Part of Your World (Twisted Tales)(49)

“There was a storm, and a ship. I think most of the crew died. But I managed to save you and take you to shore. You were so…handsome and strange.”

“Strange?” he asked in surprise.

She laughed softly. “You had two legs, silly. And no fins. Strange.”

“Right. Of course. Strange from a mermaid’s perspective,” he said quickly.

“‘From a mermaid’s perspective…’ Yes. Anyway, I’ll skip the more complicated parts, about my father, and other things that happened. Suffice it to say I made a bargain with Ursula the sea witch that if I couldn’t make you fall in love with me in three days, she would keep my voice forever—and me, as her prisoner.”

“Three days? That seems rather short. To make someone fall in love with you, I mean.”

“I’m a mermaid,” Ariel reminded him. “For thousands of years you people have been falling in love with us at first sight, immediately and forever upon hearing our songs. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“But you weren’t a mermaid. You were a human.”

“Yes, and I had no voice, which made things even harder than I imagined,” she said bitterly. “But, I suppose, just as hard as Ursula hoped. I also suspect she had her hand in little incidents that went wrong along the way.”

“So I was looking for the beautiful mermaid who sang me awake,” Eric mused, thinking back on the time. “And all the while she was right there before me.”

“YES.”

Ariel said it a little louder, a little more fiercely than she had meant. Her eyes blazed.

Eric looked at her, surprised.

“You had legs,” he pointed out.

“I had the same face and hair, Eric,” she said, using his name for the first time.

“But you couldn’t sing. You couldn’t even talk. I remembered that better than how you looked. It stayed with me. I was coming out of unconsciousness, Ariel. Please have a little pity. I had swallowed copious amounts of seawater—I was coughing it up for the rest of the day, and lay in bed with a fever for three nights. I narrowly avoided pneumonia and there’s still a little bit of a twinge in my lungs on certain days if I cough too hard.”

“Oh,” Ariel said, taken aback. She hadn’t thought it was like that at all. From her perspective she had saved him, fought with her dad, and returned triumphantly as a human to woo him. She hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what had happened to him in the meantime.

Same old Ariel, she thought with a mental sigh. Impulsive—and a little thoughtless.

“Would you have stayed? A human?” he asked curiously. “If I had fallen in love with you, and you got your voice back, and could stay on land?”

“I…suppose so…?”

It was a question she had thought about many times over the past few years. The answer had changed with time. Back then, she absolutely would have stayed, and lived happily ever after as the human princess married to her true love in the Dry World.

But now…as someone who had been Queen of the Sea…and, perhaps, had more time to think…Who knew? There were so many details to the world that she hadn’t understood back then, when her vision was colored in bright primary hues and the borders between truth and fiction were defined in bold black lines. Would she have aged and died as a human? Would it have been worth it? Would she miss her friends, her family? Could she wake up every morning and not choke on the dry air?

“…on the other hand, it’s also possible my father, the King of the Sea, would have stormed your castle, drowned all the inhabitants, and dragged me back home. He’s a bit controlling that way.”

“Drowned? Everyone?”

“I mean stormed quite literally,” Ariel said with a tight smile. It was a power she now controlled, by means of the trident disguised as a beautiful and ostensibly harmless hair comb.

Eric took a moment to digest this.

“I guess falling in love with mermaids is pretty dangerous,” he finally said.

“Did you?” Ariel asked in a small voice. “Fall for me? At all?”

Eric gave her a measured look, treating the question seriously as she had his. “I did fall for you, just not in the way I expected it would happen. And maybe not in the way you hoped. It wasn’t a lightning bolt. As I got to know you, I realized you were the most…energetic, fun, enthusiastic…alive girl I had ever met.” He smiled at the memory—and Ariel felt her breath catch. “You know, for a boy who’s all about sailing and running around with his dog and exploring, you were just about as perfect a companion as he could ever want. And beautiful, to boot. I would have been very lucky.”

He said this wistfully.

Ariel wasn’t sure when she was going to start breathing again.

What if, what ifs…

“…So yes. I think I did,” he said, taking her hands and squeezing them. “No, I know I did. You were one in a million. Even an idiot like me saw that. But then…Vanessa came along….”

He looked confused.

“She had my voice,” Ariel supplied. “And you remembered the song.”

“Yes! But…it was more than that. Somewhere between Wait, that’s the girl who saved me! and the next moment, everything went…fuzzy.”