Shine: Chapter Fourteen

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In retrospect, wearing a white dress to see her merman boyfriend was not a good idea.

It was a great idea.

Because though Drago was dubious overall on the idea of clothes, he still seemed to appreciate the way she looked with her dress clinging transparent to her skin. The pretty lace of her bra wasn’t meant to leave anything to the imagination, so she might as well have not been wearing anything at all.

But the fact that she was made it kind of fun.

She was sitting up to her waist in the water, the waves making her dress billow around her thighs as she watched Drago swim. She’d tried to join him briefly, but she just wasn’t used to being out in the water while wearing… pretty things. Circlets and necklaces and everything else, she couldn’t rid herself of the anxiety that she’d ruin them, that they’d fall into the murky deep and be lost forever. Even though that made no sense. They were clearly made to be worn underwater.

Maybe she’d get used to it. She didn’t know how often Drago would expect her to wear them, or if he’d expect her to wear them at all. She should probably ask. Or maybe he thought she already knew? Maybe the fact that she didn’t know what she was accepting invalidated her acceptance.

It was probably fine. She’d wear them on special occasions, like any other boyfriend gift. Totally fine. It probably didn’t mean anything that important.

When he decided to join her in the shallows, he wasted no time, sliding immediately between her knees. It was abrupt enough that she squeaked, startled, nearly falling back away from him. He hummed something, his fins flaring, and she swallowed a nervous lump in her throat.

“I, uh. Thank you again. For the… these.” ‘The jewelry’, she was going to say, but she’d faltered. She wasn’t sure why.

He cocked his head to the side, and his expression made her nervous. “You should not thank me,” he said finally.

That definitely wasn’t ominous at all. “I shouldn’t?”

“For you to thank me for these is rude.”

This was not the best conversation to have when he was between her legs. “It is? I’m sorry!”

“You did not know.” He seemed very forgiving about it, at least.

“Why, um. Why is it rude, exactly?” His fins were still all flared out. She wasn’t quite sure what that meant. He’d decided to rest his hands on her legs, and it was very… evocative. Which was a very rude train of thought, when he’d been nothing but sweet.

It wouldn’t even work, anyway, with those teeth. Right? Right.

He considered this question, or else he considered exactly how to phrase his answer. Maybe it was one of those things that was difficult to translate. “Thanks are for favors,” he said finally, “or things that are… extra. Not for things that are yours. Things you deserve.”

Her hand went to the necklace. “So if I thank you for this,” she asked, “then it’s like I’m saying I don’t deserve it?”


“Which is rude because…?”

He hummed as he seemed again to search for the right words. Then he pressed a hand to his chest. “It insults my taste. My judgment. Suggests that I have been foolish.”

“Oh! That would be rude, I don’t want to do that.”

“Yes.” He rested his hand on her knee, watching her. Behind him, his tail swayed in that suspiciously catlike way it sometimes did. Predatory. “I want to take your clothes off.”

“Oh.” Her eyes went very wide. At least he was honest. And her mind wasn’t just in the gutter for no reason. “Okay.”

He tilted his head in a different direction that it had been. The gesture always made him look so much more… inhuman. “Okay?” he asked, clearly looking for more clarity than that.

“I would like that very much,” she said, so he could not possibly mistake her meaning. It felt like he hadn’t touched her in weeks, in months; she’d been thinking about it ever since, and when she hadn’t known where he was it made her miserable.

“Good.” His hands slid beneath beneath her dress first, tugged at her panties; she lifted her hips so that he could pull them away, already half-breathless with anticipation. She sat up just enough that she could peel off her dress, pull it over her head and toss it aside.

Carefully, though. She wanted it to land on the rocks, not float out to sea. It was a nice dress.

She’d nearly pulled her necklace off, but thankfully it fell back down around her neck. She checked that she hadn’t ruined her hair, that the circlet was still in place.

