Page 37

I waited for the sound of the padlock before I slipped onto the stage. I was afraid to light the lamp, but the moon was waxing through the small window above, and once my eyes adjusted, I could see Río leaning against the glass with his forehead in his hand.

I gave a gentle tap to the tank before climbing up the rungs. With a worried glance at the curtain’s edge, he rose to the surface to meet me.

“You should leave,” he whispered, a deep crease between his brows. “He might return.”

“Not while he’s banged up and dripping como un perro ahoga’o ,” I said, undoing my shirt buttons. “Besides, the tank’s probably the safest place to hide from a guy with a gun. My old foreman said it’d take a cannon to break this glass.”

Río watched anxiously as I stripped down to my undergarments and slid quietly into the water. As soon as I was afloat, I opened my arms, and he swam into them.

“For all the years I have watched your kind, I still cannot understand humanity,” he whispered into my neck, gripping me with his sandpaper palms. “Such violence and cruelty. I can hardly believe you are one of them.”

“I’m no saint,” I admitted, rubbing his back while I did my part to tread the water below us. “I could’ve started a riot when I heard him yelling at you like that.”

“A riot sounds like a terribly unwise course of action. I am glad you resisted.”

I chuckled and wondered if Río knew he was being funny, but when I pulled away to look at him, what I saw made me pause.

He looked drawn. A trick of the light, maybe.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded and lowered his head against my shoulder. “His presence often leaves me... shaken.”

“Come on, then.” Taking him by the waist, I swam us toward the wall where I could hold the rim of the glass and tuck my legs in. I steered him onto my lap where he leaned into me wearily, folding in the sharp spines on his back.

“Benigno?”

I kissed his salty shoulder. “Hm?”

“What does ‘return on my investment’ mean?”

“Means trouble,” I muttered. “Those guys who beat up Morgan paid for this nightmare, and now they got Morgan stuck under an anvil of debt.”

“They want a dog, not a merman. A noisy, obedient thing that does tricks. Why can these walruses never understand merfolk have no masters?”

His voice sounded so heavy. I turned his chin to search his face, and it lanced me through the chest to find fear in it.

“Oye,” I whispered. “I’ve been around plenty of cabrones like him, and they mouth off ’cause making dogs of everyone around them makes them feel better. Morgan might look at you, but he sure don’t see you.”

Río touched two fingers to the medallion hanging from my neck. “What do you see, Benigno?”

I didn’t have to guess why he asked. Morgan had unearthed Río’s weakness without even trying when he’d called him soulless and willing to watch children drown. Without a language that could do Río justice, my “native song” would have to do.

“I see someone brave and beautiful and too noble for a world as unjust as mine,” I said in Spanish. “With a heart as wide as the ocean if it was willing to bring a lonely, broken thing like me into it. You saw a man starved for air and tenderness and gave him both. You are so much more than a fool like Morgan could ever comprehend.”

I covered his hand with mine and traced my thumb over his knuckles. “From the moment I first saw you, I knew you were a miracle.”

He gazed down with wide, glittering eyes and took my cheek in his palm, guiding my path to his mouth. I kissed Río the way he breathed: Slowly. Deeply. Until the cords in his muscles dropped their traumatized grip.

The cage blended into the shadows, but even in the dark, his loveliness shone over me like a star. Through a veil of wet hair, he smiled and raised his tail to the surface, draping it loosely over my shoulder so I could skate light fingers across it. I pressed another kiss to the pearly gems that decorated him, warming at the low hum that vibrated in his throat at being touched the way he liked.

“ Llévame, río, hasta el mar ,” I sang in a quiet voice.

“ Sobre las olas de agua cristal ,” he sang softly back.

“I have a secret to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“That song?” I nuzzled my cheek against his tail. “It’s about you.”

“Barnacle.” He smirked at me. “That is not a secret.”

“Yeah, well, it’s your fault I can’t keep anything from you. This tank’s got more confessions than a Catholic sacerdote .”

He sighed. “If only confessions had greater uses.”

“ Bueno . That depends on the confession.”

My heart had gotten ahead of my brain, palpitating before I even realized what I was about to say. Without the pump to drown out the sound, I was sure he could hear it, because his stare deepened, and he whispered, “Will you tell me another?”

There was only one secret left to tell him, something that made me feel weightless all the time, whether or not I was suspended in ten feet of water. After all the monstrous lies Morgan flung at him, I could have shouted it to the night.

“Te quiero, Río.”

I reached into the water, found his hand, and lifted it to my chest.

“You call me the moon, but it’s you. You’re the beacon. Dios mío , I’ve loved you since the moment you touched my hand through the glass.” When Río’s eyes went suddenly wide and unreadable, I hastily added, “You don’t have to say you feel the same if you don’t. Doesn’t change anything. I just wanted you to—”

Río stopped my mouth with his fingertip.

“Benigno, surely you know,” he breathed. “ You are my heartsong.”

In one fluid motion, he slid off my lap and kissed me against the glass—arms and tail winding around my body like he was el Leviatán about to swallow me whole. I met his eagerness with something like desperation, drinking him in like I walked the earth by day with a Río-shaped hole in my chest.

He loved me.

And I thought: What if passion—the sort that melts down all your raw, untempered pieces in another’s heart—needed something more? A different ingredient. A higher temperature. What if intimacy had always been out of reach because I’d never loved anyone like I loved Río? I was deep in the crucible now. Molten. Glowing. Here in the water, kissing with my eyes half-open for the miraculous vantage of seeing his affection up close, all I could think about was how badly I needed to show him what I felt.

Panting, I pulled my lips away. “Do your kind make love?”

I’d shocked the hell out of myself with that question, while Río didn’t so much as flinch.

