Chapter Text
1.
The first time she feels something is during a horse-riding lesson.
She’s picked up riding a lot faster than anyone else Grimsby’s taught, he tells her. When she sees Eric again afterwards, she teases him about stealing his place as Grimsby’s favourite. But to her dismay, Eric doesn’t seem bothered at all. Instead, he tells her he’s not surprised and kisses the smirk right off her face.
“It’s impossible not to adore you, Ariel.”
She thinks about him at her next lesson, the mirth in his blue eyes, the dimple in his cheek when he smiles, the warmth of his lips against hers. Today, Grimsby has her performing jumps. The horse beneath her is a lovely, well-trained creature who clears the easier ground poles. As she works her way up to the slightly higher poles, Ariel tenses her core and shifts her weight slightly forward out of the horse’s way, just like Grimsby shows her. The horse takes a leap, and Ariel is suspended above the saddle for a millisecond.
When she lands, a small spark of electricity shoots up her spine from the spot between her legs.
Her breath hitches in her throat and she instinctively squeezes her legs, accidentally urging her horse into a canter. Quickly, she tugs lightly at its reins and it comes to a stop.
Grimsby trots up beside her, his brows creased in concern. “Lady Ariel, is everything alright?”
She forces the confusion out of her features and smiles reassuringly. “Yep, everything’s fine!” she says a little too brightly. “Although I’m feeling tired, is it okay if we finish this lesson tomorrow?”
Grimsby agrees and calls over the stablehands to help them with their horses.
Later, when she’s alone in her quarters, she throws her leg over a cushion, mimicking the position she was in earlier. She squirms a little, trying to summon that strange feeling again. She’s learned much about humans from the books she salvaged below sea and from her conversations with Scuttle, but she had no idea what that was. And if there was one thing about her, she wanted to find out.
She gives up after a few minutes when she starts to feel silly and climbs into bed instead. Maybe it was just one of those unexplainable bodily sensations, like the involuntary flutters she used to get in her tail as a mermaid.
She’s already forgetting about it as she drifts off to sleep.
2.
She’s humming to herself on the beach when it happens again, the white sand warm between her fingers, staring out at the rolling waves. It’s one of those rare days off when the palace is quiet and Queen Selina allows her a reprieve from all the lessons and tutors she’s arranged for Ariel.
“How do you do that?”
Beside her, Eric is sprawled out on the sand, staring at her openly in awe. She can’t help but smile as she turns towards him. “Do what?”
He sits up. “Just… sing. The most beautiful melodies. So easily like that,” he says.
She lets out a small giggle. “Pretty easily, actually. So when your vocal cords vibrate a certain way, they create sound-”
She lets out a shriek when she suddenly finds herself on her back. Eric’s face appears above her moments later, his lips curved into a smirk. “Oh, you think you’re funny today?”
“I’m funny everyday,” she replies without missing a beat. She notices the column of his throat, the tendons along his neck, the bump of his Adam’s apple. Absently, she reaches up and touches the base of his throat just above his collarbone. “It starts here,” she says softly, mystified by the hollow there, by the slight prickle of his freshly shaven skin. “Your vocal cords vibrate when air passes through, creating sound.” She hums a single note to demonstrate, focusing on the vibrations of her own voice. “But the different notes are created by the speed at which they vibrate, and the stretching of the cords.” She hums that melody again, tracing the rise and fall of each note along his neck, fascinated by each dip and ridge. For some reason, she has the urge to lean up and replace her fingers with her mouth, her lips, her tongue. She wants to taste every inch of skin on display and feel his pulse beneath her lips.
“I could listen to you sing for the rest of my life,” he says softly, reverently.
Her gaze snaps back to his eyes, her heart racing inexplicably in her chest. For some reason, she feels like she’s just been caught in the middle of something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. But she catches herself quickly – she plasters on a smile and hopes he doesn’t notice. Fortunately for her, he doesn’t seem to. He’s smiling down at her adoringly, those dimples she loves so much on full display. It makes her want to lean up to kiss him, already forgetting about everything.
They’re interrupted by a loud, pointed cough.
“Your Highness, the Queen needs you in the council room.” Grimsby’s voice, usually one she is glad to hear, makes her want to tear her hair out.
