O Captain, My Captor Read online

  She pushes my mouth back to her slit — not roughly, but in a way that brooks no resistance. “Kiss it,” she commands. “It's how we introduce ourselves up here.”

  Why she suddenly wants to be civil now when she's been all brusqueness and intrusive up until this point, I don't know, and I don't entirely trust her explanation. But I do as I'm told and kiss her between her legs, probably clumsily, considering my sudden and recent introduction with the practice. It is warm, and slightly damp — like another pair of lips, I realize, but turned the wrong way and crowned with a light fuzz. Again, I find myself curious as to why she needs another mouth on the bottom of her body. Do I have one now as well? Is that why her touch down there felt so strange?

  She exhales, a deep, ragged sound that rumbles in her throat toward the end, and her fingers twine themselves in my hair. “More, Princess,” she demands. “Your lips are so soft...”

  I kiss it again — what choice do I have? — and then again as she commands, over and over, wondering where this is leading. Her breathing quickens as I do, and I think she is getting angry with me; but she makes no chastisement unless I stop, whereupon she tells me to keep going, and to use my tongue this time. She is having the same reaction I was a moment ago, I realize. I don't know how one kisses with a tongue, though; she tells me to slide it between her lips and lick at the flesh in between. When I do, I feel her body arch away from me, and her hand grips my hair more roughly for a moment before releasing it, only to grip it again the next time my tongue delves into her. She is wet, and warm, and her lower mouth sucks my tongue in like an anemone pulling in its fronds.

  She tastes like ... like a human, I suppose, though I've never tasted one before in any context. I don't know what else to compare it to, except to say that it is slightly salty, with a hint of earthiness, and makes me think of home.

  A few minutes in and both of her hands are on my head, her fingers threaded in my hair, and her hips are swaying against my face as the muscles behind her lower lips twitch. The juice inside of her is leaking heavily now; I can feel it coating my lips and dripping down my chin, warming my face as it moistens it. After her forced drying, it is a comfortable feeling, though it seems to bring her great discomfort. She has since stopped making demands of my mouth and instead fills the little room with frantic, distressing noises: moans and growls, panting and heavy, labored breathing, and the occasional whimper. Whatever animosity I feel toward her for taking me from my familiar water to subject me to this array of strangeness, I can't help worrying slightly for her as the noises intensify. Why she holds me to a task that discomfits her so, I've no idea, unless this really is some civil penance for her behavior toward me earlier — in which case, I have no idea why she had been forcing the same feelings on me, or why I began to crave more of them.

  I'm not prepared for how it ends, though. With one final, stifled cry that dies halfway out of her throat, she presses my face tight to her cleft as the muscles beneath spasm wildly, and I feel her whole body shiver and tremble as the wetness inside her comes pouring out. I try to retract my tongue in surprise, but she holds it tight in her twitching lips for a moment before finally releasing it, along with a steady trickle of her juices that flows warmly over my lips and down my throat. There is enough of it that some excess dribbles down my chin to my neck, and I can feel the trail of her spilled wetness as it slowly, gradually drips down between my breasts toward my navel. It is comforting, in a way, but so very odd.

  When it is over — when my captor's juices stop flowing, when her lower mouth lets go of my tongue, and when the woman finally, shakily, steps back from me, releasing my hair — I swallow the last remains of her wetness and take a deep breath. My breathing had been shallow while our prolonged kiss went on, the soft, short hair of her cleft tickling my nose. I'd never spent enough time above water before to get fully comfortable with my lungs, and I was reminded of that fact now. I've never been sure why gills don't work out of the water, but with them there is no need to draw in and expel every breath. I still wasn't conscious of my own breathing until now, and I wonder how humans put up with it.

  “Not bad, Princess,” she says, her ample chest still heaving as she leans against the far wall and smiles at me. She's enjoyed herself, then. I don't understand why or how, but I wouldn't have guessed it during the act. “That is a proper, civil greeting. You're a natural.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, regaining her composure. “Still plenty of practice to be had, though.”

