TREASURE ISLAND BEACH

by Becca De La Rosa
Based on an idea by Maybell Marten

There’s a level of irony to the situation. He is aware of this, a sly half-nod to himself, a secret aside, and it makes him feel both better and worse as he kicks off his shoes and sinks his bare feet into the white, white sand. The aesthetics are just too perfect. The haze of June Gloom gentling the city. The empty strand. The bottle of bourbon heavy in his leather satchel. I’m so glad to sit down with you, the agent had said. Her teeth like white marble, expensive and brittle.

He drops his jacket and sits. The sand is cool and endlessly shifting. The water pulls out and in. Further up the coast it curls into riptides, prized by the surfers and the bodyboarders who crowd the beaches, but here the water is almost peaceful. Deceptive, like everything else.

He is drowning his sorrows. I am drowning my sorrows, he thinks, speculatively, as he takes an unpleasant swallow of bourbon. It’s satisfying to put everything, even this unhappiness, in its rightful place within the narrative. Here, the soundtrack thrumming and throaty, something with too much scratchy bass to be exactly intelligible: the proper background noise to his failure. Which means that at some point there will be a triumphal rise, an unexpected success. That’s just good story structure.

A splash from the nearby shelf of rock breaks him out of his thoughts. He turns, expecting a sleepy seal, maybe a gull tossing a mussel to smash against the stones. Instead he sees a woman, just shouldering out of the water to rest her elbows on a mass of seaweed.

It’s not that she’s beautiful. Her hair is a slick black coil against her neck, dripping down her back, her eyes enormous, her mouth a pouting pink shell, but everyone in LA is beautiful. Mostly it’s that she seems pissed off. She’s glaring at something in the distance, her shoulders hunched, and she looks equal parts defeated and antagonistic towards the world in general. It’s a look he empathizes with. “Hey,” he calls. “Are you okay?”

The woman whirls to stare at him. Her wet hair cuts a knife-track through the air when she turns. Her eyes are oyster-shell-gray, the color visible even from this distance. “Oh, charming,” she says crossly. “The tide will never come in fast enough. You’d have better luck jumping off the pier.”

He laughs, in spite of himself. “Thanks for the advice. Does it come from personal experience?”

In response, the woman pushes herself fully out of the water. She’s naked, her hair falling in sodden strands over her breasts, her long, muscular tail a glimmer of blue-black scales, iridescent in the haze. He feels a momentary crawling flicker of curiosity, embarrassment, and arousal, all braided and folded together. “Oh,” he says. “That answers that. You want a drink?”

The woman doesn’t move. Her eyes narrow in apparent suspicion. “What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon.”

“Is it expensive?”

“No,” he says cheerfully. “It cost eleven bucks. It’s all I could afford.”

“Then why,” she says, with the single most withering stare he has ever willingly submitted himself to, “are you drinking it at all?”

“Dreams crushed,” he says, waving the bottle. “The end of innocence. Everything gone up in a plume of smoke. That kind of deal.”

The mermaid shakes her head. “Self-pity,” she remarks to the murmuring sea. “Incredibly boring.” She slips off the rock and back into the water.

Is that the end of it? He sighs, scrunches his toes through the sand. But a moment later the mermaid reappears, easing herself from the water onto the rock nearest to him. She reaches out one hand with proprietary impatience. Obedient, he passes her the bottle. “Levi,” he says, gesturing at himself.

The mermaid scrunches up her face in distaste. “Amra. This is extremely disgusting.”

“It’s not great,” he agrees. “I thought mermaids never left Santa Monica.”

Amra passes the bottle back to him. “I had a fight with my sisters,” she says, glaring again. “So I went off on my own.”

“What was the fight about?”

She sighs. Without warning she flops back on the rock, so dramatically that droplets of water splash his cheek. “I want to be an actress,” she announces, up at the mist-gray sky. “My sisters told me I couldn’t do it.”

“Are you any good?”

Frostily, and with enormous dignity, Amra turns her head to peer at him. “Yes,” she says. “I am excellent.”

