“We’re closed,” he says definitively.
“Then maybe you could help me with something?” I give him a weak smile, fearful this might set him off, but he doesn’t shut down. He just narrows his eyes and waits for me to say more. “It’s not geocaching this time,” I’m quick to add. “Just… something I’m curious about.”
“I’m gonna have to start charging you,” he says, teasing.
I laugh and pass him the paper I brought. “I saw a poster recently, at someone’s place. This was written on it. I wondered if you’d ever heard of such a thing. It looked pretty old.”
Studying what I’d written, he asks, “How old?”
“Mid-nineteenth century, I’d say. A lithograph. There was an illustration too, just there in the center where I drew the—”
“Mermaid,” he says for me.
“Yeah, I guess so. But she doesn’t really look like a traditional mermaid.” I lean over his shoulder to look again at my rendering.
Levi shrugs. “Well, depends on what you mean by traditional. Mermaids have been described as looking like a lot of things over the years. Fish. Manatees. Aquatic primates. Sirens were originally part bird instead of part fish. What we think of when we hear the wordmermaidtoday is very different from what other time periods and cultures have described.”
Somehow mermaid doesn’t fit with the beastly, dragon-tinged allusions I keep getting, even the way Levi describes it. “The poster calls her a monster and a demon,” I point out.
He nods. “These old freak shows used hyperbolic words, anything to draw in a crowd.”
“Did we have those here in Seattle?”
“Possibly,” he admits. “But these shows often traveled, especially if they were successful. This reminds me of the infamous Fijimermaid, an exhibit that was displayed at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum for years. It amounted to the preserved body of a monkey sewed onto the preserved body of a fish. Maybe someone tried the same thing here.”
I chew my lip, wishing it were that easy. But somehow, I highly doubt it. “She doesn’t look like a monkey sewed onto a fish.”
“Neither did the posters for the Fiji mermaid,” Levi tells me. “Like with their word choices, pit shows like this one often heavily embellished their advertising.”
“Well, this one seems local, at least to the Pacific Northwest,” I point out. “I thought you or your grandfather might have heard of it.”
“I can ask him,” Levi says, refolding the paper and tucking it into his shirt pocket. “There’s also a curiosity shop on Pier Fifty-Four that might know something about it. I’m acquainted with the owner. This is precisely their kind of thing. Okay if I keep this?”
“Please,” I agree, grateful he’ll investigate further for me. “I think there may be more to it than meets the eye. It’s just a hunch,” I explain when he gives me a questioning look.
“Funny,” he says, facing me and stepping very close. “I have the same hunch about you.”
I’m suddenly and fiercely shaken by nerves I didn’t expect. Levi’s windswept charm and warm countenance have reduced me to a lovesick teenager with a single line. I have half a mind to turn around and never return, to cut this off like a gangrenous limb before it has time to infect me further. Because this, I can tell, will be nothing like Roger. This thing growing between us will lack all the ambivalent, invisible energy that kept me safe, detached, impartial. This will ask everything of me. But I may have come too far to turn back. He’s already under my skin. Like Arla. Like the Fathom.
My life has been invaded. I’m under a new regime.
“So,” he says, “back to the matter at hand. Did we just have our first date and our first fight in the same night?”
I can’t hold back my smile. “I think so.”
“That must be some kind of record,” he says.
I can’t deny that we seem to be moving at an advanced pace.
“There’s another first I think we owe it to ourselves to get out of the way.” His fingers wrap around the collar of my trench coat, and he pulls me gently up and toward him. “I’m going to kiss you now, Judeth,” he says softly, like it’s more of a wish than a statement. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to do since the moment you stepped in here looking for ‘something familiar.’”
“Okay,” I whisper. I’m not sure anyone’s ever told me they were going to kiss me before. Roger certainly didn’t. He just leaned across the charcuterie board and groped my lips with his, tasting of hard cheese. This ought to be infinitely sweeter.
Levi nods as if he’s questioning my consent, and I nod back, tingling with anticipation. But he is not brusque and stingy like Roger. His lips brush mine delicately and then linger, passing over my mouth again and again until neither of us can bear to pull away for air. He stiffens against me and his hands hold my face as if it is something precious, the smell of old leather and paper circling us like an aphrodisiac. My hands snake hungrily beneath the hem of his shirt, over the waistband of his well-fitting jeans and the plane of his abdomen, and into the coils of hair that cloak his chest. He groans into my mouth and drops a hand to my waist and then lower, squeezing with relish as he pulls me closer.
Reluctant, I break away, head nodding and eyes flashing to the wall of storefront windows that face the street. “We’ll have an audience,” I tell him. Medusa’s curvy stage comes to mind, Arla tucked comfortably in her dark booth, everyone there a voyeur in someone else’s game.
With a final peck, he steps away, thinking I’m telling him to stop. But I’m just getting started.