  “I don't understand,” I say, looking at her in confusion. “I am to be ... a conversation partner? What was that just now?”

  She chuckles, and the sound is like airy music, surprisingly pretty. “That was us getting to know one another.”

  “It was like no introduction I've ever heard of before,” I say warily.

  She laughs her musical laugh again. “It’s the only introduction worth having. It's more intimate than exchanging names, don't you think?” she asks, leaning down at the waist to fully remove the leg wrappings that had been tangled around her at the middle of her legs, in the place where they bend. She lifts one leg alone and slides it easily up the other, out a hole, then switches to the other, so nimbly and smoothly that I watch impressed. She makes having legs look easy.

  I look down at my own again, reminded they are there. Pink and bare, they stretch out in front of me, almost touching the far wall. I wonder how tall I am now. “Am I still a mermaid?” I ask, and the realization scares me for a moment. “Is my tail gone forever? How will I ever go home?”

  She laughs and pats my head. “Calm down, Princess, you worry too much. Spend some time in the water and you'll get your tail back, good as new. I'm not doing you any irreparable damage. I'm a nice girl.”

  “Then take away this strange yearning and let me go and put me back in the water,” I plead. “Please,” I add hopefully.

  She kneels, straddling my new legs, and smirks at me. “I'm not that nice,” she says. “Not even for a please.” And then her hands are on my breasts again. And then so is her mouth.

  Her tongue licks circles around my pert nipples, her lips tickling the soft pink skin while her hands rub and massage the small mounds of my full breasts, her fingers teasing at whichever nub she doesn't have her lips around. I gasp again, then moan aloud, surprising myself. It is an instinctual reaction, the same as earlier, returned and renewed; sounds of pain, I would have thought, had I not sudden, sufficient evidence otherwise.

  The noises come unbidden more times than I can count while she fondles me, my breathing heavy and ragged. My body, though developed for my kind, has only recently stopped filling out, and still no part of me is as big as the same part on her, my breasts least of all. Neither has anyone but myself ever touched me before for more than a fleeting gesture; in the hands of this lean, strong, unfamiliar human woman, I feel very small and delicate.

  And yet, as I squirm and blush and whimper beneath her attention and wish fervently to be elsewhere, at the same time something inside of me is warming up again and squirming for an entirely different reason. My new legs come together tightly and rub against one another under a strange impulse. I tremble constantly, uncontrollably. It’s happening again; what she is doing to me, what she is making me feel, I ... I do not have sufficient words to describe it. Perhaps the humans do, but not I. It is new and strange and unwelcome and confusing, and I hate it at the same time that I want to feel it some more: more intense, more frequently, all over, certain that I will never feel enough.

  My head clouds. I can't think straight. Before I know what's happening, I'm crying out, a high-pitched moan echoing her own from earlier that chokes off as it begins, and every muscle in me seems to clench at once. I feel some new wetness leaking between my legs from nowhere, close to where the base of my tail used to be. I am warmer than I ever remember being before in my life. All of it feels unbelievable. Overwhelming. Incredible.

  She laughs. “How brightly you must burn inside, Princess! What els
e are you hiding from me?”

  I don't know what she means. I don't know what is happening. I don't know who she is or what she wants or where we are or even what I am anymore. So much has changed so fast, and all of it is turning my world upside down. I feel dizzy. I feel scared and excited at once. Gods, what is going on?

  I haven't yet realized that I now possess the same strange opening between my legs as my captor; so when her fingers dip between my legs and then — somehow, suddenly — inside of me, I am caught completely off-guard. It sends a jolt through my whole body, and what breath I still have escapes me in a rush, an involuntary cry. My new muscles clench, squeeze her fingers, feel their thickness, though they appeared to me before so slender. I feel I will melt.

  “What ... what is ...?” I breathe with difficulty. It is all I can manage.

