Tidal Whispers (6 page)

Her heartbeat grew faster until it pounded against her chest as if communing with another that beat as hard and as fast. A feathery lightness filled her head, and all thoughts of the world vanished leaving but one—Otis. Even the toes in her shoes curled before straightening enough to scoot her mere millimeters closer to the man in her arms. Every part of her sought to cling to him. Desire coiled and pooled its heat in her belly.

He didn’t seem to mind. A groan preceded a repositioning of heads. A sigh accompanied the dance steps his hands traced on her back. If a woman could melt, Circe had done so because none of her bones wanted to hold her up. Otis’s hands roamed over her body, cupping her butt, threading into her hair, squeezing her waist and ribs.

Without warning, he pushed her away. Her face buckled with disappointment at the abrupt end until she saw a strange woman poking her finger into Otis’s shoulder.

“You’re in public, you know, Otis? You should be ashamed of yourself! Your mother raised you better than this!” She clucked her tongue after delivering her words and stomped off down the sidewalk.

Otis had stared at the woman’s mouth, his brows drooping at the outer edges as she’d harangued him. After she left, he turned to Circe. “Sorry,” he mouthed. Though he loosened his hold, he didn’t let her go.

Circe shook her head and pulled away, signing, “That’s okay. My fault, too. I heard her, but I didn’t realize she was talking to us. Is kissing not allowed here?”

Otis chuckled and signed, “That was one of my mother’s friends. She’s always been a little on the preachy side …” He grimaced. “The first kiss was permissible, but after that, I’m afraid I got carried away. My fault, not yours, and though not illegal, I suspect we were a bit … too … intense. ” His darkened eyes moved in a lively dance as they scanned her face searching for approval? Forgiveness?

“That was intense!” She smiled. “I like intense.” His lips entranced her, distracted her from his signing.

“So dinner? I’ll make anything you like. I’m quite a good cook. Or, if you prefer, we can go to a restaurant. I guarantee you the food won’t be as good, but you might feel more comfortable? Your choice.” Otis angled his head, his features arranged into a question mark that had moved way past yes or no, and sought only to discover where.

The rational voice in her head screamed warnings, but her heart won the battle. Circe signed, “Show me your home, please, and your cooking skills. I’m sure I will be very impressed.”

Chapter 3

Otis hoped Circe wouldn’t be disappointed by his tiny little apartment but would accept his explanation that, because he spent so little time on dry land, anything luxurious would be a waste.

Circe’s gaze swept around the main room of his apartment, taking in his nautical décor, the netting on the walls, the seaside paintings, and seashells. Her mouth dropped open as she spun to all points on the compass.

“Your home is so cozy!” she signed, taking a seat on his beat-up leather sofa.

“Thank you.” With a thumb over his shoulder, he turned and walked into the kitchen. He could still see her over the breakfast bar, and she him, as he signed.

She jumped up from the sofa and moved toward the kitchen. He liked her near. To his surprise, she kept walking, past the kitchen, down the hall. She probably had to use the bathroom. In his refrigerator, he found two fresh salmon fillets—anything but halibut. His practiced fingers, taste buds, and nose quickly assembled the ingredients he needed to create a delicious meal for two.

When Circe didn’t return after he’d popped the fillets into the oven to broil, he followed in her tracks. She wasn’t in the bathroom, but in his bedroom, where she stood looking at his family pictures. In her hand she held one of his favorites—his father, mother, sister and him, taken a scant two weeks before his father died of a massive heart attack. The old pangs stretched and yawned as if to remind him that, though they dozed, they hadn’t gone completely dormant.

She lifted her head, and their gazes connected.

“My family,” he signed.

She picked up the next photo and tapped on the face of the woman, her brows arched.

“My mother when she was twenty-five.”

“You look like her,” Circe signed. She picked up another photo, of his high school basketball team, and sat on the edge of his bed. When she lifted her face to his, she smiled. “I see you. You’re the tallest one in the back of the group, but you’re much younger.”

He was no longer paying attention to her signs. The sight of her on his bed had hijacked his thoughts to activities other than basketball.

Circe flitted between innocent and seductive with remarkable fluidity. The kiss they shared had shattered his peace of mind, but her comments afterward had hinted of virginal naiveté. She was a mystery he needed to solve.

