Page 17 of Make Out With A Merman

His mouth twitches. Not a smile. But notnota smile.

“They lived deep,” he says, still watching the water. “Past the shelf. Where the light dies and the real world stops. Magic’s thicker down there. Slower. It clings to your bones.”

My breath catches.

He’s not performing. He’s remembering.

“We weren’t supposed to come up often,” he goes on. “Surface living was... novelty. Dangerous. Some of us went anyway. Curiosity, I guess. But I was born curious. Couldn’t help it. Wanted to know what starlight looked like underwater.”

I say nothing. Just listen.

“One night, there was a breach. A crack in the trench that shouldn’t have been there. Old magic. Something collapsed. Whole outpost went dark. My parents, my sister, my mentor, gone.”

My stomach knots.

“I swam for hours,” he says, voice steady but cracked around the edges. “Looking. Screaming through the current. By the time I got to the top, the rupture had sealed itself.”

He turns toward me now. Not fully. Just enough that I see his profile, his jaw set, his eyes dark, rimmed with silver light.

“I was fifteen,” he says. “And alone.”

The only sound is the lapping water and the frogs somewhere in the reeds.

And I can’t make a joke.

Can’t flirt or sass or spin a metaphor out of grief.

So I just say, “I’m sorry.”

And mean it.

He shrugs. “That’s the thing about the deep. When it takes, it doesn’t give back.”

I inch closer, not touching him, just... near.

“But you came up,” I whisper.

He nods. “Camp offered me a job three years ago. Said they needed someone who understood the water.”

“And rules,” I say, gently.

“And rules,” he echoes, softer.

“You think you’re holding it all together,” I say. “But maybe it’s okay to let someone else swim beside you.”

He looks at me then.

Really looks.

His eyes in the moonlight are silver glass. Not cold just unguarded.

It feels like a held breath.

Like a wave that hasn’t crashed yet.

Then he turns away, just a little, and says, “You ever talk this much at night?”

“Only when I’m trying to get broody lifeguards to crack,” I say, voice shaky but teasing.

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