The Merman Boxset: Gay Merman Romance

by Aratare, X.

  Now, sitting in the van, Gabriel tried to explain that “why” to Corey. “Love is nothing compared to longing.”

  “Okay, what the heck does that mean?”

  Gabriel took in a deep breath. “I write with longing and about longing. I think it reflects reality for a lot of people. None of us is going to find someone like the Mer in real life. A love so perfect like that is … rare.”

  An image of his mother and father looking at one another that last day on the boat juxtaposed with his mother’s determined expression as she swam out to her unconscious husband flashed in front of his mind’s eye.

  So rare it can’t survive.

  “So you’re finally admitting then that you do want a relationship? You’re even longing for one, but you’re not going to do anything to find it?” Corey’s forehead puckered as he obviously tried to reconcile the idea of Gabriel both wanting and not wanting a relationship at the same time.

  “Maybe I like longing for a relationship more than having an actual relationship,” Gabriel admitted. “It definitely works for writing.”

  “I would rather see you in a relationship than on the bestseller list.”

  “I’m not sure yet about either thing, Corey. It’s odd being known,” Gabriel admitted. “I never thought anyone would read that story, let alone want to talk to me about it.”

  “That’s why you are afraid of relationships! You don’t want anyone to know you, and that’s what a relationship is all about. But Cupid is planning a love trap for you this summer,” Corey said with a happy nod.

  “Love trap? Cupid? Oh boy, you’re really scaring me now!” Gabriel tipped back his head and laughed.

  Corey pulled at his beard. “Do not be afraid, young padawan. I shall save you from the forces of aloneness.”

  “Now I’m absolutely terrified.”

  Gabriel looked over into his best friend’s cherubic face and couldn’t help but smile. Corey had a good heart. He would never be able to understand Gabriel’s intense solitary nature. It had only been Corey’s gentle, but insistent desire to be Gabriel’s friend that had broken through the boy’s shell all those years ago. Only around family had Gabriel ever been fully at ease, and Corey had become family.

  But the idea of letting anyone else in? No thanks.

  “Looks like they started the party without us,” Corey suddenly said and pointed out the windshield toward a house.

  Gabriel could already see the glow of a huge bonfire out back on the beach. There were people everywhere. Red and white plastic cups already littered the street and drunken laughter spilled out from dozens of mouths.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find parking here,” Gabriel muttered.

  “Oh, ye of little faith! Watch the magic happen.”

  Corey drew the van over to the side of the road and parked in a space that didn’t look big enough to hold them, but somehow his best friend made it happen. He didn’t even tap the other cars he parked between. He turned off the van. The tick of the engine was muted by the sound of waves. Gabriel tensed. He realized that he was white-knuckling the strap of the seat belt.

  “As a man who hates the water, why did you choose a school in an ocean front city again?” Corey asked.

  “Just a masochist, I guess.”

  “I knew you had kinky tendencies, Gabe.” Again came the wagging finger.

  The truth was that he had thought about going to school in the middle of the country, far away from large bodies of water, but the idea had terrified him even more than living next to the sea ever could. Even though he kept mostly to campus and away from the water, he still knew it was there and he needed that, despite the fact he couldn’t explain it to himself or anyone else. Going to this party right on the beach would be the closest he had come to the ocean since going to school. But both he and Corey had thought it would be good preparation for going to Ocean Side.

  Corey looked down at the seat belt that Gabriel was holding in a death grip. “You have to undo that if you’re going to get out of the car.”

  “Yeah, right, completely.”

  Gabriel unhooked his seat belt with shaking hands and opened the van’s door. He tried to breathe. The blaring rock music didn’t block out the sound of the waves, nor was it dimmed by the frantic babble of voices coming from the partygoers. The scent of the briney sea flowed over him, borne by the cool breeze that came off of the water. Gabriel closed his eyes as he set his feet on the asphalt and shut the van door behind him with a solid thunk.

