Chapter Text
Performing a simple, polite gesture should not result in a marriage, but—Adam Parrish learned—this did not apply to selkies.
He hadn’t even made a conscious decision to bend down and save the leather jacket from sliding into a puddle on the floor when it began falling off the back of a chair. It’d just been—instinct. One arm full of the round aluminum platters diners used to shuttle cardboard boats of fried clams, onion rings, and lobster rolls to their tables, Adam saw the dark gray speckled coat start slipping and he’d simply acted. In one fluid motion, he reached down, caught the jacket’s collar, and returned it to the back of the diner’s wooden chair without so much as breaking stride on his way toward the kitchen. The lunch rush on Saturdays demanded The Sea Shanty run like a well-oiled machine, and that meant Adam had to clear tables within seconds after diners vacated them or he’d have his manager Greg breathing down his neck and barking in Adam’s hearing ear. Adam was not particularly interested in either. Not when faster turnover meant more diners, which meant more tips in the yellow plastic sand pail next to the cash register for everyone but Greg to split at the end of the night.
Tips that made returning to The Sea Shanty for the third summer in a row worthwhile because, by the end of August, they filled Adam’s bank account with enough money to pay for a full school year of things scholarships didn’t cover: room and board, books, fees.
Adam didn’t think about the jacket again after playing good samaritan. He couldn’t—not when he had to get the platters to the dishwasher, then take a stack of clean ones to the pick-up counter, then refill napkin dispensers and ketchup bottles and the mason jars on every table stuffed full of toothpicks shaped like tiny swords.
He wouldn’t have thought about the coat again at all if he didn’t run straight into the guy who owned it when he pushed through the restaurant’s back door on a trip to haul an overstuffed garbage bag out to the dumpster. The solidity of the man—Adam bounced off him like he’d run into a concrete piling of a pier—gave Adam the initial impression he’d collided with one of The Sea Shanty’s cooks, a trio of boulder-sized locals who took turns chain smoking out back so two of them always manned the kitchen. Except no cloud of cigarette smoke hovered around the fenced-in gravel area behind the restaurant, and no string of curses left the guy’s mouth when Adam took a staggering backward step. In fact, the guy seemed far too calm and collected after being hit head-on by a 160 pound busboy carrying a forty-five pound bag of trash.
Probably because he’d just been caught hanging out in an area designated employees only by the unnecessary amount of signs posted on the opposite side of the restaurant’s faded wooden fence.
“Can I help you?” Adam asked once he’d had a moment to recover from the collision. It hadn’t been hard enough to knock the wind out of him, but the jolt of adrenaline from the crash had sent his heart rate up a few ticks. The guy he’d run into though…
His attractiveness almost caught Adam’s breath in his throat.
“You returned this,” the guy said, lifting the leather jacket he held, except held wasn’t accurate. It draped delicately over the man’s forearm, looking like the most expensive bar towel Adam had ever seen. Outside, in the warm late June sun, the coat’s true colors became visible: a deep blue-gray so dark as to be almost black, but not so dark Adam couldn’t make out the truly black speckles across its shoulders and down its back. Living and working in Boothbay Harbor, Adam saw his fair share of lavish, bespoke clothing and accessories, but he’d never seen a leather jacket like that before. Not just the unique coloring, but the supple butteriness of the leather seemed very out of place on something that looked like it had been made for riding a motorcycle.
As he looked up from the coat, Adam took a moment to study the guy—his dark buzz cut, his knife-sharp cheekbones, his ice blue eyes—before slowly replying, “I did, yeah.”
“Why?”
Adam furrowed his eyebrows—already fair and almost invisible, but made more so by spending every opportunity he got outside—and shifted the garbage bag from one hand to the other. “Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “It’s not mine.”
Though Adam’s response was completely logical and sensible, it appeared to confuse the guy. He furrowed his eyebrows—thick and dark—and glanced down at his jacket. “That hasn’t stopped people before.”