He drinks, passes the bottle back. “My script got rejected today,” he tells her. “That’s why I’m down here, feeling sorry for myself.”

“Are you any good?”

A question he’s been asking himself. He presses one palm flat to the sand beneath him. It crunches pleasingly under his skin. “I think so,” he says, as honestly as he can. “Today’s making it a little harder to be sure.”

The mermaid curls around to push herself up on one elbow. “When you have a dream,” she says, very seriously, “you should follow it.”

He makes a concerted effort not to stare at her breasts, but the bourbon is getting to him. Everything moves in strands of color. “Hey,” he says, more to distract himself than anything else, “we should make a movie. I’ll write and direct. You star. We could do everything ourselves. No one’s voices but our own.”

Neither of them speaks for too long. A looming discomfort sneaks over the morning. He shouldn’t have spoken, shouldn’t have opened his stupid, stupid mouth. Just when he’s gearing himself up to apologize, Amra moves again, this time to lie belly-down with her chin tucked on her arms. She regards him, her eyes wide and clear as pools of cloud. “Okay,” she says.

The bourbon makes everything warm. “You wouldn’t happen to have a fuckload of shipwreck treasure to finance our movie, would you?”

“That is a misconception, and it’s racist.”

“It’s not racist. You’re being racist.”

“Mermaids don’t see skin color,” Amra says loftily. “You’re all just people to us.”

He clutches at his chest. “‘Just people’? You’re breaking my heart.”

“No,” Amra says, “I am not.” She scowls. “Also, no. No treasure.”

“Oh.” He accepts the bottle from her, half-empty now. Half-full, he corrects himself, with slightly drunken optimism. “Know of any get-rich-quick schemes?”

The mermaid draws one finger down a patch of feathery moss. Her nails are blue-green, pale and strange. Her hair is drying in glossy tendrils. She’s so beautiful that nothing else in the world seems real. “No,” she says. “Do you have any weed?”

-

He doesn’t, but he does have a friend named Sky who obligingly meets them at the beach with her rolling kit and a bag full of meatball subs. Amra sits upright on the rock to smoke and eat. He finds himself fragmenting her into small details. The lazy flick of her tail where it’s dangled in the water. The muscles of her arms, lean and long. The five gills slit into either side of her pale throat, sealed shut except for when she talks excitedly about something. When they shimmer open, he sees red tissue, dark tissue, a secret depth. Sky, who takes everything in stride, doesn’t bat an eyelash to find Levi sprawled on the sand beside a mermaid. She listens with stoned sympathy to their predicament. Critically, it is Sky who makes the suggestion first. “You should do porn,” she says, scratching her nose with the hand holding her joint, bringing the lit end dangerously close to her halo of red hair. “It’s how Whelan’s cousin Treya bought her moped. She crashed it three days later, but it was so cute.”

He and Amra look at each other, look away. At each other. Away. He laughs under his breath, poised for some new and unique rejection, but she’s studying him when he cuts his gaze back to her. “You are fairly good-looking,” she says. “And I’m an actress. How would we do it?”

Sky shrugs. “How long can you be out of water?”

“As long as I want, if I’m careful.”

“Get a hotel with a bathtub. Film it on Levi’s phone. Post it online. Get paid a zillion dollars. Make a movie.”

The plan sounds so simple he’s positive there must be something wrong with it, but he can’t catch the tails of his drifting thoughts. “You’d be up for it?” he asks Amra.

She licks marinara sauce from her wrist. All of her movements, even the least extraordinary, have an animalistic edge to them. Wildness where there might otherwise be predictability. “I would,” she says. “Would you?”

“I’m a guy,” he tells her. “You’re beautiful. It’s not really a question.”

“I am beautiful,” Amra agrees, preening. “All right, then.”

They sit on the beach until long after dark, though later he can’t remember what they talk about. The next day he wakes up with a crippling hangover and a haunted feeling, like waking from a beautiful dream. But there are eighteen messages from Sky on his phone, explaining in exhaustive detail about a van she’s borrowing from her roommate’s friend’s brother, and someone’s girlfriend’s boss’s penthouse in the Arts District they can rent for a hundred dollars an afternoon. He forgoes coffee, forgoes breakfast, drives down to the beach, half expecting to find nothing, no shimmering scales to break the surface of the water, but Amra is there on the rock, combing out her hair. He shows her the texts. “A van,” Amra says, disdainfully.

