Swans Landing #1 - Surfacing (19 page)

“He’s been trying to,” Dylan told me. “But he didn’t know how.”

Dylan’s eyes looked pleading, but I wasn’t ready to forgive and forget. I wanted to swim into the horizon forever and never look back.

But I was tired. Treading the water and learning how to work this new part of my body was exhausting.

“I’ll go back to shore,” I finally relented. “But I’m not going to Lake’s house. I mean it.”

Dylan nodded. “You can come to my house, okay?”

I agreed to this and we started swimming back toward the shoreline. As we neared the empty beach, two complications arose in my mind.

“Um,” I said, looking at the beach ahead, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to stay in the water.”

Dylan floated ahead and turned around to face me. “Why?”

I gestured toward the water. “Well, number one, I’m not sure that I know how to change back.”

He grinned. “That’s easy. Easier than the first change and a little less painful. You look at the shore and start walking as you normally would. Your tail will change back on its own.”

I was eager to try it and see if it really was as easy as Dylan said, but then that posed the next problem. “And number two,” I said, “my jeans are nothing but torn scraps of fabric attached to a waistband.” I lifted a strip of torn denim from the water as evidence.

The sudden flaming of color to his cheeks surprised me. He ducked his head, unable to meet my gaze. “Oh, right,” he said. “Sailor has never been shy about that so I forget that not everyone is like her.”

I could just imagine Sailor parading around in all her glory for anyone to see.

“You can wear my shirt,” he offered. “I left my clothes on the beach and the shirt should be long enough on you to cover you up until we get to my house. It won’t exactly be warm, but it’s something.”

This was the only option, other than living out the rest of my life in the water. I trailed behind Dylan, following him through the crashing waves toward the beach. We drew close enough that I felt the tip of my tail brush against the sandy floor.

He kept moving confidently toward the shoreline, never pausing as first his shoulders emerged into the cold air, then his torso, and finally his legs, his skin slick and shining with water. Where there had once been iridescent blue-green fish scales, there was now the pale skin of his backside, leading to the tanned skin of his long, lean legs.

Dylan had the decency to avert his gaze as I attempted my emergence from the water. I moved toward shore, certain that the tail fin was there to stay. I had already taken several steps before I realized that I was walking on actual legs. I ran my hands over my slick thighs, marveling that they had returned. There was no trace of the golden scales that had covered them only moments before.

My shirt had soaked completely through and it clung to my body. I pulled off what remained of my jeans and then took the shirt Dylan offered me, quickly pulling it on once I’d removed my wet clothes. My skin prickled with goosebumps in the cold breeze as water dripped from my hair and down my back. I retrieved my coat and bag from a bit farther down the beach where I had left them.

Dylan’s hand slid down my back and finally found mine as we walked past the sand dunes and out of the direct path of the wind. My fingers intertwined with his, enjoying the warm feel of his skin against mine. He wore only his jeans, shoes, and a jacket, but he didn’t act as though he were cold.

“So why weren’t you in school today?” I asked. “Felt an urgent need to go swimming?”

Dylan laughed. “Something like that.”

“Were you with Sailor?” My stomach knotted itself as I waited for his answer.

“Yes, for a little while,” he admitted.

I didn’t want to think about Sailor or anyone else. My body and mind were numb from the day’s events. Tomorrow, I would think about what being finfolk really meant for me. Tomorrow, I would allow myself to mourn the passing of my old life before I left for good.

Because I knew now that I couldn’t stay in Swans Landing. I had been told too many lies. There was nothing keeping me here.

Today, I would live for myself, only doing whatever could bring me comfort in my final hours here.

So I stopped suddenly, pulling Dylan into a halt in front of me.

His lips tasted salty, like I thought they would. His free hand reached up into my hair, tangling his fingers so he could press me into him.

And even though he wasn’t the guy I pictured in my head when I kissed him, he was solid and real during this moment when I wasn’t certain that anything around me was.

Chapter Twenty-One

The first thought that crossed my mind as I drifted in that space between sleep and awake was that I could hear the ocean. The steady swoosh of the water sounded much closer than it usually did and I wondered if I had slept with my window open last night.

I rolled over to look at the clock on the floor next to my mattress. But instead, an unfamiliar blue lamp and a stack of books on a table I’d never seen before greeted me.

I sat up, rubbing away sleep from my bleary eyes. I lay tangled in strange sheets in a bed—an actual bed, not just mattresses on the floor—in a bedroom that was not mine. The swirls of cream and blue on the wallpaper made me think of the ocean, and the pictures on the walls were of people I didn’t know, except for the photo of Sailor tucked into the mirror over the dresser across from me.

The ocean sound stopped and I turned my head toward a door to my right. The sound of a shower door opened and then closed in the room beyond.

Oh my god, I had spent the night with Dylan. In his bed. Had we...?

I still wore his clothes, an old T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Memories of the day before came flooding back as I stared down at the unfamiliar clothes.

I wasn’t human. Not fully, anyway. My entire life had been a lie. Everything I thought I knew about the world was dead wrong. And, oh yeah, I had kissed Dylan.

That just about summed up all the catastrophes of my life.

The bathroom door opened and Dylan emerged, shirtless, with his long hair wet and sticking to his shoulders. He smiled when he saw me.

“You’re up,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward before I had a chance to react. His lips felt foreign on mine, though I remembered that this wasn’t the first time we had kissed. It wasn’t even the second. After we had reached his house to find his parents not home from work yet, we’d hidden out in his room and talked for a long time about what being finfolk meant. And then when I couldn’t stand talking or thinking anymore, we’d kissed and let our hands explore each other’s bodies. It had felt good and I had desperately needed a distraction.

