“Can I hold you?” she asked.
“Are you really going to get as wet as me—” he started but she was already upon him, throwing her arms around his shoulders and dropping into the pitch-black sea. The water was cold but she didn’t care. She had to be with him.
He curled into her, his hands tightening around her back like he truly could never let go, and he nuzzled his face into the base of her neck.
“I swam away,” he mumbled into her. “I’ve never been back tothe deep since. I…” She just held him as his breathing turned more ragged. “I’m such a failure.”
“No,” she instantly shushed. “You did the best you could. He’s the one at fault here. Not you.”
There was something wet on her shoulder but she didn’t mention it and instead just held him tighter.
CHAPTER 30
“I’m sorry,” he said when he pulled away after some time.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
He still looked upset about it though. Well, that was understandable given what he had shared.
But his next words shocked her. “Still, I said I wanted ‘happily ever after’ with you and then I do something like this.”
She had to restrain her laugh. He was so cute. “No,” she said, smiling. “No, happily ever after doesn’t meaneverymoment is happy. It’s just a saying. In fact, in marriage vows, husbands and wives agree to love each other through the bad times, through sickness and in health and in everything in between.”
“Husband and wives?”
“When two people get married, husband is the man and wife is the woman. And ‘wives’ is more than one wife because language is insane sometimes.”
He sort of snickered a laugh and then trailed his hand along her jaw, slow and sensual. “So you’d be my wife?”
She felt the blush. “I guess I would. If we get married.”
She might as well have said ‘if we have a happily ever after’, for he understood it just the same.
“I…” he started before it died off. “Daria, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I listened. That man wanted to be your husband too.”
CHAPTER 31
“Oh.”Oh. “Yes, he did say that,” she said after a moment. There was no reason to deny it.
“You didn’t say no.”
“He didn’t want to listen to no, and I thought—”
“It’s okay,” he said, cutting her off.
“Hey, I don’t plan on saying yes to him.”
“No? But isn’t a human better than a mermaid?”
“Says who?” she practically chastised. “Whose hands are on my waist right now? Certainly not his.”
“But—”
“But nothing. What would make you think I want him when I so clearly wantyou?”
That got him to be both shocked and blushing. “How can you say that? I’m a failed mermaid, too scared to even go where I belong and he—”
“Maybe you belonged right here,” she suggested firmly. “Maybe that part at least was fate so we would meet.”
