Sweet Romance16 min read
The Man on the Subway Was a Mermaid (and He Became My Husband)
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I heard the voice again on the subway.
"That man diagonally across from you is a mermaid. He's running out of water. If you give him a bottle of water, he'll become your boyfriend."
1
The voice first spoke to me when I was five.
"Stop your parents from going out now, or they won't come back," it said.
I cried until my small face was wet because I believed the voice. My parents stayed home that day. Later they told me a truck had crashed through the vendor stalls where they'd have gone; they called me their lucky charm. Only I knew the charm had been a voice.
I never forgot that voice. When it sounded in my ear on the rattling midnight train, I looked up without hesitation.
He was handsome—sharp cheekbones, a narrow nose, lashes that shadowed his lids like a promise. He leaned back, eyes pinched with effort. His skin was the kind of pale that made the lights on the subway seem warm. He looked ill.
"Can I get you some water?" I asked, before I could talk myself out of it.
He blinked, accepted the bottle with long, knuckled fingers, and drank until his Adam's apple bobbed frantic under his throat. Water dripped down the line of his collarbone.
"Thank you," he said, and his voice was smooth, like a stone rolling under a river.
I had promised myself I'd never, ever ask a stranger to be my boyfriend. I had also been single my whole life. My face flamed.
"Will you be my boyfriend?" I asked in a small voice.
He choked on a laugh that turned into a cough. "Cough, cough—"
I patted his back in panic. "Sorry—sorry. I didn't mean to—forget I said anything."
He steadied himself, smiled in that exact way the subway lights made him dangerous and soft, and said, "Yes."
"Yes?" I echoed, because the word fell into my chest like a stone of astonishment.
He wrote his name on a card. "I'm Fielding Cruz. Call me. Or don't. Remember to call me, girlfriend." He poked my forehead playfully and walked away.
I watched his back until the doors hissed shut. I floated home feeling ridiculous and alarmingly giddy. The voice had said this man was a mermaid. I had handed him a bottle. He had said yes.
The subway stopped, then restarted, and a strange dull regret set in: we got off at the same station.
I had to sit through another stop, then turn around and go back. I worked late that night and reached my building around nine. I patted my pockets for my keys. Nothing. I stared at the neighbor next door—our balconies were connected—and an idea slid into my head.
I knocked, and the door opened.
He stood in the doorway wrapped in nothing but a towel. Steam braided the air around him. My eyes snagged on the line of his ribs. He caught me staring. "Hey, girlfriend."
"You—" I stammered. "Can I please climb over your balcony? I forgot my keys."
"No," he said, very decisive.
"Ah?" I said back.
He bent down, lips close to my ear. "Or you could stay at my place. If you're my girlfriend, you may as well use the guest room."
My face lit like a match. "No, no, I can figure it out. I won't be any trouble—"
He grabbed my wrist and tugged me along. "I'm kidding. Come on. I'll walk you over."
When he let go on the balcony, he handed me a small box. "Thanks for the water. This is for you."
I looked: inside lay a pearl necklace, big pearls strung on a simple chain. Real, luminous. I swallowed. He smiled like a boy hiding something and said, "Wear it."
That night I slept with Fielding's business card in my pocket. He worked at Sovereign Law. He was—according to my internet research after I fell asleep while staring at the card—one of their best. The firm handled big cases and even bigger money. He lived across from my office building. The world, I thought, had shifted slightly and I was living on a new axis.
2
"Good morning, girlfriend."
"Good morning," I said, pretending to be cool, and I fastened the pearls around my neck before packing my lunch.
The train was crammed; a man barged into me and sent my chest into Fielding's. My palms landed on his abdomen, on ribs that rolled under his tee like waves. Every careful, private thing that had been mine—his skin, the sound of his breath—felt like a public secret.
"Sorry," the man said, apologetic, and stepped away.
Fielding's arms slid around me as if it were the most natural thing. "We're boyfriend and girlfriend," he murmured into my hair, which made the whole subway feel conspiratorial.
"You're weird," I said, but my voice was thin with happiness.
At one point the flash of white along his collarbone caught my eye. "Do you have," I asked, because the voice on the train had not lied before, "scales?"
He caught me staring and lifted his shirt for a second at the hem of his torso. There it was—an iridescent shimmer like tiny tiles. "Yes," he said. "So?"
"Then you're a mermaid."