Eric lets out a small sigh of frustration, almost imperceptible if he wasn’t hovering above her, and sits up. “Of course. I’ll be there shortly,” he tells Grimsby. He shoots her one last apologetic smile before gathering his things and following the older man to the palace.
Ariel lies there for a moment longer, thinking about the contours of his neck, the strange heat she felt all over her skin. Then she sighs and decides she should get going, too. She sits up and-
“Oh!”
Her undergarments stick against the skin uncomfortably and the spot between her legs feels… wet. When she shifts again, she feels another jolt of electricity like the one before during her riding lesson, her flesh hypersensitive to the friction of her clothes. Suddenly, she becomes aware of every sensation; the grip of her corset against her chest, the brush of her hair against her back, the sea breeze against her face. For the first time since she traded her tail for legs, she feels overwhelmed by the sensations of her new body, feels too big in her skin.
She hastily gets to her feet and runs to the palace, eager to wash herself clean.
3.
It gets so much worse after that.
At first, she has herself convinced that she can go back and carry on as if nothing had happened. Because nothing did. Nothing happened. There was nothing to think about, nothing to avoid.
But then he moans against her lips when she wraps him up in a blanket one chilly morning, involuntarily igniting that heat in her navel. It was clearly innocent on his part; he was shivering from the cold, and he was grateful for the warmth of the blanket. But the sound ripples through her anyway, against her will.
She watches him out on the beach with his fencing instructor in a plain shirt that reveals his bare arms. His muscles roll beneath his skin as he practises each move, his biceps flexing as he raises his sabre, his torso tightening with each exertion. At some point, he decides his garment is a hindrance to his movement so he pulls it off, and Ariel almost salivates. She watches him roll his impossibly big shoulders, traces the ridges of muscle along his bare back with her eyes. His chest, smooth and golden in the sun, is glistening with sea spray and sweat. It makes her dizzy, it makes her feel electric, it makes her unbelievably frustrated, and she doesn’t understand why.
When he notices her staring, he gives her a shy smile. The innocence of it immediately snaps her out of that trance and she feels embarrassed at the way she had been looking at him, the way he made her feel.
By the week’s end, she can barely look him in the eye.
That night, she decides she’s had enough. She wants to get to the bottom of those infuriating feelings and understand what’s happening within her body. That’s the only way she can conquer it and make it stop, she tells herself. So after she’s dismissed her servants and is left alone in her bath, she touches herself.
She starts with the soft, supple skin on her chest, one part of her body that hasn’t changed since becoming human. She’s grateful for the familiarity of her breasts, the sensitive flesh of her nipples. When she runs her fingers over the brown skin, she shivers. As a mermaid, she had watched her body change and develop as she aged. She was no stranger to her breasts, what they felt like, how they responded to changes in climate. But she’s never touched herself like this before. The peak of her nipples harden and a burst of electricity shoots up from between her legs.
That part of her body was new. She dips her hand beneath the water and lets it rest on her inner thigh. She’s less sure about this. She’d done enough reading in her off-days to know some things – she knows it’s called a vagina and it was a crucial part of their reproductive system – but there wasn’t a whole lot of information about what she really wanted to know. She wasn’t thinking about babies at this point; she wanted to know about pleasure.
She takes a breath to steel herself, then shifts her fingers onto her outer lips. Nothing yet. Just a lot of hair. But that was to be expected. After another breath, she spreads her legs slightly more and pushes a finger closer to her core.
The flesh here reminds her of the delicate insides of shellfish beneath the sea, of sea urchins beneath their skeleton. She maps out the shape of it experimentally; her inner labia, her vaginal opening, her vestibule, her urethral opening, her-
She lets out a sharp gasp as her fingers find that tiny bud at the top of her lips and every nerve in her body comes alight. Clitoris, she thinks with excitement. She pushes against it and the air is stolen from her lungs once again, her thigh muscles tensing, her vagina pulsing with heat.
So that’s where it comes from.
After that, she touches herself with purpose. Her other hand grabs onto the edge of the tub for leverage as she gives into the sensation, her fingers swirling around the bud, her knees pushing against the confines of the tub. She accidentally flicks at it abruptly and she can’t help the moan that escapes her mouth. She tries it again but it doesn’t have the same effect. She experiments again with different rhythms and different amounts of pressure, trying to replicate that feeling.