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Hey,” he adds, moving closer to her. “I have a question. Are mermaids cold-blooded?”

Amra pauses with her fingers laced through handfuls of shining black. “Why?” she asks, one dark eyebrow raised. “Concerned at the prospect of what you will be sticking your dick into?”

Levi, whose motivation behind the question had been exactly that, reacts with unearned indignation. Amra rolls her eyes at him. “I am not going to tell you,” she says. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

They agree on Thursday, two days away, and he says goodbye, drives to his job at the office, where he processes data and repeatedly Googles are mermaids cold-blooded, and then, when that doesn’t answer his question, what does cold-blooded mean. Finally, ashamed and intrigued in equal measure, he types in fucking a mermaid, though he deletes the text before he clicks the search button.

The days crawl by. On Wednesday night he brings a pizza down to the strand after dark, and he and Amra watch greedy gulls fight over their crusts. Neither of them mentions what’s going to happen tomorrow. He goes home and doesn’t sleep.

Sky appears at seven in the morning with the borrowed van, a ten-gallon tank of water, a shopping cart, and three breakfast burritos. Amra accepts the burrito, but refuses to get in the shopping cart. “It’s undignified,” she explains, stretching out to sun herself. In the morning light her nipples are the same pink as the inner sweep of a conch shell. “I am not groceries.”

“How do you expect to get to your acting jobs?” he asks, feeling, for the first time, dubious about the entire venture.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“When we make it big, I’ll buy you a gold horse-drawn chariot. Until then you’ve got the shopping cart.”

Amra opens one imperious eye to peer at him. “I don’t like the sound,” she says. “The wheel squeaks.”

Forty-five minutes and one trip to CVS for WD-40 later, they’re driving towards the Arts District, Amra humming to herself from where she’s curled in the body of the cart, polishing her scales with Sky’s coconut body butter. At the apartment building they have to take the service elevator, which Amra finds distasteful, but the apartment itself is beautiful, all light and exposed brick and views of the Art Deco buildings in the Historic Core. Amra exclaims in genuine pleasure at the sight of the bathroom, a palatial suite with a whirlpool jet tub big enough to fit four mermaids. Sky nudges Levi. “Got you a present,” she says, and digs a slightly battered GoPro from her pocket. He laughs. He can’t help himself. The strangeness of the situation is getting to him.

Together, he and Sky help Amra into the bathtub, which they fill with water, and then Sky salutes them both, and wanders off to raid the apartment’s bookshelves. He and Amra regard one another. “So,” he begins.

“Set up the camera,” Amra says patiently. “Take off your clothes. Come here.”

He does. The cool water makes him shiver. Amra is watching him, interested and amused, interested and unreadable, the feathery tip of her long tail gently grazing the lip of the tub, back and forth. “I have a confession,” he says, not moving from the opposite end of the tub. “I have no idea how to fuck you.”

“I don’t think you can do it from over there.”

“I’m psyching myself up,” he admits.

The amusement in Amra’s face falters. “I didn’t realize it would be that difficult.”

He stares at her. “No,” he protests, then, “shit, no. You’re – you’re so – I just don’t want to – I don’t want to fuck it up,” he says, dragging one fist down his jaw. “I don’t want to – be bad at it.”

