Page 20 of Alien Kraken's Prize

I squint at him. “Are you using the sexy secretions on me right now?”

He tips his head back and lets loose a throaty laugh. “No. Are you telling me that you are aroused?”

“Yep,” I say.

I cup his face in my hands, and the rumble of laughter resonating against my chest settles as I pull his face down to mine.

When our mouths meet, I feel like a research scientist. His lips are smooth, supple, tender and salty tasting. Save for the mass of tentacles writhing around me and holding me tight, it’s almost like kissing the few others I’ve kissed.

Until he groans, his rough hand gripping the back of my neck as he deepens the kiss, setting off an inferno inside me. My legs wrap around his waist, and I moan when his tongue slicks against my mouth.

Wow.

Wow.

He breaks off the kiss, and I make a small squeak of disappointment.

“Your stomach is making a strange noise.” With no further explanation, he tucks me tight into him, and dives.

I want to scream the moment I’m completely submerged, but I know—I know—that will just mean I end up swallowing a shit ton of water.

The urge to breathe is incomprehensible. My lungs want to pump air through my bloodstream, even though whatever stuff is in his… stuff has made me able to take oxygen through my skin straight into my bloodstream.

None of it makes a lick of sense to me, but I hold onto him, and I bury my face in his shoulder, and before I know it, the zig-zagging nature of his swimming evens out into a more normal pace.

The fear of drowning still nags at the back of my mind, but my curiosity, as always, has overridden my good sense.

Slowly, I force my squeezed-shut eyes to open and look around.

“Holy shit.” The words are audible, though muted to my own ears, but Borumor looks down at me with clear amusement dancing across his face.

I roll my eyes at him, but I’m smiling too.

“Are you alright?” he asks, squinting at me.

“I keep wanting to breathe,” I tell him. “It’s bizarre.”

Everything sounds weird, too, different and muffled under water, distorted.

Borumor, however, looks perfect. This is clearly where he belongs, his hair floating around him in a blue-tinted cloud, whatever sunlight is coming from the surface illuminating his skin with iridescence that’s breathtaking.

Well, it would be breathtaking, were I breathing.

Weird.

“I don’t think I’m suited for living underwater,” I tell him. “I don’t like this. I feel claustrophobic.” I do, in fact—my skin is crawling. I hate it.

Despite the fact the accommodations where Borumor lives are something out of a fairytale I read, with shell-studded spires reaching high, high above me and a rainbow garden of corals with incredibly vivid fish darting in and out of it?—

I feel sick to my stomach with being underwater, and panic begins to claw at my throat, the need to breathe taking over every single brain cell I have left.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” I start chanting. “I need air, I can’t do this, I need air?—”

Borumor doesn’t wait, doesn’t try to calm me down or talk me out of it.

He just grabs me again, and I squeeze my eyes as he races back through whatever tunnel got us here in the first place.

By the time my head bursts through the surface of the now-familiar pool of my habitat, I’m sobbing, sucking in great, heaving breaths.

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