“Even dolphins breach the surface to taste the heavens,” he replied in his silkiest voice.

“So, that’s a ‘yes’?”

He laughed softly. “It is quite different from the ways of humans. But yes. Of course, we do.”

“Different how? Or—” I blinked. “You mean. You don’t. That there’s not—”

“I have the requisite anatomy for reproducing, Benigno. I am just not as”—his eyes drifted downward at my obvious arousal—-“exposed as you are.”

I was one more embarrassing sentence away from disintegrating in ten thousand gallons of water.

“Your shame has no place here, Benigno. There is no part of your body that does not tempt me,” he murmured. “But what you are asking about has little bearing on the furtherance of our race. It means more than my fervent pleasure in touching you or being touched, however much that may feature in the undertaking. Making love, for merfolk, is a consummation of a different sort.”

“What sort?”

He brushed my hair from my eyes and let his fingertips trail the curve of my face. “Two rivers converged,” he whispered. “Two breaths made one.” His caresses traveled farther down. “A union most sacred.”

Río had taught me how to breathe. Though he hadn’t meant to, he’d taught me how to cry, and later, to swim. As he touched me with the same sureness I saw in his eyes, I realized I had something important left to master.

“Teach me how to love you, Río.”

He didn’t blush since blushing, I’d learned, wasn’t something merfolk could do. But he bit his lip and looked at me as though for once in his long life, modesty had overtaken him. “A human might find it overwhelming.”

“And if I wanted to be overwhelmed?”

I ran my thumb across the seam of Río’s mouth. His eyes fluttered closed. “Then your soul would bind to mine. And mine”—he firmed his iron grip around my waist—“to yours.”

The idea took my breath away. I imagined us, bronze and pewter, melting together until we glowed with the same light. I smoothed his hair back over his shoulder, the better to taste the salt along his neck. “My soul is yours. If you want it.”

His swallow sent a ripple across my lips. “Neptune knows how deeply I want you. But...”

“But?”

“Benigno,” he said quietly, “you still don’t know my name.”

The words fell like stones on my heart. I was about to apologize for my atrevimiento when Río laid a palm against my chest to stop me.

“But perhaps it is time you knew it.”

I searched his face for shadows in the dark. I couldn’t tell if he felt pressured. “You don’t have to—”

“Hush.” He brought his mouth to my ear. “I give it freely.”

Río’s arm traveled the familiar path under my shoulder blades, pulling me closer. His other hand skimmed over my thigh to hoist my leg gently over his hip while, below the waterline, his tail curved around my other ankle. I wasn’t undressed, my union suit still clung to me like a second skin, but we were so completely entwined I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.

“You feel certain?” he whispered.

Whatever was about to happen, I wanted it more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. I nodded. “?Y tú?”

Río took one last lingering look in my eyes before they closed. “Sí.”

This kiss.

It spilled.

Spread across my chest and down my back. Warm. Like rain running thick down plantain leaves in a thunderstorm. I let go of the glass, and we stayed afloat, his body cooling against me like my blood had mixed with seawater. When I shivered, he hesitated.

“No pares,” I gasped.

One-handed, Río undid the buttons over my heart, then slipped his fingers between them with a lightness that sent tremors through me like lightning had struck the water. His lips rolled in waves along my jaw and down into the hollow of my throat before I started hearing something unexpected. Something impossible.

Two heartbeats pulsed in my ears. I knew mine only by the way it slowed to match his. With each beat, ordinary noises seemed to resound, to turn to music. The wet of our lips. The water colliding gently against our shoulders. His sighs played like a symphony in my ears, and Dios misericordioso , was this how all merfolk heard the world?

Returning to my mouth, he hovered there and sent his voice into my mind just as his mother had done.

Respira .

I inhaled. As I did, he blew a breath into my open lips that came alive inside me, pure as a spring and familiar as a song.

It was Río—the raw, unbounded essence of him—and in the space of a heartbeat, a hundred of my questions about him were all answered. He was young; uncertain and innocent, an elemental spirit pulsing with bravery being tested for the first time. Río’s yearning for the sea now throbbed like a subterranean ache inside me , as if an invisible cord had reached through the metal and glass to pull me powerfully by the chest.

My next exhale, Río breathed in, and I watched the bond take him too, his breaths coming faster, his expression opening with bliss and wonder at whatever truth he sensed in me. I held him through it while my blood resisted the human urge to race and calmed in my veins instead.

And not just my blood— everything was slowing down. Water rippled in protracted motion. My breathing had gone almost still. I sank into blue until the margins of my body blurred, then disappeared.

If Río’s soul was an ocean, then I’d found the sea floor. Here, I saw his mother’s face—not pained and desperate, like it had been at Lawrence Point, but glowing with the same compassion and kindness I saw in her son.

That’s when, like a blow to the chest, I remembered. I’d seen a face like hers before.

In the rapids. In the hurricane. That face had been mer . I felt it confirmed down to my fingertips alongside the sudden certainty that this moment with Río was no accident. The part of me climbing to the surface ever since we’d met had been searching my whole life for exactly this—for a love that didn’t burn, but flooded, until all I could see behind my eyelids was the sea spread out in all directions, as boundless and blue as Río’s eyes.

My next breath stayed held. I didn’t need air.

Llévame, Río, I said in his mind.

He pulled us under.

Río sang to me in his language. The rarest, most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

Without opening my eyes, I saw moonlight reflected on water, glittering like stars on the ocean’s skin. Turns out merfolk have a word for that.

Río’s true name.

Laying together among the sand and seashells, he named me just like I’d named him. A melody sung prayerfully into my mind where only I could hear it.

I’ll never tell it to another soul.