  The rush and shush of the water and the sound of his own pounding heart seemed to merge for a moment. The sensation he had felt the day of the accident, like there was a string attaching him to something out in the depths, suddenly returned. There was someplace he was supposed to go. Something amazing would be there. Gabriel’s eyelids flew open. Sticky sweat coated his face. He viciously pushed the feeling away.

  The storm would have found us wherever we headed. But if we had done what Mom had wanted, stayed closer to shore, they would have survived. But I insisted. And they ignored their instincts, took us out into deeper water, to please me. My fault. All my fault.

  Corey was beside him. “You okay, Gabe?”

  Gabriel gave him a shaky smile. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Just lead the way. This is your friend Jenny’s party after all.”

  Corey grinned and rocked back and forth on his sandaled heels. “She’s a real sweetheart.”

  “They always are, Corey. Your friends—excluding me—are like you. Bright. Sunny. Cheerful and generous.”

  Corey clapped him on the back. “So are you. Come on, let’s go in. I’m dying for a beer. And just remember that you don’t have to go onto the beach if you don’t want to. We can stay inside the very land-bound house.”

  Gabriel nodded. He knew that he didn’t have to go out on the beach. The thing Corey didn’t understand was that he wanted to. He loved the ocean. Loved it still, despite what it had taken from him. He just couldn’t stand the thought of actually going in it or looking at it or even hearing it.

  They walked up the front path to a brightly lit porch. People were sprawled on the porch swing with beers in their hands. Though it was still cool, most of the women wore cut off shorts and tanks. The guys were in board shorts and graphic T-shirts. There was that familiar air of wildness tinged with relief that always came when finals were over for the year. A blonde with a striped red shirt pushed a cup of warm beer into Gabriel’s right hand as soon as they stepped up onto the porch. Immediately, half a dozen people crowded around Corey. Gabriel stood back and watched. Wherever he went Corey was mobbed, and Gabriel just tried not to get in the way.

  Finally, a young woman with frizzy black hair, plump hips and a wasp-like waist emerged from the house. Her face lit up as soon as she caught sight of Corey. She rushed to him. “Corey!”

  “Jenny!” Corey enveloped her in a hug. She gave as good as she got. “Gabe, get over here. I want to introduce you to Jenny.”

  Gabriel came nearer, extending his hand to Jenny, but she engulfed him in a bear hug just the same as she had given Corey.

  “You’re just like how Corey described you. But different than how I imagined you’d be even after reading Swimmers in the Deep,” she said after she pulled back to study his face.

  “I’m afraid of what you imagined.” Gabriel gave his best friend a pointed look that said he was going to make Corey pay for this later.

  She cocked her head to the side, studying him through her chunky black-rimmed glasses with a critical eye. “Actually, you’re more handsome than I thought, and I was expecting really handsome.”

  Gabriel flushed and scrubbed at the back of his head. “Oh, thank you.”

  “And you’re just as shy and introverted as Corey warned me about, too.” She grasped Gabriel’s hands and started pulling him into the house. “But he also said that you warm up once you get to know people. So we’re going to have you get to know some people.”

  Gabriel cast a horrified look
at Corey, who was standing there with his hands laced over his large belly, smiling Buddha-like.

  “What people?” Gabriel asked.

  “People who are dying to meet you! They read Swimmers as well.” She dragged him into a side room where three people were already seated, laughing and talking. Jenny pushed him into a deep recliner chair where everyone could see him. “Hey everybody, this is Gabriel Braven. Gabriel, this is everyone.”

  All eyes turned towards him, and he knew he was flushing more hotly than before. He wanted to hide in the leathery folds of the recliner, but there was nowhere to go. Corey sauntered into the room and splayed himself out on a loveseat.

  A woman with mousy brown hair and glasses that kept sliding down to the tip of her nose asked, “So where did you get the idea for Swimmers?”

  “That’s Karen, by the way,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah, sorry about that! Should have introduced myself. But I’ve been dying to ask you about the story since I read it. We all have!” Karen said brightly.