He laughed, soft and incredulous. "Yes," he said again. "Put it like that if you must. But I'm on leave. I live mostly on land."
He walked me to the office building across from his work.
"You're so close," I said.
"I know," he said, brushing his thumb over a hair at my temple. "Our fates are efficient."
My desk mate Jordyn Moreau, who had the voice of a town crier, announced my every jewelry choice. "Where did you get that necklace? You're glowing." The team hovered; gossip tastes like sugar and sour at the same time.
"From my boyfriend," I said.
They all looked at me like I had painted a halo behind my head.
3
There was a man from my team who hated me. Bryson Schultz had been a trainee I helped six months earlier. He had stalked my messages, sent awkward images which he deleted after sending, and I had had to get HR involved, then asked for a reassignment. He now sat in a corner scowling like someone who had lost a lottery ticket.
"Nice necklace," said Jordyn, loud. "Is it real?"
"It's probably costume," I said. "I've been poor my whole life."
"That's not costume," she scoffed. "My aunt sells pearls."
She analyzed quality. "It's natural," she declared in a tone that made people nod. "This is three to five carats, easy."
"Stop," I whispered, because a thousand eyes on money feels like a cliff. Bryson's face tightened.
That evening rain made the world smell like iron. Fielding appeared beneath my umbrella. "You don't have to walk with me," I offered.
"I want to," he said. He slipped his arm around me and shielded me from the rain.
He watched Bryson's direction and closed the space between us without speaking. "You're mine," he said before anyone else could name it.
4
I knew something else about Fielding. He wasn't just handsome and rich. He couldn't predict exactly everything, but he had a way of sensing little things before they happened. A tiny voice of foresight, the kind that cost him.
"Where did you learn to do this?" I asked once. He blushed.
"It's complicated," he said. "We merfolk have things humans don't."
I told him about the voice in the subway. He smiled with a secret in his throat. He didn't deny it.
We ate the dinner we made together—he cleaned my apartment after I cooked because apparently my sink needed a particular kind of care—and whenever someone walked by the doorway, Fielding's hand found my waist. He took off his jacket without thinking and gave it to me when a draft caught my shoulders. The small acts multiplied and became a constellation.
"You're different with me," I whispered once.
"Because you're different," he said.
5
Then the nights got noisy.
One night, very late, the voice pulsed in my skull like a bell: "Fielding is drowning. Now."
I ran across the shared balcony and found the bathroom light on at his apartment. In the tub his head bobbed under water like a small boat turned over. I yanked him out, breathed into his mouth until his chest worked, and he coughed salt and sleep out.
"Why didn't you—"
"Listen," he said, weak, staring at me with that thing in his eyes—the thing people fall into and can't climb out of. "If you touch my tail you must marry me."
"Your tail?" My voice sounded like a child.
He undressed partway, and when the robe fell open it revealed iridescent skin, a tail so beautiful it didn't belong to the world of clothes. "It hurts to be on land," he said, laughing hollowly. "Sometimes I forget I'm not always water."
I touched it. It was cooler than I thought, soft and slick like the underside of a river stone. "This is—amazing."
He took a deep breath, and his voice changed. "You saved me by mouth-to-mouth. That's our first kiss."
I was stunned, then delighted.
6
At work, rumors started. A woman named Kristina Murphy came to my desk, then later to my house; she called me by my full name and dropped a bag of pearls on the table.
"Take them," she said. "Leave him. Take these and live like a queen."
She smacked her lips at the idea as if bargaining food.
"I won't," I said.
"Fine," she said, and spread even more pearls across the table then left a paper wind in her wake. She had been one of Fielding's colleagues in the city office. She said it with a smile, but there was sugar and grit behind it.
In the quiet hours I told Fielding. He laughed—short, hard. "Kristina has a temper."
"She told me I bring him misfortune," I said.
He touched my knuckles. "I wouldn't let her hurt you."
7
Not all trouble wore pearls.
One night walking home from a birthday dinner I had to go to with colleagues, my heel caught in a gutter. I heard footsteps and felt cold breath against my neck. Bryson lunged at me from behind.
"You're mine," he said.
I fought. He brought out a knife. The blade gleamed under a failing streetlight. I thought about the voice in my head calling me to be careful. I thought about not being the reason someone I loved came to harm. My phone was already in my hand; I aimed and hit him in the face with pepper spray I had tucked into my bag. He staggered, shrieking. I ran. He pulled a knife and the world narrowed.
