Sea Goblins

It's funny how differently you view things you've seen a million times before, when you know it will be the last time you lay eyes on them. It's like leaving a foreign country that you know you probably won't visit again. You take in every mortal detail you can, committing them to memory.

Michael got changed into board shorts before he started fishing. He had a vivid tan line around his waist from all the time he'd spent, shirtless, on the boat, and probably the most seductive snail trail I'd ever seen. It led from his stomach down, a series of thick black hairs that curled and knotted, thickening the lower it went.

Slim hips. Relatively flat bum. The circumcised penis with the kink in it, a kink that wasn't as noticeable when he was flaccid. Proportionate testicles which he kept neatly shaved.

'Is there some reason you're staring at my dick?' he asked, bemused.

My gaze travelled upwards, over the chest that was sprinkled with black hair, the small pink nipples, the strong arms, and up to his kind face and dark brown eyes that were flecked with gold. He was a good-looking man in an understated kind of way. Gentle and non-threatening.

'You want to have sex with me,' he guessed correctly. His eyes lit up and he grabbed my hand. 'Into bed we go.'

His enthusiasm made me laugh. I followed him into the bed and we fell onto the mattress. He was naked and I could feel his cock hardening, pressing against my thigh, with each kiss. I was still dressed, and was wearing neatly pressed chino shorts and a white polo shirt, the ultimate in boring, conservative outfits. I'd worn it in the hopes of winning over the property manager.

'This outfit's so cute on you,' Michael said, pushing the shirt up and kissing my stomach. 'And I love your little belly. It's just the littlest bit chubby.'

He continued to kiss my stomach as he removed my shorts and panties. His mouth moved lower, brushing against my pubic bone, and down to my pussy lips. His tongue delved between them, pushing them apart, and found my clit. I let out a soft moan and buried my hands in his curly hair. Michael continued to nuzzle, lick and suckle me until I was squirming, and I impatiently pulled him up.

Before I could do anything, he yanked my shirt over my head and reached around to unclip my bra. He fumbled with it for a few seconds before managing the unhook the back, and pulling it off. He grinned cheekily and leant down to suck on my nipples.

Then he was back between my legs, not so much to try and bring me to orgasm, but to ensure everything was well lubricated. I appreciated the caution, and showed him just how much by pushing him onto his back and kneeling between his thighs. I cupped his balls in my hand and rolled them around, marvelling at their weight.

Michael gave me a lazy smile, put a hand on the back of my head, and pushed me down. He wasn't rough, it was just a gentle nudge in the right direction, but I took the hint. He arched his boat and took a deep breath as I gripped his length and swirled my tongue around the head. A bitter drop of precum created a perfect, translucent ball at the slit, and I carefully licked it off.

Michael's hands were now behind his head, pressed against the edge of the boat. He grunted as I began to properly service him, each sound revealing just how aroused he really was. I was pondering whether I should just take him to orgasm or not when he grabbed me and pulled me up onto his body.

I straddled him and lined his cock up with my entrance, before gently easing him in.

'Enough lubrication?' he whispered.

I nodded. 'All good.'

He pulled me down for a kiss. 'I love you so much, Katie. You're the sexiest woman alive and you have no idea how happy you make me.'

I was overcome with emotion and wiggled my arms underneath his shoulders and hugged him. He smelt good, he felt good, I loved him... at that moment it felt like we could overcome any difficulty.

Michael adjusted my position and caught a breast in his mouth. He fondled the other one and thrust upwards. I grind against him. The stimulation he was giving my nipples was incredible. I was extremely aroused, and with each minute drew closer and closer to orgasm.

Just as I was about to peak, he climaxed, grabbing my hips and moaning around his mouthful of nipples. He pushed himself as far into me as humanly possible, before falling limply on the bed.

'Keep going,' he muttered. 'I'll stay hard for another couple of minutes.'

He was right; it did take a couple of minutes for his erections to fully subside.