But after a while, the initial intensity of her pleasure begins to plateau and fade. She frowns in confusion as she half-heartedly touches herself. What happened?
Unbidden, an image of Eric climbing out of the lagoon soaking wet appears in her mind. It was from a few days ago when they accidentally fell out of their rowboat. He emerged from the water laughing, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, his white button down shirt hanging open and clinging to his skin. She remembers how her mouth went dry at the sight of his broad chest and torso, how she followed with her eyes the water rivulets racing down his slick skin to his navel.
Ariel suddenly feels hot all over again. Her clitoris pulses with renewed excitement. Her fingers reflexively respond by picking up the pace again.
She thinks of his clever fingers showing her how to tie various knots out on his ship, delicately setting up bait on a fishing hook, plucking the strings of his guitar. His fingers are so much bigger than hers. She wonders how they would feel on her, inside of her.
Involuntarily, she traces downwards and finds herself coated with the slick of her arousal, even beneath the water. The feeling of it makes her wetter and she gently pushes a finger inside herself, imagining it’s one of his. At the feeling of the stretch, a filthy groan, so unlike any sound she’s ever made, escapes from her. She starts pumping back and forth and palms her clitoris simultaneously, rebuilding that rhythm.
As if a dam had burst open, a flood of images from the past few days flood her mind; Eric’s shoulders beneath her hands as he hoists her up, his arms around her bare waist pulling her below the water, his thighs beneath hers when they sit together poring over maps. Every single image she had tried to squash down into the recesses of her subconscious. At that moment, she allows herself to feel every ounce of desire she had been pushing away for so long, to indulge in every dirty thought she had about him. She wanted to push him against the wall and tangle her fingers in his hair. She wanted to feel his bare chest beneath her palm, to mark his neck with bruising kisses. She wanted to distract him from his own studies, climb on top of him and straddle his thighs, feel his hands on her skin.
She comes with a loud, drawn out moan, her orgasm ripping through her, her inner walls pulsing around her finger. For a moment, she feels weightless and free, like a floating soul with no body. Then the sensation returns to her slowly; the sweat along her neck, her wet hair sticking to her chest, her knees lax against the tub. The exhaustion in her bones. For the first time all week, that persistent frustrated feeling is gone. She feels completely and utterly relaxed.
When she catches her breath again, she climbs out of the water and readies herself for bed. She calls in the servants to empty the tub once she’s dressed, hoping they don’t comment on the musky smell of the water.
She’s so tired that she falls asleep before her hair dries.
4.
She regrets it instantly the next day.
Ariel thought that finding her release would put an end to that tension building within her, relieve that unfamiliar hunger in the pit of her navel whenever she was around him. But instead, it only heightened it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to have his mouth on her collarbone, his hands on her hips, his fingers inside of her. She wanted him in the library when he braced his arms above the table, on the beach as she watched his bare back flex in the sun. She wanted him in her bed above her, below her, everywhere.
But then he’d give her that boyish smile when he caught her staring, his eyes so full of affection. And Ariel would duck her head in shame. He practically worshipped the ground she walked on, and all she could think about was what pleasures his body could bring her. It felt vulgar; wrong. From the moment she heard him on that ship, she recognised the kindred spirit in him. Their connection was meant to transcend the ebb and flow of mortal instinct, of fickle desires of the flesh. That was what true love looked like, from what she had seen growing up beneath the sea. Yet, here she was, single-handedly dismantling everything they had built together.
It was almost a relief when he announced he’d be sailing off to Colombia, a neighbouring country and one of the kingdom's closest allies, and that he’d be gone for a month. At this point, merely being in the same room as him was torture.
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with me,” she tells Lashana miserably one evening as the older woman washes her locs. “I mean, I’ve always noticed how handsome he is, but that wasn’t the reason I wanted him— not that that’s changed! I still like everything about him, but now when I think of him, I can’t seem to focus on anything else but…” It makes her ashamed to even say it aloud.
To her surprise, Lashana only laughs. “Miss Ariel, if you only heard what the servant girls say about the young men on Prince Eric’s crew while they prepare his ship for his next voyage, you’ll quickly understand that whatever you’re feeling is normal,” she says kindly, amusement dancing in her eyes.
