She nodded, brow and mouth pinched.
Wolfgang waded out until waist-deep then lowered her into the water, only to find her arms locked about his neck.
“My love,” she whispered.
My love – an arrow to the heart. Painfully so.
He should’ve strangled Cupid.
She kissed him, and he sighed, returned the kiss for long enough to feel a stir.
Then he broke away. “No. Don’t do this. If you shift… if you do, I may forget what I decided. That would not be good.”
“No. I guess not.” Her mouth twisted in regret. “I will never forget you, my Wolfgang.”
“Nor I you, my precious girl. You woke a part of me I thought long-dead – my heart.”
“Is that a line from a play? Romeo and Juliet?”
“No. But it should be.”
“Write one for me.” She pawed his dampening shirt – the sea was climbing up the cloth – put her nose to him and inhaled. Her lips trembled. Then she met his eyes. Already the ocean tugged at her hair, fanning it out into languorous scarlet curls.
Sadness passed across her irises, fashioned by the wavering reflections of sea and rising sun.
Gently, he pulled her arms from him, released her, then moved away. “Go, my love.”
He’d never said my love to anyone. Because I’m a bastard, he reminded himself.
“Goodbye,” she whispered then turned and did a shallow dive. With a strong push and swirl of tail, she dived deeper, and was gone. Only her shadow was left, flitting in the dull gray-blue sea, heading outward until it too vanished.
He blew a last kiss into the wind. “Find the edge of the world for me, find dragons and whales, pet the seals in Antarctica. Swaying palms, coral reefs. Everything I cannot see.”
His imagination went elsewhere for a while as he stood there, pants soaked, waves shushing against him.
This was the hardest thing he had ever done, and that was saying something. Such suffering and pain he had, once upon a time, seen and caused, and yet this was the hardest ever.
“Pussy,” he muttered. “Fucking pussy.”
Eventually, he returned to the house, walked up the beach, dripping. He sat down in the sand, with his back against the concrete below the pool wall and stared out to sea for a bit longer.
Regrets, he had more than a few.
An hour, two, passed by. All his recriminations and regrets wound down to nothing.
He shoved himself to his feet, brushed off the sand and nodded at the ocean, to her. “I never deserved you. Always that was true. But I guess trying is better than not trying.”
Then he went into the house, retrieved the woman from the bottom of the pool, and took her down into the garden to a different place from the homeless guy. Not being terribly enthusiastic about this, he planned to bury her in a fairly shallow grave. Then, at the bottom of the hole, his shovel pried loose a corner of red cloth with a familiar red button on it.
Another Merrick memory floated by.
“Damn you and shut up.”
He sighed, hauled the woman into the hole and covered her over with soil. It left an obvious grave mound. He was no good at this. Merrick would’ve been better at all of this shit. That man was better at everything, as well as ruthless.
Fuck him.
He should do something useful with the rest of his life, and he thought he knew what it should be. He would tidy up some loose ends.
Before he left.
CHAPTER 12
Raffaela never returned, of course. She obeyed him.
Her decision both satisfied and frustrated? If frustration was the word for this bone-deep numbing ennui. He was tired of the world. What he’d had with her could not be surpassed. How could it be – an enthralling, obsessive, mind-blowing relationship with a siren?
She was correct. Siren was the better word. She had burrowed into his sexual psyche, his id, his soul, and left her mark there, and he hoped he’d left some sort of mark or memory on her heart and soul too.
Memories. Wolfgang spent many nights up on the pool level, sitting in the white lounger with a glass of whisky in hand, under the starry sky or the stormy sky, with the rest of the bottle at his feet or cuddled to his side like a baby.
All that research? It had been an excuse toward the end. None of it had been leading him anywhere. He needed a whole team and years to get any answers – if any answers were possible? He suspected a mermaid simply could not change back into being a human, permanently.
He wrote a memoir, a sort of late diary of their weeks together. Every event he could recall was detailed. He did sketches of her, especially of her tail because of its uniqueness, and of her face because she compelled him. The scales on her tail would have made perfect jewelry and it seemed such a pity none of that had been left to him. Not one single scale.
He sketched all of her in black and white, and never could he do her justice.
He wrote obscure love letters to her in the pages, and only realized that he’d been subconsciously doing so when he reached the date she had left. The day he set her free.
His pen had risen from the page. This was so personal.
He was right too, about what he had told her.
If she returned now, he would chain her up and keep her. Properly, this time.
A freshly bloomed red rose waited for him to use it, cut from a garden shrub. One of Merrick’s. The whole flower would not fit inside the book. He fumbled over the side of the lounge, searching for the memoir.