Amra’s laughing at him. Her laugh is high-pitched and chilly, the sound of raindrops falling into tide pools. “Self-doubt,” she tells him, “is immensely unattractive, but somehow you manage to be quite sweet about it.” She holds out her hand. He moves to take it, feeling foolish and simultaneously intent, pushes himself towards her through the water. He brushes his leg against her tail. It’s silky, cold. Muscular, like the python he once wore around his neck on a school trip to the San Diego Zoo. The sensation trips some fuse inside his mind. “Here,” Amra tells him, guiding his hand down through the water. Six or so inches below the space where her belly button would be, if she were a human woman, the scales folded so intricately one over another part at the touch of his fingers. Below them, a sinewed seam in flesh the color of a Tahitian pearl, gun-silver and vaguely holographic with the way it shifts in the fragmentation of light through water. It both resembles and is nothing like a cunt. For one thing, the length of it is longer. Longer than the stretch of his hand, maybe, maybe longer than that. For another, the frills and lace of tissue that spill from the opening are silver, too, glistening underwater. She is entirely alien, and he is harder than he ever has been in his life. Carefully, he reaches out to touch one of the delicate protrusions. Amra gasps, startles back, her eyes large as teacups. “Good or bad,” he asks intently.

The coil of her tail lashes closer to him. “Good,” she whispers. “Do that again. Now.”

He brushes his fingertips against her. The silver flesh feels soft, glossy, like the viscid strands of seaweed that snatch at his ankles when he swims in the shallows. He hears his own breath catch. With infinite caution, with purpose, he presses two fingers inside the silver slit.

It’s wetter than a human cunt. Warm, too, far warmer than he had expected. The inner walls of the slit are textured with soft ridges and bumps. He tests one with his finger. Amra gives a soft moan. She reaches for him, closes her hand around his cock, forcing him to pause his movement inside her, all his thoughts turned towards stillness, everything in him desperate to thrust against her. Amra shimmies closer. The motion shoves his fingers deeper inside her. Her breasts press against his chest. She tips her head, angling her neck to offer him the gills at the left side of her throat. Hesitantly he bends to kiss them. Amra writhes. Encouraged, he opens his mouth against her skin. The gills part beneath his tongue, and he tastes salt, some oceanic bitterness, and the floral sweetness of bergamot. Amra hisses, grips his cock tighter. “What does it feel like?” he asks, all alive, wondering.

She strokes him once, only lightly, though it’s enough to make him shudder. “They’re sensitive,” she says, her voice unsteady. “When you lick me there I can feel it all down my body.”

“How deep are they?”

“Why? Do you want to know if you can fuck them?”

He’s wound too tightly to be anything other than baldly honest. “Yes,” he says.

Amra’s eyes flutter closed. She’s panting slightly, her lips wet, her hair snaking in the water. “They’re deep enough. You should try it sometime.”

The world opens up in bizarre and hedonistic new patterns. He lowers his mouth to her gills again, this time curling his fingers inside her when he dips his tongue into one of the slashes across her throat. Amra whines, her tail looping and splashing, sending great sheets of water down across the bathroom tiles. Electric triumph shoots through him. She looses her hand from around his cock, and he pulls his fingers free and shoves himself inside her in one fluid, ravenous movement.

For a moment he can’t breathe. Can’t think. The grip of her is impossible, the textures of her slit gentling and abrading all down the length of him, her breath hot in his ear where she has her cheek pressed against his, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. He thrusts once and almost comes from the sheer inexplicable pleasure of it. Her tail cuts patterns into the water.

Slowly, he builds up a rhythm, fucking into her, his hands at her breasts, at her ribcage, guiding her scale-slicked hips. When he gently nips the edge of one gill with his teeth, Amra shrieks, the sound guttural and piercing, a visceral pierce, like someone’s taken a sword to his side. Fucking someone without legs to part feels unexpectedly transgressive, as though he’s fucking a secret opening in a rock, an eddy of water, a stranger’s mouth in the pitch darkness. Amra is beautifully, terribly expressive. She whimpers, and bucks, and kisses him so deeply he can taste the secondary row of sharp, cartilaginous teeth behind her smile. Her tongue is warm, too.

He feels pressure building. Wills himself to slow down. Amra slicks her tail around his legs. “Oh,” she says, her head dropping backwards. The muscles in her slit flex around his cock, and he makes a sound he registers only distantly, and half-dreaming, half-fevered, he pushes his finger into one of the gills at her throat. It sinks up to the knuckle into slippery muscle, so tight the thought of fucking her there makes something like agony lance through his stomach. Amra lifts her head and gazes at him. Her eyes are all black, pupil and sclera, her cheeks flushed. “Don’t stop,” she says breathlessly. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.” Coming from her, even this plea sounds like a command. He grabs her hips. His fingernails catch on her scales.

