“How could you help us?” he asked. “We don’t need any help.”
“You’re wrong there,” she replied. “Trin said you would never ask the human women to leave the Lycaon to come here to help rebuild your population. A human woman who had been here and went back could explain to them what it’s really like. Some of them might decide to give it a try, once they heard firsthand what it’s like.”
He cocked his head. “Interesting idea.”
“The other factions are suspicious of you because they know nothing about you,” she went on. “No one has ever come back from the Aqinas. Everything they know about you comes from the brief times you’ve stuck your noses out of the water to intervene in their affairs. It makes sense they would impute the worst motives to your actions.”
He listened with sparkling eyes.
“Someone who knew you and could describe in detail how you live and how you think could dispel those myths and prejudices,” she told him. “Someone like that could get the human women to come and live with you. I knew a lot less when I made the decision to go live with the Avitras. If someone told me what I know now, I might have come here instead.”
“Would you, really?” he asked. “Are you sure about that?”
She dropped her eyes to the ground. “Well, maybe not. But it certainly would have helped. Besides, Sasha is here. When they hear there’s another human woman here mated to one of your men, they’ll realize it can’t be all bad. No one knows Sasha is here. They probably think it isn’t possible for a human to live here. They think you’re slugs living in the mud.”
He burst out laughing.
She smiled. “It isn’t so funny when you think the Aqinas could also collapse from some misguided sense of social honor that stops you from sending word to the Lycaon that you’re in just as desperate need of females as the other factions. You should be grateful someone is willing to carry that message for you.”
His laughter died, but his eyes twinkled. He leaned forward and took her hand. “You’re right, and I am grateful. I’m glad to hear the only reasons you could have for leaving are concern for your family and concern for the Aqinas. I’m glad you don’t hate it here enough to want to leave.”
“I don’t hate it here,” she replied. “I love it here.”
His eyes widened. “You do?”
“Sure,” she replied. “What’s not to love? The whole place is geared to be perfect in every way. It’s the most ideal, most beautiful place I can possibly imagine.” She chuckled. “I guess that’s the whole point.”
“Then why don’t you stay?” he asked.
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to stay or not,” she replied. “But whatever I decide to do, it will be permanent. If I leave, I can’t come back, and if I stay, I can’t leave.”
“You can always leave,” he told her. “You’re not a prisoner here.”
She shook her head. “If I decide to stay, I will stay. There’s no going back. I couldn’t live here with the question always nagging at my mind if I should be here or not. I have to decide and stand by my decision. That’s the only way I could live with it.”
He gazed into her eyes. Then he laughed again. “Now I understand why the water brought me to meet you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“What you just said about making a decision and standing by it,” he replied. “That’s why.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Believe me, whatever decision you make, I’m sure it will be the right one.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she replied. “I’m not so sure.”
His laughter died and he became serious again. “You’re a strong woman who knows your own mind. You might not be sure what you will do yet, but your way will become clear to you soon enough. When you make your decision, you will go through with it and never look back.”
She stared at him. “Is that all you have to say?”
“What more do you want me to say?” he asked.
“Aren’t you going to beg me to stay?” she asked.
“Beg?” he repeated. “No, I won’t beg you to do anything.”
She blushed. “I don’t mean beg. I wouldn’t want you to beg, either. I only meant aren’t you going to say you don’t want me to leave?”
“You should know by now I don’t want you to leave,” he replied. “None of us does. We need you too much.”
She smacked her lips. “I know that. I’m not talking about the Aqinas. I’m talking about you.”
He studied her with his head on one side. “What about me?”
She yanked her hand out of his grip. “You’re impossible. Go away.”
But he didn’t go away. He sat there and scrutinized her with his inscrutable expression. The longer he sat there, the more he annoyed her. This was the first time someone hadn’t immediately withdrawn from her presence at her first thought that she might prefer to be alone.
She glared at him. “What are you still doing here?”
He smiled. Then he sighed. “All right. You win.”
“Did we have a contest?” she shot back.
He leaned forward and took her hand, and this time, it wasn’t like all the times Jen and Trin and Sasha took her hand. His was the first human touch she’d felt since she gave her sister Anna a hug the night before she fell out of that tree. Of all the people who took her by the hand in Aqinas territory since then, he was the first to really touch her.
His expression softened. He wasn’t playing anymore. “Don’t leave, Frieda. Stay here.”
She caught her breath so she could barely answer. “What are you saying?”
“The water knows what we want and what we need even better than we do,” he replied. “You said you were thinking about meeting Aqinas, and it brought me to you. You said you were thinking about children, and it brought me to you a second time in answer to your questions. Don’t you see? We belong together.”
She considered pulling her hand away, but she couldn’t summon the strength to do it. “You’re crazy.”
