Chapter 2

THE PLOT THICKENS....like whipped cream!!!

As unconsciousness merged into consciousness, Zoe became distantly aware that she felt warm but not soothingly warm but almost as though her skin had begun to burn. She could hear waves that seemed to be crashing on a distant shore, which slowly grew louder. As she became more aware she could hear sea birds calling out. Distantly she felt aware that her body ached, like one giant bruise, particularly her neck. 

At last she forced her eyes open, painfully blinking into dazzling sunlight, azure blue skies and the flickering shade of palm fronds. She became aware of hot sand under her fingers and the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Her clothes felt damp but not wet like she had been lying here for awhile. 

‘What the hell? I should be dead. I was in a plane crash. I drowned. Maybe I am dead. Maybe I am in hell and this is just a screen saver…..or something,’ she thought. It made no sense. 

Slowly she pulled herself upright and sat crossed legged in the sand trying to make sense of her surroundings. The white sands along the beach were almost blinding as the sunlight dappled off the clear blue ocean. Waves crashed on the reef before rolling down and lapping just in front of her feet. Behind her a verdant tropical island soared up in a violent mass of greens, browns and the wild colours of the tropical colours. Her throat felt dry and sore. 

“Your awake!” A voice called out suddenly. 

Zoe whipped around and stared, her jaw dropping into the sand. 

There was another person on this island. Sorry correction. There was a guy on this beach. And he was naked. Very, very, very naked. 

He seemed oblivious of this as he swaggered towards her holding two coconuts, his long feet sinking in the sand. He was naked and judging by the deep, but not fake tan  had been for a very long time. He wasn’t overly muscular, he had definition but he wasn’t what she would call buffed or muscular. He had an unusual face, a snubbed nose and a very prominent, rounded chin which plunged to a sexy Adam’s apple. His eyes twinkled grey blue as he smiled showing sharp front teeth with pointed canine teeth. His blonde tufty hair fell in his eyes as he dropped onto his haunches before her and offered her the coconut. 

“You took quite a bump in that crash,” he grinned. 

“Your naked,” Zoe stammered. Right there, the full Monty naked.

“You feeling alright?” he asked. 

“Your naked,” Zoe repeated. 

“Yes. I am aware of that,” he sighed. 

“Your-,” she began but he jumped in. 

“Cold? Hot? Hungry? Tired? Nauseous?” he asked sounding a bit annoyed. 

“Huh?” Zoe blinked. 

“Drink the coconut,” he sighed sitting down beside her. 

Zoe obeyed meekly, relishing the sweet, slightly fizzy fluid. He drank his seemingly in one gulp before nestling the coconut in the sand and regarding her closely. 

“What?” she asked. It was impossible to make coherent thoughts when a naked guy sat right there. Full frontal. No strategically placed shrubs, nothing. Plus she was on a beach drinking coconuts with a naked guy when she should be floating down to Davey Jones locker in a water closet. Ha, ha. Water closet.

Zoe looked at him out of the corner of one eye. Maybe he was a castaway. Maybe she was dead and this was one of the inner circles of hell. Maybe she was unconscious and dreaming. Maybe this had all been a dream and-

“Now how do you feel?” he asked. 

“Ok I guess. Where am I?” she asked. 

“A small island about 120km off the coast of Fiji,” he responded promptly. 

“Ok,” she nodded. None of this made the slightest bit of sense. “How did I get here?”

He grinned, his lips curling up in the corners and his eyes glowing brightly. “Your mommy and daddy loved each other very much and they wanted to-”

“Not that! I mean this island!” she snapped. Even as she did she felt her face go red.

He laughed loudly, a silly, almost goosy laugh that disintegrated into sniggers. “What do you remember?”

Zoe blinked staring out to sea. “I remember trying to get the door of the toilet open as I sank into the ocean and then I blacked out.”

He looked up at her, his tufty hair falling across the bridge of his nose. “So you don’t remember me pulling you out?”

Zoe shook her head and stared. “You couldn’t have! Were you on the plane? You couldn’t have been I have never seen you until now.”

He was still grinning at her. “Hows that bruise on your neck going?”

Zoe reached up and gasped lightly as she felt a bruise about halfway up her neck. That sat right on a main artery. Which was sore and had two scabs the size of peppercorns at the centre of them. She looked back and remembered his pointy canine teeth.

Zoe scuttled backwards through the sand, staring in horror making a strange gasping, choking noise. “You! You! How dare you! What have you done? Why did you bite me!”

He stood and folded his arms. “Because if I didn’t you would still be dead.”

“Still dead? Huh?” Zoe stammered. 

“You died in that crash. Your only alive because I bit you. I’m a mermaid and as mermaids we can revive the dead with our venom,” he said slowly.

“Wha-?” Zoe just stared at him blankly. This wasn’t happening. Bad dream, it had to be a bad dream. She had never heard of mermaids being venomous or biting. And isn’t venom meant to work in the opposite way? Wait mermaids don’t exist. “Wait. You’re a dude.”

