Content warning: emesis

‘Angela, it’s Zoey. We’re coming to rescue you. Stay put!’

Angela falls back into the water with a disgruntled sigh. “Please,” she mutters, as she brings a hand to cover her eyes and shuts them tight. “Do not come, Zoey.” Do not ruin this for me.

After a moment, the siren regains her bearings. She grasps the rock once more then she carves a reply in return with her claws. ‘No need, Zoey. I am fine. I will return on my own terms. In my own time.’

She chucks the rock back outside again, and hopes that Zoey will see.

It is when the siren is on the verge of nodding off once more that Zoey’s rock makes its grand return, and Angela curses under her breath at the brief hint of pain that travels up her tail, when the small stone finds its final resting place atop a patch of her scales.

Angela swears again upon reading Zoey’s final note to her.

‘He forced you to write that, didn’t he? I understand, Angela. You aren’t in a position where you can speak. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it all. Stay put, Angela. Do not let him cook you!!!!’

This time, Angela loses her patience. ‘Do not meddle with my affairs, or I will throw you to the sharks, Zoey.’

She throws the rock out with all her might, then listens, to the sound of it landing into the ocean nearby.

The siren gulps. She can only hope her message will get through to her old friend. Her throw may have been… a tad too strong.

Angela huffs. As she allows her back to fall back into the tub’s quaint water, she shuts her eyes. Zoey has always been of the meddling type. This should not come as a surprise, yet… it certainly will be a nuisance, she thinks whilst her head tilts until it rests against the tub’s curved and cool, pale marble.

Even if her old friend believes she is saving Angela, Angela cannot let her harm Francis, no matter what.

He is hers.

The flutter of a bell makes itself known across Francis’s modest cottage.

Angela glances upward to find that her lover has returned with a piles of chopped wood, hugged tightly between both his arms.

She raises a brow. Signs to him, ‘What’s this for? Are we making fire?’

He stares at her and smiles. A laugh escapes him—it is not calculated nor restrained at all. The sound is loud. Just like Angela likes it.

There is something freeing in being with someone who does not care much for sound, all Angela has ever been throughout her life was a voice that could enchant—without it, she was worthless in her people’s eyes. Nothing.

A drop in the ocean.

But he does not mind, if he she does not perform.

If she is herself.

Francis places the wood down with a heavy huff. He shuts the wooden door to his friendly abode, then finally raises his hands to reply to her as best he can. ‘You will see,’ is what he says.

And Angela shakes away the words from her mind, that she had read on Zoey’s stone.

Do not let him cook you.

The siren tells herself, Francis would never.

…Right?

Francis crouches before what has now become Angela’s Bathtub. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks her with a perplexed, little tilt of his head. ‘You look very frustrated with… something.’ He pauses. ‘I didn’t do anything to upset you, did I?’

Angela purses her lips together. Her gaze wavers to the chunks of wood that have been deposited next to Francis’s antique couch, she gulps. Would this truly be enough, to make a meal out of her? she wonders. And how would Francis even go about this in the first place? She has claws!

She could definitely defend herself!

Francis places a hand against the siren’s wrist to get her attention. The act dampens his skin. ‘Angela?’ he signs the words into her bare shoulder. ‘What is wrong, dear heart?’

‘Nothing,’ she replies. Because it is true. She is being silly. There’s not a hint of hate for her in Francis’s bones. The young man tends to build things all the time—it is likely this is for another project of his. Not a secret plan, held in his mind, to kill and eat her.

When Francis excuses himself in order to go cook the two lunch, Angela leans back into her bathtub once more and stares at the ceiling with a sigh. All ten of her webbed fingers linger against its ghost white sides.

The siren thinks of home.

It is true, that she was not just in the way that she disappeared. She should have warned someone, at least told a soul, that she was all right. But one day for her kind is nothing in comparison to the thousands of centuries her friends and family—and herself—likely still have left to live. Francis, on the other hand, counts his minutes preciously. He makes lists. Calculates how long certain recipes and projects will take him. In fact, aside from their lovemaking, Angela has noticed he is not one to get lost in moments of feeble distractions, that most humans seem to enjoy partaking in on the daily.

Angela shuts her eyes again. Zoey’s face comes to mind. The cottage’s scent of ancient, sun-tanned pages and lavender fill her senses with comfort—because, yes, this is now what home smells like to her.

She does not know, when she will leave.

She tells herself she must go back some day.

But it is hard.

Hard to go.

One day, Francis introduces her to the taste of what humans often eat. Some of the dishes, she does not digest; and when Angela immediately regurgitates everything onto the bathroom floor, her lover promises her, then, that he will replace every bit of salad with freshly picked kelp instead.

One night, when daybreak melts from the sky and the moon rises above BrittleNeck’s deserted shores and beaches connecting to a lonely little town, Francis picks out flowers, petals that he scatters across Angela’s bath-water. He brings her candles. Reads her stories with his hands—about these lands and ones neither of them have seen before—whilst she tells him tales of her childhood. What it was like around these parts, hundreds of years back.

And, at the end of their exchange, Angela finally decides now would be a good time to let Francis know. ‘Tomorrow,’ she signs, ‘I will return to the sea. My loved ones must know, that I am here. That I am alive and well.’

To her surprise, Francis’s face falls. Goes from loving to complete and utter disarray and panic in a matter of minutes. He perks up from his stool. His lip trembles. ‘You are leaving? Forever?’

The siren shakes her head. ‘If it is okay, I would like for us to stay together… a little while longer. I would like… to return to you, once the sun dissipates from the sky—tomorrow I will find my way back to you, beloved.’

And Francis replies, ‘Of course—of course, it is okay,’ as tears rise, then fall from his eyes.

That night, they do not indulge in each other’s bodies. Instead, Francis creates a make-shift mattress out of hay, that he puts next to Angela’s bathtub. They fall asleep peacefully, holding hands and smiling at one another. Saying goodnight through mutual squeezes of each other’s palms.