Baths and Break-Ins

Trayrock, A few days after the storm

He was really sick.

If this was the water sickness, Lyric was grateful that she had escaped it. He sweated and tossed and turned, moaning his way through the night. She checked his temperature, but it was very difficult to tell if he was running one as she didn’t know whether Mermen were normally hot or cold. If he had been human, he would be feverish, however, and as he looked human, that worried her.

If she gave him paracetamol or ibuprofen, would he react to it as a human would? Did she dare take the risk? If she didn’t, and he died for lack of something so simple and easily provided, would she be to blame for not administering it?

She didn’t know, and the not knowing held her indecisive, until there reached a point during the night when she was just so exhausted and he seemed so ill, that she took the chance, and administered both to him.

And then hoped.

He seemed to find ease in the medications and slept somewhat naturally. She nodded off, waking to find herself curled at his side, her cheek resting on his shoulder and her hand over his heart, monitoring that he lived even in her sleep. His head was bowed, and his face was in her hair, his breath warm against her scalp.

She stayed very, very still. She was on top of the covers, but she knew that just below them was a very big and very naked man with a pearl-adorned cock. A man that she did not know. A man who was half-fish and that she had just dragged out of the river the night before. A man who would not speak to her.

Fool Lyric, she scolded herself. It was a foolish thing to bring this man into the house and to fall asleep next to him in the bed.

His hair surrounded them. It had to come to his waist and was thick-stranded. In the daylight, the strange green-black of it was even more obviously unattainable through a bottle of hair dye. His chest hair echoed the color, and his skin caught the light just a little like the shimmer of scale below the smooth surface.

Was he dangerous?  

She did not feel unsafe with him.

She eased away carefully sitting up and put her hand on his forehead. He was still running hot, his face pale, and his mouth bracketed with lines of pain. He opened his eyes, but they struggled to focus.

She swallowed hard. “You’re really sick,” she told him quietly. “I wish you would talk to me. I’m not sure that I am helping or harming you. What do you need to get well?”

He sighed heavily. “Water.” His voice was deep, smooth, and heavily accented even on such a simple word. “With salt. A pool of it.”

“A pool of salt water?” She stared at him. Where did he expect her to get such a thing?

“The river has been poisoned,” it was exhausting him to speak. She could see the drain of energy from his face, and he seemed to sink into the pillows. “A magical and biological taint. I must wash it from me.”

“Poisoned,” she repeated. The water sickness. Magical and biological? “Right,” she said slowly. “Would a bath do?” She couldn’t precisely drive him to the ocean, not with the militia blocking the roads but she did have a couple of bags of sea salt in the kitchen larder and a tank of rainwater.

He didn’t answer but his hands clenched on the bedding.

“Mermaids probably don’t have baths,” she realized. “Okay.” She hurried out to the bathroom with its claw-footed tub and began to run the water, hearing the generator kick in. As the bath filled, she retrieved the salt from the kitchen and placed it on the vanity.

She was thinking through the problem of getting the very big Merman from the bed to the bath when he appeared in the doorway, naked but for the bandages that he wore. He looked… thinner, she thought in surprise. His ribs were starker against his skin, his hip bones jutting…

“Oh,” she said in surprise, almost falling over the washing basket as she stepped back.

He picked up one of the bags of salt, opened it, tasted a granule, and pulled a face but emptied it into the bathtub. Ignoring the bandages that clung stubbornly, he stepped into the bath and sank into the water, bringing it sloshing to the rolled edge.

She reached over hastily to turn off the tap. The last thing that she needed was to flood the bathroom. She did not have the skills to make repairs.

He sank into the bath water, submerging his head, his hair snaking out onto the surface, and his knees poking up like islands.

“I guess water isn’t the magic ingredient that turns a man to a Mermaid,” Lyric noted to herself. She saw his eyes open underwater and realized that he had heard her. He surfaced slowly, sliding his knees back under the water, and braced his arms on the rim of the bathtub, resting his head back. His hair dripped a steady stream of salted bath water onto the tiles and Lyric used her toe to nudge a towel into a growing puddle.

“The taint from the river has been carried out into the ocean,” he murmured. His eyes were closed. There were thumb-sized bruises beneath them, and the sockets seemed deeper, the bone standing out. “As with all things from the land,” his lip curled in a sneer. “It is we in the seas who must suffer your carelessness. But this… this is different,” he told her. “I swam upstream to locate the source of the taint, to end it, but I could feel it sapping my strength and I was forced from the water.”

He opened his eyes and slid her a slight smile. “We control the shift; it is not due to submersion. However, it does take… energy and concentration. The taint in the water temporarily robbed me of my ability. I am grateful for your kindness.”

“Sure,” she clutched a towel to her chest, forcing her gaze to stay on his face and not venture lower. “So… does the paracetamol and ibuprofen help?”

“Your medicines?” He peeled one of the sopping bandages from him and let it sink into the water. “They seemed to assist. However, it is best not to experiment too greatly.”

“The salt water is helping,” she could see that, his expressions were becoming more energetic, his eyes brighter and his posture more relaxed and at ease, the pain stripped from it.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It helps.”

There was nothing more that she could do and the longer that she lingered in the bathroom, the more pervy her doing so seemed, so she set the towel down upon the stool and edged towards the door. “So… I will… Go and make some food.”

He closed his eyes, relaxing back against the bath.

She closed the door behind her and berated herself under her breath as she walked to the kitchen. What did Mermen eat? She wondered as she reviewed the larder.

A shrill alarm sent her running down the hallway to the third bedroom. A black 4WD was making its way along the driveway to the cottage. Someone had found their way past the gate on that side of the property.

“Nothing to worry about,” she told herself. There was an old house at the top of the driveway. Long abandoned and falling into decay, Arthur had left it to rot as anyone who did find their way onto the property and came that far would assume that they’d reached their destination, and finding nothing of interest, would return the way they came.

The 4WD stopped and two men in black got out to look at the house.

“Shit,” she said through her teeth. They were militia from Trayrock. “Nothing to see here,” she whispered. “Turn around and go back please.”

They consulted a device and one pointed past the house, towards the cottage. “Fucking hell,” she exclaimed. They knew where they were going. How? The cottage was not visible from above, and not marked on any map. They had not entered the same way she had returned from Trayrock by; therefore, she hadn’t been seen… No, there was only one explanation. Someone had tagged her car.