The view was similar to last night yet now past sunrise the gantry cranes of the Port of Long Beach were bright orange iron-and-steel sentinels lumbering back and forth. Lorna sat in an armchair by the window of the hotel room. Lorna and Kitt planned to go for a scenic drive later that morning and then Kitt was leaving for a two day seminar at Sea World in San Diego. For now, however, Lorna had thrown the curtains wide and was drinking room service coffee from a white ceramic cup with the Hyatt hotel logo on it – the same logo that was on the breast pocket of the terry cloth robe she was now wearing; the robe that Dr. Kittridge Dawson had draped across her shoulders and in which he had carried Lorna in his arms across the pool deck of Rooftop 360 and into the elevator.
Once Lorna had showed Kitt her tail, Kitt placed his hand gently over hers and pulled it away, letting the table cloth fall back down to conceal her transformed self. Kitt picked up the white linen napkin from his lap, folded it neatly and placed it on the tabletop.
“Pardon me,” said Kitt, signaling a passing waiter. “Can we please have the check?”
“Very good, sir,” said the waiter – not Derek, who Lorna noticed was typing something into his cellphone.
Maybe Marina’s phone number.
Kitt and Lorna sat for a while longer at their table at Rooftop 360 atop the Hyatt hotel in Long Beach with the glow of its pool, the chatter of its guests, and that lingering view of the sun setting, ever setting, disappearing and finally gone. When the time came, Kitt excused himself.
“Wait,” he whispered, lips brushing Lorna’s ear – Caressing my soul, thought Lorna – before heading to the elevator.
Kitt had left his iPhone behind on the tabletop and, while she waited, Lorna saw the screen light up with a received text message. She didn’t mean to look, but it was a reflex action.
Arnold called me. He’s coming home. Thank you. R.
Arnold called Rita. I wonder how much he told her. Possibly, he told her everything.
If so, Lorna could now hold at least some measure of respect for Dr. Briar. What was it Kitt had said? Try not to hate him.
“Lorna?” said Kitt’s voice at her shoulder. It startled her, pulling her out – thankfully – from thinking about Dr. Briar and Dr. MacAvoy and Marina. “Everything alright?”
Lorna turned in her seat and looked up at him. Kitt was carrying a long bathrobe draped over one shoulder and in that moment Lorna knew that she was in love with him. Kitt lowered the robe over Lorna’s shoulders, and she gathered it around herself.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I’ve managed it before,” replied Lorna. She pushed back her chair and stood, making sure the robe was concealing her. Her caudal fin was by turns pliable and rigid as Lorna pictured her feet, as she made herself shuffle-walk. She made it halfway to the elevator and stumbled. In one fluid motion Kitt swept her into his arms and carried her. Lorna felt for sure that someone would notice, that within moments there would be a hundred camera phones trained on her, zoomed in on the tail emerging from the hotel bathrobe. She rested her head on Kitt’s shoulder and realized that, in his arms, she didn’t care.
Kitt pressed the call button and when the elevator arrived, he carried Lorna inside.
“Wait, Kitt,” said Lorna, watching the doors slide shut. “What about the check?”
“Everything has been taken care of,” he replied. “I charged it to the room.”
Lorna had another sip of coffee, holding the warm cup in her hands, listening to Kitt in the bathroom. The door was partly open and the sounds of showering filled the room. He was humming a tune, something Lorna recognized from an oldies station. Steam slipped from the open door, drifted across the ceiling and dissipated above the bed.
Kitt had carried Lorna to the bed and lowered her gently. He’d already been to the room before coming back for her. Instead of the counterpane, Lorna now found herself on crisp white linen. He sat down next to her and looked with fascination at the lower third of Lorna’s tail from the delicate curling ends of her caudal fin, up to where her ankles would be had they not fused and become part of…whatever this was. From there crimson and teal scales covered her tail – formerly her calves and shins, the length of her former legs not covered by the robe and, beneath it and further up, Lorna’s dress.
“I had glimpses of you,” said Kitt. “At the Aquarium, when I helped you out of the sea lion pool. A quick view of scales and color before I threw a towel around you…”
“You threw a towel around me and you held me close,” said Lorna. “And now…”
“And now I see you,” said Kitt. “I see you whole.”