“I want to kiss you,” he said as she reached behind herself to unhook her bra, pulling it off her arms with remarkable speed. It hadn’t taken long for her to get very comfortable with the idea of skinnydipping. It was her damn house, after all. She giggled, bit her lip and nearly leaned forward. “Not there.”

She froze.

“You want to…?” She was definitely turning very, very red. He nodded, but his grin made her very anxious for entirely new reasons. “But your…” She gestured to her mouth. “Your teeth?”

He frowned. “Maybe not kiss,” he conceded. “My teeth will stay far away, I promise.”

“Oh.” She tried not to look too terribly anxious. She didn’t want to offend him. “But, I mean. Even if it’s just your tongue, that’s still. Really close? It seems like?” She kept imagining herself doing something with her hips and hitting him in the face. And teeth.

Drago furrowed his brow and scratched at the back of his head. Clearly, he had not anticipated this level of resistance to the idea. Experimentally, he stuck out his tongue, like he was trying to measure the distance.

Emily shrieked and covered her mouth too late to smother it.

He retracted it immediately, recoiled in displeased surprise and rubbed at one of his ears while humming. “What?” He pointed at his mouth. “Was that rude?”

“That was… that was something alright.” Tongues were not meant to be that long. Why was his tongue so long? “How long have you been able to do that?” she demanded.

He was getting more confused by the second, his fins finally falling back against his skin. “Al… ways?”

“It’s never done that before!” She would have noticed. She definitely would have noticed. He had licked her before, she was sure that he had, and it had never felt anything like that.

“I… did not need it? Is this a problem?”

She covered her mouth again. This was the opposite of a problem. And that made it a problem. She shook her head. “You can just go ahead,” she said, and her voice was a tiny squeak behind her hand. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing, you can just go ahead and, uh. Kiss whatever you want.”

Drago looked very suspicious. Slowly, he moved closer to her, as if worried that she’d scream again if he let his guard down. And then he—

“Oooh my gosh.” Emily covered her face with her hands entirely, fell back because if she watched him she was going to just die. Long, slow licks to test the waters, and her fingers curled to press hard against her mouth, her eyes shut. She thought that if she screamed again he might get a little irritated about it; but that was definitely his tongue sliding inside of her, he was purring and she could feel it and her toes curled into the sand. Back out to draw well-placed circles, back inside her again, again and again and was it really that obvious how well it was working?

Had he done this before? He had to have done this before. Right?

Ariel must have been really disappointed after the wedding.

Her eyes opened when he stopped and the purring faded, and he was above her, watching her face. As best he could, anyway, with her hands covering half of it. “Are you okay?”

Her hands slid away from her mouth, fingers trailing down her chin. “You stopped,” she said, sounding slightly betrayed. His mouth split in a grin, and he lowered himself enough to kiss her.

His tongue really didn’t feel like it was the same one as before. Where was he even hiding the rest of it?

“I want…” He hesitated, hummed as he tried to find the words he wanted. She really needed to find him a dictionary with sexy words in it. He gave up in favor of looking pointedly down at both of their hips. Her eyes followed his gaze.

“Oh goodness yes that’s wow hi why is everything bigger than I remember?”

“Okay?” he asked.

“Well, uh, for future reference what you want to ask is…” ‘Do you want to have sex’ sounded so clinical, though. ‘Make love’? Ew, absolutely not. And she didn’t want to start teaching him swear words. Emily wasn’t religious, but ‘taught a merman to say fuck’ felt like it would get her sent right to hell. “You know, I think you can just ask to touch me and see where things go from there?”

“You seem less than okay.”

“Oh no I’m doing great I just, well, you’re very large, is the thing.” That made him grin, proving that the male ego was a universal constant.

He bent to nuzzle at her neck, the brush of sharp teeth against her racing pulse. “I will never hurt you,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

“If you’re sure we’ll fit,” she said, breathless, but she was clearly dubious about the prospect. He was so tall, after all, insofar as that could be the right word. And he didn’t have legs, and it really seemed like it had the potential to get very awkward if—

Just like that he was using a hand to lift her hips, catching her mouth with his again. “We will fit,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if that was a growl or a purr. Maybe it was both. She felt him start to push inside of her, and she gasped, took his face in her hands to kiss him again and smother the sound.

