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You are drowning when he finds you, choking on the salted spray of the ocean. Your parents fished from these waters once; a source of life, today, a thalassic grave.
You are drowning when he finds you, tossed from the wreckage of your ship, head swimming with sotol, heavy and thick. He lifts you onto shore with one hand, your weight as light as a feather in his grip.
“Are you alright?” He asks, calm and measured.
You cough, water pouring from your mouth. When you fully see him, his beauty is more of a shock than the water, more enveloping than the depths.
“I’m alright.” You hear yourself saying, an ocean away, your voice floating out of your body as you slowly return to yourself. “Then, remembering yourself, you respond in Spanish. “<I’m okay.>”
“<Didn’t you see the storm? Why did you bring the boat out so far?>” He admonishes calmly.
“<It looked like clear skies to me.>” You reply, reaching into your pockets for your cell phone. When you find it waterlogged and useless, you sigh and drop it back into your pocket.
“<I see.>” He says, studying you more openly than perhaps he should. “<What were you doing out here?>”
You sigh and pull your knees to your chest, shivering as the growing chill from the setting sun sinks into your skin. “<I was-I was pouring out my parents’ ashes.>” You point out towards the slowly sinking vessel far out at sea, a dot on the horizon as the storm that capsized it slowly abates. “<My family’s old fishing grounds.>”
He follows your finger, gaze even and pensive for a moment. “<I remember your family.>”
You finally take in the rest of him, glancing at him in the dim amber light of the setting sun. Shirtless, dripping with water, and wearing little more than emerald green swimming shorts, his limbs adorned with golden bands, and his feet-the wings upon his feet.
You watch those feathery white wings flap briefly before folding back against his ankles. He catches you looking at them, and then stands up. “<Perhaps I should take my leave,>” He announces, and you look at his face, and finally notice the points to his ears.
The mundanity of the statement clears away the last of the fog from your mind, and you realize that he seemed to appear without a boat. “<Who are you, really?>” You ask, the shiver gone from your voice.
He considers your question for a beat too long, and you think he won’t say anything before he stands to his full height. “<My name is Ch'ah Toh Almehen. But, if it is simpler to remember, you may call me Namor.>” Before you can respond with your own name, he walks back into the waves.
“<Hey!>” You get to your feet and call after him. “<What are you doing?>”
“<I am returning home!>” He shouts over the waves. “<I suggest you do the same.>”
Without another word or backwards glance, he vanishes into the water.
The night wind picks up, lashing sand and salt spray against your legs. You draw your soaked coat tighter around yourself and make your way up the beach towards the harbor.
When you return home, many of your parents’ old friends ask after your haggard, sea blown appearance, amazed that you made it back to shore after the storm.
You feel the truth on your tongue, like the tang of salt water, but you hold back. Let them see you as lucky instead of mad, because surely no one would believe that you were rescued by a man with wings on his feet.
You go back to the ocean with a new boat the next day, one in a veritable fleet of vessels your parents owned. Vessels you now own.
You carry shells, sea glass, a roasted fish, pieces of jade, gold plated jewelry. Anything of value that you hope comes close to repaying the debt you now owe Namor.
The sea is calm that day, bright sun beating down on you from overhead, cooking your already golden brown skin even darker.
The waves reveal nothing to you, no glimmer of Namor, no sign of movement beyond the gentle blue black surface of the water.
“I don’t know if you’re there,” You speak into the air. “But I wanted to thank you for yesterday. I hope you find this.”
You gather up the gifts and drop them one by one into the water.
Before you turn to pick up the plate with the fish, movement catches at the corner of your eye.
“You have returned.”
His voice is calm, a measured tone that shimmers across the air.
“I wanted to thank you.” You say to him, backing up and squinting at him in the glaring sunlight blinding off the water.
He looks down at the platter of fish. “You brought me food.” He says, not a question, just an observation.
“I did.”
He smiles. “Something you caught yourself?”
You shake your head. “I don’t have the touch for it the way my parents did.”
He looks over the simple boat, assessing the small net, the worn wooden deck. “You do not sail with a crew.”
