When rugby star Jesse Brannon buys the house of his dreams in the small coastal town he grew up in, the sea calls to him. While diving through the reefs and kelp forest of the private bay, he comes across something unexpected -- an injured merman. His late mother always told him there were mermaids in the water, but Jesse never thought she really meant it.
As Jesse does his best to help the lonely, injured merman recover, he finds himself falling in love. The two of them grow closer, learn how to communicate, and overcome their differences in anatomy, but the impossibility of a future together starts to weigh on Jesse. Time is running out and Jesse will have to leave the house by the bay as soon as the new season starts. Will his new mate understand and wait for him, or will he lose him forever?
Stepping into the water felt like salvation, almost like the homecoming Jesse so craved but would never have, now that part of what made this area home was gone forever. But the water soothed that ache, and he let himself fall into it, his goggles on tight, his fins no longer making him clumsy once he was off solid ground. On a holiday, their first extravagant one, Jesse and his mum had learned how to properly scuba dive. The option to stay down in the water for so long without needing to come up for air had been so tempting. But by the end of their course, they had both left the tanks and suits behind and gone back into the water the way they knew how to do it best, with nothing but a deep breath in their lungs.
His first breath carried him out of the shallows, where small fish flitted out of his way. As soon as the ground dipped out from under him, though, the sea really came to life.
The water was so clear that the sunlight penetrated to a surprising depth, illuminating this undersea world in beautiful shades of green and purple, pink and blue. Jesse set a sedate pace, comfortable in a way that he never was on land, legs fluttering, sending him deeper and deeper until he entered the kelp forest, where all of the concerns of the real world faded away. Down here, it was easy to imagine his mum was waiting for him on the beach, the edge of the waves tickling her toes.
He gripped at the kelp to pull himself along, his internal timer reminding him that he would have to head back to the surface soon, his eyes drinking in the details of the reef below. The fish darted away from him, silvery points of light traveling so fast he could barely track them, and he could see little crabs scurrying along the seafloor where the rocks were finer and almost sandy in places. He was the largest animal near the reef by far, all his life -- he hadn’t even seen the shadow of a shark larger than his forearm and most of the fish that came this close to the shore were smaller than his hands. He felt his heart rate slowing as he exhaled, the cool pressure of the water and the silence suffusing his body, bringing him a level of peace he could never hope to find on dry land.
He was just about to angle himself upwards to ascend for air, when Jesse felt something in the water, the sort of shift that he had felt only a few times on holiday when he had taken his mum to swim with whales -- he didn’t know of anything large enough to feel like that. Slightly panicked, he pivoted his head left, then right. He was deeper than he had realized, the sunlight above partially blocked by the long, waving arms of kelp, slinky shadows surrounding him. He turned in a full pivot, trying to keep his movements calm as he scanned the area, and there, behind a few tall, waving columns of kelp was --
Jesse blinked. It couldn’t be. His eyes had to have been playing tricks on him, and yet the figure was still there, unmoving.
Frozen in the water with shock, Jesse stared at the equally wide eyes of the creature in front of him. For a second, he tried to convince himself that it was a fellow diver, someone with eyes less sensitive to salt water than his own, someone who dove with neither goggles nor fins.
Dread and excitement mixed into a tumultuous flurry in his gut as he realized this was no human. His eyes were wide and shining in the water, like something that was fundamentally built to make the most of limited sunlight in much deeper and darker places than this. His features were that of a human man, almost, handsome but sunken in hunger. And where legs should have been working to keep him down this deep without rising, a massive long tail, at least as long as Jesse’s height, was swaying slowly in the water.
Jesse’s chest felt tight; he was running out of air, but the profound bone-deep knowledge that he was looking at a predator kept him in place, kept him staring in wild fear, his heart pounding. Fascination battled primal instincts in his chest; he couldn’t swim to the surface, couldn’t look away lest this creature, this merman, grabbed him and pulled him down, never to resurface.
And then the merman moved, turning tail and fleeing, as if he had overcome his own fright seconds before Jesse could unfreeze. When he moved, Jesse saw what the kelp had hidden before. He watched as the merman dug its hand into a gaping wound in its side, knuckles -- they had knuckles, they had hands -- white as he supported the loose, torn skin under his prominent ribs, trying to flee fast enough for Jesse not to follow.
His air was really running out now; Jesse had no choice, so he kicked his legs to get to the surface.
There was a merman in his bay and he was hurt.
