Page 13 of The Naiad's Wish

“I want to do it,” I said.

Erik’s smile was slow. “If you’re sure. You don’t have to. As I said, it was just a dream.”

“Did you wake hard from this dream?” My face heated as my thoughtless words hung between us. I patted his little cock apologetically. “I meant wanting. Did you wake wanting?”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

I quirked a brow at him.

He leaned over me and dropped a quick, biting kiss on my lips, then held my jaw to stop me from taking it further. “It was a daydream, Sayan.”

His meaning sank in. “It was deliberate.”

“Yes.”

A bubble of delight rose through me. “You were in your city, surrounded by your friends and your human things, and you were thinking of me. Imagining me.”

“I was. I missed you.”

I hummed and stretched my body long, flexing every muscle then releasing them languidly, watching his face.

His cheeks darkened.

I pushed at his thigh. “Go and sit down.”

Erik did, grimacing when his knees cracked.

His body did things mine did not and he liked to grumble about them, complaining that he was getting old, though he was only forty-three.

His joints cracked.

Sometimes he got a cramp in his thigh or a stitch in his side in the middle of our love play, and we had to pause.

He’d said hesitantly once that he would age in our long life together. He’d said it as if I hadn’tknown. He’d said that the silver in his hair would overtake the brown; that the creases and lines in his skin would deepen. That his muscles would soften.

“I know you will age,” I’d said when he’d finished, uneasy at his apologetic tone. “I, more than anyone, know what ageinglooks like. What a life coming full circle looks like. I’ve seen it often enough.”

To me, locked in my immortality, it had always looked like magic.

I’d been lying with my head on his chest, and I’d tightened the arm I had wrapped around him, rubbing my face subtly over him. Cuddling, Erik called it. “I am excited for it.”

He’d let out a puff of surprised laughter. “You’re excited to watch me wither?”

I pressed a kiss to his warm skin. “To be there with you. To always be with you. To experience it with you.”

Erik had lifted my face and looked down at me. “Will you age?”

I blinked. “Oh. No. I will of course remain young and beautiful until the day we die.”

“Of course,” he’d said dryly.

“As you will remain beautiful until the day we die.”

His face had taken on that rueful look he sometimes got when I told him how much I loved his body. “The way you see me,” he’d said with a small shake of his head, and kissed me.

I saw him truly. I didn’t think he understood that. Maybe one day he would. I didn’t have the words to explain it, in the same way I couldn’t explain the bond to my lake. Instead of using words, I’d shown him.

I watched as Erik returned to his seat on the sofa and reclined against the cushions. He raised a brow at me.

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