“Am I?” he asked. “Why do you think the water brought my mother and sister and relatives to you, and brought you to our family home? You’re part of our family. You’re my family.”
She shut her eyes against the inevitable, but a flood of images tumbled through her mind where the sight of his face used to be. The whole sequence of events, from meeting him the first time, to meeting his family and going with them to their house, her conversations with Jen and Trin—and now.
If she believed all this hocus-pocus about the water creating a fantasy environment where everything and everyone appeared in their most idealized form, she had no choice but to believe this, too. It would bring her the man she most perfectly matched. If she thought about children, it would bring her the man most suited to give them to her and to accompany her into a future where they shared family, community, home, and country.
Ever since she landed on Angondra, her destiny, along with all the other human women with her, was bound inextricably to the men with whom they mated. None of those women found a stable home for themselves until they met the man with whom they would share their lives. The men bound them to Angondra, to their people, to their homes, to their futures.
Why would it be any different with her? She didn’t find any man that inspired her in Lycaon territory, and she wasn’t in Avitras territory long enough to form more than a passing acquaintance with anyone. If she wandered through the Aqinas world without connecting with anybody, she would certainly leave and go back to the land in search of a stronger connection. The water matched her with a man she could connect with. If she couldn’t connect with Deek, she couldn’t connect with anybody on this planet or anywhere else.
Where would she go if she did leave? She wouldn’t try again to find a faction she could call her own. If she didn’t stay with the Aqinas, no other f
action would ever be her own. How could a simple touch of his hand make her so certain of that? But it did. She would search for her sisters. She would visit her cousin Aimee in the Lycaon village, and she would tell the Angondran people what she knew about the Aqinas. But she wouldn’t make any further effort to find a mate. That search ended here, with Deek.
Her vision cleared, and she started in surprise when she saw the glazed look in his eyes. He gazed at some point over her shoulder. He was seeing the same vision in the water. All of a sudden, his eyes snapped to her face, and the sparkle returned to them.
He squeezed her hand. “You won’t leave. You’ll stay.”
“What makes you so certain?” She didn’t even have to ask.
He gazed at her for a moment. Then he bent over and kissed her. He kept his lips firm and closed, with no soft, mushy open-mouthed passion. He planted a quick kiss on her lips and pulled back to look her in the eye again.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“I just thought I’d get it over with,” he told her. “No sense prolonging the inevitable.”
She drew farther back. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
He held onto her hand. “Why not? We both know we belong together. You won’t leave. You’ll stay here, and we’ll be mated, and we’ll be one family.”
“What about my sisters?” she asked. “I already have a family on land. You don’t really expect me to turn my back on them, do you?”
He paused. “I don’t expect you to turn your back on them.”
“I’ll have to find them some day,” she told him, “and the only way to do that is to leave the water.”
He gazed across the meadow toward the wall and nodded. “You’re right.”
“How can I stay here, then?” She still couldn’t form the words to say she would stay with him. That would be giving away too much.
He faced her, and when he pressed her hand this time, the warm reassurance of his touch drew her even deeper into the protective comfort surrounding her on all sides. That comfort and protection came from the water. Its silky currents caressed every inch of her skin and even her heart and mind and spirit.
His hand cradling hers represented better than anything else the seamless harmony of water bathing all these people and connecting them to one another through their very cells. It left no gap between them the way air did on land. They shared a collective consciousness through the water with no friction, no isolation, no discord.
She became aware of his lips against hers, but this time, she could detect no line of demarcation between his skin and hers. She had no skin, and neither did he. They were one organism in the water. She understood all his thoughts and feelings and desires, and she offered no resistance to him knowing hers.
She stared straight ahead into the vast limitless universe of the ocean. Only through her conscious vision did she comprehend she stared at that universe through Deek’s eyes.
Chapter 5
Deek and Frieda strolled hand in hand through the meadow. The sun warmed her face, and the light streaming down through the brilliant flickering waves above shone brighter than she remembered. The undulating seaweed glowed greener, with no foreboding shadows in the forest depths.
From a distance, she spotted Sasha cross between the trees on her way to her own house. Frieda hesitated. She’d never seen another person in her environment away from the wall, but not even that could change the undeniable rightness of the situation.
A little way further, Deek tugged her hand. “This way.”
Frieda stopped and nodded toward the forest. “I’m going this way.”
“The village is over here,” he told her.
“I’m not going to the village,” she replied.
He frowned. “Where are you going, then?”
“To my house,” she replied.
A black cloud crossed his brow. “But you’re coming home with me. I thought we understood each other about that.”
“Not yet,” she replied. “I’m not ready to move into your family home in the village just yet. I want to go home to my own house now.”