“Whole?” asked Lorna.
“You’ve been thinking of this transformation as something…something else, something that isn’t you,” said Kitt. “But it is, Lorna. It is you.”
“Kitt, I –”
“May I?” he asked.
After a moment’s hesitation, Lorna nodded.
Kitt touched Lorna’s tail. Her scales, her skin, warm under his hand, radiating a gentle heat like the embers of a bonfire on a beach after last night’s revels; a memory of heat and blood and love. Beneath his fingers, Kitt felt Lorna’s pulse like the ripple of a wave through the soft scales, each no bigger than a thumbnail and each seeming to…
“Sing,” said Kitt. “Your scales, your skin, feels like it is singing.”
He pulled his hand back for a moment, then placed it on Lorna’s tail again, the sensation resuming.
“What is it?” asked Lorna.
“You said when it happens, the transformation…”
“Yes, Kitt,” said Lorna, already knowing what he was going to say – the same part of her that knew what a caudal fin was.
No, thought Lorna. Not part of me.
“You said it tingles,” said Kitt. “Like a limb waking up.”
“Yes,” said Lorna.
Not part of me. All of me.
“I can feel it, too,” said Kitt.
In a hotel room in Long Beach California, accompanied by the faint and constant hiss of ducted air-conditioning, a marine biologist was touching the tail of – in the absence of any other convenient term – a mermaid.
“I don’t know how much longer this will last,” said Lorna. “And I want you to see me.”
Kitt pulled his hand back again.
“Are you sure?”
Lorna untied the bathrobe and opened it, revealing more of her tail, the length of it where it reached up to her knees and then widened before being concealed again at mid-thigh by her floral dress.
“I want you to see me,” she said again. “Every time I’ve been…transformed, I’ve been dressed. At the mall, at Neiman Marcus, with you – I’ve only ever seen myself as you already have.”
Kitt stood up, kicked off his shoes and pulled off his jacket, the lines of his arm and chest muscles visible though the blue Kenneth Cole shirt. He walked across the room and dialed the dimmer switch down, the lighting now softer, mellow. He came back to the bed.
“I want you to see me,” said Lorna for the third time. “I want my first time to be with you.”
I’m ready for this, she thought. I’ve spent all this time, these past weeks looking for answers as to what this is, what I am.
"Close your eyes,” said Lorna as she closed her own. She didn’t need to wait to see Kitt close his eyes first, nor need to peek to ensure he kept them closed.
Marina didn’t have the answers.
Lorna hiked her dress higher, past the tops of her thighs and up over her bottom.
My dad didn’t have the answers.
Lorna pulled her dress higher still. As she did so, she felt the transition of her skin with her fingertips, from scales to flesh where her tail met her hips. She lifted her dress up past her navel, her breasts, over her shoulders and off her head. Eyes still closed, she tossed the dress across the room. She leaned back on the bed, her arms behind her, resting on her elbows, her pose like that of a sunbather.
My family doctor didn't have the answers.
“Kitt,” said Lorna. “I’m going to count down from three and then we are going to open our eyes.”
In the morning light, as Lorna poured another cup of coffee, the shower was turned off and she heard the soft rasping sound of a towel being pulled off the towel rack, Lorna’s every sense attuned and attenuated. Lorna could hear and count every seagull flying in formation above the water of the Port of Long Beach or roosting in the struts of the gantry cranes. Lorna could, through the double-glazed windows of the seventeenth floor hotel room, hear a rushing police car, a racing fire engine, a speeding ambulance.
The echo of sirens calling.
That’s what my pose had been, thought Lorna, remembering again last night. Not a sunbather, but a siren. Is that what I am? A Siren?
None of her obsessive studying had covered that possibility. Lorna couldn’t remember, either, having seen anything to that effect at Kitt’s exhibition at the Aquarium.
“Three,” she had said, her voice calling across the night and through her memory into the day.
“Two,” said Kitt, joining her in the countdown.
“One,” they had said together, opening their eyes.
