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He came to visit her every day.
He didn’t know he was visiting her for some time. At first he came to her cove not knowing she was there sunning herself on a wide, flat rock and drowsing in the languid warmth of early summer. His splashing startled her fully awake, sending her into the safety of the water as he raced into the waves with a great white beast that seemed more wolf than dog.
He was very handsome. As handsome as a boy she’d loved once in a dream. She’d thought that boy didn’t exist but now she knew better.
At first she merely watched him, swimming only close enough so she could see him as he swam with sure strokes, his legs cutting through the water in a way that fascinated her. They fanned past each other, moving apart, then together, only to move apart again, and Sansa felt some hidden part of herself struggle to do the same. She was frustrated when her tail only flicked and sent her shooting away from him. Her own body had never felt so wrong before. Her life had never fit so poorly.
“I am a hermit crab in a too-small shell,” she thought to herself as he walked up the beach into the setting sun, standing up straight and tall in a way she never could.
After the first few days, he stripped himself bare before diving into the water, no longer wearing the strange clothing that made little sense to her in how it tied and laced, like the sails on the ships she swam alongside sometimes. He was only more fascinating that way, stripped of his coverings, more foreign and familiar to her all at once.
His wolf-dog found her first, sniffing her out one day when she swam too close, wanting to see his smile as he burst from the surface and shook the water from his hair in shining drops. The beast made a sound like nothing she’d ever heard. The boy made a sound not much different, diving away from her in a panic and scrabbling up the sandy beach as if she were a monster from the deep come to devour him.
“I won’t hurt you!” she called, sounding wounded even to her own ears. It was only that she’d come to feel as though she knew him. As if they were friends.
“You…” he said hesitantly, holding his clothing to his chest as if it were a shell to protect him. “You can speak.”
“Of course I can speak,” she said. “I’ve always been able to speak. You just didn’t know I was here.”
“Have you been watching me?” he asked. She swam a bit closer, the bottom rising under her hands and fins as she moved close to the shore, wanting to see his eyes as she answered.
“Yes.” She moved closer still, so that she could have flicked him with water if she wished. “I like you.”
“You saw me,” he said, almost petulantly. “I was…I was bare.”
“And that is my fault?” she asked. He did not answer. Nor did he come the next day, and she could have sworn she felt her heart split in two. But then he came back the next day, and every day thereafter, and her heart mended itself so quickly she could think it had never broken but for how it was always a bit more fragile afterward, easier to break along its faultline.
“What is it like down there?” he asked one day, swimming a spiral around her, his movements somehow elegant for that he couldn’t swim nearly as well as she. She’d learned his name by then, Jon, as he had learned hers.
She shrugged, unsure how to answer such a question. “Blue. Beautiful. Dangerous. What is it like up here?”
He laughed. “I suppose it’s all those things as well.”
“No,” she told him, moving in close and pressing her forehead to his, reveling in the sharp intake of his breath at the touch of her skin. “It’s better.”
The witch’s lair was farther than Sansa had ever gone before, deeper than she’d ever swum. So deep that the only light came from within the lair itself, spilling out the cracks and making the water around it glow. The witch was matter-of-fact, nearly disinterested. It didn’t keep Sansa from being scared. But neither did her fear keep her from accepting the potion, from hurrying to the surface so she could drink it down in one long gulp. Had she known the pain it would bring, her fear might have been greater than her desire to be human, so it was just as well she didn’t know.
****
His world was as strange and foreign as she could have expected. Everything felt heavier and harder. Merely walking filled Sansa with surprise and consternation at its difficulty. She’d once swum through the sea with barely a flick of her tail. The ocean had been cool and quiet, with sounds like songs sung from far away. Here it was filled with harsh noises, and strange beasts that he laughingly told her were not beasts at all but wagons and coaches, carried not by legs or fins but something called wheels. Even watching men’s ships had not prepared her for life on land.
“That’s because sailors are more fish than man,” he told her with a smile, tucking her hair behind her ear. He was perpetually tucking her hair behind her ear, for it was perpetually coming loose. Hair on land and hair underwater behaved in quite different ways, she found.
His kiss was not strange or foreign. His kiss felt like something she’d been missing all her life, something once taken from her and only now given back. She was not allowed to kiss him outside his chambers, that she’d learned, but when they were in his chambers together they did little but kiss, tasting each other and touching each other, lying together and murmuring into each other’s mouths, their legs tangling in a way tails and fins never could.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he would whisper. “We shouldn’t be doing this, it isn’t proper.”
“I don’t care for proper,” she would whisper in return.
“Nor do I,” he’d admit, and she’d laugh into his mouth each time, loving this small ritual between them almost as much as she loved the feel of his mouth on hers, his hand tucking that bit of hair behind her ear again and again and again.
The day he’d tucked her hair behind her ear and then tucked his hand between her legs was the first day she understood what the yearning she’d always felt inside her was truly for. Oh, such blessed feelings, such a blessed freedom to part her new legs to his hand, to the new feelings he stirred inside her, feelings that seemed as new to Jon as they were to Sansa.
“So sweet,” he murmured in blissful surprise against her neck. “So warm and wet and slippery. Are all girls so wet and slippery, or only girls from the sea?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she panted, her voice climbing into a squeak when he circled his fingers, exploring what was new to them both with delicate care.
“Nor would I,” he admitted, and that felt nearly as wondrous as his touch between her thighs.
Neither felt anything near as wondrous as when he replaced his fingers with his mouth.
She clutched his hair with both hands, pressed her still-unfamiliar thighs against the intricate shells of his ears. She wanted to squirm away. She wanted it to never end. She’d thought her days of wanting ended with the witch’s potion, but she’d not known the kinds of things still left to want, and now she wanted, she wanted, she wanted.
“Jon,” she panted and squeaked, his tongue against her, his lips encircling her, his mouth making her feel like she could drown in dry air. His hands curved over her hips and he traced small circles there, on the skin that was softest and warmest, that sometimes she lay in bed and petted with her own fingers, awed forever at the new form of her body. And now as she felt some strange, painfully sweet relief flood through her, she was awed forever at the new things her body could do.
“Is that something that’s done?” she asked after she’d stopped shaking, after Jon had laid against her and kissed her while he moved his hand over himself until warmth spread against her hip as he jerked and cried out into her mouth. Jon turned as red as an anemone, shakily wiping his hand and her hip clean with the linen sheet beneath them.
“I did not mean to disrespect you, my lady,” he said, his voice losing the warm intimacy she’d come to cherish so. So she kissed him again, turning into his embrace, feeling him sticky and soft against her belly.
“I mean before,” she said. “When you…with your mouth. Is that done?” Jon turned red yet more, but there was a tinge of pride in it, a streak of heat.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said shyly.
“Nor would I,” she said.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked. Sansa feathered her fingers along his jaw, tracing them over his lips. The lips that brought her pleasure.
“I’m not sure,” she said, trying not to smile as his face fell. “Perhaps we should try again to be certain.” His grin broke out, bright as the sun. He tucked her hair behind her ear and brushed her lips with his own.
“Perhaps we should,” he agreed, and for the first time on land, Sansa felt like she was floating.