My Online Alien Merfolk is Real novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dock Lamp
At 2:47 a.m. the stranger Sorcha has chatted with for two years types that he is at her dock, and he is real. He says the face she sent was never hers.
At 2:47 in the morning, the stranger I had loved for two years typed, "I'm at your dock."
I read it three times on my laptop, sitting cross-legged on the sofa in my father's old flannel shirt.
The cottage was dark except for the screen.
Outside, the inlet slapped against the pilings the way it did every night.
I typed, "Funny. Very funny, Velun."
He answered right away, the way he always did.
"I'm not joking. Look out the window, Sorcha."
His name on Driftline was Velun_Tides, and he had told me on our very first night that he was an alien merman.
He said his ship had gone down in the trench off the Oregon coast and he had been stranded ever since.
I had decided he was a lonely roleplayer with a gift for worldbuilding, and I had decided it kindly.
I never said it out loud, because I needed him to keep talking.
Nobody else asked me how my day was and then waited for the answer.
My phone buzzed on the cushion.
It was Brent, my ex, at 2:49 a.m., because Brent did not sleep when he was angry.
"Saw your chat logs are all over the town group page. Great look, Sorcha. Tell your fish boyfriend the loan's due."
I stared at it.
Then I opened the town group page, and my stomach dropped through the floor.
Someone had posted screenshots of my private chats with Velun.
The caption read, "Sorcha MacAuliffe and her alien boyfriend. Bring her a casserole, folks, she's lost it."
There were three hundred comments.
One of them said, "Is this the crab guy's daughter?"
One of them said, "Brent says she hasn't left the house since the funeral."
My face went hot.
Brent had been the only person I ever gave my password to.
I closed the laptop so hard the sofa shook.
The dock light shone through the kitchen window, a yellow smear on the black water.
Something moved at the edge of it.
I told myself it was a seal.
I told myself a lot of things, and then I pulled on my father's rain boots without socks and went out the back door.
The cold bit my knees.
The boards of the dock were slick with fog.
I walked out under the lamp with my arms wrapped around myself.
The water beside the last piling rippled in a long, slow line, and it was not the line a seal makes.
"Velun?" I said.
My voice came out.
A hand came up out of the water and closed around the piling.
It was a long hand, silver-grey, with webbing between the fingers and thin blue lines running up the wrist.
Then a head rose out of the dark, and the lamp caught his eyes.
They were amber, and they glowed.
His hair floated around his shoulders, dark teal and wet, and along his neck, under the jaw, thin slits opened and closed as he breathed.
I did not scream.
I want that on the record.
I stood very still, and what came out of my mouth was, "Your profile picture is a whale."
His mouth moved.
It took me a second to understand he was smiling.
"It is a very handsome whale," he said.
His voice was the one from the nights I had talked myself to sleep.
It was low and a little rough.
It had a real throat now, and a real chest under it, and a real breath that fogged in the lamp.
My knees gave out, and I sat down on the dock.
He pulled himself up onto the boards beside me, as far as his arms would take him.
The lower half of him stayed in the water.
I saw the long curve of a tail under the surface, scaled in dull silver, slowly keeping him there.
"You're real," I said.
"I told you I was," he said.
"Everyone says that."
"Not everyone says it from the bottom of the sea."
I laughed, and it broke in the middle, and I put my hand over my mouth.
He lifted his own hand and stopped an inch from my face, not touching, as if he were asking.
I leaned into it.
His palm was cool and rough and dry-wet.
I felt the pulse in it.
"Two years," I whispered. "You've been under there for two years."
"Two years, four months, and nineteen days," he said.
"You counted?"
"You were the only voice I had."
My eyes stung.
I had spent two years imagining this moment in a hundred ways, and in every one of them I was braver.
In every one, I knew what to say.
He tilted his head, the gill lines under his jaw fluttering.
His thumb moved once along my cheekbone, very gently.
"Sorcha," he said.
"Yes."
"I need to tell you something, and I want you to know I'm not angry."
My stomach turned over.
"The woman in your pictures," he said. "On the ridge, laughing, in the green jacket."
I stopped breathing.
"That was never your face," he said.
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