by Dani Stowe
Once we have paid, the old man shows Willis how to start and stop the engine and then, within a few minutes, Willis and I are at sea.
The man is beaming. The second we make it far enough from shore, the wind picks up, the sails come down, and Willis is hollering. The wind blows through his hair and I swear he looks like something out of a scene in the movie, Titanic, especially the scene where Jack and Rose are at the bow. It’s the scene where the couple truly fall for one another romantically right before they decide to get freaky in the backseat of a 1912 Renault Town Car. Of course, I know these details because I’m obsessed with all movies related to the ocean, but right now, I’m regretting watching that movie over a million times.
It’s clear that although Willis has been tied to the sea and could still very well be for eternity, the man loves the ocean. I consider perhaps that Willis had not been cursed worse than the other seamen, but instead gifted his greatest love.
I could never be his Rose.
“What are you thinking about over there?” questions Willis, leaving the helm as the boat slows.
“Nuh... nothing,” I hum lowly as he removes his shirt, tossing it aside.
His muscles are rippling again. They gleam as they flex under the midday sun while he moves swiftly this way and that to lower the sails with yanks on ropes and pulleys to slow us down.
He drops the anchor.
“Why are we stopped?” I ask standing up from my seat.
“There are sharks up ahead.” He raises a brow.
My knees get weak and I have a sudden urge to cling onto something. I instinctively grab onto him. “Sharks?”
“Aye, see there.” He points to a place in the water where I can definitely make out fins. Two. No. Three! Fins.
“What are they doing?” I ask, clawing into the muscleman beside me.
He removes my hands, getting behind me, and pushing me further towards the bow.
My feet, reluctant and fighting with shaky resistance, don’t want to move any closer to the edge than they have to.
“Take a look,” he says. “I believe they are feeding. They must’ve caught something.” Willis nudges me more forward in front of him, placing each of his hands at my hips.
“Captain?” I sway, wrapping my fingers tight around his wrists. The last time Willis held me like this with his fingers digging into my hip bones was last night right before he tossed me into the ocean to scrub my face of what he thought was demon’s spit.
Willis nuzzles his nose through my hair until his lips find my ear. “We should go for a swim.”
What? Is he crazy!
I jerk back. My bottom, dressed in loose white linen shorts I had to borrow from Shelley this morning, bangs against Willis’s groin.
“I’m not swimming with a bunch of hungry sharks out there.” I try to scoot forward out of embarrassment, but his hands keep my butt planted against him.
“There’s a hungrier shark on board,” he growls.
I’m not sure how to respond. Should I laugh? Cry? Gag? The Captain is not so smooth as I thought he was because that was the cheesiest pickup line I think I’d ever heard in my life.
I cock my head. “If you’re trying to flirt with me, saying you’re a hungry shark is hardly—”
“I wasn’t talking about me,” he interjects, pushing on my hips with his hands to create some distance between us. And now, I can’t deny that I wish I played along. As I watch him take a seat, propping his arm over the side of the boat and pulling a knee up—so confident but so relaxed—he finishes, “I was talking about you.”
“Me?” I point to myself.
He smiles widely with a squint of one eye. “Aye, you. You’re worse than a shark. You scare me a little—always coming around every summer since you were little. Trying to tempt me, lure me into showing myself to you. A little monster you were—so stubborn, so foreboding.” His eyes gravitate to my mouth. “And those teeth! Like razors, they scare me. Show me one of those shark teeth.”
I cover my mouth, mumbling. “I don’t have shark teeth!”
He laughs, leaning forward to grip my fingers. “Come here.” He pulls, dropping his knee so that my butt lands on his lap. Swiping his finger over my cheek, Willis pulls a tendril of my hair away from my face before he takes off my glasses, putting them atop a cooler I hadn’t noticed earlier beside him.
He pulls at my chin so that I am facing him and he runs his thumb across my cheek. “I know this face,” he says. He strokes his index finger down my chin, my neck, and my chest. “After all that gibberish I’ve heard from you over the years, I also know too well this soul and all that is desired by this heart.” He taps at the space between my breasts.