At that, she turns to face her suddenly, sending shampoo suds whipping around the room. “It is?”
“Knowing you, your thoughts are tame compared to the shameless filth that comes out of their mouths. I’m always telling those girls they better wash those mouths before going home to kiss their mothers, but it’s always in one ear and out the other! I suppose you can’t blame them, with everyone on this island so comfortable with stripping down for work. I’m sure you’ve noticed the men yourself when you’ve come down to the beach, although I know you’d never say half the things those girls do,” Lashana says as she works the shampoo onto her scalp.
Ariel considers her words, taking them in slowly. She was used to nudity; down below the sea, the merfolk of her father's kingdom regularly went about their business without anything to cover themselves. There was no concept of shame or modesty as a mermaid – bodies simply were. But in a similar vein, there was no concept of desire, either. Sure, merfolk took on partners whom they would love and share children with, but the act of procreation was nothing more than a swift act, singularly for that purpose. An instinct to fulfil, but not one for eliciting pleasure, or satisfying a desire.
That was part of what made her own desire for the human world strange, and her search for pleasure among the humans unheard of. Among all the beauty and wonders that the sea had to offer, what reason would anyone have to want? The ocean already provided everything a mermaid could dream of to find pleasure and joy. And when she gave up her tail and met Eric, her world split open once again. The heart of her, which found its pleasure simply from loving him, would always be of the idyllic world down below. But her human body ached to be known by him, to seek rather than find pleasure – to desire.
“I don’t think I feel like that with anyone else, Lashana,” she says quietly. “Only Eric. He’s the only one who makes me feel like this.”
What messed up things did that say about her? How could she feel this way about the person she cared more about than anyone else in the world, the one person who truly understood the essence of her? At least down below, it made sense that her desires be frowned upon; there, she was the ungrateful princess who dared to dream of a life beyond the gilded cage. But in her new body up above, her desires felt wrong; a betrayal of everything she felt for Eric, a stain on their relationship. How could she still desire more of him when he was already everything she wanted, and more? How could she sully that soul bond between them with her carnal impulses?
What would he think of her if he knew how little she respected him and their relationship?
In the mirror across the room, Lashana’s face softens with sympathy. “Ain’t he one lucky boy, to be the only person who gets to be loved by you like that?”
Lucky?
Lashana comes around and kneels beside the tub to look at Ariel properly. “Look, girl. I don’t know what it was like among you merfolk, what sort of expectations you grew up with. But here above sea, we humans have many different ways of showing our love to the people dearest to us. The things you feel and the desires you have for the prince, that’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s not a failing on your part that will ruin your relationship. It’s the opposite, in fact. Your physicality is another language you have at your disposal to show him you love him. And ain’t that a beautiful thing?”
Her desires were… beautiful? The thought was so foreign to her. She had spent so much time believing she had to hold herself above those base desires, that the only acceptable love she could feel for him was the innocent kind. The idea that the call of her body was something to celebrate and not conquer, it was still something she struggled to accept.
But beneath all that inner turmoil, there is a glimmer of something else. Maybe it was possible that he wouldn’t turn her away if he knew how she really felt. Maybe he’d love her all the same. Maybe she could embrace her body for all that it was, all that it allowed her to do, to feel. Even the parts she resented.
Lashana rinses her hair through it all, gently working the shampoo out, patting it dry with a towel. She warns Ariel one last time not to neglect caring for her locs—
“You might’ve gotten away with it below sea, but here, you need to be moisturising and using that silk bonnet I gave you before you sleep,”
— and bids her good night.
“Lashana,” Ariel calls out just before she closes the door.
Her head reappears in the door frame. “Yes, Miss Ariel?”
Ariel smiles. “Thank you. For everything.”
5.
It takes her three days to muster up the courage to find Eric.
She finds him in the library the night before he’s set to depart. When she first heard about the trip, she was content to let him go without much more than a chaste goodbye. But after processing her last conversation with Lashana, she realised she didn’t want that – not in the slightest. She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want to be away from him, ever. She wanted to follow him wherever he went.
