Page 120 of When We Believed in Mermaids

“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. “Enjoyis 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 notenjoy,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.

I haven’t been able to settle into anything since I got home. Work makes me restless. I can’t sit for more than five minutes with my mother. Can’t read. Hobo is fine, just as my mother said, and she thinks he might want a companion.

All I do is surf, whenever I can get out there. This morning, the surf forecast is not particularly brilliant, but I don’t care. I load up my board and, on a whim, head for the cove. I haven’t been there since I’ve been home. Maybe I’m looking for answers.

To what, though? Everything that ever happened to anyone, ever? Life is sometimes just wretched; that’s all. I was lucky to have the good years at Eden with Dylan, and Josie, and Cinder. All of us happy, on the beach, before everything that happened. Some people don’t even get that.

One of the things I can’t make peace with is Dylan. I thought I knew him and understood him, but Josie’s revelations destroyed that vision of him.

Or maybe, honestly, I knew.