Amra comes first, a seemingly endless wave of contractions rippling through her internal muscles, and he finds himself physically digging his thumbnail into his palm to ground himself at the overload of sensation, and the sight of her with her eyes heavy-lidded and her lips parted brings him so close he has to pull out of her, and before he registers what’s happening she darts underwater, takes him deep in her mouth. He comes with her soft secondary teeth gliding against his cock. It feels like being gutted. She swallows every drop.

“You are quite good at that,” Amra tells him, when he’s still somewhat reeling, black dots dancing at the edges of his vision. “How much money do you think we will make? Can we do it again?”

Can we. She said can we. He shoves water from his eyes. “Likewise,” he says, attempting to sound coherent and managing only to sound dazed, enchanted. “And probably we’ll have to.”

“All right,” Amra says, brushing back her dark hair. “I like you well enough. Can we get pancakes?”

-

The second time, he fucks her gills. The first video has just been posted: he spent one revelatory afternoon on his laptop with some free video-editing software, and the results are unexpectedly dreamy, the shots from his phone intercut with the underwater shots from the GoPro, rippling, shimmering, full of unintended artistry, his skin dark against hers, her tail lashing in and out of frame, the slide of his cock into her silver cunt hauntingly poetic, all of it scored by a pulsing, thrumming electronic piece dreamed up by one of Sky’s many friends and used in exchange for a free look at the video, which was decreed too fucking hot, dude. Already it has a few thousand views, which translates to a few hundred dollars in his bank account. After consulting with Amra, he spends some of it on their own website and online commerce package, so they can keep a greater percentage of their cut. Every time they meet, Amra steals his phone to check their views. He finds a near-erotic delight in watching her ego swell.

They film the second video on a beach in Malibu at twilight, with Sky standing guard a few yards away, the tripod set up near a cluster of seaweed-drenched rocks, across which Amra drapes herself like a Waterhouse painting. He stands over her. It should be grotesque, his cock disappearing into the side of her pale throat, the membranes of her gills opening and shutting for him, the glimpses of dark tissue when he pulls out before shoving back into her. It isn’t. It’s one of the most beautiful things he’s ever done. She fingers her slit while he fucks her, her tail snaking over the rock, and her gills are a tight red fist around him, and when she cries out he can feel it, the vibration of her voice, so momentarily he understands how sound has a speed, too, particles of energy and force dispersing into him, unknotting everything that holds him so carefully together.

“I’ve never done that before,” Amra tells him after, when they’ve cleaned themselves up and Sky has driven off in search of tacos and beer. She sounds subdued.

He pushes himself up beside her on the rock. His entire body seems hyper-sensitized, like he can feel the currents of air pulsing around him when he moves. “Did you like it?”

“Yes,” she says, frowning out at the dark horizon.

He waits, but she doesn’t speak again. “Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Why does something have to be the matter?”

“I don’t know,” he says, bewildered. “You just seem – ”

“I don’t seem anything!” she shouts. “You are wrong, and you have to admit it!”

He raises his hands, palm-out, a gesture of surrender. “All right, I’m wrong,” he says. “I have no fucking idea what I’m wrong about, but obviously I am.”

“Good.” She lapses into a sulky silence, only broken when Sky returns.

Some part of him thinks this has to be it. He’s done something, ruined it all somehow. But at the end of the night Amra flings her arms around his neck and kisses him on the cheek. “See you tomorrow,” she says cheerfully. He drives home in confusion, and doesn’t sleep.

He hasn’t really been sleeping much at all. His thoughts are full of Amra, Amra’s soft curves, Amra’s undulating tail, the way it feels to be inside her, all the strange places he has fucked her. Their second video brings a surge of subscriptions to their new website. He shows her the next morning, both of them sleepily stretched on the sand, nursing an enormous coffee between them. “We are very famous,” Amra observes.

