Page 84 of A Siren Song for Christmas

Then he and Uzoth turned and left the store.

Malachi frowned at the closed door, his insides and thoughts a tangled mess.

And in his chest, that painful lump swelled and festered, growing even larger inside him. It rose into his aching throat, choking him. He could barely draw breath.

He paced back and forth behind the counter. Back and forth. Back and forth.

He couldn’t stand still. He walked in circles around the emporium. Even though it wasn’t closing time, he turned the sign to closed.

Grady’s words unnerved him. Made him uncertain and unsure. Because Malachi had no fucking clue what he was doing!

His body flushed hot. He tugged at buttons and fabric, trying to cool himself. He pulled his shirt open.

I’ll never see Trent again.

Malachi paused. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and forced the air into his constricting lungs. He rubbed his hand over his throat, over that swelling ache that choked him.

“His love for you needs to fade. So he can move on.”

Grady’s words echoed. Malachi’s breath came too fast. His head swam. A broken groan escaped his throat as the pain consumed him. He knew Trent needed to stop loving him. It was for the best. But every nerve in his body rejected the idea.

His emotions and thoughts jumbled, like seaweed knotting together. He felt like he was trying to swim through them and kept getting caught in their grasps. He felt like he was drowning and didn’t know the way to the surface.

Then a memory hit him.

He remembered swimming through a dark, deep ocean, lost and confused and aching. The grief had been so overwhelmingly strong after Forathia’s death.

He felt the same way now.

Because he was grieving the loss of Trent.

“What is the difference between friends who are fucking and being in love with someone?”Grady’s words nagged at him.

Malachi opened his eyes. He flittered his gaze around the store, not knowing where to look or what to do. He stared at the drooping flower of the yellow sorrow.

What was the difference?

When he’d heard Forathia’s song so many years ago, the world had burst into shining colour and magic in a single instant.

Meeting Trent had been nothing like that. Not at all.

Trent had entered his emporium and his world so silently that Malachi had barely even noticed him. Over time he’d paidmore attention to the nervous young human who kept coming into his store.

Then they’d started to get to know each other. And bit by bit, Trent had changed his world. He’d brightened it from a dull lifelessness until Malachi’s world burned once again with vibrant colours. It had come alive with beauty and joy and hope and magic.

And love.

Malachi stared at the yellow sorrow as cold realisation slid over him.

He’d assumed it couldn’t be love, since it looked nothing like the first time he’d experienced it. For his whole childhood, his head had been filled with stories of sirens falling in love. Of love that occurred when one first heard their mate song. Of love that was instantaneous.

He’d been so full of these stories and the memories of his own past love that he’d been oblivious to any other way that love could form.

Trent’s face filled his mind. Trent’s sweet, lovely face. The pain in his chest and throat spread through him until his hands and feet tingled with it. His vocal cords trembled.

And suddenly, the pain of the past few days made sense. He wasn’t just missing a friend. He was grieving a lost love.

Because Malachi had fallen in love. And then he had cast that love aside, breaking both their hearts.