Chapter 36 Cure
Cure
I come downstairs after a long night of looking and listening, my senses now completely dulled.
The nerves stripped and overexposed to all of the stimuli that crawls through the darkness and into my eyes and ears.
I’m tired but I can’t bring myself to sleep in my bed.
Since Lir returned he’s too large to crawl up the steps of the lighthouse and I miss him desperately.
I need him in my arms, more than I need a warm bed, more than I’ve needed anything in my entire life.
In a slightly chaotic clamber, I stumble out the door and he is already waiting for me. He weaves his fingers into my hair, a basket to carry my head to press into his. Deliver me to you, Lir, I could want nothing else. He is my ultimate vice, my most vital necessity.
The pool feels warm today and I float happily, wasting away the day in his arms while I look up at his face that is framed with the clouds overhead. I think if I could climb that spiral staircase into Heaven, it would be full of Lir.
Rubbing his hand into my cheek, I can feel the spirals of his fingerprints imprinting into my face, molding my skin into those swirling ridges. He has fingerprints. He can’t be any less human than me.
He can bleed, he can scream and he can love.
If I could crawl into Hell from the catwalk below, it would be filled with those horrible screams. “I’m sorry you were in so much pain, Lir.
When you were out there all alone.” I whisper against his chest, knowing full well it wasn’t just one night he was alone.
Knowing there has been so many nights I couldn’t save him, injuries, pain and heartbreak probably before I was even born.
I press my face into his palm trying to read the story all those lines and ridges tell.
“It’s alright, I’m just fine now.” He whispers.
He looks more than just fine, I don’t think any man, creature, or God has ever looked better. “I’m glad I could help.” I smile up at him drunk on his touch.
“Help? You’re the cure, Andrea.” He leans down kissing me between the syllables of my name.
“There should be statues of you strewn across the ocean floor.” He lifts my chin with his finger pulling my mouth into his.
“You. With you life is even better, even sweeter than before. I feel my body has been restored by the ocean and by what you’ve done for me. You’ve transformed me.”
Into his warm stomach that little droplets of water hydrophobically bead down, I nuzzle as he holds me up just on the surface of the water.
Moving me back and forth so that I am rocked in the safety of the enclosed pool.
In his arms I am floating in gentle buoyancy, none of the aches and pains of my body seeping between my joints.
None of the rusty springs in my mattress are poking up at me in this kelp bed that I am held within.
I am instead bundled—secure. In the clouds my warm breath forms rolling across the surface of the water, I feel weightless in his arms. As light and wispy as spun cashmere, he finger knits me into the sweetest sleep that I easily drift off into—
My dreams lap up over me like the water surrounding us, seeping into me so deeply that they are not just fantasy, instead premonitions. They are great truths that only the ocean knows, the secrets that Lir has told me of.
In this hazy dream that I sink deep into, deeper than I thought this tide pool could even possibly be—little tiny stars are being embroidered all across my skin, the pain worth it for each bright glow that glints in the dark.
At first, I think I’m floating in the sky as the tiny needles pucker in and out of my flesh but actually it is above me reflecting on the infinite black ocean spanning out like liquid silk.
My body is folding and unfolding within its arches and peaks from the wind ruffling beneath it, from an unbridled power just below the surface.
Rolling in the iridescent satin, in a fluid mirror I see my reflection reaching out for me. Dark red hair whipping all around in endless motion and flailing strands. But something is different, instead of fragile muscle and meat, she is gilded in silver, dipped in a liquid suit of armor.
Panicking, I reach out for her, to protect her and shield her from everything I have feared, but she does not need me.
She shakes her head and points to the full harvest moon above, which unfurls at her command.
It is Lir who uncurls down to reach for her, to hand to her a glowing gift.
The North Star, Polaris—which sizzles in her small hands and glows red between her fingertips that clutch the fizzling spark.
All the stars above sing, encouraging her choice, bells ringing as they fall from heaven in long streaks of variegated light.
My reflection and I meet at the perfect intersection of land, sky and sea.
It is not a kiss, but a perfect melding between our two forms, between these two sides of a silver coin that all culminate within me.
I swallow the star.
Gasping in Lir’s arms, the painful burn still radiates in my throat. I grasp up reaching for him and he immediately soothes my thirst with his mouth. His lips blessing both of mine, first the top delicately and then the bottom fervently in their effort to quell any pain within me.
I pull his neck towards me. “I’m tired of these dreams that haunt me,” I whisper the words into his skin, into his scars that are scrawled out like ancient carvings from lands far away.
