Awakening Read Free Page B

with his own hands. I was sure of it.
    I looked up to find him standing over me. He was still naked, without a shred of modesty. Maybe like me in that way. Or like I’d been before, when having bare breasts was innocent and natural. Certainly nothing dirty or sexual. His legs were solid and unmoving like a tree.
    My gaze panned up. His arms were crossed over his chest. Finally my eyes reached his face. There was an amused grin there.
    “Enjoy your fin while you have it, Nerina. I will seduce, and I will win. Rest well.” With that pronouncement, he left. I tried not to watch the sinewy muscles bunch and release as he went away. It seemed such curiosity would only lead to the thing I feared losing the most.
    His parting words took a bit of joy out of swimming. I sank beneath the water, trying to imagine that I was back in the sea. The real sea, not this artificial sea that had been created with only a small piece of the ocean. I’m not sure if I was crying. It’s impossible to tell when underwater. But I felt like I must be.
    It was at that moment that I finally got out of my own head to realize my family would be missing me. They might never know what happened. They might imagine all sorts of awful things, like a shark or sea monster attack. I was known for wandering off in places I shouldn’t go. Even so, my mother would never believe, after her warnings about men, that I would be on land, the captive of one.
    What if Kyros won? What if the legend was real and he could make my body feel whatever it had to feel to make the transformation happen? I looked down and watched my fin fluttering about in the water. How could he take that from me? How could I let him?
    I swam to the deepest corner of the pool and curled up to sleep. The next day I would find a way to get him to release me and go back to my life in the ocean.
    That night as I slept I saw pictures in my mind. The images were brief, small, like the embryonic form of something that would grow larger over time. It was just a quick snippet of him and me, and I had legs, which were draped over his shoulders. It was vulgar to me. And yet …
    Twitch.
    I woke immediately, fear causing me to lose the fuzzy vision. My fin was still there, and I was alone. But the images haunted me. Not only because of the content, but because I’d seen them at all. It was so real.
    I swam laps back and forth in the pool, as if my fin might somehow split in two to form legs at any moment. I felt that if I just kept swimming, I could stay a mermaid forever. It was what I wanted most. Wasn’t it? I finally drifted, exhausted, back to my corner. I wrapped my fin around me and slept, unmolested by further disturbances.
    Morning came too quickly and I sensed a presence beside the pool. I opened my eyes and swam to the surface. Kyros still wasn’t clothed. He sat on the concrete edge and dropped his legs in.
    I’m not sure why I’d thought of the pool as a safe haven from him. It wasn’t that deep, and surely he’d been in it before. Why else would he have it? To keep mermaid pets? Definitely not if it hadn’t been filled with seawater.
    He lowered himself the rest of the way in and started to do laps. I was surprised he could swim, and so well. I could understand why they’d avoid it in the ocean. With the sharks and sea monsters, it’s a lot to deal with for someone who doesn’t have to for survival. Or maybe they sometimes swam close to land, and I hadn’t noticed them.
    I watched his legs kicking out as he smoothly traveled through the water. Finally I surfaced to watch from above.
    After about twenty minutes of laps he stopped and stood in the shallow end of the pool, the water coming up to just below his pecs.
    “I might keep the ocean water. It’s refreshing.” He ran his hands through his hair, and I closed my eyes.
    After last night and the way he’d touched me, the way I’d been at his full command, something felt different. And that feeling seemed like a dark