Then it occurred to her that he had never asked her to come with him to Colombia. And it occurred to her that she hadn’t spoken to him properly in several weeks. She’d see him coming to find her and feel so overcome with guilt and embarrassment, that she’d disappear before he saw her. In her mind, he had become more of a statue on a pedestal; something to admire at a distance, but never allowed to touch. To ruin. She thought she was protecting him, in her own ill-informed, nonsensical way.
She had never once thought about how it might’ve made him feel.
He looks up when she walks in, genuinely surprised to see her. Then he gives her a small, self-deprecating smile. “You’re not avoiding me anymore.” He says it like a joke, but there is a pained look in his eyes.
She winces as if she’s just pricked herself. “I was hoping you hadn’t noticed,” she says lightly, trying to be self-effacing.
He lets out a dry laugh. “Ariel, I notice everything about you.”
She knows he doesn’t mean to, but his admission stabs at her. It was all the confirmation she needed that her behaviour had affected him. Hurt him. Suddenly, she feels incredibly selfish. This whole time, she thought she was sparing him the disgust of her new feelings by keeping him at arm’s length. She had never once considered what pushing him away might do to him.
She swallows a lump in her throat and notices all the paperwork sprawled out on the desk before him; last minute arrangements for the trip ahead. She feels even more ashamed at the sight of it. She’d spent the better part of the last few weeks avoiding him, and now she had barged in unannounced, expecting him to drop everything for her. “Sorry, I didn’t realise how busy you were, I didn’t mean to-”
“Ariel.”
There are few times when she remembers he’s not only a prince, but a future king. His voice cuts through the air with the firmness of a command, but also a softness that would always belong to him. He comes around and stands in front of his desk, paperwork promptly forgotten. The intensity of his gaze holds her in place, rooted to the spot at the doorway. His eyes beg her to stay. He needs this just as much as she does, she realises. “Tell me what you need to say.”
At that, any protest she might’ve had dries up and she closes the door behind her. She ventures a few steps forwards, but still lingers on the other side of the room. She doesn’t know yet how to bridge the chasm between them.
Use your words, girl, says a voice in her mind that sounds a lot like Sebastian.
She takes a breath, steeling herself. “I have been avoiding you,” she admits, quietly. “I didn’t realise what that might’ve done to you, to vanish without a word. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” And she truly means it, with her whole heart. She can’t imagine what must’ve been going through his head each time she turned away. She tries to decipher his features now, tries to reach into his mind and understand what he’s thinking, but his expression is inscrutable. It disheartens her for a moment – she had hoped he’d lower his guard now while she poured herself out to him, even while she knows he’s not usually so open with his emotions – but she figures she deserves it a little. After the last few weeks, she had to earn his confidence back.
“There’s… something… I’ve been trying to deal with. Something I’m ashamed of,” she goes on, pained. “I was trying to protect you from it. I didn’t want you to ever find out.” Her gaze shifts away. “But I guess I failed. You’ve known all this time, and I still haven’t figured it all out.”
His brows crease in concern, the first crack in the wall. “That’s okay. I’m here. We can figure it out together,” he says, approaching her.
She jolts back as he comes closer and he stops, just a few paces away from her. His lips press together in a firm line. “It’s more complicated than that,” she says, picking at her nails nervously. She forces herself to look up at him. This was it. This was the crux of it. “The… thing… I’m struggling with. It’s about you. My feelings for you. They’re not the same anymore.”
Her words wash over him like a dark shadow. She catches the muscle of his jaw tense, the colour darken in his eyes. He doesn’t say a word for the longest time.
There are times when he gets like this; when he shuts himself off from her completely and retreats into himself. And try as she might to reach him, he keeps her locked out. It’s always made her feel out of her depth and woefully inadequate. She knows him like her own reflection, but she’s never been able to understand this part of him. In the past, she’d never pushed him to open up. But in that moment, she wants so desperately to know what he’s thinking, to pull him out of whatever dark, hidden place he’s disappeared to.
“You… don’t feel the same anymore,” he says hollowly.
Why do I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing?
