When We Believed in Mermaids(60)

He sighs, his hands on my waist. “You’re my Achilles’ heel.”

With my thumb, I brush away one of the tears, and I bend in to kiss each eyelid. “No. I’m your sunshine in the morning, your moonlight at night.”

He lets go of a choked laugh, and then his arms are around me, so tight, and it’s my turn to make a hushed, grateful sound. “I need you,” he says.

“I know. And I need you.” Into his neck, I whisper, “It’s all a big mess, but we’ll work it out over time.”

We sit, exhausted, together for a long time. “I talked to my mom on FaceTime,” I say quietly. “I told her to come see us.”

“Will she?”

“I hope so,” I say, and I mean it.

Now, if only Kit will forgive me, everything will be all right.





Chapter Thirty-Four

Kit

I head straight up the elevator to Javier’s floor. My hair is wet from the rain, and I’m trembling in every inch of my body, and I’m having trouble catching my breath. I keep thinking that if I can find him, talk to him, some of this will make sense. Dylan and Josie.

Josie.

Javier is not home. I pull out my phone to call him, and then I just tuck it back into my bag, feeling airless, as if I will fly apart, dissolve into the universe. Standing in the hallway, shaking, I can’t think what to do. What my next step should be.

I can’t do this. Can’t sort this out. I can’t breathe or think or even settle on a single thought. Josie and Billy. Dylan and Josie. My poor, poor sister, carrying it all for so long. Finally killing herself off rather than deal with it anymore.

Dylan.

Images of him spill through my mind. So beautiful, so lost, so tortured.

How could he have had sex with Josie? How could he have kept a secret about her abuse like that? Knowing she needed counseling. Needed help. He saw her spiraling, drinking, drugging, and he didn’t just not stop it; he encouraged it. How could I have missed all this?

Overwhelmed, I spin around and head for the elevator.

Home. I just want to go home. Lie in my own bed. Sit on my patio.

I want it so desperately, all of a sudden, that it’s all I can think about. I return to my rooms and start throwing everything into my suitcase, willy-nilly, not folded. Bras and dirty underwear and new T-shirts. It feels like I’ve been on a very long, challenging journey, as if I have traveled around the world and taken part in a million festivals and now I’m leaving, a changed person.

The view this afternoon is moody and soft, the water roiling, turned a steely gray by the rain, and it makes me ache. I haven’t known it as well as I’d like. I wanted to learn more, but it’s just impossible to stay right now. I have to get back home, to my refuge, to the world I’ve built.

From my laptop, I make reservations on a plane for this very evening. It costs a fortune, but I don’t care. I kick it up another notch and go first-class. It leaves at 11:45 p.m., and I’ll be home in the morning. I’m already packed. Maybe I should just go to the airport.

A knock sounds at my door, and for a moment I consider not answering. The only person who comes here is Javier.

But it would be deeply unkind to leave without letting him know. Taking a moment to center myself, I open the door. He’s wearing soft jeans and the long-sleeve heathery T-shirt that fits him perfectly. His feet are bare, which awakens that physical part of me that still wants him.

“Hey,” I say, trying to sound normal. “I just knocked on your door.”

“I was practicing guitar,” he says, and his eyes sparkle. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Come in.”

He sees the suitcase on the bed. “What is this?”

“My sister—Dylan—There is . . .” I shake my head. “I just can’t do this. I need to get home.”

“You’re leaving? Now? Today?”

I throw another shirt into the suitcase. “Yes. It’s time. I have to go.”

He frowns slightly. “Did something happen?”

“Yes. Confessions of all kinds. Things I didn’t know. Things I didn’t want to know.”

“Are you all right? You look—” He reaches for my arms, kindly, and I dodge him, unsure what will happen if he touches me. “Distraught.”

“I’ll be fine once I get out of here and back to everything normal.” I swallow. “I’m sorry, though, about leaving so abruptly. I really have enjoyed your company.”

He licks his lower lip, and there’s something in his eye that I haven’t seen before, something darker. “Enjoyed?” He steps closer to me, and I step around, and he follows, as if we’re dancing.