He was moving very slow, which was all well and good for being considerate, but Emily had never been terribly patient. Even when it was in her best interest. She rolled her hips, pulling his cock deeper inside her and making him purr louder. He was humming something again, and by now she had simply resigned herself to the fact that Drago probably liked to talk dirty and she would never be able to understand any of it.

It was still nice to think that she’d stolen away his ability to string words together in English.

He was stretching her open and filling her up, so very much of him on top of her and inside her and overwhelming all her senses. Every single ridge was felt in perfect clarity, and she could probably count them if she tried, if she was still sensible enough to count. She could feel the way he purred all the way to her core, and though she couldn’t quite wrap her legs around his tail, her knees held him anyway.

That fin down his back could be terribly inconvenient sometimes.

His hand left her hip, let her hold herself against him as he moved his hands along her arms instead. Both hands laced his fingers with hers, pressed her hands into the sand and pinned her to the ground. Then he started to thrust, shallow motions of his tail that still made her cry out as his cock moved inside her. Barely thrusts at all, but it felt like so much more than it was, her whole body moving with his.

Scales against her thighs, still trying so very hard to be gentle, to be sweet. Would he even know what she meant if she asked for more? For harder? She moved as if to kiss him, but instead she turned her head, nipped at the skin of his shoulder. The effect was immediate, that was a definite growl as he gave a sudden hard thrust, almost certainly involuntary. She cried out louder, gripped his hands tighter, rocked her hips and tried to make him do it again. He didn’t need much encouraging, and this time he pulled out further before thrusting back in, made her back arch and her head tilt backward. It didn’t matter which way he moved, which way she moved; he hit all the right spots either way, and she could feel it all the way to her fingertips.

Growling still, and it sounded so much more aggressive than before, but somehow that made it better. She was feeling a little aggressive herself. She was so close now, so agonizingly close, and maybe he could sense it in the way that her whole body started to go taut and her legs straightened. He bent his head and ran his tongue over her throat, and she had no idea why that was what did it, forced all the air out of her lungs and turned her scream and her groans into gasping things. He was still holding her down, still moving, and every beat of her heart felt like a burst of sensation all through her.

He couldn’t possibly keep going, she couldn’t possibly keep going, she couldn’t possibly take even a second more—but he did, and she did, and her second climax was quiet and shaking as it moved all through her. She went almost limp, her legs and her back and her arms in the sand. He bowed his head, shut his eyes, and she could feel it, the moment he came. Twitching muscles all filling her with heat, and she mewled helplessly, squirmed beneath him. Not that it was a bad feeling, not that she didn’t like it; there was just so much, like she was too overwhelmed to control herself.

He kissed her, all his sweetness and affection in his lips against hers, the happiest little song filling her ears. She sighed as he pulled away, untangled his body from hers. If they’d been having sex in a bed, she might have rolled over and gone to sleep. How was she even supposed to walk back to the lighthouse?

Drago tapped one of her legs. “You kick,” he said, and he looked terribly amused about it. She stuck her tongue out at him, but when he emulated the gesture it was much more impressive. Then he looked hesitant. “I need to swim,” he told her, like he was asking her permission. Even merfolk probably considered it rude to go running off right after sex. “I will be right back.”

“That’s okay,” she assured him, patting his arm.

He smiled, took her hand and lifted it so he could kiss it. She was still wearing his bracelets, his necklace; she was almost scared to check the state of her hair. “Mine now,” he said, and with that he pushed himself back out into the water.

He was just so cute, she couldn’t even stand it.

She looked at her bracelet thoughtfully, ran her fingers over it. A thought was itching at the back of her brain, tracing the shapes along it. Very nice gifts, a very formal acceptance. Very good sex.

Mine now.

She sat straight up, quick as a shot.

“… did I just get fish-married?”

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