Chapter 6
Nerida
The air in this box… this house… is dying.
Without the machine’s hum, the atmosphere stagnates, thickening into a soup of moisture and heat.
It presses against the windows, heavy and suffocating, a physical weight that seems determined to crush the life out of the dry spaces.
To Jack, it is misery. I see it in the way his shirt clings to his spine, dark patches of moisture spreading across the gray fabric like a slow-moving infection.
I smell it in the salt blooming on his skin, a scent that calls to the deepest, most primal parts of my brain stem.
But to me, the heat is nothing. I am a creature of the abyss, where the water is near freezing, and the pressure is enough to turn bone to dust. My skin is a permanent chill, a slab of marble pulled from the bottom of the trench. I am a heat sink in a furnace.
Slumped in the armchair, he fights for air. His chest stutters in a shallow, frantic rhythm. The heavy humidity is too much for him, sweat slicks his skin as his body feverishly panics, unable to cool down. He looks so fragile. Easily broken. Delicious.
“You are leaking,” I say, my voice raspy from disuse, observing the bead of sweat tracking down his temple. It catches the dim light, a tiny jewel of waste water.
“It’s… it is the humidity.” He gasps, his eyes wide, fixed on the blue light pulsing beneath my skin. He looks at me as if I am a hallucination, a fever dream brought on by the sweltering dark.
Strength floods the new limbs. Bare feet cross the floorboards without a sound. A single step closes the distance between his spread knees. He shoves his shoulders into the backrest, desperate to retreat. The deep upholstery swallows him whole. Escape is impossible.
Cold, damp weight drops directly onto his lap.
The heavy muscles beneath his jeans lock rigid under the sudden pressure. Fever-hot warmth radiates from his skin. The heat of his racing blood bleeds upward, sinking into the freezing, frictionless flesh that anchors him down.
“Nerida,” he chokes out, his hands fluttering uselessly in the air. “What are you doing?”
“Stealing your warmth,” I lie. I’m really claiming it. I want him to be mine.
I slide my hands up his chest, my palms flat against the damp cotton.
Through the fabric, I can feel his heart’s frantic drumbeat.
The bioluminescence in my veins flares brighter, responding to the proximity of his heartbeat, syncing with his biological rhythm.
It is racing, a frantic, staccato rhythm that hammers against my palms. Thump-thump-thump, like a trapped fish thrashing against the net, knowing the knife is coming.
“We shouldn’t,” he stammers, his hands hovering near my waist, trembling. He is unsure whether to push me away or pull me closer, torn between the instinct to survive and the instinct to mate. “You don’t know what you’re—”
I reach up and clamp my hand over his mouth, tiring of his noise. Words are for surface dwellers, for creatures who need to explain their existence. In the deep, you simply exist, or you do not.
His eyes go wide in the dim, storm-lit room.
I reach for him, my fingers cold and slick as they settle against the hard line of his jaw.
The damp webbing between my digits presses over his lips, carrying the heavy, metallic brine of the deep ocean.
He goes completely still. A sharp exhale washes hot against my palm, and his pupils blow wide.
“Quiet,” I command. The word vibrates in my chest, a low-frequency rumble meant to travel through water. “You talk too much. Listen to your blood.”
he pulse in his neck beats fast against the thin skin. It makes my mouth water. I want to know exactly what his fear tastes like.
But when I move, it's to capture his mouth. I don't know how to be soft, so I'm not. I press hard against him, and when he keeps his lips stubbornly sealed, I nip him. My teeth are serrated, too sharp for human skin, and the copper taste of his blood hits my tongue instantly.
He gasps, his mouth falling open in shock.
I sweep in, tasting the iron and the sheer, blinding heat of him.
It’s like swallowing sunlight. He makes a choked sound in the back of his throat, his hands locking onto my hips.
For a second, his body tenses, ready to throw me off.
Then his fingers dig into my flesh, bruising me, pulling me down into him instead.
I grind my hips against him.
There is something hard pressing against the soft flesh of my thigh. A ridge of tension beneath the denim of his trousers. It is a biological signal, unmistakable across species. I pull back slightly, looking down at the juncture of his legs.
“This,” I whisper, shifting my weight, rubbing the center of my heat, my cold, slick heat, against that hardness. “This is not fear.”
I look back up at him. His head is thrown back against the chair, his eyes squeezed shut, his chest heaving as if he has just run a marathon. He is fighting himself, a war between his mind and his biology.
“Nerida, do you really want…” The words are breathless, unconvincing.
“Yes.”
He tries to sit up, to regain some semblance of control. He reaches for my wrists, perhaps to pin me, to show me his strength. He is a male, after all. Dominance is likely hardwired into his pathetic terrestrial brain.
But he has forgotten what I am. He has forgotten that I am designed to swim against currents that would crush a submarine.
I catch his wrists. My grip is like a vice of coral.
I am built to withstand the crushing pressure of the deep.
His human muscles are nothing to me. They are soft, pliable things.
I force his arms back, pinning his wrists to the chair’s armrests.