When I was a child, I liked to believe I had found tablets from Atlantis on the beach. My parents had laughed at me for having such fantastical dreams, they were obviously simple termite swirls in driftwood that had washed up.
Yet now, looking at Lir here in my arms, how could anyone tell me that I was wrong.
Living proof is clutched under my nails of all my fantastical hopes and dreams being true, being alive.
I swirl my tongue up along his stomach, across his chest that beats with a human heart so very similar to mine.
Sliding my mouth in a spiral closer and closer around his pectoral, a sea snail trail of lust glimmering on his skin.
He exhales, his nostrils flaring in heat as his gritted teeth will not let any air escape through their tight seal.
Gripping my shoulder, he squeezes in anticipation as I near that tiny peak and pulls me upwards back to his mouth.
I like to believe I’ve signed my name all over him in that dead text, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s as I still drag my tongue up as he lifts.
“I’m tired of the ghosts and the gears, the nightmares and dreams, I just want to live in this beautiful reality with you,” I say, my lip quivering as as he nibbles it.
I no longer want to escape, to run away.
I whisper to him, my breath heavy with desire, “I only want you.”
“Nothing, and no one is going to take you away from me. Not your dreams, not your nightmares.” I place my hands over his while he holds my face.
His thumbs trace and smooth out the small lines that pepper it.
“You seem to think that it is you who will slip through my fingers, but actually, you are the one who has completely captured me. It is I completely caught in your net, Andrea.”
“Lir, I want to stay with you—to be with you.”
“Of course we can stay together. Of course I’ll keep coming back here—“
“I want to leave.” I exclaim. He tenses up as I reach out for his hand to try and explain. “I think I should leave when that Admiral comes back.”
Lir looks over me, through me. “You think he won’t tear you apart?
Maybe not your flesh, Andrea. But—I see how they have torn apart your heart before.
How the shredded remnants flutter in your chest haphazardly glued back together.
” His hand rests on my chest, covering it completely.
“They do not understand how precious of a thing it is.”
He exhales.
“I have seen their greatest riches sunken to the bottom of the sea, if they valued hearts and souls—they would not have so many chests of gold weighing down their ships.”
I can hear little timbres of notes beneath his quaking voice. As if he wishes he could simply control me with it, but stifles out the song. “I beg you Andrea, to not give those pieces up to them again.”
Lir pulls back a little, but it is me who grips his hand tightly this time. “I’m scared here. Not of you.” I’m sure to tell him that, to console him from that thought. “But, of those men, of that light I’ve seen out there in the dark...it is an ever present reminder that we are not alone here.”
He grips my hands tightly and interrupts me, “I saw it too. When I was out in the sea—”
“I think that’s where those two men came from,” I whisper.
“And the noise,” he says solemnly, “The noise that crash-landed me here, I heard it coming from that direction.”
I look out towards the sea, even though I can’t see anything right now. Just knowing that Lir saw it and felt it, twists my stomach into knots.
“When that Admiral comes back in a few weeks, I’m going to leave with him—”
“Where will you go the next time they break your heart? When the edge of the world was not far enough to get away from them?” He clutches my shirt. I know he could shred through it, shred through my skin and take that thing he finds so precious away for himself.
Instead, he begs and pleads for me to not stay, not go—but to just be where I can heal, where I can be safe. “I will go—I will go with you, Lir.”
Gasping as if he needs the air to breathe, he looks up at me. A silver lining encircles his lash line.
“I will get on the first boat out of here—but, I want you to follow me.” Pressing our foreheads together, I whisper my plan to him.
“I’m going to buy a boat with that,” I say while gesturing with my chin towards the goblet on the rocks with all our other glass bottles.
It shimmers beautifully in the light—yet unimpressive compared to the man in front of me.
“Then, we’ll go anywhere, anywhere you can lead me to that we can be together—”
It’s not running away this time. I wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place, but I think I’m supposed to be with Lir. Even if I can’t grow a tail, and he can’t grow legs—I’m sure there is somewhere on this planet that any two people in love can exist.
“Okay, Andrea. I’ll follow you to anywhere the water will let me. And even then—I’ll crawl and scrape as far as my flesh will allow.” He winks and I nudge him with my elbow.
“No more scraping Lir! No more desperate crawling.” I trace one of his scars. “No more pain. From now on, only us.”
He smiles and holds me close for a long time. The sun growing low on a horizon that seems larger. Not just a cage anymore, but actually with places we could travel beyond the gray expanse.