Awakening Read Online Free PDF Page A

holding hands.
    But for Kyros, this request was as natural as breathing. I inched closer, wondering if just tasting him could somehow put out the flame burning through me. I closed my mouth around his finger and sucked the liquid off. Salty. Primal. It was like the sea. Somewhere deep in my mind, I knew he could be my new ocean.
    It was a heady and terrifying thought, that one person could loom so large and be so much to me. I didn’t want to accept its truth.
    He gently grasped the back of my neck, urging me forward to lick it straight off his stomach. As my tongue ran over him, he massaged my neck and played with my hair. Something about the twitch changed until it became a deep throb. I felt as if my fin were electrified. The pulsing feeling was too frightening, too much. I pulled away.
    “No, please, Master.”
    His eyes narrowed, disapproval creasing his brow, and I knew he must be thinking about punishing me, but in the end he merely used the towel I’d been reclining on to wipe his stomach clean.
    “All right, Nerina. I’ll slow down. But you can’t have your own pleasure until you surrender to me.”
    He nestled me against him and rubbed my back for a little while, then took me to the pool.
    A few weeks passed like this, and I knew he was growing impatient. At night my dreams became longer and more vivid. In the dreams, when he took me, I could feel that throb start again. Every time, I woke up before anything happened, before I could find out how that throb ended and what it became.
    He spent endless amounts of time stroking me, kissing me, nibbling on my neck, suckling my breasts, having me touch and stroke him. Each time the feelings that had started to grow got stronger, scarier. They felt like a violent storm brewing inside me, like a disaster poised and ready to strike.
    At each meal he fed me from his plate, his fingers lingering in my mouth so I could suck off the juices from the food, whether it was fruit or meat. Slowly, live fish became distasteful to me. Soon I was eating meat like him and drinking wine.
    The wine made my head a little fuzzy, made me braver. It made me crave him inside me. Such a weird thing to crave. I only understood the concept on the most basic level. If you drew me a diagram I would have gotten it, but only as a theoretical principle. Not as a living reality.
    I knew he was plying me with alcohol to speed the process, to turn me into something he could take his full pleasure inside.
    One night, a little drunk, I lay in his bed while the servants drained and refilled the pool with fresh seawater. He started touching and stroking me.
    “Master?”
    “Yes, Nerina?”
    “If the legend isn’t real, are you going to kill me?” It was the thought that lurked deep inside me, always driving a little buzz of anxiety, making me try to please him a little more to hold off my fate.
    He waited a long time before answering, his voice distant and sad when he finally did. “No. I’ll give it a little more time, and then I’ll return you to your home. Maybe you belong out there. Perhaps it was foolish to think you could ever be mine in that way.”
    Home. Why did that thought not fill me with hope and happiness? Why was it that the only thing I could think about at that pronouncement was never seeing his beautiful face again? Of never being touched again?
    Although the change he’d hoped for hadn’t come to pass, I’d grown accustomed to hands on my body, to warm, close cuddles, to kisses, to passion. I’d tasted the lips of another living being, and he had, in return, tasted mine. To go from that intimacy to the ocean seemed cold and wrong.
    “You wouldn’t keep me?” There was a small catch in my voice when I asked. I wondered if I might plead with him to keep me as a pet.
    “If I can’t make your body want mine, there seems no point. Why torture ourselves with this incompleteness? It would only breed resentment in both of us.”
    A tear trailed down the side of my face. I