Then there was a blur and a foot and a man's voice saying, "Stay back," and Bryson fell back with a thud.
Fielding had come in a sliver of time I had no right to expect. He had a knife in his hand once Bryson lunged, but he threw himself between me and Bryson and kicked the knife free. The blade slid across the pavement uselessly.
Police arrived within minutes. Bryson screamed and cursed and called me all kinds of names. Fielding held me and kissed my brow like a benediction. I felt his tears on my face.
"Why did you come?" I asked later, when the police had carted Bryson away.
"I saw it," he said simply. "I can feel when danger touches you." He pressed a pearl into my palm—his tears turned to pearls sometimes—and I realized he had been crying for me.
8
Work went on. Fielding and I became something people whispered about: the lawyer from Sovereign Law with the mermaid secret and the girl who wore pearls like armor. We ate, we fought small fights, we acclaimed small victories. We learned the quiet grammar of each other.
Then the car came.
We were on a narrow riverside promenade. He held a conch shell and told me it would let us talk if we were apart. I told him things I had never told anyone: my childhood, my small half-lies and my big hopes.
He turned his face as if to answer whatever I had said into that shell.
A car leapt the curb. I screamed his name.
He was thrown. The vehicle hit the railing and his body went over.
I ran to the river. Blood stained the water like bruised fruit. The city watched in a slow, collective inhale. I screamed and screamed until my throat burned. Voices answered me with police radios and car horns and the wet slap of shoes.
He didn't surface.
The next days were a blur of sirens and emptiness. The police dredged the river for three days and found nothing. People left candles and flowers. Kristina stood at the edge and said quietly, "You brought this on him," and left like a winter wind.
I kept the conch shell pressed to my ear. "Fielding," I said into it every night. "Come home."
The shell never answered.
9
I was not dead, but I felt dead. I stopped going out on weekends. I went back to work after a few weeks. I learned to move through corridors like a ghost. The pearl Fielding had given me hung like a pulse at my throat. I learned to breathe between memories.
Three years passed. I wore my hair a little longer. I was promoted to supervisor. My parents called and wanted me to marry; I said no, that my heart belonged to someone already.
Sometimes I stood by the river and watched the water turn a thousand shades of gray and blue. I would talk to the shell. People left me alone out of a kindness that knows not what to say.
Then, one night, while I sat on the stone bench with a container of fish for the dead and the living, something walked out of the dark.
"Emmaline?" a voice said.
I thought I would not get up. I thought I would break. I looked and there he was: hair wet, eyes laughing like they never stopped, clothes that still smelled faintly of sea salt. He stood as if he had been gone a day, not three years.
"Fielding," I breathed.
He smiled the smile I had lived on.
"I told you," he said. "You don't bring me misfortune. You bring me home."
I ran. He wrapped me up in an embrace warm enough to stop the ache. He told me the story in fractured pieces: how he had gone to the deep to heal, how he had been slowed down by merfolk law and injury, how Kristina had lashed out because of pride and been punished for it by the council. He said, "I am here now," and I decided I didn't need any more proof than the weight of his body against mine.
10
But nothing in stories is that simple. Kristina's wound remained raw. She had been rebuked in private by merfolk elders for her attempt to manipulate fate; they had ordered her to make reparations. She came to my office one afternoon with open hands and a public plan that would change everything.
"Leave him," she said in front of the whole office kitchen. "Back away from his life, Emmaline. You're reckless."
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Because I work with him," she said. "And because I can tell that the things you do are dangerous."
I laughed, and the laugh was hollow. "You tried to buy me with pearls."
She didn't shrink. "I did. He left me. I paid his trust with everything I had."
Fielding stepped in. "Kristina, stop."
She looked at him like a wound open to the air. "You didn't punish me fairly," she said. "You let her stay."
"Check your tone," Fielding said, and something old in her snapped. She turned and left.
11
I thought that would be the end. But then came the day when the firm threw a gala—a public charity evening where all the city's suits and ribbons came together. I was there as Fielding's guest. The ballroom glittered. People smiled like polished coins. A thousand lamps dangled like thinking eyes.
Kristina arrived late, like an accusation. People noticed. "Oh," she said, when she saw me. "So this is the woman."
Fielding moved to me like varnish; his hand found mine.
