Sen sang the last line wrong on purpose.
Ilar stood halfway down the orchard steps, a basket of apples against her hip. Below her, the evening tide covered the rocks. Sen’s pale shoulders rose from the water; his gills, at the sides of his neck, stayed beneath it.
“It ends on a high note,” she called.
“Only if you want the gulls to join in.”
He sang it low again. She answered high. From farther out came a gull’s sharp cry, as if he’d arranged it.
Ilar laughed so hard she set the basket down.
They had been meeting for two months. She tended her family’s orchard; he sang in the tide choir with his sea kin. Each knew the sound of the other’s work before knowing much else. He asked about the trees she liked best; she knew which choir songs bored him and when he sang them anyway for his sister. His songs drifted among the trees. Her dropped apples sometimes rolled down to the water.
The rocks were wet. She went one step farther to hear him, slipped, and caught the rail. Her basket tipped. Three apples fell into the sea.
Sen caught one. “Are you hurt?”
“Only angry.”
Above them, her aunt Bres opened the orchard gate.
“Come up,” she said.
Ilar climbed. Bres looked at her wet skirt, then at the merman below.
“So this is where you disappear.”
“I told you I was walking.”
“You left out the part I needed.”
Bres’s son had drowned years ago. She seldom spoke of him, but Ilar knew why she kept the sea gate locked at night. Her aunt had raised her. Fear was one of the ways she still tried to do it.
“No more meetings,” Bres said. “Not here. Not anywhere in the water.”
Ilar wanted to say she was forty and could choose for herself. But she was standing in a wet skirt after almost falling onto the rocks. The words would not make that disappear.
“Not on these steps,” she said. “I agree about that.”
“You heard what I said.”
“I did.”
The next afternoon, Ilar walked to the public tide pool at the other end of the orchard. A broad dry path led there. Families used its shallow steps on calm days. She told Bres where she was going and invited her friend Orla, who brought sewing and stayed on the upper bench.
Sen entered the pool through its open sea channel. He couldn’t live in fresh water. He couldn’t grow legs. The water had to keep flowing over his gills, even when he lifted his face to speak.
“We could meet farther out,” he said. “She wouldn’t see.”
“I would. I’d see myself hiding.”
“She won’t like this either.”
“I know.”
He rested his arms on the bottom step. His tail moved slowly beneath the surface.
Ilar sat one step above him. She could swim and hold her breath for a short while. That did not make the sea her home. Sen could talk with his head out of the water. That did not make the orchard his.
“I thought about leaving,” she said.
“The orchard?”
“Everything. Then I tried to picture where I’d sleep.”
He rubbed his thumb across the stone. “I thought you might ask me to stay here.”
“Would you?”
“I couldn’t stay through low tide.”
From the channel his sister Dema called, “Sen! The choir leaves soon.”
She swam into view, carrying a bundle of dark sea leaves. “I’m not singing your part again. Last night I had to do both.”
“I was here.”
“I noticed.”
Dema looked at Ilar, not cruelly. “We need him too.”
“I don’t want to take him,” Ilar said.
“People say that before they do.”
Sen turned toward his sister. “I’ll come when the tide begins to fall. I said I’d be there today.”
Dema remained beside the channel. She had her own reasons to wait.
Footsteps sounded on the path. Bres came down and stopped beside Orla’s bench.
“You’ve found someone to watch,” she said. “That doesn’t make the sea safe.”
“No,” Ilar said. “It makes this meeting less dangerous than the rocks. I won’t go farther out.”
“And tomorrow?”
“I can’t answer every tomorrow today.”
Ilar looked at Sen. “Will you keep asking me to hide?”
He took time to answer. She let him.
“No. But I want you to hear our choir. From here, if you like. We’re more than my voice.”
“I’d like that.”
He lifted one hand. Ilar leaned down from the dry step and took it. Water ran over her wrist. His fingers were cool, broad, a little rough from the stone.
“You’ll have to come lower,” he said softly. “My neck has to stay in the water.”
She knelt. He raised his face while his gills stayed covered. Their first kiss was brief because her knee hurt against the step. The second lasted longer. When she sat back, Sen was smiling.
Bres turned toward the path. “I’m going home.”
Ilar didn’t ask her to stay. “I’ll come before dark.”
“Then don’t expect me to keep your supper warm.”
The tide had begun to turn. Sen glanced toward Dema. This time his sister didn’t have to call.
“Go,” Ilar said. She disliked saying it.
He slipped toward the channel, then looked back.
“I miss you already,” she told him.
“I haven’t gone yet.”
“Then don’t spoil my line.”
He laughed. Dema caught his shoulder and pulled him into the sea.
Orla packed her sewing. Ilar stayed on the step a little longer, alone now. The voices of the choir rose beyond the rocks. She could not tell which one was his. She listened anyway, tasting salt on her lips.
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