Page 82 of The Pirate Queen of Ruin
I sobbed, begged them to take everything from me, so long as they wouldn’t take Delphini with them. I’m not sure if they heard my cries.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
The air is punched from my chest when I hear her voice. I open my eyes as Delphini blinks tears onto my face. Her hand cups my cheek and warmth explodes from it. My body sings with the glory of her divinity. She’s still here. I raise my hand to touch her as well, to swipe the tears away from her cheek, but I stop short.
My skin is clear, speckled with hair and odd dark freckles, but I am without Love’s mark. There are no scars, no tentacles. I try to call them forth, but all I feel is my tongue. The suckers latch onto my teeth, but the rest of me is human. She must see the concern on my face because Delphini hushes me.
She grabs hold of my hand and brings it to her face. Warmth grows where we are connected and I weep.
We are together. She is real and whole. Myomphalosis still with me. My lips part as I suck in stunted breaths. There is so much I must do now, but I need to hold her in my arms. My muscles ache as I move, but I fight through the pain. She is really with me. As tightly I grip her, she holds me just as fiercely. She holds onto my nape as I bury my face in her braids. She chokes on a sob.
“I’m sorry I failed you,” I say, over and over again until I am hoarse. “I will spend the rest of my days proving myself to you.”
“Shh.” Her hand brushes through my short buzz cut. “No, Orthia, we did it.”
“No,” I argue. “I ruined everything, and I thought I lost you.”
“Listen to me, wife,” she says, squeezing me lightly before pulling back.
I am not worthy of the title now, not after what I have done to her. She deserves so much more, someone who will follow her without getting in the way.
“We did it,” she asserts again. “Love is here now.”
Her eyes flash a milky white and then she transforms. Her body morphs, braids twisting into tentacles and skin slickening. Where Delphini’s two brown eyes are warm, they are replaced with a set of six navy blue eyes. Her nose flattens into nothing. Her lips are as dark as the depths.
“We had to evolve and reclaim the broken parts of us,”Love says.“You gave us the strength to be here, your love did this.”
“But what about Delphini?” I ask, staring at the creature before me. A human-like torso that melds into a mass of tentacles, all of them teal. All of them covered in scars and etchings.
“I am right here.” The body turns halfway back to hers, the etched teal replaced with her smooth brown skin. “I am still here, Orthia. But so is Love.”
“If you had known all along, Love, why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“You know there must always be a choice. First you accepted us, then our sweet one. We were destined to reunite, to join. Her soul is a small fragment of me that was once lost to the cosmos. But we needed our soulmate, too.”They weave their fingers through mine. We are holding hands for the first time.
I have never held them like this. For as long as we have been connected, Love has never had such a human form with me. I never desired one; what I wanted was them, but now they appear before me like this. I find I crave this touch just as much.
Delphini has ruined me. Centuries of denial, of being chilled to the bone by the simple brush of another, and it only took a summer to have me craving her hands, her gentleness. And Love offers me the same. Their grip is secure enough to touch all of me yet loose enough that I could pull my hand away without effort. A gentle, supportive hold that I have known for nearly all my life.
“Truly the goddess I was always meant to worship at the altar of,” I whisper, my chest aching with emotions I have never felt before.
“You are our priestess, our captain, our wife,” Delphini says, smiling as Love takes over her form once again.“Our heart.”
“Kiss me.”
There is a breath, a moment where Love looks at me with wonder, with hunger, like they can’t believe they will get to touch me like this. Wet lips meet mine, and I am lost in the taste of pomegranate and salt that coats their tongue. My body buzzes with energy from their slick, but when I take control of this kiss, they soften. Love’s form pulls me on top of them. The tentacles that make up their lower half twist around my legs softly while their hands cup my cheek. I am immersed in their warm embrace like never before.
The god before me bows to my needs as I plunder their mouth—our first kiss. And when I pull away, a goddess stares up at me, one I will happily follow into our new age.
12 Days
Even as I shove my feet back into my boots, I don’t want to leave. Tourist season is over, finally. Why the fuck should we be doing anything but relax? We should be in the bath with the rest of the crew. I should be watching myomphaloslick every inch of Cookie’s sex while Hamako sits on her troll’s face. There should be nothing but debauchery before me.
But no. It’s Tuesday night. And Aoife refuses to attend another meeting in our stead. According to news reports,The Platinum Signalhosted a much too wild party involving drugs and fireworks that caused an almost unbelievable explosion. The family is distraught that their son is missing, but no official charges have been brought up against him or the Bradshaws. Everyone is just happy to see it all swept under the rug as an accident.
Apparently, I owe Ramón and Arlo for the body cleanup. Fuck that. I would have been happy for the shitty Gwenmore Police Department to clean up that mess.
“Do we have to go?” I ask for the tenth time this evening.
