Page 86 of Siren Problems
“You don’tyet.” I tug his hand. “Come on, sea monster. One dance. For me.”
He exhales like I’ve asked him to fight a kraken, but lets me pull him onto the makeshift dance floor—really just a cleared space between the tables, where laughter spills louder than the music.
There’s no real band—just that weirdly tuned fiddle and enchanted drinkware chiming in sync—but the rhythm is enough. We sway in time with the chaos. Calder’s hand slides tomy waist, warm and grounding, and I don’t even mind when he steps on my foot the first time.
Or the second.
“I warned you,” he mutters.
“You’re lucky you’re hot.”
We move slowly, awkwardly, letting the spelllight dapple across our skin. He holds me like I’m something precious. I look up, and his eyes—those deep, storm-gray eyes—soften in a way that turns my insides into seafoam.
“I still don’t understand how we got here,” he says, voice hushed. “How we survived it.”
I squeeze his hand. “You stopped running. I stopped pretending I didn’t care. Magic did the rest.”
He huffs a breath that could almost be a laugh. “You always simplify the impossible.”
“It’s a gift.”
Across the room, Mira raises her glass in our direction, and Lyle whistles like a pirate at a siren sighting. I flip him off with a grin and lean into Calder’s chest, soaking in the warmth of him, the way his breath stirs the top of my hair, the steady beat of his heart against my cheek.
“You’re dancing,” I murmur.
“I’m dancing.”
“For me.”
He chuckles. “Only for you.”
The spellfire flares as the fiddle launches into something vaguely romantic, and Calder—bless his sea-scarred soul—tries to twirl me. It’s a disaster. We nearly trip over each other’s feet and crash into a table full of potion shots, but I’m laughing so hard I don’t care.
“I love you, you grumpy ocean cryptid,” I say as I catch my breath.
He pulls me closer, forehead to mine. “And I love you, storm-brained lunatic.”
The world falls away for a moment. Just me and him, wrapped in light, in magic, in something deeper than ley lines or curses. Something real.
We dance through the end of the song and into the start of another, barefoot and stumbling and entirely too happy.
And when he kisses me in the middle of it all, it’s not a grand gesture or a dramatic finale.
It’s a beginning.
Mira knocks back her third “Sea Bitch” with the kind of confidence usually reserved for dragons and research scientists. Her elbow flies wide as she laughs at something Kai says—and knocks an entire glowing goblet onto the nearest guest.
Unfortunately, the guest is a water sprite.
“Oh no,” I mutter, watching the sprite blink, sizzle faintly, and start muttering in ancient stream dialect.
“Oh hell,” Mira gasps, grabbing napkins that immediately disintegrate in her hands. “I am so sorry! That was—experimental alcohol! Possibly sentient!”
The sprite begins to swell like a wet balloon about to scold. But before a full-blown elemental tantrum can explode, Lyle steps in with the grace of a trickster fox and a shot glass of rainbow mist.
“Peace offering,” he says with a wink.
The sprite gurgles once, tastes it—and bursts into delighted giggles. Crisis averted.