“Stop it,” I say. “I’m not that woman.”

“What woman is that, Kit? The one who falls in love, who lets her emotions come to the surface?” He brushes the very back of my nape with light fingers, and I shudder. It freezes me, and I can’t seem to move away as he closes the distance between us and kisses the place he touched, lingering and light. His hands slide around my waist, and I can feel my heartbeat in every part of my body—my palms and the soles of my feet, my thighs and breasts and throat.

He turns me in his embrace and firmly backs me into the wall behind me. I hear myself gasp as our bodies connect, and he smiles faintly. “Enjoy is a little thing, like olives.” He runs his hands up the backs of my thighs, under the skirt I’m wearing, and hauls me closer. “This is much, much more than that, and you know it.”

He bends to take my mouth in an insistent kiss, his whiskers abrading my chin. I find myself making a soft mewling noise, and my hands are on his body, pulling him into me. He kisses me, and kisses me, and kisses me, his hands roving, rousing. There are tears on my face, and I don’t know why—I don’t think that’s ever happened before—but all I can think is that I need his body, all of it.

Our joining is nearly violent. No exploration. No ease. Just lips bruising and clothes ripped away, my shirt and my swimsuit top and panties, his jeans. Then we’re rocking hard against each other on the bed I will never sleep in again. We’re both lost in it, lost, lost, lost, dissolving and melting and reassembling, me in him, him in me, my molecules lost in his skin, his lost in my bones.

When it’s over and we’re panting, he doesn’t move but cups my face in his hands. “That is not enjoy, mi sirenita. That is passion.” We’re both breathing hard. He holds my gaze, bends to sup my lower lip. “That’s love.”

Tears are running from my eyes onto my temples. I slide my hands into his hair and feel his skull. “How can I trust that, Javier? Insta-passion?”

“Is that what it is?”

“I don’t know. I’m terrible at all this.”

“Don’t trust me,” he whispers, running his index finger along my jaw. “Trust us. This.”

For a long, long moment, I wish I were someone else, that I had some tiny bit of the heedlessness that marks my mother and sister. “I can’t,” I whisper. “I just can’t.”

He gazes down at me, touches the tears. “The ice is melting.” Gently, he kisses me. “You go. But I want your email. I have been writing all day. I want to send you a song.”

“Oh, don’t.” I close my eyes. It’s weird that we’re having this conversation this way, half-dressed, messy from sex. “I can’t bear it.”

He laughs softly. Kisses my chin. My throat. “You will like it, gatita. I promise.”

In the end, I relent. He stays with me until it’s time for me to go to the airport, but we don’t talk a lot. Just sit in the quiet and look out at the rain, his hands in my hair.



I’m fine until the plane lifts off and circles, and I see the city spread out in yellow lights and carved bays below me, and it feels like my ribs are breaking, as if I grew long roots there in that place, like one of the Moreton Bay fig trees, and now I’m ripping them violently out, all at once. Why am I leaving?

What’s wrong with me?





Chapter Thirty-Five

Kit

One month later

It’s been a brutal night at the ER, a teenager killed when he crashed his car through a barrier wall and landed in the river; a fentanyl overdose we couldn’t revive; an old woman who broke her leg in two places falling down the stairs, a hideous injury with bones protruding.

Which sets me off on some weird level. I am furious with the world in general for the rest of the night.

It’s busy. All the usual things. Broken wrists and knocked-out teeth and food poisoning. The human body is a delicate, amazing creation. It takes almost nothing to completely destroy it, and yet it takes a lot. Most of us manage to stay on the planet, in our bodies, for seventy or eighty years, all of us amassing scars along the way, each one with a story. The chunk of plaster that marks your face forever, that belt buckle, those cigarette burns.

My mom texts me: Want breakfast this morning? Blueberry pancakes.

She’s worried about me. I know she is. And I’m trying to be at least somewhat normal so she doesn’t have to be afraid to leave and go see her grandchildren, a trip that is arranged for the middle of next month. I’m happy for her. She’s done the work. She’s earned it. I text back, Sure. I’m surfing. Will come after.