour—pale skin that hadn’t had a chance yet to warm in the summer sun; the beige of my cargo trousers; the navy of my anorak; the black of my wind-tossed hair.
Dominating all was the dove-like silvery grey which was how Dave saw my eyes.
Because this odd creature, not recognisably human to me, was how I appeared through Dave’s eyes.
This was him, looking at me.
My head came up and I scanned the rocks. “Dave!”
Water splashed loudly out at sea. It was the only sign that he was—or had been—near.
When we’d first had penetrative sex, not only had Dave stuck his dick in me, he’d stuck his fangs in me. He’d bitten deep and left a scar that, when I pressed it, sometimes showed me images.
Despite my irritated instruction not to, Jerry insisted on calling the scar my magic button.
To begin with, I’d thought that the images I saw were my fevered, lovesick fantasies.
Then I segued into thinking that I was having a fun little breakdown.
Even now, I found it hard to accept. I did accept it, obviously.
But it was hard. A mental bond that allowed me brief glimpses of the world through someone else’s eyes was a hard sell—a lot harder than believing that my life partner was an honest-to-god merman.
I couldn’t really question that.
Not when he’d held me in his arms, kissed me, and slid inside me, and he’d done it all underwater, with a tail and gills.
If I pressed the scar and thought of him, I could bring up images on purpose. Sometimes, as had just happened, the flashes of what Dave was seeing or doing came out of nowhere. I didn’t know what caused them, though I suspected it happened when he thought of me.
Resting my fingers at the base of my neck where the scar was, I closed my eyes.
I slumped.
He’d swum off. He’d gone far; the water surrounding him was deep and dark.
And he was busy.
I watched through his eyes as he arrowed through the water in a blinding rush of speed, slicing through as he chased after a glitter ahead of him that turned out to be a group of fish that he—
I snapped my eyes open and shook my head to clear it.
Nope.
I did not need to see that, thank you.
The rain came back and the tide came in. I stood and gazed out to sea.
He was still here.
That was all that mattered.