You shake your head. “My parents did not believe in hiring more hands than they needed. They liked doing the work themselves, small batches, minimal impact.”
He nods and walks the perimeter of the boat. Again, you’re caught by the sight of his bare chest, of the water drying on his deep golden brown skin.
“Who are you?” You ask again.
“You already know my name.” He replies, gaze fixed on the horizon beyond your boat.
“I know your name.” You respond. “But how did you get here? You don’t have a boat, as far as I can tell.”
He chuckles and looks back at you, tilting his head curiously. “I have wings on my feet and pointed ears, and you want to know why I don’t have a boat?”
“I did notice that. I just didn’t think it was polite to bring it up unless you did.” You confess, shading your eyes with the back of your hand.
He smiles at you, an expression that keeps his teeth hidden, but you recognize the mirth in it nonetheless.
“I remember your parents.”
“You do?”
He nods, looking back over the water. “They fished this coast for generations, your family. I remember when one of your ancestors first set foot on this beach, running from some turmoil on the mainland.”
Your mind swims with information, your understanding capsized by his simple words. “What are you talking about?”
He looks back at you, steady as a tide. “Are you surprised?”
“You say you knew my ancestors?”
“Not personally. I never revealed myself to them, it wouldn’t have been wise for me to do so.” He looks past you, sighting the shore miles away. You look in the direction and can only see the most distant glimmer of land, the ocean a seemingly impenetrable distance away. He looks back at you, eyes distant and kind. “They were conscientious fishers. Never taking too much, just enough for themselves and the people on shore. Where were you, in all of this?”
His curiosity feels oddly misplaced. “I wasn’t raised in Progreso. I grew up in Michigan. Inland, near the Great Lakes, with my only aunt on my father’s side. I wanted to go to college in the states, which happened to be far from the ocean, and that was that.”
“But you stayed near the water.”
You pause, squinting out at the horizon. “I suppose I did.”
His gaze returns to the sea. “I need to return. I have matters to attend to.”
“Of course.” You pick up the plate of fish and brush your hair out of your eyes, tucking it behind one ear. “I expect I’ll see you again tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
And he slips into the water, winged feet first, his eyes never leaving your own.
You see him again the following day, and the day after that. You don’t fish every day, but when you do, he fills your nets at the end of your conversations, with the implicit understanding that he does so out of love for your parents, a way of making your time with him worthwhile. Even a being from the depths of the ocean seemed to understand the necessity of capital to keep one’s lifestyle afloat.
After a while, though, the conversations grow longer and longer, and it takes you more and more time to get back home after catching the fish you need.
“Would you like to come back with me?” The question comes to you out of nowhere, smoke from a fire that’s been kindling in your chest.
“To your home?” He asks.
You nod, and he smiles secretively to himself, as if the possibility of him visiting your abode was a distant dream he dared not entertain.
You steer the boat back to shore, hitching the rope to the dock with a detached steadiness, running through the rooms in your mind, trying to remember if you’d tidied recently enough to receive guests.
None of it mattered when he walked over the threshold to your home, to the home that your parents had occupied until just recently.
He gazed around the living room at the various artifacts your parents had gathered from the sea, tchotchkes and shells and gilded pieces of coral that you couldn’t bear to part with.
He walks over to a shelf across from the door, trailing a single finger across the pink edge of a shell. “I know this one.”
“You do?”
“I know the creature that once called it home.” He looks back at you, eyes full of a kind of ease that you had not noticed until just that moment. “I do not know the name of each and every denizen of the ocean, but I at least know of them, and I’m especially familiar with those that pass through my kingdown.”
His kingdom. “Well now that I’ve invited you over, can you take me to your home?”
“You would not survive to see it. The water pressure at the bottom of the ocean is immense.”
“Right. You mentioned that.” You sigh softly and table the conversation for a later time. You cross your arms and lean back. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Water will be alright.”
You walk through the kitchen, your bare feet padding gently across the cerulean tile under you. “Ice?”
