straight to the centre of me. “Can you feel my arm around you?”
Oh yeah baby. “Uh-huh.” Back to being inarticulate as the possessive weight of that arm sent dizzy kicks all around my insides. I tried to not imagine the hardness of the rest of him.
“What else can you feel?” His whisper was so low it was hardly audible but it didn’t matter. I was like a tuning fork, responding to his commands.
I relaxed in the pose, as far as I could with his arm burning a white-hot hole against my side and his voice and breath stroking fire into my brain and between my legs.
“I can feel… something.” I tried harder to concentrate. Ignore the hormones a moment and focus. There was a subtle shift in the body of water below me, slow and low at first, and then quickening. Something was coming. Something big.
The turbulence in the water became unbearable, but he used that vice-like grip to hold me in place, only releasing me as I felt the water fracture in pieces around me. At that precise moment he lifted me bodily above his head, like Swan Lake on the high seas.
Or maybe Dirty Dancing.
All around me, the water danced and writhed and it took several seconds for my drugged senses to register what I was seeing. “The Dance of the Dolphins,” I finally realized, laughing down into his face like a three year old child. “It’s tonight?”
“Yes.” He laughed as well. “Come on!” His face was lit up with something so pure I suddenly saw him as he must have looked as a child, the first time he had ever been here, had ever seen this ritual. The force of the image knocked the breath out of me.
He threw me forward into the water and I took off, swimming, dancing and cavorting with a hundred thousand dolphins of the deep sea. Their silver grey hides flashing in the moonlight like fairy dust on their night of nights. As I swam, they circled closer, touching me with quicksilver caresses, alighting briefly in my brain with dolphin grace.
Magic made flesh.
As he caught up to me with a few clever strokes, he reached for my hand, and it felt too good. I reminded myself that I still didn’t know his name, and decided that even though this may have been truly a Kodak moment I needed to ask it before I went cavorting off with him.
But he was too quick with a question of his own. “Now?”
I shook my head in confusion, so caught up with my own thoughts, and with the joy and magic of the moment that I didn’t understand what he was asking.
Indigo eyes framed by wet lashes bored into me. “Back at the wedding I asked you what moves the rest of you. The parts that aren’t human. So.” He grinned at me like a schoolboy. “Tell me. Now do you remember?”
Evening: The Wedding
Lecanora blinked in surprise when I appeared beside her.
“Lecanora, I’m sorry,” I mumbled. I suspected the Princess could tell I was kind of confused about exactly which bits I was sorry about, but I did know I’d been making my way over to her when the wolf had waylaid me. And I hadn’t meant to disappear for so long.
Lucky Gadulan weddings were extended affairs.
“Worry not.” Lecanora’s hands twisted prettily in front of her. “May we speak now?”
I was about to say hell yeah when Mom joined us, greeting Lecanora with her customary warm embrace. “Hello, sea-daughter,” she said with a wry smile, using the ancient, but seldom-used greeting for beloved friends. “Are you well, recovered from the events of yesterday?”
Lecanora smiled nervously, nodding, and skittering anxiously on the spot. Lunia placed one hand around her waist and another over her heart, stilling her. “There is nothing to be nervous about here.”
The Princess closed her eyes and seemed to visible settle before my eyes. “Lunia, I am sorry.” She motioned to where I’d been sensing before my disappearance, hours before.
I felt an upswell of outrage and was about to remind them both I was there too.
Lunia laughed her musical tinkle. “Don’t be. Daughters are supposed to do things their mothers would prefer they didn’t.” She looked warmly into Lecanora’s eyes with her trademark twinkle as she continued. “But, you know, mothers often do things they shouldn’t as well.”
Mom kind of melted away as Lecanora took my hand and led me to a quiet place, where sea grass day-beds formed a private enclave away from