“Merman then. I didn’t want to confuse you,” he said. 

Zoe burst into an unnatural, insane laugh. “What am I saying mermaids, mermen, they don’t exist. They’re fairytales you tell kids like Santa.”

Shaking his head, he stalked down the beach as Zoe stared at his back. Starting from where his tailbone would be right up to below his shoulder blades he had fluorescent yellow spots either side of his spine. Tattoo. Wait no, tats don’t come in that colour. What the? The blonde dude dived in the water and surfaced a few seconds later, hair wet but no tail. 

“Ha! See-,” she began when he almost lazily lifted his tail out of the water. And waved at her with it.

Zoe stared wide eyed. The shape of his fin reminded Zoe of a whales tail but it was translucent and spiny like most ocean fish she had seen in Aquariums with two long spines flowing off the tips of his flukes. His skin that slid from the base of his tail to his waist looked smooth like snakeskin but she could tell by the way the sunlight glimmered off it that it was made up of thousands of tiny scales. The predominant colour was a rich, iridescent peacock green. Zoe then spotted the yellow spots that started at the base of his tail and slid up his back. He had a dorsal fin along the back of his tail that rose up, spiny and beautiful. 

Zoe stood slowly and walked over to the waters edge, not for a second taking her eyes off the merman who rested in the small waves. With a lazy flick he propelled himself onto the sand at her feet and rolled onto his back staring up at her, one hand shading the sun from his eyes. 

“By biting you I not only revived you but also bestowed you with the gift of transforming into a mermaid like I can. It is a gift that only natural mer-folk can bestow only once in their life. We can revive the dead a few times but only transform a human into a merfolk once,” he explained softly. 

Zoe stared at him. Her day was just getting weirder. “Are you saying I can do that?” 

A larger than usual wave crashed onto the shore, foaming around his tail and frothing at her feet. Almost immediately she felt pins and needles coursing through her feet. As the waves receded she could see her skin begin to pimple as scales began to appear along her skin. 

“Give me your hand,” he said, his eyes glowing up at her. 

With a single flick of his peacock green tail he hauled her into the water with a squeal. She managed to gasp a breath before he pulled her under the surface where the currents pulled them towards the open ocean. Zoe could feel her lungs screaming for breath as she tried to kick, to pull away from him. Tried being the operative word as she suddenly realized that her legs felt as though they had been fused together. Wrenching her hand away from him she turned upside down in the water. She had a tail. 

It wasn’t as pretty as his, it was a deep maroon with lighter coloured fins and no dorsal patterns. She stared at it, feeling the long, spiny flukes in her fingers. She could actually feel her hands on her tail, like she had nerves in there. It felt real, like it belonged to her. She flicked it cautiously, curving through the water, twisting and diving. She began to laugh when she suddenly realized that she could also breath under water too, through her nose or mouth and then out gills that had slit staring just below her ear-lobe and down past her jaw. She also realized with a slight squeal she was naked, well topless to be precise, her pale breasts hanging loosely. 

She looked over at him as he seemed to hang just below the surface with the biggest grin on his face. She didn’t know if that was because she was a mermaid like him or because she was topless. “Don’t worry. Its only people that mess around wearing clothes. We mer-folk are very open with nudity.”

Zoe gasped a trail of bubbles. “You can hear my thoughts?”

His goosy laugh rang lightly in her head. “I have been listening to them all morning but I figured you had enough on your mind.”  

“How come I cant hear your thoughts?” she asked. She could hear the current stirring through the sand and the waves pounding on the reef but she couldn’t hear him thinking. He could hear his voice in her head but not actual thoughts. 

“Practice. Natural mer-folk are born with the gift but you will just have to practice,” he responded. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

Zoe took his hand as he led her to a gap under the reef. He explained he could jump the reef but she hadn’t been swimming enough. Plus this way was safer. He led her into the deeper water, passing schools of fish that skittered out of the way. Here the water glowed blue, but comforting blue. She noted that he only had to flick his tail occasionally but she had to constantly bat hers simply to keep up. Again he explained that she would develop those muscles in her fins with time. 

After swimming along the sandy bottom they came to another reef. They skimmed just under the surface, dodging the columns of coral that rose up around them in every colour of the spectrum. Fish too darted between the coral, anemones waved in the currents and even Manta rays soared about. Zoe stared about herself in disbelief. Only a few hours ago she was a person, on a flight, headed to college and then she crashed and her life was turned on its head. No actually it was thrown out the window. 

A sudden rift in the ocean floor appeared the corals growing either side. With a strong flick he dragged Zoe deep into the canyon. The water was cooler down here as they dived deeper and deeper into the rift as everything went darker around them. Zoe could feel the crushing pressure of the water but she could still breath easily. Almost near the bottom he stopped near a small hole. 

“Ladies first,” he grinned. 

