Chapter Nine #2
feet. Priddy relaxed his thighs, and the bulk between them
increased—oh, gently, reducing the scrape of the scales to a
minimum, like sitting up against a drystone wall on a hot day and
pleasantly scratching your bare spine. Granite and dry lichen...
The thickness growing still, and growing, until at last there he
was astride Merou, riding the place where his hips would have been,
feeling the brush like a whispered promise of the slick upraised
cock. Don’t stop, Merou! I only fuck for
love too.
Good. It’s the best way.
Priddy let go his desperate clasp of Merou’s shoulders. He
raised his arms and crossed his wrists above his head. He writhed
to meet the push against his anus, lifted his pelvis on a surge of
the sea. He was weightless, painless. Merou took hold of his
buttocks, cradling one in each webbed hand, the sensation
extraordinary. The tail—one band of hot muscle—lifted and pushed,
and Priddy was filled in an instant. The couple of boyfriends he’d
let do this to him before became ghosts in his memory and vanished.
Nothing in those awkward struggles bore a resemblance to this.
Merou fitted inside him like a bud into its sheath—yes, as if he’d
been there first and Priddy had grown around him, tight sticky
horse-chestnut scales dying to burst into life. Don’t thrust, he begged, clenching
his thighs tight. I’ll come if you do. Oh,
I’ll come.
Laughter, silent, silver rings spreading out through his
mind. Isn’t that the general
idea?
Not straight away. Let it last.
Oh, it will. You came for me before. We took the pressure off
then.
Not much, but it was true. Gratefully Priddy remembered. His
urge to climax became a slow-building wave. He lay back on the rock
and turned his head aside, smiling, lost. Let the merman fuck him,
then, hold him and penetrate him, withdraw and shove deep
again. Do it, he gasped into the
mind-silence. Screw me until I’m nothing, until I wash up on the
beach neither dead nor alive, neither human nor fish, covered in
seaweed and sand. Fuck me blind and deaf and brainless. Fuck
everything away.
More laughter, rocking and racking him this time.
Is that what you want, my landling?
Yes. Yes.
Technically you already made your wish. But very
well.
***
Someone
close by him was sobbing. The voice was terribly familiar, or
Priddy wouldn’t have been able to come back for it. He wasn’t sure
he wanted to. His head was pillowed comfortably on his arm, his
belly resting on sand, as was natural to his kind—the wet-ripple
sand of low tide, when even the cold winter sun of these parts
could warm the shallows, and the Mer could lie quietly, sculling
their tails and dreaming of Atlantis. He was, as he’d requested,
laced up in seaweed, its drift a soothing tickle on his
skin.
“Oh, God, Geoff, I can’t believe this! I should never have left
him alone.”
“He wasn’t your responsibility.”
“He was! He was! I told
you what happened between us. Oh, Priddy! I knew
you were flaky, man, but how could you go and do something like
this?”
A dry
throat-clearing, then the odd new voice again, crisp and too neat
on this shore of songs. “The timing’s certainly
interesting.”
“What?”
“For you to find him like this. A bit of a
coincidence.”
“He didn’t know when we were coming!”
“It’s a lighthouse, Kit. There must be a fair view from the
top.”
“What, so he... dashed downstairs and lay facedown in the water
until he was dead?”
“He just doesn’t look very dead to me. I’d better call an
ambulance, or whatever you have around here. Move aside, and pull
yourself together if you can.”
“Don’t touch him.”
“Why on earth not? You can’t be concerned about evidence, not
the way you’ve been pawing at him. I only want to find out how cold
he is, so I can give the services an idea of how long he’s been...
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Kit!”
“What?”
“This boy’s alive. He’s warm.”
“He can’t be. He’s not breathing.”
Kit had
a very good point. Priddy hadn’t breathed for hours. That had been
fine down in the kelp-grove palace with Merou, but didn’t work so
well on Hagerawl beach. He had to make a conscious decision to
start. He pushed upright onto his arms: spat out a cockleshell and
inhaled noisily. “Hiya, Kit. You all right?”
Kit fell
on his backside. Behind him, a tall, grey-haired man bent to help
him, his expression heavy with irony. “It’s a miracle,” he said.
“I’ve told you before, Kit—if you’re going out with me, I can’t
have any fuss or indiscretion with your previous boyfriends. Is
that understood?”
“I... Yes, but I...”
“Then I’ll see you back at the house.”
He
turned and walked away. Priddy took a moment to admire him. He’d
never seen anyone so beautifully dressed for a winter day on the
beach. He was perfect, from the top of his expensively barbered
head to his Wolfclaw boots, which Priddy could identify because
they left bad-ass little pawprints in the sand. “He seems
nice.”