Because people are assholes, Adam wanted to reply. Notably the ones who had summer homes in the area, the ones who carried the local economy in with them when they arrived for Memorial Day and took it with them when they left after Labor Day. But before Adam had the chance to say anything at all, the back door of the Shanty slammed open, echoing against the restaurant’s red shingle siding, and Adam’s boss yelled, “What’s taking so long, Parrish? There’s half a dozen tables with shit all over them. And who the hell are you?”
After glancing over his shoulder at Greg for a second, Adam turned back to the guy with the jacket and smiled tightly, apologetically. No one should have to deal with Greg’s wrath, not even this guy who oddly questioned why Adam had returned something that wasn’t his.
“You’re welcome, I guess,” Adam said, his sneakers crunching on rocks as he stepped around the man when he made no indication he’d be moving out of Adam’s way. Batting at a few flies, Adam wrenched the dumpster open and threw the trash bag inside, and by the time Adam passed the guy again, he still hadn’t answered Greg’s question, though Greg didn’t care. He’d disappeared back inside as soon as Adam got into motion, leaving the door wide open to urge Adam along. The guy hadn’t gotten the hint a thank you would have been nice either. He hadn’t said anything at all. Instead, he kind of seemed stuck in place, and that was when Adam noticed that—while his black t-shirt fit him fine—the guy’s jeans were a little too short and he stood barefoot on the gravel.
Neither thing would have been unusual if they hadn’t been combined with the jacket. Adam never walked around town barefoot, but people did—few places had no shirt, no shoes, no service policies—and Adam couldn’t claim all of his jeans fit perfectly. But paired with the fancy leather jacket, the lack of shoes and too-short hems gave Adam pause. The guy had been inside—presumably eating—not that long ago, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be down on his luck.
Adam had been down on his luck enough that he knew how it went. You made due with what you had, pinching pennies everywhere, but sometimes you needed to do something to make you feel human. Sometimes you needed to get lunch at a seafood shack instead of making yourself yet another cheese sandwich in a long line of cheese sandwiches.
Though he often put empathy on a backburner, Adam summoned what little he did have and said something countless middle-aged and elderly women had said to him his whole life when they’d pitied him. Adam didn’t feel pity for this guy, but he felt—something. Curiosity. Concern. Maybe a little unease. Whatever it was, it sounded very out of place for coastal Maine when Adam tapped into his Virginian roots and told the guy, “You take care now.”
Then Greg hollered Parrish through the restaurant’s open door and Adam hustled past the guy—Greg could find another busboy in a heartbeat, but Adam wouldn’t be able to find another job that paid half as well—until he stopped with one foot through The Sea Shanty’s back door when the guy finally spoke again.
“Ronan,” he said.
The sole of Adam’s sneaker still outside the restaurant ground against gravel as he pivoted. “Beg pardon?” he asked, because he didn’t know what else to say when an already strange interaction started to get stranger.
“That man—” the guy waved behind Adam with his free hand “— asked who the hell are you.” He made it sound fantastically civil compared to Greg. Meeting Adam’s gaze, the guy continued, “I’m Ronan.”
Not knowing what he was supposed to do with this information, Adam stared until Greg yelling at him again became an imminent threat, then he nodded once, curled his fingers into a loose fist, and rapped his knuckles against the doorframe. “Okay,” Adam said, and before he turned back around and stepped all the way inside The Sea Shanty, he added, “Take care, Ronan.”
The crestfallen slouch of Ronan’s shoulders and the wrinkle of hurt between his eyebrows stuck with Adam for a long, long time after he shut the restaurant’s door. He didn’t understand Ronan—anyone else would have never acknowledged Adam’s courtesy in saving their jacket from certain trampling by flip flop. He also didn’t understand why Ronan was carrying a jacket around in June; nights could get chilly, but with highs near seventy degrees during the day, no one needed a jacket, let alone a leather one. That served to punctuate Ronan’s oddness along with his behavior, and while Adam considered himself an odd creature too, he’d at least learned to follow basic social norms, to keep his head down so he didn’t stand out.