  There were a series of nods around the room. Gabriel desperately wanted to turtle in on himself, but he was trapped. “Uh, okay. Well, I got the idea for the Mers from a story my mother told me. It’s sort of an urban legend where my grandmother lives.”

  “So they have a local merman story in that town? I’m Joe, by the way.” Joe was a young man with bushy black eyebrows. He wore a pair of worn brown corduroys yet managed to make them look stylish.

  “Yeah, that’s where she heard it,” Gabriel said.

  “That’s really cool. And my name’s Sarah. Oh, and I’ve been dying to know if the love story is based on anything?” Sarah asked. She had ginger-colored hair and giggled as she looked at Gabriel shyly.

  Another flare of color heated Gabriel’s cheeks. “No, no, just my imagination.”

  “The ending was so nihilistic though,” Joe said with a frown. “I mean he goes and kills himself over what could have been an optical illusion!”

  “Only if you read it that way!” Karen objected, while Sarah bobbed her head in agreement. “You could also read it as real. That the merman was real, and that he would come and save the main character.”

  “There’s no way to read the story as real,” Joe scoffed. “It was like a whole metaphor for love: it’s illusory and will kill you in the end.”

  “We have the author right here. So why don’t we ask him?” Karen was the one who spoke, but all four sets of eyes turned to Gabriel.

  “Authors don’t get to say what the story is about. They might intend something, but the subconscious offers a lot more for the reader to see and interpret,” Joe said, though he, too, was looking at Gabriel with surprising intensity.

  “Well, I …” Gabriel swallowed. Words seemed beyond him at that moment. The girls were more accurate than Joe was on the surface, but after what he had said to Corey in the car, maybe Joe was correct about the ultimate meaning of the story. He didn’t know what to say.

  Corey saved him from answering by saying, “Some of it’s real, Joe. Gabe, tell them the latest news about the dig and the Mers.”

  Gabriel gave his best friend a grateful look. “Uh, yeah. This past fall, my grandmother moved back to Ocean Side, the town where the legend comes from.”

  “She’s already a councilwoman there! Grandma G gets stuff done,” Corey said proudly.

  “Yeah, she was part of approving and inspecting a local development on this plot of land right by the beach called the Morse Place,” Gabriel explained.

  Even now he could clearly recall his grandmother’s excited voice over the phone as she had told him about the discovery of an ancient Native American city. The city was like nothing ever found in North America before.

  “Gabriel, it’s the most amazing thing,” Grace had begun. “I was reluctant to grant the zoning change for the Morse Place to be developed into multi-family homes and condos. There’s always been something special about it, not the least of it being that we found you there after—after the accident, but—but I knew it would be good for the town. So I agreed to the development. I went to see how the construction was going. They were just beginning to dig the basements and level the earth, I think. And I just … felt it.”

  Gabriel’s chest had clenched when she mentioned the Morse Place. That was where he had washed up. He could remember all too clearly the expanse of beach where he had, at first thought, he had been placed. But monsters didn’t exist. They certainly didn’t carry you in their tentacles through the deep. That had been some terrible dream or hallucination he had had after the trauma of losing his parents and nearly drowning.

  “What did you feel, Grandma?” he had asked her, pushing his own feelings of unease to the side.

  “A sense of anticipation. As if I knew they would discover something and I was waiting for them to do it,” she had answered, and his sense of unease had grown. He knew all about having feelings like hers. It never led to anything good. “I watched as they started to dig up the earth and then … it was so odd, but before I actually even saw the top of the building, I screamed for them to stop. I practically jumped in front of the machinery!”

  What they had discovered was the top of a massive stone temple, buried seemingly purposefully beneath the dirt and sand. And that wasn’t all they had found. There was a whole city of buildings that would have looked more at home in ancient Egypt or the Yucatan Peninsula. But beyond the shock of finding such extraordinary architecture where it had never even been suspected to exist, was discovering the unmistakable carvings that depicted two different peoples meeting. One group coming from the land and one from the sea. The people from the sea were humanoid, but the carvings showed that they lived underneath the waves. Mers.

