Hands... touching hands...

Rey’s day was spent planning the murder—or at least eviction—of her unwanted guest. It was also spent cleaning a neighbour’s net, and filleting fish, and scrounging food, and by the time her guest awoke he still wasn’t—well—dead.

She came back to the hut and found him upright, propped against her bunk. He was still naked, but he seemed much recovered. Recovered enough, at least, to watch her. He noticed the sack she had.

“You will share your food with me,” he said, all dark eyes, and again she felt that compulsion. Despite everything she shared her meagre haul with him, and they ate together like friends—except that they ate in total silence, watching each other. He finished first, and his eyes tracked the movement of her food to her mouth—but he didn’t command her to surrender it. She ate especially fast to keep the thought from occurring to him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Rey,” she said.

“Rey what?”

“Just Rey.”

He looked around the hut. “Where is your family?”

“Gone.” The words tumbled from her unwilling mouth. She had no control over them, and some part of her watched in horror.

“What are you, Rey?”

“No one.”

He glanced around the room again while she took in his musculature. It would do well for a dock worker: every part of him was strong, and again something inside of her buzzed. She pressed her legs together, annoyed. His face wasn’t handsome, like the stories said it was supposed to be. It was… something else. Unique. That was worse.

“Are you wealthy, in the eyes of your people?” he asked.

At this, even under his spell, she laughed. “No.”

His gaze sharpened. “You’re poor.”

She nodded.

“I could help you.”

She blinked. “Why?”

“You’ve helped me.”

“You’re a devil,” she said. “A monster.”

His people were wise. He was… not. She sensed the wrongness of him.

He smiled grimly, and she flinched. It was her first view of his teeth—sharp, inhuman. As upsetting as the glow beneath his pale skin.

The throbbing started inside of her again, the tightness of her breasts and cunt. Why, why, why. She clenched her teeth.

“I am,” he said. “I could still help.”

“I don’t want your help. Leave me alone.”

They were sitting opposite each other, him with his legs crossed and her kneeling. His modesty was preserved only by an oilcloth—and he leaned forward. He trailed his thumb along her jaw.

Her skin burned with the contact.

“Do you mean that?” he asked.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure. She wanted to blame his magic, his dark eyes, but there was… something else. Curiosity.

Want, said unflinching truth. She turned from it.

“I have to leave soon,” she said, avoiding the inevitable. The pleasure zinging along her nerves at his touch—that was nothing. Magic. It would be wise not to get mixed up in it.

He nodded, and sat back.

She finished her meal in silence.

He was gone the next morning, and the next. Then he was back.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Nowhere.” Now he was the one being cagey. “Do you want my help?”

“No.”

He took her food, and asked her questions, and she ignored the burn inside of her—the wanting. It was new, and she didn’t trust it.

He left again, and she was relieved.

Pearls appeared, rolled beneath her doorstep. She caught them in her hands, rolled them between her palms. They were cool, and then warm with her own heat. She sold them to buy new clothes, better food, and considered the debt paid.

It was good to be rid of it.

He came to her hut at dawn, when she was just back from her shift.

“Rey,” he said. Wounds streaked his skin once more. “Rey.”

“What?” she asked, knowing what he wanted. Bandage my wounds, feed me. She kept her jaw set.

He said nothing—and she still moved forward to bandage him. It was for the pearls, she thought. Only fair. She cleaned and bandaged and was done. She shared part of her food cache, because the pearls had given her savings, and she supposed that as the procurer of pearls he deserved that much.

He watched her.

“You never ask me anything,” he said.

“I know what you are.”

“A devil. A monster.” That grimace of a smile appeared once more.

She looked away. “I don’t know where your pelt is hidden, but you can put it on and never return for all I care.”

The pearls. She’d miss the pearls—the income.

“Rey No-One,” he said. He watched her, the flame of life itself in his eyes. Sunrise slanted through curtains, lighting his skin orange. “You don’t even want my name?”

He wanted her to want it, she thought, and so she wouldn’t. It was hard enough wanting…

She swallowed. She thought of pearls slid beneath her door. He was some other-thing, not from the wise cities below the waves but something else. He’d magicked her. He’d forced her to take him in.

“If I tell you to go, will you leave?” she asked.

He nodded.

