How to be a Mermaid (The Cotton Candy Quintet #1)(12)

The aquarist looked taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

“What day is it?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh.” I sat back. So it was the next morning. I let out a long sigh of relief. I might not have been in as much trouble as I’d initially thought. Although, based on the aquarist’s stern expression, my being near the dolphins was probably a bad sign.

“What are you doing here?” he asked again.

“Last night,” I said, gesturing to the pool, “I wanted to check on Kai. He seemed so sad, I wanted to make sure that he was okay.”

As if in answer, the young dolphin let out a mournful cry. Thankfully, I didn’t hear him cry for help. I don’t know if I could have handled hearing him talk at that moment.

The aquarist either didn’t hear the cry or didn’t care, because he was still busy drilling me.

“By sheer dumb luck, you were out of sight of the security cameras, otherwise they would have caught you.” He gestured behind him and I caught a glimpse of the security camera that was trained on the largest of the dolphin pools. I was behind a pillar, beyond the security camera’s reach.

Thank goodness for small miracles.

“I, uh...” I didn’t want to tell him that I’d hit my head or anything and raise alarms that I’d had a concussion. After Nereia’s ministrations, I didn’t want to go to the hospital and have them see any evidence of a sea witch messing around with my cranial structure. I knew that my head was fine, even though I’m not sure what she did or even if she was real. “I laid down to talk to him, and I guess I fell asleep.”

“So you were drunk,” the aquarist said, unimpressed.

“No! I fell asleep here accidentally.” I demonstrated by tilting my head as if to pop my neck and rubbing my shoulder, as if I’d spend the entire night on a concrete surface. “Listen, I know what I did was wrong, but please don’t tell anyone. I could lose my job.”

I really could. One of Neptune’s biggest rules when we went on our tour was to not make a splash of bad publicity for his aquarium. I knew that sneaking into an animal enclosure and falling asleep constituted a “splash”. The realization of that made tears spring to my eyes.

The aquarist considered my plea for a second, before sighing with a long, drawn-out nod. “All right. It’s only because I’d feel bad for you. I know people make mistakes in their lives, especially when they’re young.”

I got to my feet and threw my arms around him. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Mister...”

“It’s Tim,” he said, filling in the blank. “Call me Tim.”

“Thank you so much, Tim!”

“Don’t make me regret it,” he said with a grunt.

I pulled my arms to my side. “Of course,” I said.

Out of the need to make it up to him, I offered to help him feed and prep the dolphins for the day. Instead, Tim waved me away.

“That’s more rule breaking,” he said, “and you’ve done enough of that. Go back to your dressing room, and hurry because others are arriving for work. And don’t swim if you are hungover.” He added that last bit, giving me the impression that he didn’t believe my story about me falling asleep near Kai’s tank.

Before he could change his mind about keeping this quiet, I hurried back to the dressing room. It was early morning, so the hallways weren’t busy either. Even as it was, I rushed as fast as I could. I gratefully slammed the door shut and leaned against it, breathing heavily.

Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe I really had bonked my head on the side of the pool and only imagined everything. Hell, I was lucky that I wasn’t dead. It would have been all too easy to fall in the pool and then have someone find me, bloated and drowned. I’ve read stories like that before where someone had snuck into an aquarium and fell in, only to be discovered in the morning.

I shivered and wrapped my arms about myself. I’m too morbid sometimes.

Cautiously, I walked back to my station and looked at myself in in the mirror. No wonder the aquarist thought I’d been drinking. I looked awful. There were dark purple circles around my eyes, making me look like a zombie. My dark hair was in disarray and it would take a long time to get it looking somewhat presentable. I was also slightly sunburned on the side that had been exposed to the morning sun.

I gingerly lifted the hair from the right side of my head, and I saw a dark, angry spider web of bruising. So that’s where I had hit my head. Thankfully, I didn’t have any blood on me and my hair mostly covered it up. It certainly didn’t look like I had fallen into the Gulf of Mexico and split open my head. It looked like I had hit it pretty badly, sure, but nothing like what Nereia and Finn were talking about.

Maybe it truly was all a dream. Regardless, I probably shouldn’t swim that day.

Yet then I’d be in even more trouble because I didn’t report in last night and I’d be missing out on a performance today. Not to mention that something deep inside me wanted to go back into the water.

A shower would do me a world of good. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 8:15, so I had about forty-five minutes to get showered and get myself looking like a normal human being. I had to get a move on before Christine showed up.

I got to my feet and headed into the shower, my muscles groaning and my head aching. As soon as I turned on the water, I felt rejuvenated, like I was an entirely new person. I closed my eyes and put my hand up against the wall, leaning into the spray. I relished the sensation of the warm droplets hitting me and cascading down my body.