They don’t call her a mermaid. Mermaids are postcards. They don’t call her a basic siren either, not the kind that sings a clean note and drags a boat under for the moral. On this coast the old men lower their voices and say the woman between tides. She shows when the moon is gone. Nobody agrees where she comes from. Jamaica, some swear — the braids, the gold at her ear, the way the dark water loves her skin. Somewhere older than any map, say the ones who saw her and lived long enough to lie about it.

I did all three. I spoke. I answered. I followed. That is the only honest start to this seductive fantasy story.

The beach was a shut mouth. No moon, just a smear of starlight on black-green water and the suck of small waves at the sand. I had come down because sleep wouldn’t take me — the usual rotten reason men walk into a forbidden attraction. Heat in the room. A faucet ticking somewhere in the house behind me. The kind of night that already feels wet.

She was out past the first line of foam, only her shoulders and the long ropes of her braids breaking the surface. Gold at one ear. A thin dark strap at her throat. She turned her face toward the shore like she had heard my foot on the wet sand.

I should have gone back up the path. Instead I said, stupid and human, “You alright out there?”

“You spoke,” she said. Voice low, warm, island-sweet and older than the accent. “Now you have to hear me. Come closer. The water’s honest. The sand lies.”

Sinta. She gave me the name the way a tide gives you a shell. I answered. Second rule, gone. “I’m not getting in.”

“Mm.” She drifted a stroke nearer. Water licked the line of her collarbone. “Everybody says that on the shore. The shore is where men still think they have a choice. Dark romance fantasy starts exactly there — when you already know the ending and you take the step anyway.”

I walked in to my ankles because I wanted to prove I could stop. The water was cold enough to shorten my breath, black-green, full of little sparks where it broke. She didn’t swim at me. She let the tide do the rude work, easing closer until I could see the wet on her mouth and the calm in her eyes.

“You think I drown people. That’s the church version. Pretty. Useless. I don’t want your lungs. I want the thing you won’t say out loud. Every man who follows me brings one fantasy he’s never admitted. I taste it off him. Then I can find him after. Bathwater. Dreams. Rain on the bedroom glass. A faucet running in another room. Once I know it, the sea isn’t the only place I fit.”

A sensual fantasy, then. Not a corpse. Worse, maybe.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

She laughed once, quiet. “You have a filthy one. It’s sitting behind your teeth. Ankle deep is where you still get to pretend.” She rose. Water sheeted off her chest. The strap was a bikini, dark as the sea, and it did almost nothing. Her nipples were tight from the cold, and she let me look the way a siren lets a sailor look: as a toll. “Tell me, or come deeper and I’ll take it off you without the words. Both end in my hands.”

I stayed. That was the choice. She came in until her knees brushed mine under the skin of the water. Salt, warm skin, something sweet crushed under the night. Her hand found my wrist. Not a grip. A placement. “Good. Stay rude. Stay honest. The mysterious woman fantasy only works if you stop being polite.”

Waist deep, the bottom still pretended to be there. Sand shifted under my feet. Sinta stood against me like the water had voted. Braids clung to her neck and my shoulder. The gold earring clicked once against my jaw when she leaned in and didn’t kiss me — not yet — just breathed at the corner of my mouth until I chased it.

She tasted like the sea and like she had been waiting. Her tongue was slow and nasty about it. I opened. Her hand went down my stomach under the water and found me already hard. She made a pleased sound against my lip. “Ah. The body files the truth before the mouth does.”

She stroked me through wet fabric, then under it, fingers sure, a little rough with the cold. I grabbed her ass to keep from folding. Firm, high, slippery. She rolled her hips into my hand like a woman who has never been shy about being wanted.

“Say it. The one you don’t tell. The siren fantasy you actually want. Not the clean one. The one with my mouth. The one where I don’t let you finish until you beg in the dark.”

I told her. All of it. That I wanted her to use me, to talk filthy in that warm voice while the black water hid what her hands did, to take me in her mouth until my knees went, to ride me out where nobody could pretend we were just swimming. That I wanted her to know it so well she could turn up later, in the bath, in the rain, in the dream where the faucet never stops.

Sinta’s eyes half-closed, satisfied, like a lock taking a key. “There she is. That’s the one. Now I have you.”

She sank. Not a dramatic dive. A decision. Braids fanned, then vanished, and her mouth found me under the surface with a shock of heat that didn’t belong in that cold. I swore. My hand caught the back of her head and she let me hold her there while she sucked me slow and deep, cheeks hollowing when she came up for a breath and went down again. She licked the head, took me to the back of her throat, pulled off to bite softly at my hip and say, hoarse, “Don’t you dare come yet. Waist deep is just the confession.” Then she swallowed me again, messier, spit and seawater, one hand working what her mouth left, the other pressing exactly where it made my vision spark.

I hauled her up because if I didn’t I was going to finish like a boy. She came up laughing, lips swollen, water running off her chin onto my chest. “Coward. Or smart. Deeper, then. No bottom. That’s where I fuck the truth into you.”

Past the shelf the sand gave up. My feet kicked and found nothing. Sinta didn’t struggle. She belonged to it. She wrapped her legs around my waist and the dark held both of us, black-green, endless. The bikini bottom was a scrap. She pushed it aside. I pushed mine down as far as the water allowed. Her cunt was hotter than the sea had any right to permit — slick, swollen, gripping the head of my cock when she sank onto me an inch and stopped.

“Look at me. This is the forbidden attraction. Not the drowning. The staying. You feel how I fit? That’s yours now. Say my name when you move.”

“Sinta.”

She took the rest of me in one slow drop. We both made a sound that didn’t belong on a quiet beach. I fucked up into her and the water rocked us, obscene and private. Every thrust lifted a slap of sea against her ass. She rode it, rolling, grinding her clit against me, nails in my shoulders, mouth at my ear running a filthy sermon.

“That’s it. Deeper. You followed the woman in the dark water and now you don’t get a polite ending. Fill me. Use me. Remember this exact filthy stretch so when I come back in your bath you know whose fingers those are. When it rains on your window, that’s my mouth. When the faucet runs, you get hard because I told your body to.”

I got a hand between us and rubbed her the way her hips asked for — tight circles, relentless. She broke first, shaking, cursing soft in my neck, cunt fluttering around me so hard I nearly went with her. She didn’t let me pull out. She clenched and talked me through it, nasty and precise: how she wanted it inside, how she’d keep the feeling of me, how the next time wouldn’t even need the ocean. I came buried in her, pulse after pulse, her name wrecked in my throat, the no-bottom dark holding us like a secret with teeth.

After, she didn’t vanish in a splash. She stayed on me until the shaking eased, kissing the corner of my mouth, almost gentle, which was the cruelest part.

“Now you know the rule was never about dying,” Sinta said. “It was about after. Go home. Run a bath if you’re brave. Leave the tap on if you’re not. I’ll hear either one.” Her thumb stroked my lip. “And if you want me meaner than this — if you want the version where I don’t let you up until you’ve said every dirty thing twice — you don’t wait for the moon to leave. You call.”

She slipped off me. The water closed. For a second I saw only braids and a gold glint, then the black-green nothing, then the shore, very far away, like a decision I had already spent.