Lost at Sea
Chapter 12

The cave became as silent as the day Jasper had been dragged in there in the first place. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the water that refused to still against the walls. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

Eleanor’s eyes were still steady, as though she hadn’t just shattered this illusion with a single sentence. Without warning, he inhaled sharply and let it out as laughter. He hadn’t laughed like that since before he lost her.

Of course none of this had been real. He was an idiot for ever even considering it.

And so, instead of falling apart, Jasper laughed until his sides ached and he couldn’t open his eyes. There was nothing funny about the situation, and yet he couldn’t help himself. Eleanor did not move.

“You’re killing me,” he chuckled. She blinked once with an audible click, like a reptile, but still remained inhumanly still. “No, really, you’re a riot. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

She opened her mouth then, but no words came out. Three simple notes flooded the air with all the grace and majesty in the world as though they belonged right there. Instantly, Jasper found himself feeling completely empty. He felt nothing; no amusement, no irritation, not even confusion.

“Do you believe me now?” She whispered into the silence. His every nerve was alight: every color seemed richer and more vibrant. He could hear the subtle scuttling in the pile of driftwood that indicated the presence of some insect. Eleanor herself was viewed in sharper detail.

Jasper felt his chest tighten as his eyes traced the elegant curve of her neck, the outline of her collarbones, and just a little lower, he could just barely see her breasts through the curtain of hair that cascaded over either shoulder. She was real. What she said was true. And still, he was completely and irrevocably smitten with her.

“Get out,” he croaked. Every piece of him wanted to beg her to stay, to tell her how much he loved her, and yet when he opened his mouth the words came out all wrong. “Get out.”

Her face fell. She moved a few inches closer, sending his heart throbbing as he realized there actually were no reflective jade stones at the bottom of the pool. That was her tail.

“I said get out!” He shouted in panic. He scrambled to his feet. “Unnatural! Murderess!” The insults slid off his tongue as easily as water and only served to fuel the turning in his gut. Finally, she slipped beneath the waterline and left him alone with his thoughts.

He found himself instantly berating himself for the way he yelled at her. A part of him was whining that she hadn’t asked to be turned into something different from him and strange. And even if she had, he refused to believe that she’d known what she was getting herself into. His beautiful Eleanor, the one that was as familiar to him as the sound of his own voice in his ears, would never consent to becoming something so alien.

So mythological.

Could there really be truth to all that rambling the sailor’s he’d met had done? The haunting, broken look in Johnny’s eyes came back to Jasper. It had always seemed as though he had so much to tell the world, and yet he could never find the words to describe what he was feeling. Jasper thought he understood now.

A wave of uncertainty and the sense of being lost was overwhelming him. He felt exactly as though reality had been ripped out from under him and he was being thrust into a world he knew nothing about.

He only knew one thing. The thing that he’s been calling his wife is not longer his Eleanor, and she needed to die.

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