Pulling his hands away, Willis reaches behind me, cupping my bottom cheeks and blinks as he looks up at me. “I want to know this body as well, Athena, but you don’t know me at all. Why have you pledged your body to me when you have no idea who I really am, who I was? I’ve been around for a long time. I’m really just an old man whereas you...” He licks his lips as his eyes travel downward. “You still have your youth.”
Youth? Jesus, I’m thirty. In fact, physically, the Captain is so ripped and sexy, he looks younger than me. I’m confident he is humanly younger than me.
My finger circles his shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” he says seeking my hand, but I slap his away and continue.
“Don’t do what?” I respond trailing my fingers up a shoulder to his neck and through his hair where I let my fingertips graze.
“I haven’t been touched in a long time, Athena.” He leans his face into my neck, speaking, “If you continue to touch me like this, without being absolutely sure this is what you want, I might have to feed you to the sharks.”
“This is what I want, Willis.”
He grabs my hips again. “You don’t know that. You don’t know me,” he says as he begins to rock his hips upward, his groin grinding against my swelling folds. “You want the magic and the mystery. You want the merman. Not me.”
I cup his face, forcing him to look me in the eyes. “The merman, this man—you are both the same.”
He shakes his head. “I wish that were true. For your sake, I wish that were true. But I’m not. You need to learn this. I’ll show you,” he says and comes to standing, lifting me and then throwing me overboard.
For heaven’s sake!
Into the air, I go screaming and kicking my feet until I am lost deep underwater. Swiftly, I push with all my energy to rise to the surface searching for Willis up above.
He wanders to the back of the boat, tearing off his pants to be fully naked, and swinging a step ladder over the side.
I swim to the ladder, but I am quickly cut off. My path is interrupted by Willis diving in with his arms outstretched straight over his head and toes pointed. A perfect 10.0.
He swims to me with his sights set behind me. “Look out,” he says calmly, “there’s a shark behind you.”
What?
My body is overtaken with fear as I turn to see a shark fin is truly headed in my direction. I scream!
My waist is looped and pulled by Willis’s arm, but the save is not enough to keep me from screaming again! All of my natural instincts say to run, swim away, get to the ladder before I’m eaten up. But Willis keeps me trapped in his arms as he tries to calm me down.
“They’re not going to hurt you.”
“The hell they are!” I push on him.
“I swear to you, they are not. The witch— she has reign over them.”
A moment ago, I was fighting against Willis to get to safety, but now I find myself clinging to him as the other sharks also head our way. “And how do you know she won’t stop them from chewing us up to tiny bits? How do you know she doesn’t want us dead?”
Willis pulls me in front of him to cradle my face. “The deal I made. The witch needs me alive. She needs us both to break the curse, so she will have my powers. We have nothing to fear of these beasts which she con
trols. But Athena…” His eyes turn a deeper gray.
“But?” We are afloat, and I get the feeling we are about to sink.
“Magic has a cost,” he groans. “To be with you for these two days and become fully human and without powers, I had to pay.”
Pay? He’s done something. He’s made a deal. A deal I fear even more than the sharks circling around us. “What did you do? What price are you going to pay?”
Willis’s eyes bore into me. “Athena, whether you choose to lay with me or not, whether I become a man or must return to the ocean when my two days are over, I will not be able to see. I traded my eyes.”
I slam the water with both arms, splashing. “Why would you do that?”
“You were in danger.”
“Danger?” My eyes zig-zag back and forth until they veer straight into the small space between us. “Levi? You did this because of Levi? Because you think he’s a demon?”
Willis nods.
I can’t believe this. “The witch has tricked you. Levi’s no demon. He’s a goody-two-shoes. A nerd. He’d never hurt a fly. I can’t believe you let that witch trick you into giving up your eyesight. Goddamn you, Willis!”