I resumed fucking him. I didn't ask him to suck a nipple, I just shoved it into his mouth and pressed his head against my breast. I was close, very close, and then all of a sudden I was coming, wailing out into the hot afternoon sun and I rocked against him. I could hear him chuckling with contentment, and I could feel his eyes on my face, but I didn't mind. I liked watching him come, too.

When the last of the spasms faded away, he pulled me into a hug. I lay on his chest, his cock still inside me, and breathed in his natural scent as he traced his hands over my back. He ran his nails down my spine, making me shiver, before starting to slowly massage my lower back. He frequently did this after sex. It was very tender and sweet, very loving and caring.

I tried not to cry. I was so scared of what my father was going to tell me. I just wanted to stay here forever, wrapped up in my boyfriend's arms, on a white fishing boat on a hot summer's day.

~~~~~

By the time I arrived home on Sunday afternoon my father had sent me sixteen texts and left four voicemails. I'd responded to several over the course of the weekend, telling him I was perfectly fine and didn't need him to keep contacting me.

I walked inside in a foul mood. The honeymoon was over and I wasn't ready for it to end, and I took my rage out on Dad.

'Could you have possibly aggravated me any more than you did over the past sixteen hours?' I snapped the moment I laid eyes on him. 'What the fuck is so bloody important? What is it you found out when you contacted his mother?'

'Katie, calm down,' Mum interrupted. 'Your father was worried and as it turns out, he had a right to be. But we both know you won't believe anything we tell you, so here,' she said, thrusting a piece of paper into my hands. 'That's the number for Jill, Michael's mother. Call her. Arrange to go over for coffee. Hear it from her mouth, in her words.'

I was spitting mad and my foul mood continued throughout the night. On Monday morning I called Jill, my voice still filled with anger and resentment, and asked her what was so bloody important she felt it was appropriate to tell my parents and not me.

'I'm twenty-fucking-four,' I finished angrily. 'I'm not a child.'

I can't tell you why I was so rude to her. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was frustration. Maybe it was the fear that she could tell me something that would tear my life apart. I was so, so sick of fighting. Sick of having to spend countless dollars and go through endless surgeries to fix my body. Sick of being treated as either a joke or a child.

I was also hurt, I was really, deeply hurt by my father's determination to find out what was 'wrong' with my boyfriend, as if it was impossible for him to believe that a man might be genuinely romantically interested in me. Even if there was something wrong with Michael, even if he had lied to me, why did my father seem to see his actions as inevitable, rather than disappointing?

'Katie, it's such a hard thing to talk about,' she said gently. 'Why don't you see if you can get tomorrow morning off work and come around? We'll have a coffee and I'll tell you everything you need to know.'

Her voice was soft, caring and heavily accented. I immediately thought of a plump woman in her sixties who would get up the next morning and cook you grits, whatever the fuck grits actually are. I felt mean and smell and petty as I told her I'd do that, I just needed to speak to my boss.

I went to work and arranged to have the following day off. Michael called that night, and we chatted, but I think he could tell something was up. I was distant and not really engaged in the conversation.

After we hung up, I went to the kitchen and made a tray of brownies. I'd never made them before, but they were to my peace offering, my apology for being mad at Jill.

~~~~~~~~~~~

'Brownies,' Jill beamed, taking the tray. 'Thanks honey. Come in. Don't mind the dogs.'

Michael and his family lived in a two story Queenslander in a quiet street in Sandgate. It wasn't as glamorous or modern as I'd expected, but it was very cosy and welcoming. Jill was short and fat with gray hair, and she was a typical mother figure. Two overweight Labradors, one chocolate and one golden, completed the picture.

I followed Jill inside. She took me to the kitchen, where she immediately put the kettle on and cut us each a brownie for morning tea.

'Thanks for the coconut ice,' I mumbled, embarrassed by my past behaviour. 'And I'm sorry for yelling at you on the phone yesterday.'

'I understand,' she said. 'You sounded stressed.'

Stressed was an understatement. My parents had been watching my every move, but had refused to give me even a hint as to what they'd learned. I was still slightly flabbergasted at the amount of effort they must have put into tracking down Michael's parents. He has a relatively common surname. How much time had they spent browsing through the Facebook pages of people with his surname, in the hopes of finding his family?

