“But you couldn’t sing. You couldn’t even talk. I remembered that better than how you looked. It stayed with me. I was coming out of unconsciousness, Ariel. Please have a little pity. I had swallowed copious amounts of seawater—I was coughing it up for the rest of the day, and lay in bed with a fever for three nights. I narrowly avoided pneumonia and there’s still a little bit of a twinge in my lungs on certain days if I cough too hard.”
“Oh,” Ariel said, taken aback. She hadn’t thought it was like that at all. From her perspective she had saved him, fought with her dad, and returned triumphantly as a human to woo him. She hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what had happened to him in the meantime.
Same old Ariel, she thought with a mental sigh. Impulsive—and a little thoughtless.
“Would you have stayed? A human?” he asked curiously. “If I had fallen in love with you, and you got your voice back, and could stay on land?”
“I…suppose so…？”
It was a question she had thought about many times over the past few years. The answer had changed with time. Back then, she absolutely would have stayed, and lived happily ever after as the human princess married to her true love in the Dry World.
But now…as someone who had been Queen of the Sea…and, perhaps, had more time to think…Who knew? There were so many details to the world that she hadn’t understood back then, when her vision was colored in bright primary hues and the borders between truth and fiction were defined in bold black lines. Would she have aged and died as a human? Would it have been worth it? Would she miss her friends, her family? Could she wake up every morning and not choke on the dry air?
“…on the other hand, it’s also possible my father, the King of the Sea, would have stormed your castle, drowned all the inhabitants, and dragged me back home. He’s a bit controlling that way.”
“Drowned? Everyone?”
“I mean stormed quite literally,” Ariel said with a tight smile. It was a power she now controlled, by means of the trident disguised as a beautiful and ostensibly harmless hair comb.
Eric took a moment to digest this.
“I guess falling in love with mermaids is pretty dangerous,” he finally said.
“Did you?” Ariel asked in a small voice. “Fall for me? At all?”
Eric gave her a measured look, treating the question seriously as she had his. “I did fall for you, just not in the way I expected it would happen. And maybe not in the way you hoped. It wasn’t a lightning bolt. As I got to know you, I realized you were the most…energetic, fun, enthusiastic…alive girl I had ever met.” He smiled at the memory—and Ariel felt her breath catch. “You know, for a boy who’s all about sailing and running around with his dog and exploring, you were just about as perfect a companion as he could ever want. And beautiful, to boot. I would have been very lucky.”
He said this wistfully.
Ariel wasn’t sure when she was going to start breathing again.
What if, what ifs…
“…So yes. I think I did,” he said, taking her hands and squeezing them. “No, I know I did. You were one in a million. Even an idiot like me saw that. But then…Vanessa came along…”
He looked confused.
“She had my voice,” Ariel supplied. “And you remembered the song.”
“Yes! But…it was more than that. Somewhere between Wait, that’s the girl who saved me! and the next moment, everything went…fuzzy.”
“Ah. Well. She cast a spell on you. On all of you, I think, somehow. But primarily you,” Ariel said bleakly. “I think she knew her stolen looks and voice wouldn’t be enough when coupled with her, um, very original personality. So she…”
“Stolen looks?”
“That’s not what she looks like. At all. Even as a cecaelia. She’s much older. And shaped differently. Her arms are shorter.”
“She’s…half…octopus?”
“No, she’s half god,” Ariel said impatiently. “And what’s wrong with octopuses? You don’t seem to mind girls who are ‘half fish,’ as you say. What’s the difference?”
“There is a difference,” Eric said, looking a little sick. “It might not be logical, at all, but for some reason, there’s a difference.”
“Well, you’re married to a person who is old enough to be your grandmother—at least,” Ariel said with a smirk. “With or without tentacles.”