Tags:
Romance,
Fantasy,
Family,
Paranormal,
Young Adult,
teen,
love,
mythology,
north carolina,
Myth,
finfolk,
memaid
once, years ago when we both wanted to get our first kiss over with. But kissing her had never felt the way it did when I kissed Elizabeth. How terrible of a person did that make me, that I couldn’t even feel the same way about the most important person in my life as I did about the person I had always hated?
“I’ll come back tomorrow to check on you,” I said softly as I walked out of the room, leaving Miss Gale’s comment unanswered.
Chapter Six
Mara blinked up at the gray sky, nodding approvingly at the clouds overhead. “Perfect,” she stated, pulling her camera from around her neck and turning a few dials.
The wind whipped my hair around my head and I pushed it back with one hand. “Are you sure?” It didn’t look like a perfect day. A storm threatened on the horizon and the clouds looked fat with rain. The ocean crashed against the pilings of the broken pier. We stood under the structure where it rose up from the wet sand. I glanced up at the rotting wood over my head, hoping the rest of the pier wouldn’t crash down on me.
“I’m sure,” Mara said confidently. She adjusted a dial on her camera again, then held it up so she could see the LCD screen on the back. She clicked the button a couple of times, taking a few test shots. I didn’t know a lot about photography, but I’d been around her enough lately to know that she never started a photo shoot without testing her exposures first.
Honestly, I wasn’t excited to be Mara’s model for the day. If Josh had been here, I was sure she would have asked him to pose for pictures by the pier and not me. I tried not to let it bother me that I was her default choice since Josh was gone. I should have been happy she’d asked me at all. I liked spending time with Mara. I wanted to spend as much time alone with her as I could.
But I felt the weight of my cell phone in my pocket, waiting for a text that hadn’t yet come.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Mara backed up a few steps. “Act natural. Stand there and look at the water. Walk. Whatever you want. I want to play with textures.”
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cut-off khakis. The wind whipped my hair into my mouth as Mara started clicking away with her camera. I felt ridiculous.
“What do you mean, textures?” I asked.
“I mean the way the lines of your clothes and hair and skin contrast against the roughness of the wooden pilings and the foaming water.” Mara knelt, not seeming to notice that her knees would be soaked from the wet sand.
I still didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I decided not to question her further. Mara took beautiful photographs. She had a way of capturing life with her camera, like her dad could capture it within his seashell artwork. I wasn’t exactly artistic. Stringing shells on fishing line didn’t count as works of art and didn’t take much skill.
I kicked off my shoes and pressed my toes into the wet sand. On the edge of where the ocean met the beach, I could feel the call of both water and earth within me. Part of me wanted to dive in and swim, while the other part wanted to stay rooted to the land. It was hard to fight these two opposing sides of myself. Sometimes it would be easier if I was fully human, if I could walk around every day like the people at school, ignoring the water if I chose to, able to go and do whatever I wanted.
Instead, I was tied here, stuck to live out my life on this island, caught between land and water.
“What was it like before you came here?” I asked, casting a glance over my shoulder at Mara. “When you lived in Memphis, I mean? What was it like to not live near the ocean?”
Mara shrugged as she continued to take photos. “I don’t know. It was just normal. It was what I’d always known.”
“Didn’t it hurt be so far from the water?”
“Not really,” Mara said. “In the back of my mind, I always knew something was missing, but I didn’t