“We’re doing all right,” he says. He can’t stop staring at her tail. The fins are translucent, lacy, decadent folds of cartilage, and he’s dreaming of running his tongue over them, of them brushing gossamer-lightly against his cock. “What should we do next?”

Amra flips onto her belly to sun her back. “I think you should give me a necklace.”

He laughs. “I meant for the videos, but noted.”

“I want a necklace with sparkles on it.”

“Sparkles?”

“Shining stones,” she says, her voice muffled by her arms. “You gave one to Sky.”

He stares. “Sky,” he echoes, too unintelligent to understand.

“Yes, Sky. Your friend, Sky.”

“Sky’s your friend, too,” he says stupidly. Sky has a cheap necklace with star-shaped rhinestones she occasionally wears. “Wait, I didn’t give her that necklace. I think she bought it at Claire’s for like eight dollars.”

“What,” Amra says icily, “is Claire’s.”

He shows her the store website on his phone. Amra leans on him to pore over it, and at last points to a charm of a mermaid clutching a Swarovski crystal. “You can give me this one,” she says. “And I think we should have costumes, and you should fuck my mouth.”

He does. They splurge on an Airbnb, an apartment downtown with a rooftop infinity pool, and then bribe the maintenance worker – another of Sky’s neverending circle of friends – to lock the roof access door and stick an out of service sign up in the hallway. Levi wears torn jeans and a pristine white t-shirt like a fucked up Jim Stark. Amra wears Lucite sunglasses and watermelon lipgloss and a gold lamè bikini, which he ritualistically strips off her. She blows him where he sits at the edge of the pool, her tongue flickering over the underside of his cock, and then he fucks her up against the pool wall, less because he thinks it will play well on film than because he is desperate to do so. She comes violently, gasping. The mermaid necklace sparkles between her breasts.

A few days later he shows her his screenplay. She takes her time reading it, nibbling her lower lip, as he vacillates between utter panic and trying not to think about what would happen if he were to reach over, part her scales, and slide his fingers inside her. “It isn’t bad,” she says at last, setting the manuscript down on the sand. “I didn’t dislike it.”

He spreads his hands. “Coming from you, that’s pretty high praise.”

“But I don’t think it would be right for us. For our movie.”

Light plays over water. Light is always playing over water. Endless variations of the same thing. “No?”

“No,” she says, decidedly. “Do you have another?”

Something sweet breathes inside his chest. Only the smallest breeze. “I don’t,” he says, managing just barely to sound regretful.

“How long will it take to write one?”

He shrugs. “Weeks,” he tells her. “Maybe months.”

“And do we have enough money yet?”

“Not even close.”

Amra shakes sand from her hair. “Oh well,” she says, up to the blue, blue sky.

-

He brings his laptop down to the beach. Sky has set Amra up with a waterproof phone and a solar charger, and she takes enormous pleasure in texting him, slowly and deliberately and with many emojis, most of them ocean-related, but she’s never watched a movie before. The laptop lasts forty minutes before it’s doused by an accidental flick of Amra’s tail. She apologizes almost genuinely, her hands clasped together, but the truth is that they have plenty of money to replace it. He does, and while he’s at it buys a portable projector and a large standalone screen. Amra demands they watch one of their videos first. He protests that this is a popular beach, and it would probably be classed as public indecency, but she insists. Already he feels helpless to refuse Amra anything she wants. He plays the first video for her, and spends the entire length of it scanning the strand for concerned citizens ready to report them for lewd behavior.

After it’s over, Amra doesn’t say anything for a long time. He nudges her shoulder with his. “Didn’t you like it?” he asks, concerned. “I’m not a professional, but I’m learning. Give me your notes, I can always do better.”

Amra shakes her head. “It isn’t that.” She combs through her hair, a gesture he’s begun to recognize as nervous. “We look beautiful together,” she says, her expression grave.

A weight steps onto his breastbone. “There’s a but coming,” he says. “Isn’t there.”

“No but.” She leans back on her hands. “What movie are we going to watch?”