The throbbing was like a drumbeat over her skin. It was maddening. It was simply his species, she thought. Humans had always been fools for the magical creatures hailing from below the sea. Their plain bodies longed to absorb that magic something, that thing that couldn’t be named. Her body ached to accept him. She could feel it wetting, waiting. She thought of his sharp teeth.

She said nothing.

“Why me?” she asked, on their fourth or fifth meeting. He wasn’t wounded, this time, but he smelled of brine and he was naked and he watched her like she was the sun through clouds as she came into the hut. Outside it rained, water droplets loud on a tin roof, light from the windows leaden. She was wet down to her skin, having lost her oilcloth coat to an old rival at the docks.

He looked at her. Like always he was sitting, and his gaze was guileless. “You feel it,” he said.

She stiffened. “Feel what?”

His gaze turned pitying. He took her in from top to toe, registering her wet state. His dark hair curled softly around his face, scars upon scars across his pale skin.

“You could be more,” he said.

“More what?”

He waited. She took off her scratchy jumper, her overalls. She pulled her shirt away from her skin, and ignored the heat inside of her.

“You ignore your potential,” he said finally. He wasn’t looking at her face; he was looking at her body.

What potential? she wondered. It was enough work to stay alive, to stay where her parents had told her they’d find her. Ships left for unknown ports from here all the time; Rey didn’t.

Their eyes met. She wanted him to glamour her. She imagined the words in his voice: take off those clothes. Come here. Those dark, bottomless eyes, that smell of the ocean. Kneel. Spread your legs.

He didn’t command—just watched. Throbbing between her legs and across her breasts had her shivering in her wet clothes, needing something to hold her up. She leaned back against the hut’s door.

“Rey,” he said. “Give in.”

She trembled. “I know your kind.” She knew stories of his kind, at least. Bound to the ocean. They left, and the people they left were ruined.

“There has never been one of my kind. I can be something new.” He gazed at her with that fey gleam in his eyes. “You can be something new as well.”

“No,” she said. She would wait here. She would wait here, and—

And nothing. Where was her future? Where was her family? She looked down on her guest and felt her willpower crumble. Her fingers found the buttons of her shirt, undoing them stiffly. Between the cold and her fear they shook too much, and he rose like the tide, steady as sin. His large hands undid the buttons of her shirt. His mouth found hers.

She knew the stories. Pregnancy, abandonment, longing. A fey child. The people in the stories were fools.

She found she was a fool too, as his mouth plied hers, his hard body pressing her against the door. Almost immediately she felt his cock against her, pushed up between her legs, where unbearable heat turned her into a stranger. She allowed him to pull her up against him, to pull away her underwear, to pierce her and slake the buzzing need she’d felt since the first night. Her human fingernails scratched into his inhuman skin.

“Yes,” he whispered in her ear. “Good—good—Rey—”

She didn’t form words. She didn’t know what name he had, and didn’t care to know. Everything inside of her burned, tightened. She came with his cock thrust deep inside of her, and knew her unsure existence had become even less unsure. He praised her through it, lost himself. The glow of him was inside of her.

With the act done, she slumped against him.

He carried her to bed, and she woke to more pearls scattered across her doorstep.

The pearls weren’t a parting gift. As weeks passed there were treasures from shipwrecks, bits of coral, rare sea stars—and more nights. Rey wasn’t a fool. She knew there was something he wanted, something she could give—but he didn’t ask. He entered her like a man coming home night after night, and if he wasn’t a man, well—that was all right, for now. He laid treasures across her hut’s entryway, and her purse grew bloated. For the first time in her life, she thought she might become something. More than a worker for hire, more than a chit of a girl. It was give and take, with this creature from the depths, and she refused to acknowledge any greater debt.

She gave him something. He gave her something.

It was fair—but she had nightmares. Turning into one of his kind, entering the water, but being unable to breathe. Join me, Rey. The depths were calm where the surface was rough. She smelled him on his skin at all times, heard him in her head.

He wanted something from her. She knew it in the way he watched her, felt it in his burning skin against hers. That vitality in him was searing into her, marking her as his, but she didn’t know how to stop it without stopping the whole thing. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

One day she would ask questions.

His sharp teeth at her throat, his hands in her hair, his body pushing deep, deep.