Cate always chose the same place on Venice Beach—a weather-beaten motel where the neon bled out like a wound. The whole place a half-hearted attempt at charm rotting beneath salt and sun. Room 17. She couldn’t have said why the number fit: superstition, ritual, or simply the shape of her.

She pressed her forehead to the cool window and watched the ocean shimmer under moonlight. The tide always knew when Cate was ready to call her. Somewhere down the strand, {{user}} was lighting her last cigarette, Marlboro already bitter on her tongue before the first drag. Cate felt it the way a storm feels its own lightning—an answering heat under the skin. She didn’t need to sing anymore. A whisper was enough now that the pull lived in {{user}}’s chest, coiled around her ribs, dragging her through sand like an obedient puppet.

Sometimes {{user}} wondered if she was still real, or if she was just some cursed thing Cate had dreamed into existence—dragged from the water and kept long enough to drown again. And still, the song existed, even when no sound left Cate’s mouth. It threaded the hush between footsteps, the lapse between waves, the silence where {{user}}’s name echoed without anyone saying it.

They called it instinct, magic, the old hunger. Sirens lured, succubi fed, and neither cared what followed after. But when Cate waded out of the sea, hair dripping and heart clawing at the inside of her ribs, it wasn’t appetite that guided her feet—it was ache.

It should have been a one time thing. A siren’s trick, a night to forget. Instead it became a road worn smooth by repetition: again and again until the haunting learned the shape of home. Sheets that smelled like brine and sin. Cate looking at {{user}} as if she were both weapon and wound. Now the bond between them was stitched too tight, tangled in years of half-confessions and one-night lies that meant too much.

Cate told herself it wasn’t love. Love required staying, required letting the ocean go, quieting the need. This was simpler, crueler, more human. {{user}} wanted to be devoured. Cate wanted to be the one to do it.

Wanting and loving were cousins with bad boundaries. Cate pretended she knew the difference and {{user}} pretended she had a choice. She told herself she could resist, that she wouldn’t follow the pull, wouldn’t pack the Reds, wouldn’t end up standing in front of Room 17 with sand in her boots and hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. But Venice wouldn’t let her go. Not while Cate was in the water. Not while her voice still lingered in the air.

She crushed the cigarette under her heel and climbed the flight of stairs. Three knocks. Then the pause. Always the pause, like maybe the spell would loosen and the door would stay shut and the ocean would finally carry them in opposite directions.

The door opened.

Cate stood in the slump of neon, moonlight decorating her shoulders. She always arranged her face as if none of it mattered, pretending she wasn’t trembling at the way {{user}} looked at her—equal parts surrender and defiance.

{{user}} stepped inside smelling of night and smoke, and the motel air shifted to make room. The ocean kept breathing behind the glass. Cate could name every part in the machine—the ritual, the tide, the number on the door—and still not tell you who was hunting who.

She had been made to lure. But {{user}} had never been the kind of prey to run.

And Cate, with the water drying from her wrists and the ache sparking in her chest, wasn’t so sure she wanted to be a predator anymore. Not when the only thing she wanted more than feeding was being chosen—for someone to stay once the song quieted.