Chapter 11
Lorn
“See, you cross it over 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 could do was 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 actually had hair.
My father had nothing but fins and venomous spines on his head and only knew of hair what he’d seen my mother do to 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 can see what 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 about hair oils and protective styles and 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 might have spotted something startling in the waters beyond us, but she was staring at me with 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, and mine. “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 just now, 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 she pressed 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 were disfiguring 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 I liked it, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to like it like that.
My only experience with sirens was limited to what I’d been told by others, and what I’d observed of their behavior at a distance, but no one had ever mentioned these lip-presses as affection.
I was technically ‘of age’ this last migration, and my father had gently encouraged me to join the solstice ceremonies like the other mer my age, but the thought wasn’t one I’d entertained even for a second.
Thankfully, he hadn’t pushed. I think he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to me for the several year span of a mating, childbearing, and weaning that would take place from a bonding yet anyway, but I suspected he knew that my thoughts lay here with this landwalker girl whom I cherished.
I hadn’t even left with the shoal to travel to the summer waters last winter, because I felt so out of sorts when I wasn’t near her home, even though I knew she wouldn’t be here for many moons.
I’d offered to stay behind and mind the giant snails for the shoal, but the elders had explained that they needed the algae that thrived in the south to bulk up enough to survive the rest of the year here in the less abundant waters of the north.
Leo and Elias had been dismayed that I hadn’t come with them, and Leo had commented that he didn’t understand why I would want to stay behind for some fragile landwalker.
Who would risk bonding to someone so vulnerable?
Why would I favor a mate who wasn’t fierce like a siren?
Who was so defenseless? I’d bared my teeth and rattled my quills at him, and he had left in a huff.
Sadira might not have fangs or claws, but she had a strong spirit and a kind heart.
She had no venom, but she was brave and lovely and fascinating.
I knew that my closeness to Sadira was no better than a bargain with the fae.
And the fae didn’t bargain unless they knew you were going to lose.
I knew that. In the end, I’d finally traveled to the winter waters in time to help the shoal with their migration back home.
One of the other young mermen would be returning north with them after bonding his mate, bringing his new merling home on his trip, and I’d joined the return migration to be an extra pair of hands to the shoal in case they needed me.
Sadira’s eyes danced with something I couldn’t read and she still covered her mouth with both hands as I tentatively approached where she sat on her rock, as if she were guarding herself from tasting me again.
I didn’t think I’d done a very good job of hiding my body’s reaction to it—especially not my heated cheeks—because she noticeably squirmed where she sat again and apologized for startling me, and then assured me she wouldn’t lip-press me again.
I wasn’t sure I wanted that assurance and tried to think of some reasonable way to convince her that my chemical receptors needed tasting again, but I thought of nothing.
It was impossible to even begin to focus as she coaxed me back to her ledge and tried to return to teaching me to plait my own hair.
I learned absolutely nothing other than that I’d messed up her previous braiding attempt and that her alluring taste was something I would dwell on for many, many moons.