At the center of the room the law firm had a stage and a small podium. Their director was making a speech. The event was being livestreamed across channels—nothing, I learned later, moves faster than a scandal.
Then Kristina walked to the microphone. She stood in front of camera lights like a woman about to confess or condemn. "I'd like to say something," she declared.
The room quieted. Everyone leaned forward the way moths do when a fire dares to change.
12
What followed was the public punishment I had been promised by fate even before I knew I needed it. It had to be public—what she had threatened, what she had tried to do, the web she had woven had been public enough.
She began to speak.
"I have been dishonest," Kristina said, "and selfish." Her voice was steady, brittle like a frozen branch. "I bought my way into what I thought would satisfy me. I tried to buy Fielding's loyalty. I tried to buy his love. I used wealth and position to manipulate, to threaten Emmaline, to throw pearls at someone they thought would leave him."
There was a stir. Someone whispered, "Oh."
"That is not all," she went on. "I have harassed colleagues. I have tried to create problems. I used my position to make others uncomfortable. I used my knowledge of the firm to coerce and to threaten."
Someone gasped audibly. A man in a tux whispered, "No."
She was not naming names, but the implication was a blade: her list of sins was a public litany. Fielding stood very still. I felt him hold my knees under the table.
"I will accept any investigation," Kristina said, now beginning to crumble. "I will accept any punishment. I will repay what I took."
A camera had found her. Phones bloomed like flowers. People streamed what amounted to an official corporate admission of wrong. The director of the firm stepped up, pale as candle wax, and said, "We will investigate immediately. Kristina, you will be suspended until this is complete. This firm does not condone harassment."
Phones clicked. "What is she talking about?" someone asked.
People whispered. "Kristina was always ambitious," someone offered.
The surveillance footage someone had quietly uploaded earlier that day began to play on the large screens. Kristina's voice on camera at other times, her messages, her attempts to contact Emmaline—everything, unspooling like a film. The footage showed her in the stairwell where she had left the pearls. The suspension followed like a reflex.
"Is this—" I began, but Fielding squeezed my hand.
Kristina's face dropped. The right-hand woman who had tried to buy me had been turned under the public light and found raw. Her breath hitched. She staggered away from the microphone, shoulders collapsing. People around her whispered like a wind through paper.
But the punishment didn't end there. The firm announced that their board would convene a public hearing on harassment claims. Social media had already taken the video; it was out there, a rolling tide of commentary. Some called for her to be fired. Some asked for her resignation. The live chat filled with emojis: broken hearts, clapping hands, the shades of people trying to make sense of betrayal.
Kristina looked as if on some level she had always expected this. Yet when the cameras stayed on her, when colleagues replayed the messages she'd thought private, a change came over her. The smile dropped away. The defiant posture—used to be a shield—crumbled.
She began to plead, quietly, in the foyer as people filed out. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone like this," she said to anyone who would listen. "I can repay it, I will repay it—"
"Not by buying people," said one colleague from Reception, who had been harassed by Kristina's manipulative deals. His voice was small but steady and carried like a bell. "You need to own up to what you did."
"You're being nasty," Kristina snapped, but the room had turned against her.
Cameras were everywhere now. Someone started a hashtag for accountability. Fielding stayed with me through the entire thing. Later, when the firm sent out a statement condemning harassment and promising investigations, the unanimous support for that statement showed in the director's voice, which was firm and unsentimental. Kristina's supporters had titles and money; the rest of the room had faces and stories.
When she left the firm that night, it was with her reputation like a shredded banner. People took photos. People tweeted. She screamed at a few who approached her—"You don't understand!"—and others walked past ignoring her like a tide. In the end, she slumped on a taxi seat and drove into a rainstorm.
13
This punishment was not private. It was not a judicial sentence with an austere bench: it was a public unmasking. Her pleas—all the way from "it was only pearls" to "I love him"—had to meet a crowd that no longer wanted to listen. I watched her face go through the precise stages of disintegration I had been told to write down: confidence, pride, fury, bargaining, then a small collapse and blankness. She received no warm hands, no sympathetic murmurs. She had traded respect for currency and learned in the public eye that currency cannot buy conscience.
People clapped when Fielding gave a short speech that acknowledged the hurt she had caused the firm and promised action. The applause was not for spectacle. It was relief.