Ronan—if he did nothing else—stood out.
He didn’t look like a local, or like one of the moneyed part-time residents who showed up in Boothbay Harbor for the summer, and he didn’t look like someone who drove up from Massachusetts or Vermont for the weekend. He’d been tall—taller than Adam—and dark despite the paleness of his skin. By mid-June, nearly everyone in town had tanned and freckled, even Adam, who spent a fair amount of his time inside the restaurant. Ronan looked as if he hadn’t seen sunlight for a while, or he’d become professional at applying and reapplying SPF 70. With his buzz cut—a hairstyle completely off the radar of anyone in Boothbay over the age of sixteen—and sharp features, Ronan didn’t seem like he came from somewhere further away either, like he’d flown in from New York or Los Angeles or the Pacific Northwest. With his bare feet and short jeans, he certainly wasn’t polished, nor did he look like the type to wear plaid.
If anything, he looked like he came from an entirely different world, and as off-putting as their encounter had been, Adam kind of wanted to see him again.
And at the end of his shift, he got to. Without warning, just like the first time he’d—quite literally—run into Ronan.
After wiping down the polished wooden tables and mopping the less polished wooden floor, Adam headed around the front counter to return the cleaning supplies to their closet when he realized Blue Sargent—one of the girls who worked the cash register and the only co-worker Adam actually liked—hadn’t dumped out the tip bucket and started counting, but instead stood staring through The Sea Shanty’s paned glass front door.
“Is a seagull taking pizza out of the trash again?” Adam asked as he stashed the mop and bucket away.
“If only this were that entertaining,” Blue replied. She didn’t take her eyes off the door when Adam moved to stand beside her, but she waved a palm-up hand toward the glass. “This guy has been hanging out there all night. Loiter all you want, man, but it’s starting to get creepy. We closed half an hour ago.”
Following Blue’s gesture, Adam’s insides wound around themselves in a perfect cleat hitch when he saw who she’d been staring at.
On the other side of the narrow boardwalk wharf running in front of the restaurant, leaning against the wooden railing that kept people from falling into the harbor, Ronan stood beneath a streetlamp, its golden glow giving him a bit of warmth the afternoon sunlight hadn’t. Like Blue and Adam looked at him, Ronan looked back at them—probably the same way he’d been looking into the Shanty all evening and freaking out the front counter staff.
“Oh,” Adam sighed. “Him.”
“You know him?” Blue asked.
“No. Well—not really.”
“Not really?”
“He was out back earlier when I brought trash to the dumpster. I thought Greg scared him away because he wasn’t there the next time I went out.”
“If Greg did, it didn’t work, but that’s not surprising,” Blue said. She made a thoughtful sound in the back of her throat and reached up to tug at the short ponytail she’d wrangled her dark hair into, and when she spoke again, she had to raise her voice above a metallic clatter of pans in the kitchen so Adam could hear her. “Do you think he’s hungry?”
“I don’t think so,” Adam replied, shaking his head. He hadn’t noticed if Ronan had been eating earlier when Adam rescued his jacket, but The Sea Shanty had a strict policy that a food purchase was required to sit inside—one policy Greg enforced often and with vigor—even if a shirt and shoes weren’t.
Whether he was hungry or not though, Ronan stood out on the wharf for a reason, and Adam needed to figure out what that reason was. Primarily, he didn’t want Ronan’s presence to concern Blue, but hanging around after someone had simply returned your jacket could not be considered normal behavior. It needed to end before it got weirder.
Taking a deep, resolute breath, Adam moved to step around the counter, only to stop when Blue shot out her hand and grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to figure out why he’s hanging around.”
“Don’t get murdered.”
“I’ll try.”