For several moments there had been only silence, broken at first by their breathing, the air-conditioning and the distant sounds of traffic. Lorna was looking at Kitt’s face, trying to gauge his reaction. He wasn’t looking down at her tail, not at first. He was looking into her eyes.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
Only then did his gaze begin to shift. His eyes traced the fall of her hair to her shoulders and the way it curled around her ears. He traced the roll of her shoulders and the shallow depressions of skin at her collar bone. He reached out his hand and touched one of these hollows, his touch triggering a nerve and Lorna felt her skin shiver from tip to tail, her scales seeming to ripple. From here, his hand travelled further, finger tips tracing the line of her sternum, the line of her cleavage and eventually meeting the swell of her breasts in their turquoise cotton bra. His touch did not linger there, his palm briefly passing over the right cup and then settling on the skin beneath, where her ribs met the gentle swell of her belly.
“Lay back,” said Kitt, his voice strong and sure.
Lorna settled with her back on the sheets, her head resting among the pillows, her hair arrayed behind her like it was floating -- the same sensation that she felt in her arms and chest, a feeling of weightlessness anchored only by Kitt’s assuring touch.
“Kitt,” whispered Lorna.
His hand travelled on further to her hourglass curve. He leaned in and kissed her, their lips meeting again like sea and shore, fitting together and sliding apart, tongues lingering in caress. They breathed into each other, his breath warm against her skin as his lips left her mouth and kissed her neck, his beard stubble like fine sand, a delicious scratching that caused Lorna to shiver again, her body rising to meet him. She shifted on the bed, raised a hand to his chest, felt the tight muscles beneath the cotton. Kitt’s hand slid further down until the edge of his finger encountered the transition, the first line of scales that emerged from Lorna’s hips.
“Yes,” said Lorna.
Ever the scientist, Kitt stroked a patch of her skin upwards, against the grain of her scales. They rasped against his palm, like the tiny hooks in a strip of Velcro tape. When he touched Lorna’s skin with the grain, they were soft and smooth.
Kitt kissed her again, his hand reaching around and cupping the back of her tail, where her butt would be, then he stopped. He leaned back, took Lorna’s hand, and guided it across her body, past her hips, down her belly, to her pelvis.
“Do you feel that?”
Lorna looked down to see what he was seeing. From the tops of her fused thighs, scales enveloped her pelvis as though she wore a skimpy bikini, a low crest that covered half the skin of her groin and wrapping around her hips and further up to her rear.
“How do we…” said Lorna. “I mean, how does this… This is… fascinating!”
“We’ll figure it out, Lorna,” said Kitt. He leaned down and kissed her navel, her hip, gradually touring upwards back to her neck, her mouth. She reached up and started to undo the buttons of Kitt’s shirt, slowly, one by one, revealing his chest and stomach – muscles tight not from gym workouts but from working on boats and wrangling marine animals; skin golden and glowing not from a Santa Monica tanning bed but from exposure to sun and wind and waves.
Kitt could be as much a creature of mythology as I am, thought Lorna as she pulled him down on top of her, his weight settling across her breasts and belly. She wanted him as ballast, to hold onto him and sink down into the deepest depths, a private universe beneath the waves and beyond the sea. Lorna kissed him and he kissed her in return. He reached behind her and unsnapped her bra.
“I heard you,” said Lorna as Kitt removed her bra. He was kissing her neck again, and she could keenly feel the press of his lower body against her.
I heard you say that you thought you were falling in love with me.
“I know you did,” said Kitt. He didn’t need to ask Lorna what she meant, he simply knew as a lover knows.
Her senses were reeling, a tell-tale tingle filling every pore of her skin with effervescence. She slipped a hand along Kitt’s taut stomach muscles, down to the waistband of his pants. He shifted and her hand brushed the bare skin of her legs. As she moved a finger along her skin, she could feel her scales receding as though at the touch of her hand but she knew better than that. In this instance, it was his touch that was reversing the transformation.
“Make love to me,” said Lorna.
“But --” whispered Kitt. "Your tail."
“Right now,” said Lorna, sitting up to reach Kitt’s ear with her lips. “Right now, that ought to be the least of your concerns.”