Page 14 of The Merman's Kiss
His voice changed too, dropping to a lower register that made me blush when he spoke, which didn’t make sense. And hedidspeak, more and more each summer. Every year he needed less of my magic to soothe his fragile vocal cords as he forced his words out. He still liked to hold my palm against his throat–perhaps in the same way a child holds an old toy that comforted them once–but I didn’t mind. In fact, it made my stomach flutter every time he did it.
He taught me about how his people sang—even their normal speech was like songs—and explained how to use my diaphragm to project my voice farther, seeming to take an odd pleasure in listening to me practice as he lay in the surf beside me. And he told me of the mermaids—the sirens—and how they trapped mermen with their seductive songs and forced them to bond with them. It made me fearful for him. What if they trapped him, too? But he laughed and joked that he didn’t think they could bond him, as he was very nearly bonded to someone else. And Lorn looked at me with such shy tenderness that I couldn’t help but scoot a little closer and duck under the arm that always made me feel safest when he wrapped it around me.
I was still concerned though, because I knew that mermen bonded to their mates, and I asked him what he could do about it if one tried to enchant him with her voice to do so.
“I asked…sea witchonce,” he said, struggling for the word, and laughing again when he saw my shocked expression. “He’s not really sea witch. We call him that. He’s just old man. Elder. Very wise, but we joke,” he explained. “He told me I swim far away as I can, then change to legs and run more.” I couldn’t tell if he was still joking or not because of the way he was laughing so hard, but when I pressed him on it he told me not to worry so much and turned the conversation to my schooling and my loneliness there, and to my overbearing parents.
We spent long evenings together sprawled on the beach beneath the moons, concocting fanciful backstories for the items he found. This was when I learned that his eyes were reflective the way a cat’s eyes are when you shine a light on them in the dark. I’d never been allowed to stay out this late when I was younger, but he’d surfaced in the water one evening, after leaving to retrieve a new piece of junk he wanted to show me, and startled me nearly to death as he rose through the water. His pupils nearly looked like they were glowing pale yellow as they reflected the moonlight. He’d had a good chuckle at my unnecessary fright.
Every time I saw him, he was wearing a new piece of ‘jewelry’—necklaces and bracelets made from clams shells and sea glass on old fishing line—until I teased him that he was going to look like some kind of swamp monster if he kept adding more. He made special pieces for me out of the purple glass, and I treasured every one.
I always cried when it was time to leave for boarding school, though I saved my tears for the train, after Lorn was gone, and my parents couldn’t see. When I was at school, my mind would drift to him at every lull, and he featured in my dreams each night.
I existed—mind and soul—on that beach.
Chapter 11
Lorn
“See,youcrossitover this way,” Sadira said, but I did not see. It was our fifth summer together, and she sat behind me on the long, flat rock in the shade of our hidden beach. I lay in the water, leaning against it, with her knees bracketing my shoulders and luxuriated in the warmth of her skin surrounding me and her hands in my hair. “Feel what I’m doing here.”
I burbled something nonsensical. All I coulddowas feel what she was doing to my hair.
“No, with your fingers,” she insisted as she guided my hand to the back of my head to show me how she was plaiting my hair. “You can do this,” she told me encouragingly. “I’ve seen you weave netting before. This is much easier than that.”
I’d complimented how pretty her intricate braid was this morning, and she’d asked if I wanted her to show me how to do it, too. I had hesitated at first because my father had always made a mess of my hair when he tried to help me untangle it, but this was different. Sadira knew about hair because she actuallyhadhair. My father had nothing but fins and venomous spines on his head and only knew of hair what he’d seen my mother doto comb through hers when I was a merling. He certainly never learned how to braid it. Not one of my people knew the first thing about hair, so I’d always been alone in my frustrations with it. It would have been easier to simply remove it with a sharp blade, but it protected my skin from the harsh rays of the sun the same way my people’s fins did.
But I would never hesitate to let Sadira help me with it again. Her fingers in my hair felt divine. There was no way I could focus long enough to learn what she was trying to teach me. My eyes kept sliding shut in bliss at the feel of her blunt claws tracing across my scalp as she gathered new sections to add to her plait.
“I canseewhat I weaving,” I tried to argue, but it came out mumbled, sounding like I’d had too much fermented kelp.
Sadira laughed—the prettiest sound in the world. “It does help to practice on something that you can see first. My roommate and I learned to braid each other’s hair first before we were able to do it on ourselves. You can practice on mine as long as you promise to be careful with your claws. This will help to keep your hair from getting tangled too, you know.” She chattered away as she explained what she was doing, talking abouthair oilsandprotective stylesand many other things I had no idea about. I was simply in paradise with her fingers in my hair and her lilting voice in my ear.
