Chapter 1 #2
“You singing at the bonfire tonight?” Rex asks. His eyes are half-closed in that deceptive way of his. He looks relaxed, but he’s always listening.
“Mmm. Told Mateo I would. Some tourists specifically asked.” I scratch at the corner of my beer label. “They always ask.”
“Because you’re very good.”
“I’m a sirena. It’s sort of built in.”
“It’s still a skill.” He glances at me sidelong. “Not every sirena actually sings the way you do. Some of them just weaponize it.”
“I prefer to think of my voice as a gift I give freely to the community.”
Rex laughs, warm and real, rolling out of him easy as water, and something inside my chest loosens the way it does when I’ve been holding tension I didn’t notice was there. This. This is what I love about us.
No performance, no careful self-editing. Rex knows exactly what I am down to the species level and has never once made me feel like that’s anything other than completely ordinary.
When you’re both Otherkin, you develop a shorthand. When you’re also best friends, the shorthand becomes its own language.
I’m about to suggest we head in and change when voices carry up from the shore path.
Three of them. A cluster of familiar figures cutting along the lake trail the way locals do, the way that bypasses the public parking and goes right past the ecotour cabin.
The Bennett sisters from the crystal shop, moving in their characteristic matching-energy way, and old Mr. Calloway, who is human but has always known things he probably shouldn’t, including and especially when a storm is coming.
“—absolutely certain,” the older one is saying. “Liana told me she saw him in the market picking up some groceries.”
“Well,” Mr. Calloway says, in the dry register of someone who has lived by a lake long enough to have opinions about everything, “he’s got nerve, I’ll give him that. Showing his face again after all this time.”
“You know how selkies are.” The younger sister lowers her voice with the theatrical care of someone who absolutely wants to be overheard. “The sea calls, and they go. Doesn’t matter much who they leave behind.”
My body goes rigid.
The beer bottle is suddenly very slick in my hand. Beside me, Rex sits up.
“Cora—” he starts.
“I should change before the bonfire,” I say, fast and tight, already rising.
But they’ve spotted us. The older Bennett sister lifts a hand and redirects up the path toward the cabin, and I have approximately three seconds to paste something resembling normalcy onto my face.
“Cora! Rex!” She beams, glancing between us with the sharp-eyed warmth that is their family brand. “Perfect timing. We’re heading to the Rusty Anchor, come eat with us.”
“Thanks, but we’ve got the bonfire to prep,” Rex says, smooth as river stone.
Mr. Calloway is watching my face in that way of his. He has known me for about a year, and he has the long memory of someone who has been paying attention to the lake and everyone on it for several decades. “Heard the news, have you?”
“What news?” I ask.
The sisters exchange one of their looks. A whole conversation conducted in the space between two faces.
The younger one speaks gently. “About Muir. He’s back, sweetheart.”
The name is a physical thing. It hits behind the sternum, short and sharp, and for one very bad second I forget how to control my expression.
Muir.
I haven’t let myself say his name in four years. I haven’t let myself think it, not the full weight of it. I’ve skimmed across the surface of the thought the way you skim across cold water when you know what’s underneath.
And now here it is, dropped into a perfectly good evening by the Bennett sisters in their matching linen cardigans, and every feeling I have so carefully arranged is swaying on its foundations.
“Is he?” I say. The word comes out almost casual. Almost. “Huh.”
Rex’s hand finds the small of my back.
“He asked about you at the market, apparently,” the younger sister says. “Wanted to know if you were still running the Snack Hut during the summer.”
There’s a crack somewhere inside my chest, sharp and cold as lake ice giving way.
“Did he.” Not a question. Not anything.
“If you were still here,” Mr. Calloway adds, and he says it with a weight that suggests he is giving me important information, not gossip. He has always taken the difference between those two things seriously.
Where else would I be? This is my home now. He was the one who left. The idea that he’s back here asking if I’m still around—
“If he wants a tour,” I say pleasantly, “there’s a contact form on the website. Refund policy is also on the website. Very clearly laid out.”
Rex’s hand presses harder against my back.
“You always were a firecracker,” Mr. Calloway says, and there’s something fond and faintly sad in it that I like considerably less than irritation. “Never fully understood what happened between you two. Seemed like the real thing.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard enough to feel it.
The real thing.
The real thing ended with someone vanishing into the sea one morning. No goodbye, no note, nothing but the absence of someone who had been, for about two years, the presence my whole life arranged itself around.
Real things don’t do that. Real things leave evidence they were there.
“Well,” the older sister says, with the gracious social instinct of someone who has navigated more conversations than she can count, “we didn’t mean to ambush you. Just wanted to give you a friendly heads-up.”
“I appreciate it,” I say, with my best tour-guide warmth. “I’m completely fine. Four years, I’ve very much moved on—”
The sisters nod with the gentle compassion of people who absolutely do not believe you.
