Page 19 of The Merman's Kiss
His low laugh as he nuzzled against my neck confirmed it.
“I need more inside of me.”
He pulled back so he could watch my face, his own expression severe, and pressed his hips against me more firmly. I squeezed my thighs tighter against his hips, drawing another chuckle from him that turned into a groan as his cock probed deeper at my opening. Now it was his turn to watch my slack-jawed expression with a fierce and curious one of his own. I knew from the heat in my face that my cheeks were stained dark with a flush, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from rolling back into my head. His eyes were locked eagerly on my face as I felt his rounded glans writhe into my opening, then thrust deeper as he pushed himself inside of me, aided by the slick fluids coating the sides of his cock and my own dripping wetness.
His entire body tensed with the effort of trying to enter me slowly, and I could tell from the rough way his breaths trembledout of him that it cost him. There was a sharp pinch of pain as he plunged deeper and the flared base of his cock stretched my opening wide as he sheathed himself, but when he flinched at my shocked gasp and started to retreat, I grabbed the back of his neck and locked my thighs to hold him tighter. I pulled him against me. “Stay.”
He obeyed, and we lay there wrapped within each other for a long moment while we panted ragged breaths against each other’s skin. Even with the pain, I felt an overwhelming sense of completeness with him inside me, a rightness in this intimacy that I’d been craving for years and never fully understood.
After a long moment where my muscles finally started to relax, I felt him begin to stir slowly within me, his cock shifting and curling against the front of my insides. He waspetting mefrom the inside, though his pelvis was still pressed against mine as tightly as it could be. He pressed a gentle kiss against the side of my face, and there was something almost painful in his sweetness, in how much I needed him. Him. All of him. I was so tired of having my time with him rationed. Cut short. Limited.
His long shaft added pressure to its curled stroking against the sensitive front wall of my pelvis, a motion that had me seeing stars and my body locking up. I moaned against his gills. He growled in response, and pressed even closer, his entire chest thrumming as he did. The sound was primal and possessive, making more wetness drip from where we were joined. He moved against me, thrusting slowly and grinding against my mound, rolling his hips as my body clenched and arched against him, desperately needing. Seeing that I was no longer in pain, he began to fill me eagerly, throbbing and pulsing inside of me until I was finally thrashing against him, crying out and clutching him tighter. He rode me harder, chasing his own completion, pushing me deeper into my orgasm until his shoulders were heaving and he climaxed with me, hissing and growling, his facepulled taut in hot lust. It was the most beautiful and masculine thing I’d ever seen.
After a long moment feeling his shaft pulse inside of me, Lorn collapsed against me, panting and completely spent, before quickly coming to his senses and rolling to his side with me gathered against him. “Mine,” he hissed quietly into my hair. And in that moment, at least, I was.
We lay still there as we caught our breath. Eventually, his abdomen tensed and he disengaged from my body, his shaft slowly returning into his body as his fold closed up around it. I winced at the soreness I could feel in his absence, and he pressed another of his slow almost-kisses to my temple, checking on me the way he knew how. He gathered me closer to him and threaded his fingers through my hair, brushing his thumb against the tip of my ear, not feeling the need to say anymore.
But the longer we lay there, the more the outside world came creeping back into my mind. My morning came flooding back like a punch in the gut. When I finally spoke, my tone was flat, without inflection. “My parents are trying to tell me I have to take an arranged marriage.”
Lorn’s claws paused in my hair.
“What is this?” he asked, not understanding.
I tried to think of how to explain it. “An arranged marriage… sometimes it works out,” I started, “but sometimes it’s like a forced bond, I guess… like what the sirens try to do when they enchant you.”
His hands tightened on me so quickly that I felt the sharp prick of his claws on my scalp and side. A long, low hiss tumbled out of him, making my skin prickle. Before today I’d only ever heard him make that noise when he was roughhousing with his friends, and it got out of hand. I was contemplating the structural differences his mouth must have to be able to make such a sound when he shocked me with a question.
“Can you marriage me?”
My heart skipped in my chest to the point of pain. Elation, longing, hope, confusion, and despair overwhelmed me all at once.