Her long hair trailed from its bun on one side, ebony tendrils spilling over her shoulders and down her back. He had done that to her hair when they kissed, and he longed to release the remainder and bury his face in her silky tresses. Fingers twitched to touch, but if he did, he would never leave the bedroom except to chase after her to apologize for misinterpreting, or to refuel for round two. Besides, the fish would burn, and he would be no good anyway without something more substantial than coffee and fried arcade food in his tank.

Her eyes reflected the glow of the hall lighting, nearly luminescent, like a cat’s. He caught his breath and wondered if it was his imagination or just a trick of the light. A tilt of his head to check from a different angle yielded the same oddity.

“What’s the matter?” she signed, her eyes narrowed, the glow gone.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just in this light, your eyes are like a cat’s.”

Circe’s smile fell. She jumped up from the bed and pushed past him. At his front door, she signed, “I have to go. I never should have come here.” She ran down the sidewalk toward the road back to town.

“Circe!” He called out to her several more times, but she kept running. She must have heard him because her shoulders flinched the first time he shouted out her name. She was scared; he had frightened her, but if she got away, he worried he might never see her again. He had no idea where she stayed while in Homer, and she had refused to give him her last name, so he followed her, allowing her space.

Otis kept his distance until she cast a glance over her shoulder and finally slowed. He ducked inside a store doorway to remain hidden.

Her path took her toward the water. She scrambled down the rocky slope without any trace of fear but kept her head fixed forward, her shoulders back. The dark mane of her hair fluttered and bounced against her back as more escaped her bun. Where the rocks met the water, she stopped for a few seconds and turned in a slow three-sixty.

Otis ducked down behind a truck parked at the top of the boat ramp and peeked out. There in the twilight, Circe stood, naked. Her hastily shed clothes lay in a heap on the ground at her feet. The warring illuminations of moon and sun cast her figure in shadows, but not enough to cloak the jaw-dropping splendor of her body—lissome, curvaceous, and covered by creamy alabaster skin.

What the hell is she doing?
She would die of hypothermia within minutes, and she didn’t seem the type to take crazy ice water dips, certainly not while naked. He had to stop her. Before he had taken a single step, she launched herself in a shallow dive into the water and disappeared. She surfaced at least fifty feet out, leaving him to scratch his head and wonder how she swam so fast. The water swallowed her up a second time only to release her like a pale cork on its troubled surface, very much alive. He could barely make out her milky skin as she briefly swam on top of the water before diving under again. If she re-surfaced, he missed her, or she was too far out.

For fifteen long minutes, he waited for her to swim back, but she never did. Something was very wrong—the skinny-dipping, the frigid waters, the superhuman swimming ability—and out of kilter with normal human abilities. He emerged from his hiding spot and walked to her clothes. Her fresh sweet scent remained, but all traces of her body heat had long dissipated into the chilly night air. Should he contact the authorities? Where had she gone? Was she suicidal? Such a drastic act didn’t seem consistent with the smiling, laughing woman he knew. To swim in after her would be madness.

In the pit of his stomach, a fear festered that he might never see her again. He turned and jogged home, intending to call the authorities.

Otis had barely seated himself at his teletype phone when his lights flickered on and off, indicating a visitor.

Circe stood at his door, fully clothed, her long hair dripping wet. A couple of droplets splattered against his doormat.

“I have to talk to you,” she signed, flinging water all around her. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, like an animal’s.

He glanced down at his watch. “I followed you. I saw you take off all your clothes and dive into the ocean. Have you been in the water all this time?” She’d have been in the Pacific Ocean for nearly a half an hour—impossible without a wet suit.

Circe’s beautiful features drooped as she nodded. She leaned away and drew her hair into her hands. With a series of shakes, seawater fell in sheets as if an invisible hand squeezed a saturated sponge. “May I come in?”

Otis reached out to snag a lock of her hair. Dry. Her hair was perfectly dry. Hip length hair, and she had shed all the dampness like water off a duck’s back. Dark locks cascaded in ripples and curls over her shoulders and down her back.
Lovely
.
Enchantment personified
. Too bad she had all her clothes on, or he might have mistaken her for a brunette cousin to Botticelli’s Venus, arising from the ocean like a sea nymph.

