The bus stop had existed on the edge of a cliff on the island of Zakynthos since time immemorial. "Time immemorial" meant nobody could remember a time the peeling wooden shelter didn't crouch like a barnacle on the wind-swept curve. It was a remarkably awful place from which to catch the bus, which only came at 9:59pm and 5:13am. Jack Leary, lecturer in Greek mythology, had arrived there at 10pm. This was just on-time to see the blurred red smear of the bus's tail lights disappear around the bend in the rain. He cursed miserably and shook his fist at his cab driver, but the man was already hauling tail back through the storm to the conference centre, probably to pick up smarter professors, who had booked hotels on the island.
Jack had completely failed to book accommodations until the last minute, being engrossed in writing his presentation on the erotic history of Zakynthos. By that time, the only hotel within his budget was back in Athens, across a lot of water. So, like all poor planners, he reasoned that he could do what he'd never done before: restrict himself to only 2 hours drinking free alcohol and explaining his niche obsession to curious students and colleagues. Unfortunately, his presentation had gone so remarkably well that he had been mobbed afterwards with questions, so instead he surfed on a swelling tidal wave of ego and banter all the way to 9:45pm, remembered Athens at the last moment, and bolted for the door.
Along the way, he ran into Devora, also a professor of mythology at a Bulgarian university, and a woman that he had often considered to be made of pure sex. On this particular night she was drunk, grabbed his collar, and said she'd missed the first half of "your... erotic talk", with those eyes that some women have when they've decided it's time to press the matter.
Jack and temptation had never been evenly matched opponents, and all he wanted to do was fall with abandon into Devora's gravity and give her what she was hunting. But at times like this, he remembered a wizened advisor he'd had... a decade ago? who told Jack in ominous tones:
"Mr. Leary, there are some fields that operate smoothly when everybody's having sex with each other. Academia is not one of them. And particularly not our small corner of it."
So, he'd torn himself away from her molten gaze with only a small whimper, promised to send her the slides (ah, pain!) and stumbled out into the pouring rain to hail the cab. He could almost feel his cock craning back around to look mournfully at Devora's incredible and incredulous body, one hand braced on her waist in a full-body pout.
So, here Jack was at 3am, in a truly god-forsaken bus stop, waiting for the morning bus to come in 2 hours and transport his groggy and still-drunk face to the first ferry to Athens, where it could be smashed into a rented pillow for 2 hours and then flown back to London, where that same face would then have to entertain less admiring students during office hours.
At some point, he realised that if he'd taken Devora's offer, he wouldn't have needed the bus stop, bus, ferry, or hotel at all, because he'd instead be in a quiet and warm Greek bed and breakfast, slumbering next to her, perhaps splurging on a cab to the ferry after morning pastries. He tried and failed to remember his advisor's name so he could curse it properly, but the rain was too loud to think. Jack thought at least he wouldn't be able to hear his own recriminations, and stared off the cliff over the storm-tossed Greek ocean. It had been a really good shindig, though.
Actually, he could hear something over the noise of the rain. Somebody was... singing. Jack craned his neck out past the bus stop overhang, drenching his head, and saw a woman floating in the crashing black surf.
What the hell is this?
he thought.
"Hey!" Jack shouted down to them.
The woman looked in his direction from the ocean, still singing. Her eyes scanned over him briefly and then returned to staring straight up at the moon. Her voice slid artlessly as a wolf's from note to crooning note. She seemed to have not noticed Jack at all. This hurt Jack's ego a little, to be honest, but he was more worried about the fact that she seemed to be swimming in a storm. Maybe drunk, or crazy? He hesitated a moment, then decided he wouldn't watch her drown. Jack scrambled out into the downpour, down the cliff, onto the black stone beach, and pelted towards the water, peeling off his trenchcoat as he ran. He was soaked to the skin instantly.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Come back! You'll drown! The water's too rough!"
From down here, he could see that there were two women. The second one had been floating face down, but she whipped her head out of the water to stare at him with shocked pale eyes as he shouted. She scanned his face for a moment, and then, with a graceful flip of lean and powerful ass and legs, dove under the water. At this, the first woman finally seemed to notice him and ceased singing. With a sudden shake and a sound like a whinnying horse, she also disappeared below the surface of the water.
Jack stood and gawped at the choppy black sea.
A wave crashed, and then another, and then in the third wave the two women suddenly appeared on the beach in front of him. The first woman focused on him and stepped forward until he was close enough to see a haughty curiosity in her eyes. The second woman stayed back, warily regarding them.
Jack blinked as he realised they were both bare-breasted. Then his eyes slid down further to see that they were bare completely. They had been floating naked in the Aegean without fear, and now stood facing him without shame, close enough for him to distinguish their labia peeking out from curly hair...
"Human." the first woman said, breaking his reverie. Jack wrenched his gaze up to her face.
Jack was honestly unsure of how to respond to that. "Yes? Uh.... yes."
"You have come here to the shore, to fuck us. For the pact."
His brain stalled like an engine shifting between gears too far apart. "To ff... to...? The pact...?" Was he caught in a bizarre prank? One of those shows where you get propositioned by a beautiful, naked, fearless woman, with areolas like the delicate skin of a berry, and hips like-
Jack recalled that he had come down here to be a good person, and he was being a horny one. "Sorry, wait. Look, are you alright? are you..." Jack groped for a question that a responsible person would ask, "being trafficked?"
This question seemed to bounce off of the woman. She chewed her lip. "The journey from Poseidon's kingdom was not without danger, and the last time we came, no human answered our call. They are all timid now, where once they were fearless, with hot blood in their veins."
The lightning flashed, and in that brief moment of perfect illumination, Jack realised that she had blue skin.
"The journey from..." Jack grasped wildly for a foothold on the conversation as the rain ran down his face. "Are you talking about the Zakynthos myth of the erotic dance between the sea nymphs and the humans?"
"That same one. You understand the pact, then?"
Jack was befuddled. Was she a cosplayer, or re-enactor? How many people knew this obscure, almost lost story? Her eyes gave away only her impatience with him, chewing her lip, waiting for his response.
"But... the myth isn't intended to be interpreted literally. The nymphs are a narrative tool, and the pact was never real. It's a metaphor for Zakynthos' economic relationship with the ocean, spanning thousands of years and empowering them to ward off the main thrust of Athenian hegemo-"
"Human!" she snapped.
"Yes?"
"We are here. In the flesh, not a story. Will we fuck, or not?"
Jack paused, put some suddenly unimportant questions on hold, and gave her question some serious thought. He did this because he had answered similar invitations far too quickly before, at least once in his life.
But as his prefrontal cortex weighed and measured, the animal part of his brain remembered that he had started studying eroticism in Greek mythology exactly because of fantasies like this, and made its move. His vocal cords activated without him.
"You want to fuck me."
"Yes."
"You're a sea nymph."
"Yes."
"And you want to fuck me. Here. On the beach. In this storm."
