Page 47 of Siren Problems
I grunt. “I need to forget.”
“Then you came to the wrong place, curse boy.”
I glance around the room.
Kelpies lounge in tangled piles on furniture that shifts between driftwood and bone. A selkie in a leather duster is slow-dancing with a siren who has blood in her hair and no concern about it. Everything pulses with too much color. Too much noise.
Ihateit.
But I can’t leave.
Because if I leave, I’ll go back to her.
And if I go back to her... I doubt I’ll have the strength to let go again.
I close my eyes, and Luna’s face floods the dark.
The sound she made when she came undone in my arms.
The way her voice cracked when she said she wasn’t afraid.
The way shelookedat me, like I was worth the storm.
I slam the driftwood down and mutter, “Fuck.”
“That’s not gonna help,” says a voice beside me.
I turn—slowly, because the room tilts—and find Lyle. Tall. Soaked. Somehow simultaneously glowing and disheveled. His seaweed hair is braided into something tragic and his eyes are far too sober for how drunk he smells.
“What do you want?”
“To drink,” he says, flopping into the seat beside me and waving for a glass. “And to ask why you look like a thundercloud fucked a heartbreak poem.”
“I didn’t ask for company.”
“And yet, here I am. Like a barnacle on your emotional hull.”
I groan.
Lyle takes his drink, sips, and winces. “Ugh. Who made this? My regrets taste better.”
He leans on the bar, eyes too sharp for a drunk. “So. Let me guess. You slept with her.”
I don’t answer.
“Youdid,” he crows, too loud.
“Keep your voice down.”
He ignores me. “And then you bailed. Classic cursed man-child maneuver. A+ commitment issues. Truly vintage.”
“Lyle.”
“No, no, I’m invested now,” he slurs, wagging a finger. “You let someonein, and itfelt good, and now your trauma says, ‘Flee!’ like you’re some ancient sea deer dodging affection.”
I stare at him.
He stares back.