She gently combed through a new section with her hand, sliding the strands through her fingers over and over again as she did, and I couldn’t help the pleasured groan that escaped from me at the sensation. A tiny gasp sounded from behind me as Sadira’s fingers tightened gently at the base of my scalp. An instinctual response of wanting to protect her had me turning to check on her even though I knew I was messing up her hard work, only to find her cheeks curiously dark, though if she was blushing, I couldn’t discern why. Her heart was loud in my ears, beating much faster than only seconds prior. I thought she mighthave spotted something startling in the waters beyond us, but she was staring atmewith her mouth open slightly, and she even squirmed slightly when I turned to inspect her.
I frowned in confusion. There were no predators nearby for her to fear—I could feel nothing but the electrical impulses of tiny fish in the waters around us. Without thought beyond the desire to understand her reaction, I pushed myself up from the water and pressed the chemical receptors in the skin of my lips to her face right where she had flushed so deeply. It was harder to read her chemical signals when she wasn’t in the water, but even outside of it she often made her own waters, either seeping in tiny amounts from her skin in the heat of the summer sun, or sometimes in larger droplets from her eyes, and I could read the chemical traces in those to understand some of what was happening in her body.
But I didn’t recognize the chemical traces I picked up from her skin this time. There was something startlingly pleasant… a shocking taste that reached down deep into my body and made me react in a way that embarrassed me. My male parts stiffened inside the hidden sheath just below where my tail met my body, and a near wheeze left my lungs as I immediately hunched forward to try to hide any noticeable impropriety. I felt my own cheeks flood with heat at my reaction as Sadira lifted her hand to the place I’d touched her.
“Why did you kiss me?” she asked with her hand pressed to her cheek. Her voice sounded strange in my ears, huskier than usual, breathless. Dreamy.
My brow furrowed as I tried to understand her reactions,andmine. “What is kiss?” I asked, sounding a little hoarse myself.
I’d read her chemical signals many times over the years when I was baffled by her emotional states (which was often; she confused me greatly). Maybe not as blatantly as I’d done justnow, pressing my receptors to her face, but it couldn’t be what she was referring to, could it?
“When you—” She looked around, avoiding eye contact with me, so I shifted my position to find her gaze, knowing my expression looked skeptical but still trying to understand why she was reacting the way she was. “When you kissed my cheek just now.”
I scowled at her. This explained nothing other than that she was flustered and wasn’t telling me why. My mating parts still throbbed, irritable at the confines of my abdomen since I refused to give them relief by releasing them, which made my brain feel even slower than usual during our often difficult to parse conversations.
Her hand still hadn’t left her cheek, but now she slowly released it to draw all her fingers together against her thumbs on each hand. “Um, usually a kiss is when two people press their mouths together to show affection.” She pressed her fingertips together on each hand to demonstrate, and made a huffed laugh that sounded strained, her face flushing even darker.
Affection? With skin receptors? Did Sadira’s people have chemical receptors like we did? I’d never seen them. “Show me,” I said, referring to the chemical receptors I thought she was implying resided in her lips, but when she leaned down toward me, instead shepressed her own mouth against mine.
Chemical signatures exploded in my senses, so much stronger from her mouth than from elsewhere on her skin or from the water near her when she swam. That specific taste that my body had reacted to previously flooded not just my skin receptors, but I could also scent it in the air between us, and my body reacted instantly. In one breath I was leaned against the rocky ledge with Sadira’s mouth pressed against mine, her alluring taste overwhelming my senses—and in the next I was beneath the waves so that she could not see the way my breeding parts weredisfiguring my lower vent into a visible mound or hear the way my heart was hammering in my chest.
I was half afraid she would follow me into the water to chastise me for my impropriety. I’d spent the last few summers teaching Sadira to be a strong swimmer, how to navigate the currents while always keeping a protective eye on her to make sure she was safe. She’d even taken to teasing me by staying under the water until my nerves got the better of me and then losing herself to fits of giggles when I hauled her up into the air so she could breathe. But now I feared all that hard work at ensuring her safety in the water would come back to bite me if she chased me down. A siren would never tolerate a display of mating interest from a mate she hadn’t shown interest in first. But I didn’t even understand why my body was responding this way!
Luckily she wasn’t angry with me, as she appeared to be suppressing a laugh by covering her mouth with her hands when I surfaced a few feet away, after I’d finally regained some control of my bodily reactions. I was still desperately trying to hide my embarrassment and confusion at my response. My body had reacted to her mouth-press and her chemical signals as if she was a siren who had claimed me for mating—I think—and that was puzzling. I felt nervous in an excited way, and Ilikedit, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to like itlike that.
