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A burnt-out dotcom scientist thinks he's seeing things when he meets a mermaid. She thinks she's doing something wrong when he doesn't respond to her glamour--but when he explains *why*, she decides that a little matchmaking would be just the thing...
...and that's how I started spending several hours a day, whenever the tide was right, sitting in a rock pool talking to a mermaid. The pool wasn't totally enclosed at high tide, so Pearl could get in and out, but the rocks did provide shelter from the surf and somewhere for us to sit. Pearl was intelligent, insatiably curious, and utterly uninhibited. I delighted in her company, if not for the reasons she had expected. And then one day, I arrived at the rock pool, and she said, "I want you to meet someone."
There was a sudden movement under the surface of the water, and then a splash, and I was looking at a man treading water. A merman, like Pearl to look at, but handsome where she was beautiful. This time the beauty wasn't wasted on me. Before I knew what I was doing I was in the water, my mind dazzled by what I saw.
The shock of the cold water woke me. I'd stepped into the rock pool fully clothed, not thinking what I was doing, not thinking at all and, for the first time since I'd met Pearl, I was truly frightened. The splash as I went in had broken my eye contact with the merman and I looked away. Then it was Pearl in my vision, and I remembered the legends, mermaids luring seamen to their doom. I was immune to Pearl, but only because Pearl wasn't what I wanted. Now the merfolk outnumbered me and one of them was more than adequate bait even if the other wasn't. I tried to turn around and reach the rocks, fighting down panic, near to screaming when I felt a hand touch me.
The full story is 3000 words long, and was published in the Myths ebook anthology published by Torquere Press (now out of print).
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