“Who are you?” He stepped closer and drew more of her hair away from her, raising the strands to his nose and lips. Only the slightest hint of the sea infused his nostrils. How were his senses so easily duped by the impossible?

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her gaze landed on his shoulder, the door beside him, the ground at their feet—everywhere but on his face.

Bending his knees, he dropped his face to an even plane with hers. Only then did their gazes lock. He tugged her inside his apartment and shut the door.

“You’ll hate me when I tell you, but there is no other way. I thought I could do this, but I can’t. Not anymore.” Circe squeezed her eyes shut.

Otis took her by the shoulders and gave her a series of small shakes until she opened her eyes again. He shook his head with deliberate purpose and uttered one simple word. “No.” His gaze held hers prisoner, and again he voiced, “No! Never hate you. Can’t leave me.”

Circe raised her hands and signed with mournful fluidity. “My problems would be nothing compared to yours, your family’s. I can’t risk your life in the few days I have remaining. I have to make sure you understand why … why you have to stay away from me. Why I have to say goodbye because I’ll never see you again after the new moon.”

A tear fell from each of her eyes and rolled down her flushed cheeks, only to be swept away by his kisses. The saline hit his tongue, and he tasted her anguish. What confession did she fear might alter his love for her and drive her away from him? For he did love her, he realized with crystal clarity, and raised his hands to tell her.

Circe caught them and shook her head. When she released them, she pointed to his couch and signed, “Sit, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Chapter 4

Night would bring the new moon.

Circe hadn’t seen Otis in three days. With only a few more hours to go, Circe didn’t regret her decision. Seeing those pictures in Otis’s bedroom—the faces of those who loved him, who he loved, knowing the devastation his death would cause them—she would not be the cause of such pain.

She wasn’t sure he believed her at first when she’d told him all about herself, but when they parted with no plans to meet the next day, she knew he did. Slipping away, so he couldn’t find her before he left port, had been for the best, she told herself repeatedly. A vast emptiness pervaded her heart as if she’d snagged a vital part of her being on Otis and had had to amputate to escape.

Seeing Otis again wouldn’t even be within her power once Poseidon punished her. Tales of forced servitude to the capricious Olympians had been shared amongst the naiads in hushed whispers all her life. She would not only lose her voice and her livelihood, but she would probably be sent away too, to the Greek Isles, most likely. Assuming Poseidon allowed her to remain in the sea, the water would be warmer and the climate sunnier, but Alaska would always be her true home.

She took her spot on her favorite rock in Kachemak Bay. Otis knew better than to sail her waters that night; she had warned him repeatedly in her parting words, made him swear he would not navigate her way.

The sailors before him had never been real to her, had never mattered. Otis mattered. Otis would live and thrive aboard the Calypso, regardless of what she might suffer in consequence.

She began her song, a sad melody about a goddess who loved a mortal man from afar, who watched over and protected him as he fell in love with another, as he raised a family, and as he died an old man, surrounded by the wife and children he loved. She’d always dismissed the song as maudlin and nonsensical, but as she rocked herself on the tiny reef, she sang it high and clear. The sweetest song, her mother had always called it, because it dealt with the truest kind of love, a love so strong it transcended selfish desires and wrapped itself like a protective cocoon around its object.

Again she sang, in a soft, soothing tone, but no ships passed nearby. The sea would claim no ships on her watch. No sailors would die that night.

As she neared the end of her fifth repetition of the last verse, she glimpsed a fishing vessel, crashing through the waves, heading straight toward her.
Poor unlucky bastard. Too late to change his course.

For the arbitrary crime of sailing close enough to hear her song, he would pay dearly.

She began her last performance only to break off as the letters of the ship assembled into a name she recognized—The Calypso.

“No!” She jumped to her feet. “No!” Her arms waved, but the darkness worked against her. “Otis! Stop!”

Twenty-five feet to go and still the ship rushed toward her.

“Stop! Turn away!” She frantically signed to the deaf captain of the only ship ever to thwart her.

Twenty feet separated them, and he’d soon crash into the rocks, because at his speed, insufficient time remained to correct his course. She waved her arms overhead.