Blue pressed her fingertips into Adam’s arm before letting him go, immediately picking up the tip bucket and dumping out its contents on the counter, coins rattling against wood as bills fluttered on top of them. She began sorting the cash with the same diligence she always had when she worked the closing shift at the register, and Adam raised one eyebrow before he asked, “Now what are you doing?”
“Counting out,” Blue replied, not looking up from the tips. “In case he needs money.”
Adam opened his mouth to assert he wouldn’t be donating any of his tips to Ronan’s cause, but before he could, Blue’s eyes flashed up to him for half a second and she frowned before she returned to sorting. “My money. I never said yours.”
Blue was—and always would be—a better person than Adam. Her thought process jumping to help was something his would never do. He never set out to be a good person so much as he tried not to be a bad one, but in matters of money, Adam never fell on the side of altruism the way Blue just had despite not knowing whether Ronan needed money or not.
Nodding his thanks, Adam stepped out of the restaurant and the jingle of the bells hanging from the door handle joined the sounds of the harbor—water lapping beneath the wharf, the squawking call and response of a pair of seagulls, the hum of the crowd spilling out of the bar a few doors down. After waiting for a bicyclist to pass, Adam crossed the boardwalk toward Ronan, and once he was close enough he didn’t have to raise his voice, he asked, “Ronan, right?”
Ronan wasn’t a name he’d forget anytime soon, but Adam didn’t want to give the impression he’d thought about this guy all afternoon and into the evening, though Adam had thought of little else.
Perking up as he nodded, Ronan pushed himself off the railing and stood up straight. He still lacked shoes, but he’d put his jacket on to fend off the evening’s slight chill, though he’d left it unzipped over his t-shirt. Adam would have prioritized shoes over a jacket—the wharf hadn’t been sanded down since Adam had started coming to Boothbay Harbor and it was prone to dagger-sized splinters—but he wouldn’t start imposing common sense on someone who looked roughly his own age.
“Parrish,” Ronan said, and Adam couldn’t lie and say he didn’t like the way his last name founded coming out of Ronan’s mouth, like it was something reverential and prayerful, not what Adam’s father had bestowed on him at birth and would unfortunately connect them for the rest of Adam’s life.
“Just Adam is fine,” he told Ronan, and, like earlier, the reply that seemed completely sensible to Adam seemed to confuse Ronan.
“That man called you Parrish,” he said, an even deeper fold than earlier in the day forming between his eyebrows. “You’re the same person from before, right? There aren’t two of you?”
“No?” Confusion reigned in Adam and he tipped his head as he looked at Ronan. “There aren’t two of me. That’s my last name,” he said, the unease that had been in the back of his mind beginning to come to the forefront. “Adam’s my—”
Abruptly, he shut himself up. Adam had patience, but not enough for this. Not enough to explain first and last names to someone who—it was becoming evident—had some kind of traumatic brain injury or was at least going through something Adam wanted no part in. Crossing his arms over his chest, trying to make himself as imposing as possible, he asked, “What are you doing out here?”
Ronan replied, like it made all the sense in the world, “I was waiting for you.”
A small part of Adam was flattered. He’d never be considered conventionally attractive—his cheeks were too gaunt, his eyes too deep-set, his hair too close to the color of dirt—so someone like Ronan waiting around for him put a tiny voice in Adam’s ear. See, you are wantable. But the larger part—the part of Adam grounded in reality—knew that was too good to be true. Skeptical to the last, Adam asked, “Why?”
“To take you home.”
Being deaf in one ear, Adam had grown used to asking people to repeat themselves. When he’d first lost half his hearing, he’d been afraid to ask for help, for accommodation. He never requested subtitles or asked to change seats when someone sat down to his left. Until he’d had a professor sit him down and tell him he needed to stop punishing himself for a disability people would gladly adapt to, he hadn’t thought of it as a disability at all. Just his own failing. That conversation had slowly started changing Adam’s mindset, and now he had no trouble asking Ronan to repeat himself because Adam was certain he had not said to take you home.