They pick Bringing Up Baby. Amra watches in consternation, then curiosity, eventually ending up curled against him, laughing into the palms of her hands. Two classic movies in, they both fall asleep. He wakes after dark, cold waves lapping at his ankles. Amra is tucked under his arm, her hair falling in damp waves over his chest. Gently, he shakes her awake.

Neither of them speaks. Some foreign serenity has stolen over the evening. He cups her cheek in his hand. She presses against him, her fingers tripping down his shirt. Heart thudding in his chest, he reaches for her, slowly touches her bare shoulder, her pale throat. Her gills work open and closed. He leans forward so he can kiss one, savors her soft intake of breath. Whatever courage is possessing him now, it allows him to push her gently back on the cool sand. Amra gazes up at him, unblinking.

Her scales part for his mouth. Beneath them, she shines in the moonlight, silver-white, frilled as a froth of spray. He licks the length of her slit, one long path of his tongue, and Amra arches her back, her fists grasping handfuls of sand. “Everything you do,” she whispers. “It always feels so good.”

He smiles around his mouthful of her. Sucks the most sensitive part of her, rolls it delicately around his tongue like a sip of fine wine. Amra squeals and lashes her tail. Maybe there was some part of him that always wondered exactly how much of what they do is her being an excellent actress; but without the watchful camera Amra is just as expressive, crying out and writhing under him, only slightly quieter in deference to the public nature of the beach. She tastes like salt and green grass. He imagines her swimming in kelp forests, light and foliage, the shine of her scales, never seen head-on but only a hint. Something he has to chase. Her fluids fill his mouth, a delicacy. He murmurs against her. Nonsense-words, or words he’d rather not examine too closely.

“Levi,” Amra says, and then again, “Levi,” her hands gripping his shoulders. She drags him upright.

“I wanted to make you come,” he protests. “You taste so – ”

“Fuck me,” she says intently. “I want you to.”

Her eyes are black again. His need for her feels painful, painful pull of his skin towards hers. Fumbling together, both of them manage to unbutton his jeans. He sinks inside her, and it feels like the answer to a question. She tightens around his cock. Her hands settle at his lower back. “I never seem to stop thinking about you,” she says, her expression fluttering back and forth between perturbed and overcome. “It’s inconvenient.”

Every time he fucks her he discovers new textures inside her body. He thrusts against something that feels like many thin fingers all brushing down his cock. Excruciating, exhilarating. “Sorry,” he says, not sorry at all.

“If you don’t say something similar about me I will – ” she hums a breath. “I will rip out your throat.”

Possessive delight makes him dizzy. “Amra,” he says, his elbows gritting on sand, his palms smoothing the scales of her lower back, his cock buried as deeply in her cunt as it can be, “you are supremely violent.”

“I am.” She lifts her chin, looks him in the eye. “And I am selfish, and vain, and I have no time for boring things, and I am demanding and wicked and petty.”

He moves inside her. The ocean moves beyond them. Unconsciously, he has been matching his pace to the slow push and pull of the tide. His muscles feel taut with effort of control. “I know.”

She pouts beautifully. “Don’t you like me anyway?”

“Amra,” he says again. The shape of her name fits so deliciously in his mouth, the way he fits inside her, an aching rightness. “I don’t like anyone but you. You’re the only thing I think about. You have been ever since I met you.”

Her self-satisfied smile cuts through his chest like a fish hook. “Good,” she purrs. At last he fucks her harder, harder, until both of them are breathing heavily, until everything, the night, the water, the sand, the sky, is nothing but Amra. They come together. Her with one hand guiding his fingers over the folds of her slit. Him spilling across her stomach, her other hand wrapped around him. Her teeth sinking into his lip, the taste of salt in his mouth.

-

The movie is put on hold. They’re having, they agree, too much fun, and anyway, they’re making too much money. Enough to buy and kit out their own van – not quite a golden chariot, but more dignified than a shopping cart – and to rent an apartment in Venice, where Amra says the water tastes like coconuts. Every now and then, when they’re sitting side by the side on the sand, someone recognizes them. Amra likes to make them squirm. Levi writes about her, obsessively, endlessly, but it’s not work he has any intention of sharing. The movie can wait.