I swim away to the ladder. The sharks clear out of my path.
This is craziness. Yes, I’m the number one believer in all this hocus pocus, but even this is too crazy for me.
Both sets of my fingers curl over the bottom step made of aluminum. Pulling my legs in to help myself climb upward, my ankles are snatched. I turn around, still hanging on, to see Willis has them.
His face is halfway under water. Only his eyes—fixed, narrow, beaming, hungry—I see. He looks hungrier than the sharks swimming by. He parts my ankles, pushing them apart and pulls, using them as leverage to glide in between my legs. When he is flush against me, front against front, he wraps my legs around him and grabs my hips.
“You’re not getting away from me. I went through a lot of trouble to get here,” he growls.
“Yeah, and I spent a lot of money to get here.”
“Hmm, so it was a lot.” His eyes glaze over my lips. “But not worth what you paid, is it?”
“A thousand dollars is not worth this arguing.”
He swipes his wet thumb down my cheek. “We’re not arguing.”
I grit my teeth. “Then, what do you call this?”
“This...” he kisses me gently, “is a lovers’ quarrel.”
I’m melting. I’m instantly about to become one with the sea.
“Lover’s quarrel?” I mutter through his wet hot lips. “There’s no difference. It’s still an argument,” I say softly as Willis leans into me, tucking his nose into my neck.
“Aye.” Willis curls his tongue under the sensitive flesh behind my ear as he grinds his bare erection along the split between my legs. “But this argument will end as all lovers’ quarrels do—with me, a man, deep in his woman, which is you.”
Me. His woman?
The crash of Willis’s lips on mine—hard, sucking, enveloping—makes my toes curl. My knees come up, caging his ribs against me. My dripping, drenched shirt comes over my head and my bra is painfully snatched off. Clearly, he’s not used to removing such an undergarment.
I yelp, so he kisses me harder, moving to my cheek, my jaw, my neck, and down to my chest. His head disappears beneath the surface. My nipple is lapped before it’s bitten and sucked.
“Gentle,” I cry out. Perhaps, I should reveal that I’ve never done this before.
Willis pops up, kneading my breast. “I’ve been waiting for this for much longer than you can imagine.” He pinches my nipple, which makes my hips buck, and he grabs the globe of one of my bottom cheeks to claw into my flesh. “This is as gentle as I can get.”
He kisses me again—hard. I’m whimpering into his mouth, desperate to hold onto the ladder, to not let go. It’s my only path to safety that will keep me from getting in too deep.
Willis’s hand scrolls flat down my front until his fingers find my slit, which feels swollen. He strokes up and down, barely in the crease, teasing, encroaching on my swollen nub but not quite touching the hardened little nub. He pauses to gather my knees to pull down my shorts and underwear.
“Willis,” I whisper feeling the motion of a shark swimming by.
I open my eyes to look beyond Willis across the deep blue sea, into the horizon, as he spreads my legs around him again and invades me with his fingers. He pushes through my folds and into my core.
“Oh,” I cry out, never having felt this before. There’s so much intense pleasure filling my entire body as he threads his fingers in and out of me. It’s a feeling I never would’ve suspected could come from the digits of a man’s hand furrowing deep within.
But he withdraws, escaping me, and for a moment I’m in despair, feeling as if I’ve been marooned. But then he grabs my bottom and lifts my ass so my hips are above the water. My body aligns flat with the surface and my crease comes centered over his face.
“Mmm,” he laps, digging his tongue inside me where his fingers once were.
I shudder, hanging on to the ladder while trying to keep my body upright as Willis licks right up my sea-watered slit to grind his tongue against my clit.
The sky above has never seemed so wide. Everything feels so big and wide. I feel like I could just float right up into the clouds, and...
Heavens, I do.
The moment I come, I feel high. The earth disappears as my body lets go, drifting upward.
I’m soaring!
The tongue that ties me down, however, reels me back in with an overwhelming, grounding sensitivity. I become so sensitive I can no longer let the Captain stay at the helm.