“Can you say that again?” Adam asked. “I didn’t catch it.”
“I’m here to take you home,” Ronan repeated, and he looked so earnest Adam had to stop himself from laughing at one of the most ludicrous things he’d ever heard.
“I’m sure that works for you a lot,” Adam said, waving a hand at Ronan as an explanation because there were certainly other people at the Shanty who would have gone home with someone a lot less handsome than Ronan, “but if you’re trying to pick me up, I suggest another tactic.”
If he gave himself a minute to think about it, Adam probably would have taken Ronan up on the offer. He’d never been immune to hookups—over the summer or back on campus in Cambridge—but something about this felt off, like the boardwalk had tilted a little and Adam had gone off-kilter. Or Ronan had, more likely, thinking Adam would nod and go along with whatever he wanted, blinded by Ronan’s good looks.
“Why would I try to pick you up? We’re already married,” Ronan replied. He unzipped one of the pockets of his jacket and shoved his hand inside as he stepped closer to Adam, and when he pulled his hand free, he held it between them, a plain gold wedding band resting in his open palm. “That’s why I have this for you.”
Now Adam couldn’t stop laughter from bursting out of him, short and maniacal and loud enough a seagull perched a few feet away squawked a complaint before taking flight. Adam kind of wanted to follow it. Married? This time he hadn’t heard incorrectly. He was more than sure about that. Finally, fight or flight began kicking in—it should have a long time ago, but Ronan had seemed weird but otherwise harmless until he’d said they were married and produced a wedding ring from his jacket—and Adam took a backward step toward The Sea Shanty’s door.
“We’re not married,” he told Ronan. “Look, I think you should get—”
Ronan interrupted, “But you gave me back my pelt.”
“I gave you back your jacket. And I didn’t even give it back. I stopped it from falling on the floor.”
“You could have taken it, but you gave it back.” Ronan took another step toward Adam as Adam took another step toward the restaurant behind him. “For my people, that means we’re married.”
“Your people,” Adam replied flatly though his pulse was ramping up in a way it hadn’t in years, since the night he’d lost hearing in his left ear. Like that night, he hurried to try and think what he could say to placate Ronan. Intimidating white guys seemed off the table, and people in need of psychological help wouldn’t go over well either, so Adam kept quiet until Ronan gave him an answer he would have never expected.
“Selkies.”
With the Shanty’s door almost within reach, Adam stopped. The day had cooled off since the sun went down, but it hadn’t gotten chilly enough to explain the goosebumps rising on his arms, and even though his blood had started pounding in his ear, he definitely had not misheard Ronan that time. There weren’t many other words that sounded like selkies.
Selkies.
Creatures that were not real. Thanks to one of his friends at college, Adam knew all about Celtic myths. Kelpies and fae. Changelings and banshee. The Abhartach.
Selkies.
Seals who turned into humans who turned into seals again.
They were things that existed in the pages of books. In stories told around campfires centuries ago. None of them existed in the real world. The world Adam lived in. Seals didn’t shed their pelts and walk onto land as a man or a woman, only to get trapped in human form when someone stole their empty sealskin.
Their jacket.
Their pelt.
Adam didn’t need three years at Harvard under his belt to know this was impossible. It defied physics. It defied the laws of nature. Magic would be the only explanation, and Adam was absolutely sure card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats were as real as magic could get. Not even Blue’s family—a collection of psychics who performed tarot readings and house cleansings—claimed to be magic, just intuitive. If magic existed, it had never showed itself to Adam, and he’d asked and hoped for it for twenty-one years. Not that anyone or anything listened to him, but in all that time, nothing had ever revealed itself to Adam, and if magic existed, surely he would have found something.