  “Shh...” she says, and her lips are on mine again. I welcome them now, not knowing why, but this time the kiss is over in a few seconds. I moan feebly in protest as she removes them, but then they're on my neck, then my chest, between my rising and falling breasts, down my stomach, kissing up the trail of warm wetness that she leaked on me earlier. Her hair, though shorter than my own, is still long enough to trail lightly across my new legs as her face disappears between them. She removes her fingers, and there is a moment of relative calm throughout my body before something warm and wet replaces them, and I cry out anew as my whole body spasms and shakes.

  Her tongue. Her tongue is inside of me. She is eating me, I think in a moment of horror before the strange sensation breaks over me again like a riptide, sucking my mind out of clarity into strange and roiling waters. It does not yet occur to me that what she is doing to me is similar to what she made me do to her. I am not yet capable of making that connection, or many other coherent thoughts outside of amazement at what my body is feeling and doing.

  And then, before much more time has passed, my thoughts are all suddenly pulled under and drowned as the feelings build to a mighty wave that crashes down upon my bound, squirming body. I think I cry out — I think I yell — but if so, I do not hear it. The woman is still lying on the floor in front of me, her hair tickling my hips, her breasts squished against my new legs, her mouth on my hidden mouth, but I do not see her anymore. I do not feel the smooth, hard wood of the floor beneath me, nor the cord around my wrists, nor the weight of my captor pressing herself against me. All I hear is the deep, frantic beating of my blood in my ears; all I see is a wash of white that blurs and blinds me to my surroundings; and all I feel is intense, incredible, indescribable pleasure, tingling and wet and hotter even than this surfacers' sun. It holds me for moments that stretch on into eternity, wrenching away my last vestige of control, and when it is over I sink down into a soft, warm place without thought or care.

  ***

  When next I awake, I am blind — the whole field of my vision is white, and burns. I think, at first, that this is some strange side-effect of the recent crescendo of alien sensations my body forced me through, and I cry out once in panic before I realize it is but the sun, harsh and unfiltered. I had seldom seen the sunlight without the veil of the sea to diminish its radiance, and never before between its rising and setting, at those times when it burned brightest in the clear and empty sky. My eyes shut tight, but I can still feel the glow, still see its harshest edges soaking through my eyelids. Why does anything need this much light? How does anyone up here stand it?

  “Her majesty awakens,” says my captor’s voice nearby. “Sleep well, Princess?”

  I roll my head and open my eyes as much as I dare, trying to find the woman through a tiny crack in my lids, and pick her out as a light-brown blur moving against the otherwise static background of the ship, still unfocused in my vision. She comes near to me, then drops something that lands softly over my face, blocking the light entirely.

  I reach reflexively to see what she has done and find it is a circle of soft cloth draped over my face now, a bowl indentation in its center. As the shade it casts is rather comfortable after the sun’s impromptu blinding, I determine this is probably for my benefit rather than some new molestation. “Where am I now?” I ask, my own voice hoarse to my ears.

  “Still on my ship,” she answers, her voice now coming from a short distance away and above my head. She’s climbing something. “I figured you might want a little space to try out those new legs of yours.”

  I am on the deck, then; and she is tangled among the ropes above. My decision is made instantly — I lurch unsteadily to my hands, push my legs beneath me (still unnerved by the sensation of them being there at all), and lunge for the ship’s edge, bracing for the cold splash of the sea’s watery embrace welcoming me home.

  But something has a hold of my leg near the bottom and jerks me off balance. I fall sprawling back to the wooden planks, surprisingly fast and hard, my outstretched hands inches from the railing. The bottom of my leg, the part that resembles a hand somewhat, feels bruised, something cold and hard wrapped around it; and there is a delicate tinkling sound as I shift back to where I’d been before my failed escape attempt.