Later that week, the board announced Kristina's suspension and the start of a restorative process that included mandatory counseling and public apology. Social feeds shared the story. Columnists wrote about how power often sits on pearl-encrusted chairs. The firm's reputation took a bruising at first, but leadership insisted something better would grow from acknowledging the rot.
Kristina was not jailed that night. The law of the firm could not make her life into a prison. But in the public sphere she had been stripped of the very thing she had traded away: the comfortable silence that protects the guilty. She tried to hold on to her friends. Good friends stepped away. People whispered behind her, while she stood in the shade like an animal waiting for a judge that would never come.
That was her punishment: loss of trust, public humiliation, a living unspooling of every manipulation she'd woven. It was worse than being alone only because it came with a hundred mirrors. People who had been her allies folded their arms and turned away. Her reputation was a currency no one wanted to spend. Watching that, I felt compassion and anger braided together—I wanted to help, but I could not erase the long list of ways she had hurt others.
Fielding told me, later, in the quiet of our kitchen, "I did not want revenge. I wanted truth."
14
Bryson, on the other hand, received a different ending.
His punishment was immediate and different: in the police station, there was witness testimony, bruises, and a piece of footage from a café camera that caught him advancing on me that night. He pled guilty to stalking and assault. He was made to attend rehabilitation, and the judge issued a restraining order. The court hearing was public. The courtroom buzzed with people who knew how hard that first step can be. Bryson's face was a map of someone who had been exposed. He tried to pretend he had been misunderstood. He did not manage to find sympathy.
In front of everyone—my friends, the court officers, his former colleagues who had been rattled by his behavior—he apologized. It was a small, legal apology and it carried with it nothing of the arrogance he'd worn. "I'm sorry," he said. "I did wrong."
People in the gallery murmured. Some clapped. The judge spoke, stern and measured. "You will stay away from the victim," she said. "You will accept counseling." The judgment was not a celebration, but a public correction. Afterwards, he stood in the foyer—and a cluster of colleagues walked past him with their heads high and didn't look back.
His punishment was the court and the humiliation of being known as a man who had once thought he owned a stranger. That, somehow, was a mercy because it forced him to begin new behavior, in public, under watch. The world learned to call him by his crime, and that naming changed him.
Three years I spent with the weight of absence. Three years of pearls and shells and the hollow ache that lingers after someone you love appears to have left the world.
15
Then Fielding returned with wet hair and tired laughter, and he filled the space like a tide.
We rebuilt what had become ours. He taught me about the sea—about currents that remember, about tides that carry secrets, about a kind of patience that is not waiting so much as water learning to lap the right places again.
We argued, we grew. He stopped using premonition because each use cost him something vital. "I cursed myself with knowing too much," he told me once, while cooking on a slow afternoon. "I took my own breath to find yours."
We married in a small ceremony by the water—no priest, no grand hall. Fielding had a way of talking that made me feel like the sea itself was listening. He sang me a small merfolk lullaby during our vows. Tears brackish as rain fell down both our faces. People from the firm came, even some who had watched Kristina's unraveling and spoken on podiums taking care of the public wound. They clapped because it felt like redemption.
16
"Do you ever regret telling me what you know?" I asked him one night lying in bed, my fingers tracing the line of his jaw.
"No," he said. "You have been my center. I regret only that it took me so long to stop using a future I did not own."
"Am I a danger to you?" I whispered.
He shook his head. "You are everything that taught me to be brave. You give me more life than any premonition did."
Three heart-thrum moments in the span of memory: first, when he had smiled and said "yes" on the subway and my youthful heart had flipped; second, when he had fought off Bryson for me and pressed tears into pearls that he then gave back as proof that someone love-struck can still be fierce; third, the night he returned from the tide and folded me into him as if putting a story back into the right book.
17
We never stopped telling the story of the voice on the subway. When people asked how we met, Childlike wonder threaded through my answer. "A voice told me to," I'd say. "And I gave him water."
Fielding would add, with a laugh, "And she asked me to be her boyfriend in the time it took a stranger to finish a bottle of water."
We kept the conch shell on a shelf. Sometimes, when we were apart, we'd whisper into it. The sea never really left him, and for me it meant there was always a bridge.
It would have been easy to end the story with a promise—"We'll face whatever comes"—but that would be a cliché someone else wrote. Instead, our ending is the conch shell: I keep it where the air smells faintly of salt. When I lift it to my ear, I hear him in its curled silence. The sound is small, but it is the exact shape of home.
The End
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