  “Obviously, they weren’t really mermen and mermaids. More like a seafaring tribe, though it definitely explains where some of the old legends came from,” Gabriel finished telling them an abridged version of what his grandmother had told him.

  “But the kinds of structures you’re talking about aren’t found in North America,” Karen said.

  “You’re correct about that. I guess it’s rewriting the history books. Professor Johnson Tims of Miskatonic University is heading up the dig,” Gabriel said.

  “Miskatonic? Then it must be the dig my friend Greta is on!” Sarah exclaimed. “She’s been so closed-mouthed about it that I didn’t realize it was the same one you were describing.”

  “When are the people from Miskatonic anything but closed-mouthed?” Jenny asked with a roll of her eyes.

  “I’m surprised Greta’s still friends with you, Sarah,” Karen said. “From what I hear, once a person goes to Miskatonic, they don’t have time for anything but their studies and the other students there.”

  “And what’s the deal with that?” Joe jumped in. “They act as if what they’re doing is earth-shattering, yet no one there publishes. There are never any big stories out of the university. They’re all poseurs, I think.”

  “You sound jealous,” Jenny said with a wry smile.

  “Every student who goes there gets a full ride. The place is bursting with money. And after they finish school, the students either continue on at the university or are placed in high-paying jobs. Every single student.” Joe shook his head. “Their endowment is more than Harvard and Princeton’s combined. It’s not fair.”

  “Considering I can already feel the weight of my student loans like a physical bag of bricks on my back, I think I’m jealous, too,” Jenny remarked.

  Everyone nodded glumly.

  “We’re going to be in Ocean Side, Sarah, so maybe we’ll run into Greta,” Corey said.

  “I’ll let her know you’ll be there. We do text and stuff,” Sarah said with a warm smile.

  The conversation then veered off onto other topics, including the professors they loved or hated and what everyone was doing over the summer. Gabriel found himself only half listening. The shush and crash of the waves was calling to him. He found himself standing before he realized h
e was moving at all.

  “I’m just going to stretch my legs. Be back in a bit,” he explained when Corey looked at him curiously.

  He had to go out onto the beach. He couldn’t stand being away from it any longer. Besides, this is supposed to be good practice for when we’re at the cottage tomorrow with water on three sides of us.

  Gabriel threaded his way through the countless people in the house, narrowly avoiding getting beer spilled on him three times. He let out a huge sigh of relief as he finally escaped the crowd and ducked out onto the back deck. From the deck it was only a few steps down to the beach. The tugging feeling in his chest increased. It pulled him down the steps until he suddenly realized, with a jolt, that he had one foot on the sand. He let out a shuddering breath.

  I can do this. No big deal. I can do it.

  Gabriel kicked off his shoes and squished his bare toes into the cool, slightly damp sand. He let out another breath that ended in a soft laugh. He was okay. So far, anyways. He lifted his head. The water was about fifty feet away.

  I should go closer. I CAN get closer.

  He walked past the big bonfire and kept walking until the light from the house receded. The moon was only a sliver above him, but the stars looked like millions of pinpricks in a black sheet of paper. He stopped walking when he was a few feet from the foaming surf. He trembled with fear, or maybe it was excitement, as he stared at the black water.

  It feels like home. He wasn’t sure what he meant by that, except that when he looked out at the moon-tinged waves his parents’ faces flashed before his mind’s eye. Their bodies had never been found. In a way, the entire ocean was their grave and the sky their headstone. I miss you guys. So much.

  He took in deep draughts of the salt-scented air. His breathing eased and he felt like he was finally able to take in a full lungful of air for the first time in months. His run times had been getting worse no matter how much or little he trained. His normally golden tan had seemed to be fading away, and even his hair had lost some of its luster.