  “Easy, Princess! You don’t have that much space.” There is a thud and the deck shakes as the woman lands next to me. She takes my arm, unbidden, and helps me back up to my legs, balancing me on the strange, boney part in the middle where they bend (I don’t yet know all of the proper terminology), then lifts me abruptly to stand straight and erect. I yelp in fear and surprise, staggering under weight I have never needed to bear before, and cling to the woman to keep myself from toppling over. She laughs again and clamps a hand to my bare backside, to the padded curves where my tail used to begin; and though I ought to feel indignant at this, truth be told, I’m actually thankful for the help. “Walk around a bit,” she instructs, pushing me off of her but still holding me by the waist and one arm. “Get your sea legs. It’ll make escape attempts less awkward.”

  I glare at her through my squinted lids. I’m still not used to the brightness. “You mock me. If I am to be prisoner, it would be less miserable if you did not also taunt me in my bondage.”

  She laughs yet again, and it makes me angry. “I don’t think it will be as miserable for you as you claim, Princess. If this morning was any indication, you’re enjoying yourself more than you want to admit.”

  I think back to then, between my first and second blackout — to the confusion of awakening in a wholly foreign place, the fear of such sudden and unexpected physical change, and finally (and strongest), the unnervingly pleasant sensations which my captor’s unbidden attentions to my body wrought in me. I shiver again, involuntarily, at the memory. She notices, of course, and I’m starting to think that grin will never leave her face so long as I am here.

  Her fingers slide down my arm to my wrist as she releases my waist. I wobble and pitch forward, but her grip on my arm tugs me back upright. “Relax,” she admonishes me. “Baby steps, Princess. Try standing still first.”

  I keep my arms raised and extended on either side of me, one hand holding hers, the other tentatively kneading the empty air in which it floats. My body wants to push against the air and float in place, but this empty space is not thick enough, not like the sea. Here there is no friction, nothing to hold me in my place but myself and my own weak muscles. Here, falling is not a gentle downwards float but a quick and hard punishment. I would already have fallen back to the wooden floor that seems so far below me were my captor's hand not on mine.

  “Balance,” she instructs, sliding around behind me. Her hand has left mine and traveled to my shoulder, the other on my waist. “Like this,” she continues, and gently tugs parts of me back and out, posing me in such a way that makes standing upright easier. “Distribute your weight. Brace your legs if need be. But keep your knees bent.”

  “My what?” I ask, swaying uneasily.

  “Your knees,” she says with an audible smile. “The hard bendy part in the middle of your legs, between calf and thigh.” A hand of hers slides down my leg to the ind
icated joint, pushing it out somewhat, making me feel as if I will topple backward. Her other hand on the small of my back saves me the fall.

  I do as she says, then gasp as her touch leaves me, wobbling slightly before righting myself. With a bit of adjustment, I am soon standing, however uncertainly, on my own two legs.

  She chuckles her tinkling laugh behind me. “Good. Now try walking to the mast and back.”

  “The mast?” I repeat.

  Her hand appears over my shoulder, one slender finger pointing to the thick wooden pole in the center of her ship to which my leg is chained. “The mast,” she says. “Touch it, turn around, and come back.

  Though it skews my tenuous balance somewhat, I turn my head to look behind at her. “Does this amuse you?” I ask. “Why must I be discomforted so?”

  Her outstretched hand slides back lightly across my face, then gently pushes it around to face the mast once more. “My amusement aside,” she answers, “don't you think, if you're going to have these legs, you learn what they can do? You don't want to sit against the wall all day, do you?”

  “I want to go home,” I maintain.

  “I know, Princess,” she says patiently. “But this is the next best thing at the moment. Now walk.”

  Her hands on my shoulders prod me gently forward. And so, falteringly slowly, I take my first steps, my arms waving against imagined support the whole way, my body tipping forward and back like kelp in a current. She quietly offers encouragement, then advice as strange new muscles carry me to a mast that seems impossibly far away until I reach it, wrapping my arms around it and almost collapsing. My legs tingle as I struggle to right them beneath myself and keep on my own feet (another term I learn in the progress of my first walk).