Free Tidal Whispers by Jocelyn Adams, Kelly Said, Claire Gillian, Julie Reece

are you?” He stepped closer and drew more of her hair away from her, raising the strands to his nose and lips. Only the slightest hint of the sea infused his nostrils. How were his senses so easily duped by the impossible?
    She wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her gaze landed on his shoulder, the door beside him, the ground at their feet—everywhere but on his face.
    Bending his knees, he dropped his face to an even plane with hers. Only then did their gazes lock. He tugged her inside his apartment and shut the door.
    “You’ll hate me when I tell you, but there is no other way. I thought I could do this, but I can’t. Not anymore.” Circe squeezed her eyes shut.
    Otis took her by the shoulders and gave her a series of small shakes until she opened her eyes again. He shook his head with deliberate purpose and uttered one simple word. “No.” His gaze held hers prisoner, and again he voiced, “No! Never hate you. Can’t leave me.”
    Circe raised her hands and signed with mournful fluidity. “My problems would be nothing compared to yours, your family’s. I can’t risk your life in the few days I have remaining. I have to make sure you understand why … why you have to stay away from me. Why I have to say goodbye because I’ll never see you again after the new moon.”
    A tear fell from each of her eyes and rolled down her flushed cheeks, only to be swept away by his kisses. The saline hit his tongue, and he tasted her anguish. What confession did she fear might alter his love for her and drive her away from him? For he did love her, he realized with crystal clarity, and raised his hands to tell her.
    Circe caught them and shook her head. When she released them, she pointed to his couch and signed, “Sit, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Chapter 4
    Night would bring the new moon.
    Circe hadn’t seen Otis in three days. With only a few more hours to go, Circe didn’t regret her decision. Seeing those pictures in Otis’s bedroom—the faces of those who loved him, who he loved, knowing the devastation his death would cause them—she would not be the cause of such pain.
    She wasn’t sure he believed her at first when she’d told him all about herself, but when they parted with no plans to meet the next day, she knew he did. Slipping away, so he couldn’t find her before he left port, had been for the best, she told herself repeatedly. A vast emptiness pervaded her heart as if she’d snagged a vital part of her being on Otis and had had to amputate to escape.
    Seeing Otis again wouldn’t even be within her power once Poseidon punished her. Tales of forced servitude to the capricious Olympians had been shared amongst the naiads in hushed whispers all her life. She would not only lose her voice and her livelihood, but she would probably be sent away too, to the Greek Isles, most likely. Assuming Poseidon allowed her to remain in the sea, the water would be warmer and the climate sunnier, but Alaska would always be her true home.
    She took her spot on her favorite rock in Kachemak Bay. Otis knew better than to sail her waters that night; she had warned him repeatedly in her parting words, made him swear he would not navigate her way.
    The sailors before him had never been real to her, had never mattered. Otis mattered. Otis would live and thrive aboard the Calypso, regardless of what she might suffer in consequence.
    She began her song, a sad melody about a goddess who loved a mortal man from afar, who watched over and protected him as he fell in love with another, as he raised a family, and as he died an old man, surrounded by the wife and children he loved. She’d always dismissed the song as maudlin and nonsensical, but as she rocked herself on the tiny reef, she sang it high and clear. The sweetest song, her mother had always called it, because it dealt with the truest kind of love, a love so strong it transcended selfish desires and wrapped itself like a protective cocoon around its object.
    Again she sang,