I clamp my legs together, drawing them in, and he smiles, proud of himself.
12
Willis
Beautiful. From the way the tendrils of her wet hair frames her face to the way her eyes sparkle, I have never seen this woman looking more beautiful than she does now. I especially love the look of humility she’s wearing. She’s embarrassed. I don’t believe Athena has ever experienced such pleasure before and...
I hope she wants more.
I swim closer. “Did you like that?”
She bats her eyes. “I... I did.”
I cup her breast rubbing my thumb over her nipple. “I liked it too. I want to eat more of you.” I nibble on her chin.
The corners of her mouth quirk up as she continues to cling to the ladder with her hands above her. I reach up to stroke my hands down her arms, then down her sides.
She lets out a small moan, closing her eyes.
I wrap my arm around her back and lift her slightly so her breasts pop up above the surface where I take her teat in my mouth.
“Oh, jeez,” she cries, her face clenching.
I pause from sucking on her hardened nipple. “What’s the matter?” I ask, although I know exactly what the matter is. I just want to hear it from her mouth.
Her eyes pop open. “I had no idea this was going to feel so good.”
“It feels better coming from me, doesn’t it?” I dip my head to swirl my tongue around her pale pink areola before I nip hard with my front teeth and tug a little.
“Mmm, yes,” she gasps.
I capture her gaze, looking her straight in the face. “This is why you waited for me. Because deep down you knew better than both of us…” Trailing my fingers down her front, I continue, “You knew I was the only one who would ever be able to navigate you properly.”
Athena’s mouth gapes open as her eyes close when my finger finds her slit. Her chest is heaving and I can sense her grip is getting weak. Gliding the tip of my middle finger towards her entrance again, I barely graze her softened bud when her hips jerk. She’s so sensitive, she can’t hold on and her body slips to become fully submersed.
I laugh.
Grabbing onto the ladder myself with one hand and getting a hold of Athena with the other, I pull her up. She puffs, spraying water in my face before she takes
a big gulp of air.
“I’m sorry,” she cries even more embarrassed than she was before.
“My goddess should never be sorry,” I smile, pulling her in by the back of her neck so I can kiss her lips. “I have every intention of making love to you but...” My head teeters. “Perhaps right now is not the right time.”
“We need the compass.”
Her eyes are so big, staring up at me. I feel as if I could dive right into them. I want to dive into her right now. The urge to plunge my swollen length into Athena is overwhelming. The feeling is more urgent than every second I’ve spent over centuries wishing I could walk on land again, but…
“That’s right,” I say. “We need the compass if I’m to remain in this form.” I bite my lip.
“What’s wrong?” She asks with a bob, going up and down, as small waves move between us.
“Is this really how you want me? Now, that you’ve seen me… what I look like… as a man… am I still what you want?”
Athena wraps her arms under mine, hooking them over my shoulder to pull her chest against me and plants a kiss in my neck. “You are what I want.”
“I won’t have powers. All the magic you are obsessed with, Athena, I will no longer possess and I will no longer be able to see. My face will appear disfigured. The sockets where my eyes should go will be empty.”
“Your eyes are a permanent fixture in my mind. They made me who I am.” She squeezes. “And it’s not the magic that entices me but the sacrifices you made each time you were transformed. It’s the sacrifices you made that makes the real magic happen.”
I exhale, nudging her towards the ladder. “Come,” I say. “Let’s pull up the sails and head back to shore.”
“Are you sure? We still have some time left. I did pay a lot,” she says pulling herself up to hike up the ladder.
I revel, licking my lips as I watch the beautiful naked arse climbing upward right above me. I make sure I get a good look. This view is most certainly something I want to remember when my vision is gone.
“No, my love,” I respond, following up the ladder. “Time was once my friend, but ‘tis my enemy now.” I swing my leg over the side of the boat to join Athena onboard, fronting her. “I will find a way to pay you back.”