But in the reality of the morning light, I only now realized what I’d done. We hadn’t had sex—at least, I was pretty sure I’d fallen into a restless sleep before it had gotten that far—but Dylan obviously thought last night meant something, judging from the way his fingers trailed gently up and down my arm.

But what had it meant to me? And what did it mean that it wasn’t Dylan’s body I had imagined touching last night?

I pushed these thoughts out of my head. I could only handle one thing at a time and right now, I needed to get out of Dylan’s house without his parents knowing that I’d spent the night in their son’s bed.

“What time is it?” I threw back the covers and pushed myself from the bed, knocking Dylan aside.

“Almost seven-thirty,” he said, nodding toward the alarm clock on his other nightstand, opposite from the side where I kept mine. “I was getting ready for school.”

School. I remembered suddenly that I was suspended. There would be no school for me today.

There would be no school for me ever again,
I reminded myself. I couldn’t go back there now that I knew what I really was.

I ran a hand over my hair, trying to smooth down the wild pieces.

“Or I could skip,” Dylan offered as he watched me search for my shoes. “I could stay with you and make sure you’re okay.”

“No,” I said in a sterner tone than I’d intended. “I mean, you have to go to school. You already missed yesterday, you need to go today to get caught up.”

He watched me shove my feet into my sneakers without lacing them. “Are you all right? I know it’s going to be hard for you, adjusting to being finfolk.”

I didn’t believe that he did know. He didn’t have the slightest idea how it felt to be lied to this much. To spend your life thinking you’re one person, and then suddenly wake up to find out that you’re someone completely different.

Dylan had had the luxury of growing up in a finfolk household, knowing exactly who he was from the moment he was born. He would never understand what it was like to be me.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Really. Go to school and don’t worry about me.”

He hesitated, but I needed to get him out of that room so I could sneak out. “I’m serious,” I added, pushing at his shoulder. “Just go.”

He stood, squeezing my hand for reassurance. “I’ll come see you as soon as I get out of class this afternoon.”

I forced a smile to make him feel better, then let out a slow, long breath when he finally walked out the door, closing it softly behind him. I could hear the rest of his family moving around down the hall. Escaping out the front door was not an option.

The window next to his bed slid open with a loud screech that I was certain his parents would hear. I paused, waiting with my heartbeat pounding in my ears, but no one came to see what was going on. I slid the window up a little more, only barely big enough for me to squeeze through.

Luckily, Dylan’s house had a wraparound deck that I could drop onto outside, otherwise it would have been a long fall since the house, like all the others around it, sat several feet off the ground on top of wooden pilings. I crawled toward the back of the house, away from the sound of his parents’ voices and then slipped down the steps.

I raced across the neighbor’s backyard toward Lake’s house, my bag bouncing against my back as I moved. Lake always left before the sun came up to start on whatever work he was doing that day, so I could go in long enough to get everything that I didn’t want to leave behind. Then I would be rid of him and Swans Landing forever.

My key slid quietly into the lock of the back door and I stepped into the house, letting my bag land at my feet. There was nothing downstairs that belonged to me, so I headed toward the ladder beyond the kitchen.

“We need to talk.”

I jumped at the sound of the voice behind me. Lake sat at his table, seashells spread out around him in a mess.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, gasping to catch my breath.

“It’s my house,” he pointed out as he put the pliers and shells he had been working with back on the table.

“You’re supposed to be at work.”

He raised one graying eyebrow. “Why? So you can sneak back in here after spending all night with a boy?”

My cheeks flamed hot at his implied accusation. “Nothing happened. I fell asleep, if you’re so concerned.”

“Right now, I think whether or not you slept with Dylan last night is the least of our concerns.” His barefeet shuffled across the sandy floor toward the couch and he sat down, his hands on his knees as he looked up at me. “Can we talk?”

My body buzzed with the need to get out of here, to get back to the water and just go. But this was the first time Lake had ever asked to actually talk to me and I couldn’t help my hesitation.

Delaying my leaving another half hour or so wouldn’t matter, I would still be far away from here by the end of the day. I could give him a chance to explain himself and try to make his apologies.

It wouldn’t matter in the end anyway.

I sat down in the chair across from him, my body rigid and my fists clenched tight. “Okay,” I said in an even voice. “Talk.”

“Dylan told me where he found you,” Lake said. Dylan must have called Lake after I’d fallen asleep because he hadn’t left my side since we’d emerged from the water. “So now you know.”

“I know that you have been lying to me,” I said. “Did Mom know what you were? What I was?”

Lake nodded slightly. “She knew before we were married. She didn’t believe me at first. It wasn’t until I showed her my finfolk form in the water that she accepted it.”

“So both of you knew, but neither of you thought I should know?” Anger made me shake a little, but I steeled my nerves and continued to stare back at him.

“We didn’t know for sure if you could change. Mixed-breeds are never certain. Sometimes they can change, sometimes they can’t. Your mom took you away without allowing me to introduce you to the water as a baby. I wanted to tell you when you came here, but I wasn’t sure how.”
He rubbed a hand over his face, pulling at his chin.
“Miss Gale agreed that I needed to take it slow, to let you gradually come into this knowledge of who you are. You’ve been raised to believe that people like us don’t exist. Would you have believed me if I had told you that first day you came to the island?”

He had a point, but it didn’t excuse him from not telling me before now that there was a possibility I could change.