Otis stood on the deck, wearing his yellow slicker, a life vest strapped around his chest and back. She closed her eyes, unable to watch.

When she opened them again, Otis had disappeared. Maybe he’d realized his error, but it would be too late.

The Calypso sheared the side of her hull against the rocks at top speed, disintegrating like a dirt clod in a man’s fist.

“Otis, no!” Circe dove into the ocean and swam a safe distance away right before the ship’s fuel tanks exploded in superheated balls of fire and smoke.

The chances of survivors plummeted.

Waves beat the dying vessel into the waiting arms of the Pacific and sucked debris into the whirlpool created when the Calypso gave up her last breath and sank.

Circe swam back to her perch in the eerie silence that descended.

Why had he steered his ship to her reef on that night of all nights? She crawled to the top of the rocks on her knees, where she wept, her tears mingling with the seawater pools in the rock’s crevasses.

“Don’t cry, Circe. This had to be done. You know it did.” The voice drawled its consonants as if the speaker’s tongue had swollen to twice its normal size.

She turned to discover a bedraggled and battered Otis pulling himself atop the highest rock to sit next to her. Her eyes flew open nearly as wide as the chasm created by her dropped jaw.

“Otis! You’re alive!” She threw her arms around his neck, kissing every square inch her lips landed upon.

Otis gathered her into his arms. They clung tightly together, kissing and touching each other, no words necessary—until the ocean around them churned and boiled. The two turned to see the face of a mightily pissed off Poseidon. He stood in his chariot, bobbing in the rough water.

“Circe! I warned you what would happen if you failed again.”

Otis scrambled to his feet between Circe and the Olympian god, no fear betrayed by his movements. “She didn’t fail! The Calypso is at the bottom of the sea!” he bellowed in his slightly nasal voice.

“Silence, human! Your foolish tricks won’t work. Your ship was empty and you, the only soul aboard, survived. I will have your voice now, Circe, and you are hereby banished from these waters!” Poseidon waved his trident in the air in a wide swath.

The mother of all sore throats gripped Circe as if someone had driven rusty nails into her neck in every conceivable angle and squeezed them in deeper.

“Oh shut your gob, Po!” a woman’s voice chirped from behind him.

Poseidon stiffened and turned as a beautiful woman emerged from the sea foam and stood beside him in his chariot. “Do not meddle in my affairs, Aphrodite. This is not your concern!”

The goddess slapped the side of his head. “You big bully! Don’t you know true love is
always
my affair?” She directed her words to Poseidon before turning to Circe and Otis. “Oh,” she pouted, “you two are gonna make me cry, and I hate to cry! I couldn’t stop him from taking your voice, my dear, but your love, your sacrifices for each other …” Aphrodite clasped her dainty hands to her breast and sighed, “My heart is all aflutter. No further harm will come to either of you.” She directed a pointed glare at Poseidon. “Ever.”

A raft-sized seashell drifted toward the rocks until it bumped gently against an outcropping. Aphrodite pointed. “Hop aboard. I’ll guarantee you safe passage until you reach land. You might want to steer clear of the water for a while afterwards.” Hands on her hips, she spun back to Poseidon. “Now,
you
… get on out of here before I really lose my temper. Shoo! And don’t you dare harm even a hair on either one of these children’s heads.”

Poseidon let out a grumble that shook the ground beneath Circe’s feet. He waved his trident in a circle over his head, creating a watery vortex into which he and his chariot disappeared.

Seated in the seashell next to Otis, Circe’s hand flew to her throat. The pain had ebbed to nothing, but Poseidon had done what he threatened he would—taken her voice. She tried to speak Otis’s name, but no sound emerged. Not even a hum could she coax from her useless vocal chords. Yet, as she stared into Otis’s handsome face, the inanity of missing a voice for which she had no use, that had only caused loss and destruction, sunk in. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter. Otis smiled and pulled Circe into his arms. When the shell moved, they turned to see Aphrodite pushing the water with her hand toward them, creating a series of gentle rolling waves that nudged them toward home.

Circe brushed Otis’s nose, his hairline, his jaw, and his lips with her own. As they drifted toward Homer, curled in each other’s arms, both signing, “I love you,” the stars winked at them, and a soft chuckle floated down from the heavens. The sweetest song had been her last and her best.