He stiffened. “We shared a vision of our future, Frieda. You saw the same thing I did. We’re family now. Your place is in our home. You know that. You probably don’t even have a house of your own anymore.”
The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and her hand went cold in his. She pulled a fraction of an inch away from him. “I still have a house. The water will keep it there as long as I go looking for it. I don’t want to go home to your family just yet. I’m going to my house, and that’s the way it is.”
“Why?” he asked. “What happened between now and what we shared back there?”
“Nothing happened,” she replied. “I saw the same vision you did, but I’m not ready to give up my whole life and everything I left behind to ride off into the sunset with you. I haven’t let go of the family I still have on land. I’m not satisfied in my own mind with the idea of staying here for the rest of my life, no matter how great it is with you.”
His eyes flashed fire, but she confronted him without backing down. If he couldn’t handle this, he wasn’t the right man for her after all. If he expected her to fall into his arms in a passionate swoon and forget everything else she was and dreamed and felt, he hadn’t shared her vision at all. He better understand her right from the start if they hoped to have any future together.
Frieda sighed. “Something has got to shift before I’ll be comfortable enough to stay here. I can’t pretend I don’t have family back on land who think I’m dead. I can’t live in peace down here while other people are suffering without trying something to change it. You can’t expect me to wipe all that part of my life out of existence just for the privilege of mating with you.”
“I don’t expect you to,” he replied. “But we could confront all those problems much better as a family. You don’t have to go off alone by yourself.”
“Yes, I do,” she argued. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. This is my life and my future we’re talking about. I have to go to my own house—alone—before I can come to yours.”
He thought it over. “Are you saying you might still decide to leave? Would you still walk away from everything we just shared, our whole vision, for some thin promise of a life on land? How could you do that?”
“That’s all it was—a vision,” she told him. “We shared a vision of what our lives could be like if I stayed and mated with you. That doesn’t mean that future is written in stone for us.”
“I never said it did, but....” he began.
She cut him off with a shake of her head. “If we’re going to have any future together at all—and I’m not making any promises that we will—I have to spend this time by myself right now. I have to understand this in my own mind, with no help from you, and I have to come to the certainty of my decision on my own. You can’t make that decision for me.”
“I thought we understood each other,” he told her. “I thought we cared for each other enough to join our lives together into one.”
“We can care for each other without merging into one person,” she replied. “You’ve been under the water your entire life. You’ve never been separated from your own people by more than a film of fluid. I’ve been here a couple of days. I can’t just cross that divide in a heartbeat, just because we shared a vision.”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re wrong. I do have to do it,” she replied. “I have to do it more than anything. I’m sorry you don’t understand, but I have to do it even if it means we can’t be together.”
He turned and started walking away, back toward the wall. “I understand you have to do it to satisfy your own idea of being here, and that’s all that matters. Do what you have to do.”
A shadow of doubt crept into her heart as she watched him dwindle into the distance. Had she made a colossal mistake by letting him walk awa
y? Why had she turned her back on everything he could offer her? Would going with him to his family home really be so bad?
Then she shook herself and turned back toward the forest. No, she couldn’t go weak in the knees now, just because he kissed her. That vision they shared of a common future, with children and family all around them, was nice enough, but it couldn’t take the place of cold hard reality. She had her own life and her own journey, and no man, no matter how considerate, could derail her from that. Deek walking away the way he did and leaving her to follow her inclinations on her own proved he really was the man she thought he was. He could handle letting her go her own way for now on the promise that she would come back to him when she was ready.
Before she got to her own house, though, Sasha came toward her out of the woods. “What was that all about? Did I just see you two holding hands?”
Frieda’s cheeks burned. “I may have just shot myself in the foot.”
“What did you do?” Sasha asked.
“I told him I wanted to go home alone to my own house instead of his family home in the village.” Frieda glanced over Sasha’s shoulder at the house tucked between the trees. “Now I understand why you live here with Fritz instead of the village.”
“The only reason,” Sasha replied, “is because I don’t want every other Aqinas seeing us come and go, listening to us in the middle of the night, and watching me change my clothes every morning. I guess I’m not as Aqinas as they think I am, because they think nothing of sharing their personal space with dozens of other people. They don’t even notice it.”
Frieda blinked. “I never thought of that. How do all those people live together in the same house?”
Sasha chuckled. “I spent one night there with Fritz. Never again. You couldn’t even whisper without the whole clan knowing what you were talking about. And the beds are right next to each other. The Aqinas have no concept of marital privacy. Even the children think nothing of it.”
Frieda stared at her. Then she burst into nervous laughter. “I guess there’s more to living underwater with other people than I realized.”
Angondra Holiday Special Page 52
