“Two tails,” he said, gesturing to her other leg still underwater.
Brida snorted. “Legs. They’re called legs.”
He repeated the word, then nodded to show either his approval or his understanding.
She pointed to her toes, wiggling them for emphasis. “Toes.” Her foot jerked in his grasp while he counted the five digits with ticklish touches. At his inquiring taps on her skin, she revealed the name for each part of her leg. “Foot. Arch. Ankle. Shin. Calf. Knee. Thigh.” Every touch sent sparks shooting through her body. Was it possible to catch fire while immersed in water?
The tell-tale series of low-pitched clicks started low in his throat, a vocalization of his growing arousal. Her lessons in kissing had taught her as much as they taught Ahtin. In those interim moments when they’d come up for air, she’d caught a good look at his erection.
Displayed with neither shame nor arrogance, his cock had emerged from where it lay hidden behind the longer vertical slit in his tail. Pink in color and broader at its base than its tip, it had nudged the inside of her thigh covered by the fall of her skirt. They might be human woman and merman, of different origin with different bodies, but mating instinct possessed an accurate aim.
At the moment, his erection rubbed along her buttocks as he floated her on her back, and his breathing was as rapid as hers. He lifted her a little higher with one hand until the chilly air washed over her nicely warmed skin and pebbled her nipples. With the other, he stroked the line of her body from collar bones to the triangle of dark hair between her thighs.
Brida’s breathy moan made the ridges marking his eyebrows arch and his lips curve into a pleased smile. He repeated the caress, pausing to trace the curve of her breasts and tease her nipples with the barest hint of a touch.
“You are made like the merwomen here. You feed your young the same way?” Brida nodded, hardly able to retain a thought for more than a moment. He continued his journey down her body, stopping once more at the juncture of her thighs. “Here you are different.” She gasped as his fingers slipped lower, finding the entrance to her body. The heartbeat of her own arousal pulsed there, and her legs parted wider to give him better access. “Not so different, beautiful Brida,” he said in a low voice before slowly sliding a finger inside her.
Brida’s gasp echoed throughout the cave. She clutched his supporting arm with one hand and gripped his opposite wrist with the other, torn between wanting him to stop and urging him to keep going, use more than a finger on her. Use that lovely cock rubbing so teasingly against her backside, promising a pleasure she’d all but forgotten in the years since Talmai had died.
He played her body the same way she played her flute, with a combination of delicacy, prowess, and reverence, learning each curve and reaction as if she were the notes to a song. They floated in the water, Brida no longer on her back but pressed breast to chest with Ahtin, her legs wrapped tight around his middle, her hands clasped at his nape under the slippery cascade of his hair.
She explored his body in much the same way he had hers, hands marking a path over his shoulders, tracing the color divide that started just under his ears, transitioning from dove gray on his back to the pearlescent shade of ivory on his front, with its muted pastels shimmering just below his skin. “You’re made like human man here,” she said, running her hands down his arms and over his chest. “Different in other places.”
She traced the helix of his ear, not smooth and rounded like hers, but rimmed with small bony points of various heights. His ear lobe was much smaller than hers, while the auricle was much bigger, almost completely covering the entrance to his ear canal. The low-profile dorsal fin along his back, and of course his tail, were the most obvious distinctions from a human, but Brida found that it was the shape of his ears that most sharply reminded her of their dissimilarities.
The thought plagued her for the time it took her to blink before she shoved it aside. Those physical disparities didn’t matter. He made her remember happiness and spontaneity, reminded her that wonder existed in the apparent and the hidden. He made her spirit, so long asleep, awaken.
Ahtin thrust against her with a flex of his tail. “Different here as well?”
She dipped one hand below the water, reaching between their bodies to grip his cock and give him a quick stroke. His nostrils flared, and his fingers dug into her buttocks. “Only a little, and in a good way.” She kissed him then, not just with her mouth, but her entire being, rejoicing when he enthusiastically returned her ardor, those humming clicks erupting from his throat to tickle her tongue and lips with their resonance.
Waves lapped around them as Ahtin spread her thighs, opening her wider so that his cock slid long and deep inside her in one smooth stroke. Brida groaned at the penetration, the fullness of him. She squeezed his waist with her thighs, swallowing his rushed exhalation mixed with a groan of her own.
The back of his tail tensed and contracted against her heels with each thrust, his breathing as stuttered as hers when they ended one hard kiss, only to begin another. Their bodies’ positions and the rubbing of his tail against her pelvis in just the right way spiked sensations through her so hard that she climaxed before he did, nearly arching out of his arms with the intensity of her orgasm.
Ahtin soon followed her, his thrusts growing quicker, more forceful, punctuated by guttural sounds he purred into her ear even as he pumped his seed into her welcoming body. Afterwards, he stretched onto his back, with Brida atop him as they floated in the pool. He remained inside her, still semi-erect. Brida folded her hands across his chest to rest her chin on her knuckles and gaze at his handsome features, a little slack now with satiated pleasure. She suspected she looked much the same.
What a strange and marvelous thing she had just experienced. A small part of her feared she dreamed all of this: a merman, his magic, the discovery of the merfolk, Ahtin’s strong body beneath her, inside her. Brida feared waking up to discover none of it was real—that life, as she had always known it before the storms had dumped seaweed and a wounded merman on the shore, continued on as it always had. Days of mundane existence and hard work ending in nights of solitary quiet in which she would wonder if she might go mad one day from sheer boredom.
“What are you thinking, beautiful Brida?” Ahtin’s webbed hands skated down her back, one finger following the indentation of her spine.
She smiled. Dark thoughts had no place here or in this moment, and weren’t meant to be shared. She brushed them away. “I like being here. With you. I wish we could stay this way for a long time.” Forever, she thought but didn’t say it aloud.
He frowned a little. “Why can’t we?”
Struck by his question and his reaction, she shrugged. “Because dawn isn’t far off. I need to be home before I’m missed, and no doubt your people wonder where you go to each night.” In all honesty, Brida was surprised she hadn’t seen even a hint of the merfolk so far besides Ahtin. Maybe they weren’t as nosy and far less enamored with gossip than humans were.
His frown deepened, darkened. He abruptly rolled them, slipping out of Brida so suddenly, she gasped. She still floated in his arms, though now she faced him once more, treading water. “Do you have another mate?”
Her eyes rounded. Was that jealousy she heard? The idea stunned her. Was she wrong in her earlier translations when he described the habits of the mer? They found mates, but the unions were temporary, the only permanent, long-lasting relationship that of the merfolk to their familial groups led by theiraps.
Brida stroked his arm in a soothing gesture. “I did, once. He died.”
Compassion softened the pinched lines of his face. He grasped her hand and brought it to his mouth, kissing her fingers. His eyes darkened with a remembered sorrow. “I had a mate too, and a child. They died as well.”
She pressed her palm to his cheek. It seemed Death was no more merciful to the merfolk than it was to humanity. “Losing one is terrible enough. Losing both, an unbearable grief.”
He gathered her close, and they held each other until his magic faded, and the pool grew colder with every passing moment. When even Ahtin’s body heat couldn’t keep the shivers at bay, he swam with her to the rocky edge and helped her out of the water. She dressed quickly, shaking hands struggling with laces and clasps until she was finally wrapped in her shawl and her damp hair bundled in a kerchief she’d tied around her head to keep her ears warm. She wouldn’t be totally dry until she got home, changed, and buried under her blankets, but it would do for now.