“Marriage you?” I asked his chest. “Are you asking me to marry you? Do you know what you’re asking me, Lorn?” I pulled back to look at his face and found it full of concern and a frantic intensity like I’d only seen when I’d stayed underwater too long and he pulled me up thinking I was drowning.
“Yes.” His jaw was set, his mouth pulled down into a severe frown.
I wanted to believe him, but our peoples were so different—there was no way he understood. I shook my head. “It’s not like—Lorn, our marriages are for life.” At least, that was the intent. Some people left unhappy marriages, of course, but it was a completely different intention when joining together in our culture compared to his. “We don’t join together for a short time just to make a child, like merpeople do.” I couldn’t handle it if Lorn wanted to be with me for a few years and then decided it was time to move on to his next mating. “We join with each other for life. Until we get old and die.” I didn’t know how to express it so that he would understand beyond that.
Chapter 15
Lorn
“Good.Yes.Wantthat,”I said firmly, using as exacting a pronunciation as I could manage with her mouth-words.
Did she think Iwantedto be used for my ability to create a child and then discarded in favor of another male?
Elias had joined the solstice ceremonies last year, the first year he had been of age to join, eager to catch the eye of a pretty siren. According to his father, he had been selected quickly with a crown of flowers and coral placed on his head-fins by a siren just as eager to join as he. I hadn’t seen him since then. He would stay at the summer grounds with his temporary mate where there was plenty of food for her to grow their young, reveling in their short romance until she conceived, birthed, and weaned their child, and then he would return to the shoal with their child, alone. That was by design. His siren would no longer be his. She would already be on the hunt for her next mate—her instincts telling her to create and hand off as many children as possible—and Elias would raise his child to maturity and then perhaps join another solstice ceremony to do it all again. And for our people, this strategy made sense. Our sirens were the fiercersex. Even while pregnant, they defended our people and our territory, and we mermen—we were the nurturing ones, able to focus our full attention on raising our merlings with the help of the other fathers. The siren’s enchantment magic made working together in a community difficult, if not impossible for them.
But my own heart… it chafed at this culture. I wasn’t sure if it was because I had longed for Sadira specifically for so many years and knew her people had different relationships than ours did that I’d simply grown used to the idea, or if maybe I’d just always wanted a different kind of relationship for myself. Either way, I’d wanted it for a very long time, and I wanted it withher. I just hadn’t thought she wanted it with me. She had a very different life from me… I was an interlude… something she came to visit between more important things.
At some point, my heart had decided it belonged to my beautiful Sadira regardless of what was practical or even possible. And sometime after that, several summers ago, my soul and body had begun to bond to her, despite all the warnings from my father and my shoal. It hadn’t mattered then that she could never return my feelings, because I’dalwaysknown my feelings for her were my own, not something that she would reciprocate. I’d cared for her anyway, knowing that drylanders don’t bond. Not like we do.
But then tonight she’d come to me and asked me to breed her, and I could deny her nothing—even knowing that doing so would cement my bond to her in a very permanent, physical way. I’d thought maybe she was sad because she wanted a baby, and while I’d never planned to have children, I would happily put mine inside her if that would make her happy. Even if she wanted to send me away with it when she was done.
But then she had confused me by placing my shaft in her mouth instead of her vent, the way it was explained to me should happen during a breeding. That… well, that made mymind completely scrambled, but I don’t believe one can make a baby that way. It had been so difficult to keep from spilling my seed in her mouth. I would be stronger next time and keep my shaft inside me until it was aligned with her vent, I decided, if she needed to breed again. For mermen to allow our shafts to leave our body and be exposed andseenlike that was considered horribly unseemly. But the things she had done with her fingers and tongue had left me helpless and urged it out of me too soon. Spilling in her mouth would have been even more embarrassing and deprived her of her baby. My cheeks flooded with heat at the memory and my shaft began to stiffen painfully inside of me again.
But to stay with her forever? I would make all the babies with her she wanted if she would have me. I would never make her stay with me, but I wanted her to. I wanted it badly. I watched her closely as one emotion after another flickered across her face. Doubt and hope warred for dominance. Did she believe me?
“But… how, Lorn? How would that work? I can’t breathe underwater. As much as I desperately want to be, as much as I’vealwayswanted to be, I can’t be part of your world.” Her expression crumpled at this, and the sadness water welled up in her eyes again.