'Are you looking forward to Christmas?' Jill asked.

'I guess so.'

'I love it. I need to go and buy a new tree today. I was out Christmas shopping yesterday and the dogs took ours down and decided to play with it. I'm still vacuuming up bits of broken baubles and strands of tinsel.'

I didn't know what to say.

Jill made us each a coffee. We sat at her kitchen table across from each other, with our morning tea in front of us.

'Did you tell Michael you were coming to see me?' she asked.

I shook my head. 'No.'

'He's very fond of you.'

You could say that, I thought. 'Fond'. It suggested teddy bears and flowers and innocence. Maybe it was easier for her to conjure up that mental image, rather than the more accurate one, in which her son liked me to get on my hands and knees while he reamed me from behind.

'He hasn't told you, has he?' Jill confirmed.

'Michael?'

She nodded. 'He hasn't, has he? I knew he wouldn't. I thought about contacting you, but decided you'd probably figure it out yourself sooner or later.'

I stabbed at my cake with a spork.

'Katie,' Jill said gently. 'Be truthful with yourself. You've noticed he's different other men, haven't you?'

I divided my brownie into eight equal sections. I wasn't hungry. I felt sick. Queasy.

'He sleeps a lot,' I said begrudgingly.

Jill nodded. 'And he misreads social situations.'

I thought back to the day he'd approached me in the bar. He hadn't realised his clients had been taking the piss out of him when they told him I was interested in him, and that he should buy me a drink. I thought about his interactions with my father, and with Alex.

'He gets anxious about small things,' I added.

'And he believes in things that aren't real. Monsters. Dragons.'

'Sea goblins,' I whispered. How long had it taken me to realise that when he spoke of the sea goblins, he wasn't merely making a joke? Not long, not long at all. But I'd continued to pretend he was joking, because questioning it, or asking if he really believed in them, might have yielded frightening answers. 'He thinks he can see them on the fish finder.'

Jill and I fell silent. She ate her brownie. I just decimated mine, turning it into a pile of crumbs and cashew nuts. Mum hadn't had pecans, so I'd substituted.

'He has anxiety, depression and paranoid schizophrenia,' Jill remarked as used her forefinger to dab up the brownie crumbs. 'Did he tell you he was adopted?'

I nodded. 'Yeah.'

'His mother also had schizophrenia. His father was diagnosed with bipolar. They loved him, but they couldn't care for him. They've both since died. They were from poor families, they didn't have insurance...' she trailed off.

'He told me he didn't want to know anything about them.'

'He doesn't,' Jill agreed. 'He doesn't want to know what his limits are.'

One of the Labradors approached and sniffed in the direction of my brownie. Jill told me not to give him any; chocolate was bad for dogs, so I pushed the plate away and gave the dog a pat instead. It's coat was long and rough, but it's face was gentle and it began to lick my leg.

'What do you know about schizophrenia?' Jill asked.

'I know my father didn't want me to be alone on a boat with him.'

She shook her head, a hint of annoyance on her face. 'No, no he shouldn't worry about Michael hurting you, not at all. He'd never do that.'

Jill gave me a lesson on schizophrenia as well as a comprehensive history of Michael's mental health problems. He'd first had problems in his senior year of high school, and had ended up dropping out. He spent the next couple of years seeing an assortment of psychiatrists before finally being diagnosed. During this period he'd gone to work for his father as a means of keeping his mind occupied.

With medication and therapy he improved. He was fortunate to avoid some of the common side effects of anti-psychotics, but he couldn't avoid the fatigue the medication bought. He was almost always tired.

'He puts so much effort into being normal he'll forget to bathe or brush his teeth,' she said. 'Complex emotional situations are near impossible for him to cope with. He also struggles to accept that that he isn't being persecuted. That's the paranoia coming through. Unfortunately this means that when someone is being cruel to him, he tends to convince himself that he's just imagining it.'

Everything she was saying made complete sense.

'We applied to rent an apartment together,' I told her.