“No, thank you.” As you fill the glass, you look up and see him in the reflection of the window behind the sink, cool brown skin made dark in the velvet night. You turn back, glass full, and hand it to him.
He takes it and drinks, tipping his head back, and you watch the adam’s apple bob like a buoy on gentle waves.
Something possesses you. Perhaps loneliness, perhaps lust, perhaps a dizzying combination of both, but you lean forward and press a kiss to his throat, your teeth grazing just under the small knob at its very front.
It hitches beneath your teeth, but he does not choke on the water.
Because of course he wouldn’t.
A soft sound, a thrum from the depths of his throat vibrates up against your lips as he takes a hold of your upper arm.
You pull back. “I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head, setting the glass down on the counter. “Do not apologize for giving me such a gift.” He murmurs, his hand unbearably warm on your arm, his eyes murky and half lidded.
You lean forward. He does the same. And in the moment that your lips meet, it feels as if the very floor beneath you begins to sway like the rocking of a boat.
You reach up to stroke his hair, your fingers grazing against the tip of his pointed ears.
Playfulness surges within you, and you gently pinch the skin between your fingers, massaging the point.
He hisses, the sound veering into a moan as his teeth graze across your bottom lip. He pulls away. Breathes. And stares into your eyes, obsidian like his.
“How deeply do you want to dive tonight?” He asks, his breath a shudder against your face.
You smile, and pull him towards your bedroom with a frenzied urgency. “As deep as you’re willing to take me,” You murmur back before pulling away. You are seized with the thought that you would gladly follow him into the sunless, obsidian dark of the ocean if he asked you.
Then he is upon you, in much the same way that the tide rises to meet the sand, in the same way that waves reach out to caress and crash against a cliffside.
Salt and warmth.
Warmth and salt.
Tastes fill your mouth and the air around him, thrumming with the silk velvet softness of water and the electrifying arc of saltiness, the bracing tang that vibrates in his wake like a second heartbeat.
You struggle against it, not the unhappy writhings of someone caught unaware in an unwelcome lover’s grasp, but in the way that a swimmer flounders in the waves after realizing that the currents were stronger than they had realized.
But he was not so inattentive a lover as that. The crash of his ecstasies calm into a steady rhythm, a gentle lapping that replaces the urgency of storm churned waves.
And you cling to him even stronger still, not with the death grip of the drowning on a piece of driftwood, but with the surety of a deep sea diver, their fingers curled loosely around the handle of the buoy that brings them out of the murky depths.
The waves pull you back into your body, your muscles aching pleasantly, your nostrils filled with the salty tang of your shared sweat.
“<Are you alright?>” He asks afterward, voice velvet soft against your hair.
You nod and lace your fingers behind his neck, tracing the tip of your nose against his cheek. “<Are you?>” You ask him.
“<Of course.>” He picks up your hand, pressing a kiss to the center of your palm. “<I did not anticipate just how desperate->”
“<Oh don’t start with that.>” You tease. “<Like you weren’t begging me to->”
“<Careful…>” He murmurs against your jaw. “<I can do it again, if you’ve caught your breath.>”
“<Well, I was already breathless when you found me.>”
He hummed at that, trailing his lips further down to the hollow of your throat. “<And you still are, I find.>”
You place your hands on either side of his head and pull him towards you, pressing your lips flush against his.
And as your lips join together, you realize that drowning feels a lot like falling in love.
You hear the stories they tell of you, sometimes. Fishermen chatting on the deck and pouring sotol and mezcal and tequila into the water. That your boat is charmed, that your presence on the water is good luck, somehow.
You don’t have the heart to tell them that it is not your own ability that fills their nets with fish. You have, as they say, a connection with another power.
You appreciate the gesture nonetheless, the cheers that rise around your boat as you set off for the day.
You ‘fill’ their nets, and they return home with a bounty.
Then you wait for Namor, one hand dragging across the surface of the water behind your boat. He emerges and kisses you, pulling you deep under the water with him as a school of fish parts around you.
And you continue, carried by him, and carried by the tides of time that slip around you.