Because You Love to Hate Me(43)

“No—wait!”

I paused.

I didn’t know why. I knew that I shouldn’t. Every story I’d ever heard of man told me to escape into the water and never look back.

Perhaps I was not so keen to die on this beach as I’d thought.

Maybe it was my broken heart, or some part of me that was enchanted by the idea of this being, this man, calling for me. Wanting me to stay.

This man who didn’t know me and therefore could not yet despise me.

I licked my lips and looked back over my shoulder.

He hadn’t moved. His hands were held out, perhaps in an effort to keep from frightening me any more than could be helped. In the faint moonlight, I could tell he was not beautiful, but neither was he unfortunate to look on. He was of slight build, with dark hair cut short and a rather pointy nose, almost beak-like. When he smiled, though, he had a pronounced dimple in his left cheek that was very nearly charming.

He was smiling now.

I swallowed.

“Hello,” he said, barely above a whisper, as if to be louder would startle me away. And perhaps it would. My fingers were still burrowing into the sand. My tail was a twitch away from pushing me the last length into the water.

“My name is Samuel,” he said, taking one step closer. When I did not move, he dared to take another. “And you are a dream sprang to life.” His gaze slipped down to my tail again, one curious, rapturous look. “And you’re beautiful.”

The compliment struck my heart as fast and sharp as a hunter’s harpoon.

His stunned gaze found mine again, and he seemed to grow bashful. His attention dipped to the sand, then to me. Out to the ocean, and back to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You probably have no idea what I’m saying. Can you speak? Do . . . do your kind have . . . a language? I wonder if maybe . . .”

“I understand you.”

His eyes widened again.

“My name is Nerit.”

He stared at me for such a long time that I thought maybe he had forgotten there were ocean and stars and sand at all. Maybe he had forgotten all the world but for me. It was the first time anyone had looked at me like that.

Samuel eased himself down into the sand and smiled his warm, dimpled smile. Then he asked me to tell him all about the world beneath the sea.





I came to the same beach every night after that, and always Samuel was waiting for me. We were both shy at first, nervous and bumbling. But soon talking to Samuel became as natural as swimming through the salt-heavy waters. We would stretch out beside each other and I would be hypnotized by the cadences of his voice. I loved to listen to him. I loved how he hardened his consonants and drawled his vowels. I loved the stories he told. Tales of sailors lost at sea who came back telling of merfolk and Sirens.

He told me of the townspeople who laughed at them and those who believed.

He told me of wars fought in distant lands, and gods who were loved and gods who were feared, and how his favorite sound was church bells on Sunday afternoons and how his favorite food was something called bread coated with sweet butter and sticky marmalade. My mouth watered when he tried to describe them, though I couldn’t begin to imagine these foreign flavors.

He told me how he had once had a sweetheart, but she had married a man who wasn’t poor like he was, and how he had spent the last three years of his life trying to be happy for her.

Weeks passed before Samuel dared to touch me. A brush of fingers through the tips of my drying hair. Then a knuckle against my shoulder. He never touched my tail, though he often stared at it with mystified awe.

“You must be beloved,” he said one night, a month after our first meeting. “You must be admired and doted upon by all your brethren in the sea.”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Samuel cocked his head and furrowed his brow in a way that was adorably human.

I considered lying. I was pleased by the idea that Samuel saw me that way—beloved—and I didn’t want to destroy such a perception. But I couldn’t lie to him, not after he had told me so many truths.

“No, Samuel. I am . . . not well liked by my kind.”

Samuel frowned. “How can that be?”

“They think I’m strange. My whole life I’ve been shunned, mocked for my talents, and pushed away . . .” I swallowed hard and forced my tongue to still, worried I’d said too much. Would Samuel begin searching for the reason now? Would he, too, begin to see whatever horrible traits the others saw in me?

A hand pressed into my lower back, just above where skin met scales. I sucked in a surprised breath and dared to raise my eyes. Samuel was closer now, his eyes full of sympathy and kindness. It was baffling to me that I had ever looked at him and not thought him handsome. Now I was certain he was the most beautiful creature in this world.

“They are jealous,” he whispered. “They are blind fools who cannot see the treasure before them.”

He kissed me. His lips were gentle, but the kiss was roughened by the salt on my mouth.

He pulled away with a sigh. “You are the sea,” he murmured.

“I love you,” I murmured back.

Fear quickly tightened around my chest and I wished that I could pull the words back into my mouth, but Samuel’s grin widened.

He took my hands into his. “My lovely Nerit, I must go away.”