'I know. Your father told me. You can still do that, if you want, but you should also take this opportunity to consider the implications of entering into a relationship with him. It's likely that at some points in your relationship you'll be more of a carer than a partner, and it won't be the sort of assistance you offer a partner who's in a wheelchair or has broken an arm.'

'What do you think I should do?'

'I think you need to talk to him, you need to do some research, and you need to make a decision about what's right for you.'

~~~~~~~

We didn't get the apartment we applied for, which proved to be a massive relief. Michael was disappointed, but he seemed to know something was up and didn't suggest we look at more open homes. Nor did he come around mid-week.

I didn't see him until the weekend. The weather was disgustingly hot, and instead of going out on the boat, we instead went to the Sunshine Coast. We didn't speak much during the journey. Several times he asked if anything was wrong but I said 'no' on each occasion.

It was until we were at the beach, sitting in the sand on the edge of the water and letting the waves roll over us, that I came clean.

'My father tracked down your mother,' I explained. 'He went and spoke to her.'

'About?'

'You know,' I told him. He did, he just didn't want to admit it. 'But Dad didn't tell me the details. He told me to go and see your Mum, and hear it from her mouth, so I did.'

Michael shut his eyes. He was quiet for a minute or two as he processed what my father had done, and what his mother would have told him. Eventually his eyes flicked open and he gave me a wry smile.

'And now you know you're dating a fruitcake,' he said.

I started to cry. I was scared and stressed and I loved him, I loved him so much it hurt to think of not being with him. All week my father had pressed for me to leave him, and all week I'd wondered if maybe my Dad knew what he was talking about.

But how could my father understand? How could anyone understand that I loved this man, and I knew things would probably get hard, but I couldn't walk away, I just couldn't.

'I'm sorry Katie,' he said, pulling me onto his lap. 'I'm so sorry. I wanted to tell you.'

I wrapped my arms around him and sobbed into his chest. His chest hair tickled my nose and my throat was already hurting from the agony of trying to hold back my tears, but I couldn't bear to let go of him. He kissed my head and rubbed my arms and apologised over and over again.

'I can take you back home,' he offered. 'You don't need to stay with me. I just loved you a bit too much. I was scared of losing you.'

I shook my head. 'I don't want to break up.'

He laughed humourlessly. 'Not yet, maybe. I couldn't let you see my full Facebook because you would see some of the shit I've posted when I was having a psychotic break and it wasn't cool, it wasn't cool at all. I was warning everyone about Baba Yaga, sea goblins and trolls that hide in ditches on the side of the road.'

I wiped my eyes and buried my face in the crook of his neck. 'Did you really believe in them when you were talking about them?'

'Katie, I sometimes still do,' he said gently. 'It's just that now, with medication and my psychiatrist, I can train myself to ignore them most of the time.'

'Can you get medication that totally fixes you?'

'I can, but then I just feel flat. There are no delusions, no hallucinations, no hint of a psychosis, but I become an emotional void. I don't feel happy or sad, I don't want to interact people, and I lose my sex drive.' He stared into the distance. 'You swap paranoia for nothing, and when you feel nothing, you're at the end of the line. There's nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to see. You exist, but you don't live.'

We fell silent. My tears were dried by the wind and the sun. The tide was coming in and the water, even when it receded, was still a few inches deep.

'Crap, big wave,' Michael said, pushing me off his lap.

I stood up just in time to be knocked off my feet. Michael, who hadn't had the chance to get to his feet, had the wave break over him. Both of us coughed and spluttered and spat out mouthfuls of sea water.

Michael pulled me into a hug. He held my face in his hand and stared deep into my eyes.

'Do you still want to go on holidays with me?' I whispered. 'We're supposed to be leaving in two weeks and three days.'

'Absolutely. Do you still want to go?'

I nodded.

'Really?' he asked, a hint of hope in his voice.

'Really.'

He kissed my forehead and crushed me into a bear hug. It was as if he were trying to get as physically close to me as possible while we were both dressed.

'I love you,' he whispered.

'I love you, too.'

I knew he was happy. I was, too. Whatever happened next was in God's hands.

The End