She panics. The words flow out of her involuntarily before she can even think. “It used to be so easy being around you, but lately it’s just gotten so hard. I thought I could make it go away on my own and we could go back to how things were, but I don’t think we can ever go back after this. And the last thing I ever wanna do is hurt you, so I tried so hard to manage and make it work without you knowing-“
“Please stop talking,” he says quietly. Despite his softness, she’s taken aback by the sheer brokenness in his voice. “I’ll see to it that your things are packed and there is lodging prepared for you tomorrow morning. I’ll ask the treasury if we can grant you a living stipend and if you can keep one or two servants. I promise that you will be looked after.”
Is he... sending me away?
“Eric,” she whispers, unable to hide the shock in her voice. She doesn’t understand what just happened. Her heart is hammering against her ribcage, her mind is still stuck in the moment before this. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“You don’t have to explain yourself, Ariel.” He can barely stand to look at her, and the sight of him turning away is like a knife in her gut. “I won’t force you to stay here against your will. I won’t resent you if you no longer love me.”
“No longer love you?!” It bursts out of her like a poison she’s accidentally consumed. “How could you even… Eric, I could never stop loving you!”
The darkness in his eyes clears up in an instant. “You still love me?”
“Yes! God, of course I still love you!” She crosses the room to where he stands, holding onto his arms, forcing him to meet her gaze. His blue eyes find hers immediately. “I will love you until the day I die, okay? I promise that no matter what happens, that will never change. Don’t ever forget that,” she tells him fiercely. Then she reaches up to touch his face, her fingers curling into his hair. Instinctively, he relaxes into her palm, even while his expression seems unconvinced. It makes her feel helpless and frustrated, desperate to ease his anguish without having any clue how.
He covers her hand with one of his before she can ask. “Ariel,” he breathes, like her name is a solemn prayer. It’s the first sign of relief from him, like a single beam of light making it through a cloudy sky.
Before she knows it, she’s pulling him into her embrace, holding him tightly as he presses his face into the crook of her neck. He says nothing, but she feels him shaking in her arms, his breath stuttering silently against her skin. She strokes his back through it all and whispers reassurances into his hair. For now, she would have this moment of vulnerability from him, as small as it is. She’ll cradle it in her hands until he’s ready to be okay again. Slowly, she feels the tension leave his body.
Eventually, he pulls back to look at her again. “I don’t understand. You still love me, but you feel differently now?”
She looks away nervously, opting to think before she speaks this time. She didn’t want to get this wrong and hurt him again. But try as she might, she couldn’t conjure up the right words to say.
At the back of her mind, she remembers what Lashana had said about her physicality being another language at her disposal.
“Can I show you what I mean?”
He nods without hesitation, but there is still confusion lingering in his expression.
She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a breath before she leans up to kiss him. It’s familiar for both of them; he immediately responds to her, his lips pliant and eager against hers. And yet, there is that thrumming of electricity just beneath her skin, the one that comes alive whenever she thinks of him, whenever he touches her. She remembers in an instant how long it’s been since she’s felt his hands on her, how much she missed having him near. How much she wants him closer. How much she wants him everywhere. They’ve kissed plenty of times before, but never in a way that makes her feel like this.
She pulls away slowly before her impulses get the better of her, watching for his reaction. But he’s only looking at her with an intensity that she doesn’t recognise on him, that makes her feel hot all over. She’s keenly aware of the smell of his cologne, the pressure of his hands on her waist, the heat of his body where they are joined.
Before she can even think, his lips are on hers again; hotter, heavier. She suddenly forgets everything she had been worried about and leans into the sensation, sighing against his lips, her arms coming up around his neck, her fingers curling into his hair. The electricity from before sparks into a fire in the pit of her navel. She’d been burned before, but this fire didn’t bite; it made her ravenous. It made her wound up and desperate. It was too much. It wasn’t enough.
She licks at his lips experimentally, wanting to taste him, and his breath hitches. He pulls away abruptly and his hands slide down to her thighs, hoisting her up effortlessly. The moment her legs are secure around his hips, she dives back in, her hands on his shoulders, her fingers in his hair, her tongue in his mouth. He kisses her like he’s starving too, tonguing at her bottom lip, gently drawing it into his mouth. She gasps at the sensation, her thighs tightening involuntarily around him. Somewhere far away, she feels them both moving across the room, but she’s too distracted by the taste of his lips, the heat of his hips between her legs, the pressure of his fingers beneath her thighs.