I do not struggle. I do not strain. It is as easy as holding down a drifting leaf.
I lean over him, my hair wet and heavy, falling like a curtain around our faces, blocking out the rest of the room. The blue light from my chest illuminates his face, washing him in an alien glow, turning the sweat on his skin into glittering diamonds.
“I am the predator here, Jack,” I purr, the sound rumbling through my sternum and into his. “You are the specimen. You do not tell the tide when to turn.”
He stops fighting. The realization hits him, shattering his resistance. His eyes open, dark and blown wide, staring up at me with a mixture of terror and devastating lust. He is terrified. He knows I could snap his bones. And yet, he is harder than ever.
The danger calls to him.
I release one of his wrists, confident he will not move. The predator’s gaze paralyzes him. I reach for the metal tab at his waist. The zipper hisses, a sound like a snake warning, sharp in the humid silence. I free him from the restrictive cloth, peeling the layers away until he is exposed.
When my hand wraps around him, he arches his back so violently the chair lifts off the floor.
“Cold,” he hisses through clenched teeth, his head thrashing against the cushion. “God, you’re so cold.”
“And you are burning,” I whisper.
I stroke him. The texture is fascinating, smooth, hot, pulsing with blood. It is so vulnerable. There is no armor here. No scales. No shell. One bite, and I could end his lineage. The power of that knowledge makes my own blood sing, a rush of endorphins that makes my vision sharpen.
I lower my head.
When my mouth closes over his, he screams.
It is a strangled, broken sound, torn from the bottom of his lungs.
The temperature shock must be agonizing.
My mouth is the temperature of the abyss, a stark, freezing contrast to his feverish heat.
It must feel like plunging into a frozen lake, but he does not push me away.
His hands find my hair, gripping the wet strands.
His hips buck upward, seeking more, driving himself deeper into the cold.
I take him deeper. I use my throat muscles, the same ones I use to swallow prey whole.
My tongue, longer and more agile than a human’s, swirls around him, exploring the ridges and veins.
I can feel the vibrations of his vocal cords through the contact, his moans traveling directly into my jaw, resonating in my skull.
I am learning him, memorizing the map of his pleasure. Every time he twitches and his breath catches, I adjust. I am efficient. I am relentless. I treat this not as an act of love, but as an excavation. I am mining him for pleasure, heat, and the essence of what makes him human.
The bioluminescence on my skin begins to strobe. It pulses faster and faster, matching the frantic rhythm of his hips. The room flickers with blue lightning illuminating the sweat on his stomach, the white-knuckle grip of his hands on the chair, and the corded muscles of his neck.
He is close. I can taste the change in his skin, the salt becoming sharper, the pheromones flooding the air.
“Nerida… please… I can’t hold back…” His voice is a wreck, a jagged ruin.
I do not grant him mercy. Instead, I increase the pressure, my mouth becoming a relentless, airtight seal against his feverish skin. I hum against the sensitive ridge of him, a low-frequency vibration that travels straight down his spine and shatters his remaining control.
He cries out, a raw, guttural shout that is lost in a sudden, deafening crack of thunder outside, but inside, the sensation is blinding. His hips snap upward, driving himself brutally deep, and then he erupts.
The first jet of scalding heat strike the back of my throat, thick and fast. It is a violent release, a torrent of hot life pumping directly into my cold system.
He floods me, spasm after spasm, coating my tongue in the heavy, salty taste of his essence.
As he empties himself, my biology reacts instantly to the intake of energy.
My skin flares with a brilliant, blinding white-blue light, turning the dark living room into day for a split second.
The patterns on my back, legs, and face ignite like a supernova, fueled by the warm, viscous fluid sliding down my gullet.
I swallow everything and waste nothing.
In the ocean, waste is death.
Slowly, the light fades back to a gentle, rhythmic pulse, soothing the darkness back into the room’s corners. The silence returns, heavier than before, filled with the sound of our breathing.
Jack is slumped in the chair, utterly destroyed.
His chest rises and falls in jagged, broken rhythms. His head lolls to the side, sweat dripping from his chin onto his shoulder.
He looks like a shipwreck survivor, battered, exhausted, and grateful to be alive.
His eyes are glazed, unfocused, and staring at the ceiling as if he has seen God or perhaps the Devil.
I slide up his body, the friction slick and wet. I am not tired. I am energized. The heat I have stolen coils in my belly, a warm, satisfying weight.
I curl against his chest, listening to his heart slow its frantic gallop. It is still fast, but the panic is gone, replaced by a heavy, drugged rhythm. I extend my tongue and lick the salty sweat from the hollow of his throat, savoring the final notes of his surrender.
“Mine,” I purr, the sound a low, contented growl that vibrates against his collarbone.
He offers no argument. Slowly, he lifts a trembling hand and rests it against my back, his fingers dragging along my spine to feel the new skin.
He isn't the keeper anymore. The illusion of his control has completely washed away.
I close my eyes, soaking in the quiet reality of my victory, and wait for his heart to beat for me again.