Awakening Read Online Free PDF Page B

and forth. This constant separation as one leg moved in front of the other was so disorienting, a wave of dizziness came over me.
    “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said.
    I’d expected to be put in a tub like before, but instead he took me over to a clear box and stood me up. Then water poured over me like rain. I cringed reflexively, waiting for something bad to happen as the freshwater flowed over me, but nothing. No salt. And yet things were fine.
    Kyros braced my hands against the wall and then got in behind me, lathering me up with soap all over. I cried the whole time.
    “Shhhh, Nerina,” he soothed as he moved down to my waist and that new place between my thighs that throbbed every time his rough voice rumbled over me. This place felt like the new epicenter of me.
    He spread my legs and looked at me with new fascination. His thumb stroked over what I instinctively knew was a private area. So weird to feel that way, after being indifferent about my own nudity for so long.
    “I wonder if you’ll grow hair here,” he murmured, more to himself than to me.
    Why would I grow hair there? Did women have hair there? Somehow that idea struck me as very vulgar. But then I’d heard that humans grew hair in odd places. Like under their arms and even on their legs. Merfolk didn’t do that, so maybe I’d stay bare below my waist. I very much hoped so, not only because I didn’t like the idea of hair but because I wanted there to still be something about me that made me the old Nerina. Something that felt like home.
    A moment later his finger prodded at my opening, and then he was pushing it just inside my entrance. I gasped at the feeling, for a moment forgetting about everything I’d given up for this.
    As soon as his finger was moving inside me, my brain started to catalog the new sensations. The twitch, the throb, the flicker, the flame. It was all part of a sexual symphony. I didn’t know how the symphony played for a man, but I knew it built into something amazing, something I might be about to experience.
    I finally understood why women were willing to debase themselves for this. I knew my mother would be absolutely horrified, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was that Kyros didn’t stop touching me. My legs hurt and were weak, still my hips arched reflexively toward him, moving in tandem with his fingers.
    He sat in the clear box, his mouth on the bits of flesh I hadn’t even gotten a good look at because they were so tucked away. And he was there, running his fingers along the folds of skin, followed swiftly by his tongue.
    “Nerina, I’m going to fuck you, but first you’re going to come for me.”
    I felt my face flame over this pronouncement. Never had he used the term fuck with me. It was so coarse, real. He’d been holding something back, something that had previously been too wild for me, that would have had me pulling away from him so that the transformation couldn’t happen.
    Now it occurred to me that with no ocean home to go back to, I was truly dependent on him. Without Kyros, where would I go? What would I eat? How would I survive? I felt desperate now to stay on his good side, which was strange because he’d never shown me his bad side, not really. He’d been so careful with me, and I wondered if that was about to change now that he had what he wanted.
    As his tongue delved inside of me, devouring me like the appetizer I’d feared I’d become, my sexual innocence started to melt away. After all, how much innocence can one really claim with a man’s tongue in her inner sanctum?
    I gripped his shoulders for support. I felt like a jellyfish, my legs all spongy and unable to stand upright without assistance. He was too lost in me to notice.
    I didn’t understand at the time that he was playing with me, teasing me, drawing things out so that it would be better in the end. I thought this was the main event. Imagine my surprise when his tongue swirled over the spot where all the nerve