His hands are suddenly replaced by the cool surface of the desk. They break apart momentarily as she slides down his body. Something stiff rubs against her core and he lets out a low groan, one that ripples through her and makes her core throb with heat and slick. Instinctively, she rolls against it and he moans again, his head dropping to the crook of her neck.
“You can’t keep doing that,” he murmurs against her skin, pressing his lips to the juncture between her jaw and neck.
“Doing what?” she asks innocently, although her voice comes out breathy. She rolls against him again and he groans against her skin. His reaction sends a rush of exhilaration through her. “This?”
His hands are on her hips in the next moment, holding her in place. “Careful,” he grits out. “You have no idea how much I’m holding back right now.”
His words send another heady rush straight to her core. All of that… and he was only holding back? Had he thought about her the way she thought about him? Was she having the same effect on him that he had on her? What other pleasures had he fantasised about on his own, what new heights could his body bring her?
The clothes on her body suddenly feel uncomfortable and suffocating against her, the layers of her skirt an annoying hindrance. She wants to get rid of everything and feel his bare skin on hers.
“Eric?”
He jumps away from her as the door knob twists open. Ariel has just enough sense left in her fog-addled brain to register the Queen’s voice – she slides off the table, smoothing down her skirt just as the door swings open.
“Before you leave, I need to run some numbers– oh. Hello, Ariel. I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Queen Selina says, looking over at her curiously.
Ariel dips into a curtsy, grateful for the excuse to avoid her gaze. “Your Majesty,” she says calmly, forcing her breathing to even out.
“Ariel was just saying goodbye and wishing me safe travels,” Eric pipes in, his voice remarkably level considering what they had just been up to. She looks up again to face the Queen and smiles politely.
“How very kind of you, Ariel,” she says. Then she looks over at her son, raising a perfectly polished eyebrow. “I take it that the matter we were discussing yesterday has been resolved?”
Beside her, Eric coughs awkwardly. “Yes, Mother, it’s been resolved,” he says, a note of embarrassment in his voice.
The Queen holds his gaze for a moment longer, her expression inscrutable. Ariel looks between the two of them in confusion but decides not to ask. It was clear they were speaking in some kind of code because of her, but it doesn’t feel malicious in any way. If it was important, she trusted that Eric would tell her later.
Finally, Queen Selina finds whatever answer she was looking for in his eyes and gives him a curt nod. “Quite.” Then she turns to Ariel again, her eyes softening with sympathy. “Well, as much as I hate to interrupt your last night together in a while, I’m afraid I need to speak to Prince Eric urgently.”
Ariel nods, trying not to let her disappointment show. “Of course, ma’am. Have a lovely evening,” she says. She curtsies one last time before heading for the door.
“I can come find you afterwards,” Eric calls after her. Despite the coolness of his tone, she hears the undercurrent of disappointment, too.
She stops just as she reaches the door and looks back at him longingly. Although she’d managed to tell him what she needed to say (or rather, show him), she couldn’t help but feel like there were things lingering in the darkness between them, left unsaid. If they were going to be apart for the next month, she didn’t want to send him off like that.
She puts on a small, reassuring smile. She hopes he can read the pretence of it, but she knows he’s too far away. “You need to be well rested for your journey tomorrow. You should go to sleep as soon as your business is finished,” she says, but more for the Queen’s benefit.
He opens his mouth to protest, but Queen Selina cuts him off. “Ariel’s right. It’s already late. When you set sail tomorrow, you need to be well rested.”
He looks torn for a moment longer, and she almost caves in revealing her intentions. Not for the first time, she’s struck with that all-encompassing melancholy at the idea of being without him for so long. He had become such a permanent fixture in her life, she had no idea how she was supposed to carry on without him. But then he sighs in resignation and crosses the room, pulling her into one last kiss despite the Queen’s presence. It’s nothing like the last one they just shared, but she leans into it anyway, trying to memorise everything about his lips before he goes away.
“Promise you’ll be there at the dock tomorrow morning before I leave,” he murmurs when he pulls away, loud enough just for her.
She reaches out and threads their fingers together. “I promise,” she whispers back. Then she gives him a small, teasing smile. Little did he know, she had plans to find him before then, too. “I won’t let you go so easily.”