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They met for the first time in a summer storm.
The salt-caked windows were foggy with candle-smoke as the wind howled furiously and rattled the glass, demanding to be let in. But the hut was sound, only whistling draughts able to slip in.
Lisa wasn't one to ask questions. Everyone had their secrets, everyone had their wounds. She didn't want to be the cruel knife prising out the bleeding heart, like the fishermen skilfully shucking oysters and barnacles back at the alehouse.
But even then, when she took the woman with peat-black wet eyes and hair the colour of summer wheat in her arms, her fingers found the jagged slash marks across her back.
The woman stiffened but Lisa held her close and kissed her bare shoulder, tasting salt. In the dark, her lover sighed, relinquished her careful, guarded front and returned her embrace.
Her body was fluid, was liquid, was heated, was ready. Her fingers sank in Lisa's hair like a galleon in the wine-dark sea, pale throat gleaming by candle-light as she arched back, keening with want. Their bodies slipped under the sheets like seals spearing through water.
Later, Lisa was unsurprised to wake up and find the bed empty.
>
She learned her name the second time they met, also at the alehouse: Rosie.
"My husband was a fisherman down the coast."
A careful test for so many different things, watching for a sign. Lisa felt those anxious eyes heavy on her but she calmly drained her mug.
"My father was too. He drowned in a storm. Looking after the family business now, if you can call it that."
"Not me. I left it all behind." Dark eyes impenetrable as ice, challenging her to ask.
Lisa hummed. "No regrets?"
A thin smile, just the barest lift at the corner of her mouth. "None whatsoever."
Lisa returned the smile with a slow nod. "I'm glad."
By dawn, Rosie was gone, but Lisa didn't mind.
Somewhere deep down, she understood that this was the way it had to be, and she was all right with this arrangement, even if the village folk might look at her strange when she took Rosie's hand and walked out the alehouse with her, or overheard them gossip how she smelled of the sea even when she had just washed her clothes.
They lived on the coast, her hut was next to the cove and she hauled fish for a living, what did they expect her to smell like?
Still, Lisa found herself indeed smelling the sea in places she didn't expect: in little nooks and crannies around the hut, in the grassy knoll a little ways up from her hut when she went to pick berries, in little pots and pans and teapots, in her dreams.
The fifth time, Rosie casually dropped a cloak of the finest pelt—superbly weaved and richly textured—on to the rickety chair next to the dinner table before she was standing in front of Lisa with hungry eyes, hands reaching to pull her closer from her shirt.
Lisa pretended not to notice as they kissed and she bore Rosie to bed—but her lover would not turn her back on the cloak.
>
Rosie cracked by the eighth time, gripping Lisa's dark hair in a punishing fist.
"Surely you know what I am," she said and Lisa heard the cool froth of sea-foam and the shriek of gulls curl around her voice, prickling with hurt and longing.
"Of course," Lisa said softly.
She had heard the stories on her travels up the coast, heard the whispers, seen more than one waif with longing in her peat-black eyes as she faced the sea, even glimpsed a child whose face was more seal-like than usual, little nose whiffling timidly.
She arched beneath Rosie's heated gaze, yearning for her touch. "You taste of the sea," Lisa breathed reverently and the sea-salt smell around them intensified as though her words broke a spell, releasing the truth.
Rosie shook Lisa's head gently, fingers still tangled in oil-black roots. "Why?" she demanded. "Why won't you keep me?"
Why? Lisa wondered.
She could have done the same as the stories: here was a golden opportunity that only a fool would lose out on.
She could have done like all the cunning fishermen that ever came across a besotted selkie: won herself a loyal wife that would keep house, bear children and most importantly, never flee—not while her pelt was cruelly kept from her.
She could picture nightly claiming the hungry fire that kindled in Roseanne's eyes before their lips met and held, stoke it to a conflagration, and it would belong to her and her alone.
She could master a piece of the proud, seething sea, owning it as much as the ocean ruled their lives, smugly taunting it. You have my father, I have your daughter: we're equals now.
What more could she want?
A long silence waited and stretched out between them like a tidepool, filling with Rosie's breaths. Cool as a current. Deep as the Channel.
Lisa looked deep into Rosie's wet eyes and stroked her cheek with her thumb, pulse beating in her ears.
"Must I trap you to keep you, my heart?" Lisa said quietly. "Is that the shape of love you desire?"
Rosie stared, blinked, lips parting. A torrent of emotion dashed across her face, eyes stormy. Lisa remembered the husband, the eyes of ice, the cruel marks on Rosie's thin back. And then Rosie shuddered, her grip in Lisa's hair eased, caressing where before it punished. Her lips pressed cool and damp as the sea against the arching curve of Lisa's shoulder.
"What shape of love will you give to me?" Rosie whispered.
"Myself," Lisa said immediately, easily, voice ringing with certainty. "Myself, only myself, whenever you should wish it. Your cloak by the door, your body in my bed, the freedom to go, whenever you must. As long as you wish."
She sealed her promise with a gentle kiss to Rosie's trembling palm, rough with cooking and cleaning for her fisherman husband.
It's not an answer or a gesture that a fisherman would ever give, nor would think to do.
The ninth time, Rosie hung her cloak by the door, draped in careful dappled folds next to a drying oilskin jacket, and her peat-dark eyes sparkled like the sun outside the window on the mirror-smooth sea.
The End