“Oh—Priddy, don’t. He is
nice. It’s just that travel makes him tetchy, and
then you gave us both such a fright.”
“I gave you a
fright.” Priddy scrambled onto his knees. He threw his arms round
Kit, who grabbed him ferociously. “I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell are you doing out here? Why are you
undressed?”
“It’s a long story.” He looked around the sunny bay. “What time
is it? What day?”
“It’s Wednesday. I just emailed you yesterday. Oh,
Priddy!”
“It’s not the meds. I’ve been taking them, okay? The box you
made me really helped.” He sat back, casting around for a story
that would fit the facts. “It’s a nice morning. I thought I’d go
for a swim, and it’s such a short walk down from the lighthouse, I
didn’t think I’d bother with...”
“Your clothes? They’re nicely folded on that outcrop over
there, with a stone on top of them.”
“Oh. I must’ve brought them down with me for
afterwards.”
“They’re soaking wet.”
Time for
a change of subject. “How long have you and Geoff been
here?”
“We only just arrived. We were putting our gear down in the
keeper’s cottage when I looked out of the window, and... Look,
mate, are you really, truly all right?”
Priddy
didn’t know how to reassure him. He could hardly straighten his
tie. He picked a long strand of seaweed off his face and hoped that
would help make him presentable. Then he understood that it didn’t
really matter how he looked—that, although Kit loved him, it didn’t
really matter if he was okay or not. Geoff was disappearing over
the brow of Hagerawl Rock towards the lighthouse. Kit glanced after
him, and Priddy understood from that one look that his friend’s
whole world had changed. That Kit would give Geoff anything. “I’m
fine.”
“Right. Good. I’d better get after him—he’s dying for his
tea.”
He set
off at a run. Priddy managed to get to his feet after a couple of
ungainly attempts. “Right,” he told the empty air. “I’ll just make
my way back on my own, shall I?”
He
didn’t really mind. He’d told Kit the truth when he’d said he was
fine. In fact, outside of sex, he couldn’t recall ever feeling this
good in his life. He picked up the stone from on top of his
clothes. They were, as Kit had said, neatly folded and soaked
through. Merou must have put them there.
Will I ever need them again?
Don’t tempt me.
Priddy
scanned the shoreline for signs of feet or scales. Other than Kit’s
footprints and Geoff’s, the sand was unmarked. The outcrop was
within the reach of a long, elegant arm. Priddy tried to remember
being brought back home, but his mind was empty from the sea-cavern
chamber to here. The blank was pleasant, restful, like looking out
onto a snowy field before any creature came to mark it. He wanted
Merou. He missed him, needed him, desired him wildly despite the
majestic seeing-to he’d been given a few hours before.
But none of these wants was painful. They rose up like
laughter in Priddy, big and delicious. Merou would be back.
When was irrelevant:
Priddy didn’t have to worry about that, or how, or where, or what
it signified that his lover had gills—sensitive gills, rippling in
anguished joy at the brush of a tongue-tip!—and a tail.
And Merou was all he wanted. Maybe a cup of coffee and some breakfast too, but
that was the extent of his longings. The background scratch in his
brain was gone, the constant awareness of what he couldn’t have,
the dross that had become gold to him. He didn’t want a hit, not
even of Huddy Jones’s finest Dreamworld Kush. God, he wasn’t even
cold.
I can wipe away the addictive pathways in your
brain.
He
gathered up his clothes. He didn’t want wet cotton or denim on his
lovely newborn skin, and if anyone had a problem with that they
could talk to the man with the tail. He stretched, yawned, and
began to make his leisurely way up the beach.
Outside
the keeper’s cottage, he halted at the sound of his name. Professor
Geoff appeared briefly in the window, waving, and then to Priddy’s
surprise came striding into the cobbled yard, holding out a
dressing gown. “Mr Priddy? Do come inside and have a cup of tea
with us. And lovely though you look just as you are, do put this
on.”
Priddy
would have declined, but Kit had appeared in the doorway, nodding
and mutely semaphoring thumbs-up signs. He put out a hand to Geoff,
half-wishing he had a retractable wrist-spike. “It’s just
Priddy.”
“Of course. I’m Professor Geoffrey Blades of the Northeast
Atlantic Institute, but... well. It’s just Geoff.”
He had a very potent smile. And maybe it had just been the travel that had
upset him—that, and finding his boyfriend weeping by the corpse of
a former lover on the shore. Enough to set anyone off on the wrong
foot, and Kit shot Priddy triumphant I-told-you-so glances as the
mighty professor escorted him into the cottage, found him a seat
amongst the piles of boxes and cases, and went to put the kettle on
with his own hands. Kit pulled a chair out and thumped down beside
him. “See? He’s lovely!”
“Did I say he wasn’t?”