Ethan
Irolled my shoulders and sighed into the fingers that clamped down onto them, digging into all my sore bits. “A little to the left.”
Teena sighed and did as I asked, moving her hands and massaging my muscles there. “The town’s talking about you.”
I snorted and leaned farther back against her. She had her legs on either side of my body, and I sat between them. Teena was the prettiest whore in Loutu, Florida, but if you asked her, she preferred to be called a working woman. As if there was any difference. She still serviced dick, either way.
“When are they not talking about me?” I asked with a shrug.
“They say you’ve gone mad.” Teena managed to get a particularly sore spot, and I cringed.
“Fuck, that hurt.” I shifted away from her, and she dropped her hands as I turned to look at her. “What do you think?”
“I think you pay, so I don’t care if you’re mad or stupid.” She brushed some of her brown hair off her face and sighed. Her English accent came off stronger right after we had sex, and I’d always been tempted to ask her if having orgasms were the reason. “Are you mad?”
“I’m angry, but not crazy.” I stood and searched for my sneakers, finding them over near the door. At least I already had my pants on. My shirt was on the bed so I grabbed that, too, and soon I was fully dressed.
“Only a mad person would believe in mermaids.” Teena spread her legs, seemingly uncaring that she was still completely naked. With a body like hers, it wasn’t hard to see why.
“Merpeople. There’s mermen too.” I winked at her as I pulled out my wallet, grabbing a wad of bills and throwing them on the dresser beside the bed. She knew I was good for it. I’d been seeing her two nights a week for months now.
“Oh, what about fairies? Do they exist too? Or giants. I’m sure they do, too, if merpeople do.” Teena rolled her eyes and stood, placing her hands on her hips. Her tits were nice and perky, one of the many reasons I loved spending the night with her, but her attitude needed work.
“Don’t get smart with me. I pay to fuck you, not get your opinion.” I glared at her. “If you don’t want to lose a customer, learn to keep your mouth shut, whore.”
She huffed. “You know I hate being called that.”
I held out my hands. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“I just got into town eight months ago. After this thing with your dad happened. Are you at least gonna tell me what this is about?” She strode forward and grabbed her robe, slipping it on before tying it up in the front. “Why are you so angry at the world, huh?”
“I’m not.” Fuck, I was. I sighed and ran a hand over my head. “What have you heard?”
“Some things, like your dad was as mad as you are. He believed in mermaids, too, and he spent the last years of his life searching for them. A storm finally got him in the end, at least that’s what the gossips say.”
I sighed, not exactly surprised by what the people in this town had to say about him. They’d never liked my father, from the moment he and Mom moved into town. Loutu was on the coast of Florida, a dream come true for anyone. Dad, a true fisher at heart, had loved the idea of coming here with my pregnant mom. They called it their home until Mom drowned. I didn’t know what he saw that day because my ten-year-old self hadn’t been there, but since then, he’d sworn mermaids existed. He made it his mission to find and hunt them down.
“Which gossip are we talking about? Mrs. Darla?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same.”
I headed toward the door of her hotel room, one she often rented for days where she sold herself.
“Are you going to tell me why you believe in them, then?” Teena grabbed her cigarette pack and knocked a cig out, popping it into her mouth.
“No,” I said simply before I exited and stalked down the narrow hallway lined with horrible shaggy gray carpet and light yellow walls. It reminded me of something out of the seventies: psychedelic, ugly, and the kind you’d see in a horror movie. But the room was cheap, and I supposed that’s what Teena cared about.
I nodded at the desk attendant on my way out the glass doors and breathed in the scent of fresh ocean air. While the hotel looked shit, it was in the perfect location, right by the sea. The waves rolled luxuriously on the beach today, a gentle crest of white caps, not like the night I’d been found on the sand by Amber, the baker’s daughter.
Shaking the thoughts of that night from my head, I walked along the street, ignoring the way people stared at me, as though I would pop a second head out any second. They were the kind of looks I was used to and had been since my father started talking about the existence of mermaids. I hadn’t believed him, either, and thought he was crazy, like the rest of Loutu, until that night he died. It was a blur of memories that mixed together to give me flashes, but the one prominent thing I remembered washim.A tail, vibrant red and scaled like a fish’s, and a man’s slim chest. The night our boat went down, he’d been there. He’d taken me to the beach for Amber to find.
When I spoke about what I’d remembered, I’d been tarred with the same brush as my father.
Mad.
Crazy.
Lunatic.
The damning descriptions of me where never-ending, and I finally understood my father and how he’d felt.