The silence that follows has a texture. I can feel their curiosity and their pity, can feel the shape of the story they’re already telling themselves.
Poor Cora, tried so hard to look unbothered.
And something in me goes hot and stubborn and three steps ahead of my better judgment.
“Actually,” I hear myself say, “I’m seeing someone. Have been for a while now. So there’s nothing to worry about.”
The eyebrows of both Bennett sisters ascend in perfect synchronized surprise.
“You are?” the younger one asks. “Who?”
“Me,” Rex says.
His arm slides around my waist with an ease that suggests he has made this decision calmly and in full possession of the facts, which cannot possibly be true.
I freeze. Then, because we are standing in front of three of the town’s most reliable gossip conduits and the alternative is complete social collapse, I lean into him. Just slightly. Like this is normal.
“We’ve been keeping it quiet,” Rex continues, in the tone of a man who is completely comfortable lying to elderly neighbors. “You know how small towns talk.”
“You and Rex?” Mr. Calloway’s eyebrows are somewhere near his hairline. “Well. I’ll be.”
“Started as friendship,” Rex says. “Best friends to more, you know how it goes sometimes. Took us both by surprise.”
“How long?” the older sister asks, already vibrating with the delight of people who have been waiting for this development.
“Six months,” I say, just as Rex says, “Three months.”
We look at each other.
“Six months since it started,” I say. “Three months official.”
“Right,” Rex agrees. “We took it slow.”
“Oh, you two,” the younger sister breathes, as if we have personally given her a gift. “We always thought you seemed made for each other.”
They talk for another few minutes about the summer festival, and I let Rex handle it because he is somehow completely natural and I am trying to remember how to make my face do normal things.
When they finally drift toward town with bright waves and promises to see us at the bonfire, I step out of Rex’s arm and put both hands over my face.
“Putang ina.” The words come out muffled through my palms. “What did I just do.”
“Started a rumor that will be the main topic of conversation in this town by six a.m. tomorrow,” Rex says, with the equanimity of a man who has witnessed many of my disasters and found them, on balance, entertaining. “Very smooth work.”
I drop my hands and look at him. “I panicked! But you did not have to fill in the blanks!”
He shrugs, one easy lift of one shoulder. “What are best friends for, if not fake dating when an ex shows up out of nowhere?”
The absurdity of it lands, and a laugh punches out of me. Short and slightly shaky, but real. “You’re genuinely okay with this?”
“Genuinely okay.” The corner of his mouth tilts up. “I’ve survived worse. After several years of knowing you, I’m pretty good at reading when you’re about to panic. And besides,” he says, voice dropping into something quieter, “you looked like you needed a lifeline.”
I did. Hearing that name, said out loud in the warm evening air like it hadn’t been locked in a box in the back of my chest for four years, it sent me spinning in a way I do not care to examine too closely.
“Why now, why would he—?” I stop. Set my jaw. “Doesn’t matter.”
He’s quiet.
“It doesn’t,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t look like you know.”
Rex exhales through his nose. Not quite a sigh, more like the sound of a large friendly shark exercising patience. “Cora. It’s me. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine. No masks between us, remember?”
His gentleness is genuinely dangerous. It gets in through all the cracks.
I turn away from him, toward the lake. The last light is leaving the water now, the gold going copper going deep blue at the edges where the dark comes first.
The lake looks back at me the way it always does. Patient and old and full of things it knows that I haven’t told it.
“I need to change before the bonfire,” I say. “We can figure out the details of our apparently very serious relationship later.”
Rex pushes to his feet. “I’ll pick you up at eight. Should I bring flowers?”
“If you bring flowers to the bonfire, I will put you in the lake.”
“Don’t tempt me with a good time,” he says with a wink, and heads for his truck, his dark head disappearing into the evening.
I stay on the porch for another moment. The lake murmurs at my feet, its low, private sound, only for me. It knows something has shifted in the evening air, the way water always knows, the way I always know.
Later, I tell it, the way I always do. After the bonfire, I’ll come down and let you hold me for a while.
There’s a bonfire to perform at. There’s a packed schedule tomorrow, and three more booked after that, and a summer that was perfectly, carefully, deliberately arranged to leave no room for things like this.
There’s a fake relationship to maintain with my best friend, which is the kind of sentence I would not have predicted for this Tuesday.
And somewhere in Harmony Glen, there is a selkie who left four years ago and apparently wants to know if I’m still here. Who asked about me at the store.
Who has nerve, as Mr. Calloway said. The nerve of someone who chose to go and is now choosing to return, like the sea, like the tide, like people always do when they’ve decided the leaving was enough.
The thought gives me a sharp, satisfying, slightly vicious thrill.
Underneath it, softer and more dangerous and buried as carefully as I can, is the ache of something that wasn’t finished.
Some wounds, I know from long experience, are like sirena songs. They linger in the bones long after the last echo leaves the water.