“What’s in there?” Zoe asked staring cautiously into what she supposed was a black hole in the side of canyon. 

“Just trust me,” he said patiently. 

“That’s the point. I don’t. You bit me and changed me into a mermaid without my consent. I mean is there even an age of consent for being bitten by a mermaid?” she said swimming into the narrow hole. 

She could hear his silly laugh as he followed her into the hole. Zoe had to pull herself through the tube, the stones scraping her elbows. The narrow tube suddenly widened as it opened into a cave. The white sand at the bottom was illuminated by the light filtering through the rainbow spectrum of coral high above their heads. There were Angler fish in here too, the lights on their head glowing like living chandeliers. Zoe stared about her in awe as he swam over and sat on a trunk nestled in the white sand. 

“Its amazing!” she gasped. 

“Yeah this is my hideout. When I want to get away from things I come here. I was in here when I heard your plane hit the water. That’s why I swam over,” he explained. 

Zoe swam over to him. “I suppose I owe you a thank you. You did save my life and you gave me something that you can only give once.”

He seemed to blush slightly. “Why?” Zoe asked. 

“Why what?” he stared at her blankly. 

“Why rescue me?” 

“Why not.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He shook his head. “Come I will show you the crash.”

Zoe followed him out of the cave and back up towards the surface. To her surprise the beginning of the crash site wasn’t that far from the edge of the reef. Like she had seen so many times on telly, bits of plane were littered across the ocean floor. As they swam through it she discovered that the plane had been torn into two pieces, the nose section which included the toilets and then the rest of the plane. The remainder of the fuselage was badly mangled and Zoe could feel the sticky aviation fluid against her skin. 

To see the plane lying at the bottom of the ocean; luggage, bits of fuselage, metal, the food trolley, all scattered about filled Zoe with sadness. By the looks of things she was the only survivor and then again that was by default. 

“Can we go now?” his voice asked. 

“Why?” she said looking around. 

“There’s fuel or something in the water and its making my skin feel itchy,” he said looking decidedly uncomfortable. 

“Maybe your allergic to it,” she reasoned. “I don’t mind, I feel tired anyway.”

He took her hand as they swam away from the crash. He glanced at her and grinned slightly. “I’m not surprised all this swimming and at depth too.”

By the time they reached the reef that guarded the island, Zoe was exhausted. It had been a long, weird day that by no means had she begun to come to grips with. And yet somehow this merman’s presence comforted her. Somewhere between his silly laugh and that grin which lit up his blue eyes, he made her feel warm. Happy even. After spending so long trapped in school, trapped in a dull job, ogling after a guy who barely noticed her existence she suddenly felt free. Alive. A new beginning. She wrapped her arm around his and stopped swimming letting him tow her to the shore. He looked down at her smiled broadly. Riding in on a wave and with a single flick they slithered up onto the shore, Zoe rolling into his arms. 

High above them, the moon glowed through the palm trees and the stars shone brightly. Zoe sprawled herself across his chest and yet she didn’t feel weird or awkward about suddenly finding herself in the arms of a guy, sorry, merman she had just met. She suddenly felt as though she had known him all her life, like she couldn’t’t remember what her life had been life before his bright presence. 

She stared into his eyes as he brushed some of her damp hair from her eyes with those nimble fingers. His long tail swept under hers as his long fingers rested on her ribcage and slowly slithered down to her scales. Zoe felt her heart hammer wildly in her throat making it hard to breath as his eyes glowed up at her in the moonlight. Zoe became aware of everything in that moment, his breath which she could feel his ribs heave slightly before it blew its way into her damp hair, the smell of the salty ocean, the warmth of his skin. Zoe closed her eyes, ignoring the fact his breath smelt vaguely of tuna and when she opened her eyes he was still there. 

“I don’t even know what your name is,” she whispered. 

“Josiah,” he smiled softly. 

“Zoe,” she murmured just before she leaned down and kissed him. 

Author's Note

again....grammer.....ignore it LOL
Also I have had some people tell me this chapter moves too fast....thoughts would be good :D

Reviews

[Kiki Newton]

LOL glad you liked it :D
Yeah the fuel thing......Im probably gonna either a) take that out or b) weave it in better later on because it is a tad pointless at present.
as for the vampire thing, I played that down as best I could because previous reviews people just got waaay caught up in that. But basically there are two ways I thought of that a mermaid could revive and i have gotten into enough trouble with the nudity in this novel let alone my first method ;)
glad your enjoing

[RM Americano]

If you don't want grammar input, I'll hush about that.

The pace on this was fast, true, but that was a good thing. The whole mermaid bit....wow. Very out of the blue. Was the spilled fuel thing bothering him some foreshadowing? That could come in handy later.

I felt that this chapter kept me interested throughout, it didn't have the same shortcoming as the previous one. Still kind of shocked at your vampire merman. Nice idea, now I'm even more curious where this is going. Sometimes the absurd draws readers in just because it's so outlandish they can't pass it up.