Whatever Ronan’s deal was—whether this was some elaborate practical joke or a hidden camera prank show—Adam wanted nothing to do with it. What he did want—other than to finish cleaning The Sea Shanty’s dining room, go home to the garage-turned-apartment he rented for $300 a month, and shower away as much of the fried seafood smell that stuck in his pores all summer—was to get far away from Ronan. Adam shouldn’t have entertained this—ruse more than he needed to, which was not at all. The guy obviously needed help Adam wouldn’t and couldn’t provide. He’d only taken Psych 101 because it was a core curriculum requirement, but it had been enough for Adam to understand Ronan wasn’t right in the head. Delusion should be included in his diagnosis. Probably a few prescriptions too.
He needed to spend some time lying on a couch talking to someone, and that someone would not be Adam Parrish. In the space of a few minutes, Adam had cleanly torn off the label he’d applied to Ronan earlier: strange. He’d replaced with another louder, bolder one, and in very large letters, the new one read crazy. If Adam never saw Ronan again, he would be alright with that. There were plenty of other people Ronan could stalk, plenty of other places for him to loiter. Being considerate to someone one time didn’t mean that person had to be Adam or that place had to be The Sea Shanty.
“Get out of here,” Adam said, completing what he hadn’t gotten to finish when Ronan cut him off. Authority had never come easy to Adam—he rarely had any—but he put everything he had into being firm. He even stopped himself from adding please. This was no longer a please situation.
“I don’t understand,” Ronan replied, brow creasing again as the corners of his thin lips turned down. It was an expression of legitimate confusion, and if Ronan didn’t have him backed up to the front of the restaurant, Adam might have felt a little sorry for him. Nothing signaled things were going to turn physical—Ronan’s shoulders were not tense beneath his jacket, his square jawline hadn’t gone taut, he still held his hand palm-up between them like he held out hope Adam would change his mind and take the ring—but Adam knew better than to try to predict unproven behavior. All it took was just the wrong thing—the wrong look, the wrong word, the wrong assumption—for someone to snap.
“There’s nothing for you to understand,” Adam said and reached for the door handle behind him. As he moved aside enough to pull the door open, he reiterated, “Leave, Ronan.”
Then Adam was inside The Sea Shanty, his fingers fumbling for the lock as he pressed his back to the glass door. God, why couldn’t they have blinds? He bet if he turned to look, Ronan would still be standing just beyond the door, so Adam didn’t glance behind him, but he did look at Blue and ask, “Is he still there?”
“Yeah,” she replied, lips twisting as her eyes followed whatever was going on behind Adam. Her gaze stayed over his right shoulder for a moment, then she met Adam’s eyes and said, “Now he’s not. What was that about? Was he trying to sell you drugs? Do you want me to call the cops?”
“No,” Adam told her quickly. Cops wouldn’t make anything better. They rarely did, in Adam’s experience. Usually they made things worse, if they did anything at all.
“Then do you want to elaborate on why you look like someone just walked over your grave?”
Adam imagined he looked a little harried, a threatened creature who’d gotten away in just the nick of time. Goosebumps still pebbled his skin, and the armpits of his navy t-shirt with The Sea Shanty and its pirate crab mascot printed on the chest felt damp. His palms weren’t sweaty, but he still rubbed them against the thighs of his khaki cargo shorts, more as a means of calming himself down than because he needed to.
Nothing about this most recent conversation with Ronan would make sense if Adam didn’t start at the beginning and tell Blue how he’d come to know Ronan in the first place. So he did. He leaned a bit heavier against the door, took a deep breath, and told her, “During the lunch rush, I saved his jacket from falling on the floor.”
Because she too was sensible, Blue nodded as if she approved. “That was nice of you.”
“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “I thought so. Except that guy—Ronan—he says that means we’re married.”
Blue’s eyebrows rose toward the line of clips she bullied into holding her bangs off her forehead and she peered at Adam for a long minute before she pursed her lips a little and nodded again. “That sounds about right.” Blue rolled her eyes before she continued, “Maybe we should call the cops. He really said that?”
“He did,” Adam replied. “And he also said that he’s a selkie.”