Making Bubbles Read online

  Making Bubbles

  Heron Manor, Volume 1.5

  Amy Bellows

  Published by Amy Bellows, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Amy Bellows

  All rights reserved.

  Making Bubbles is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published in the United States by Amy Bellows. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover design by Fantasia Frog.

  Beta read by Deb S., Nicole B., Tracey G., Amy D., Anne S., Rachel T., and Kim P.

  Critical reading for sensitivity by B. Barksdale.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Flounder

  Stingray

  About the Author

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Flounder

  I sit down on the human sleeping rock and it sinks, like a pile of seaweed after harvest. What an odd place.

  Stingray sits next to me. The seaweed wraps Seafoam’s mate gave him cover up his beautiful body, and his red hair is strangely flat and motionless above the surface. I want to go back to the ocean where we belong, but the Sea King would never let us be together.

  “I’m sorry that we’re stuck here,” I sign.

  Stingray lets his body fall back until he’s lying on the sleeping rock. “I’m not sorry. Not even a little bit. We can make a life on the surface if we have to. I’ll wear these seaweed wraps and walk around on my feet if it means I can be with you. I’d do anything to be with you.”

  I look down at him with a sheepish smile. Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is real. Stingray could have his pick of the alphas, and yet, he’s here with me.

  “Are you sure that this is what you want?” I ask.

  He rolls his eyes. “The song was my idea, and this is where it got us. If anything, I should be asking you what you want. But I’m not going to. I’m too selfish. You’re stuck with me, Flounder. For the rest of your life.”

  He grabs at the seaweed wrap around my torso and pulls me down next to him. I stare into his striking green eyes. How did I get so lucky? I never thought an omega would sing for me, even though I secretly wanted it more than anything. The other omegas didn’t mind messing around with me, but I could tell their heart wasn’t in it—that they considered our time together to be worth less than spending a night with an alpha.

  I roll over onto Stingray, trapping his body underneath mine. I feel heavier on the shore, and I worry about crushing him, but he slides his hands around my neck and pulls me in for a kiss.

  My hunger for him is different from how I felt before. The song we sang together tonight changed us. An overwhelming desire to claim Stingray rises in my chest. Between fighting off the alphas and adjusting to this new place, that desire faded a little bit. But now that Stingray is beneath me, the need is no longer something I can put off.

  I rock against him, the stupid seaweed wraps burning against my skin as his hips buck up into me. The human sleeping rock makes a squeaking noise with the movement. Everything is so loud here, including Stingray’s moan as I yank down the wrapping covering his cock and circle my fingers around it. He digs his fingers into my hair and squeezes his eyes shut, his body going taut with the stroke of my hand. There is no time for slow and sweet. My hand pumps him hard and fast. He cries out, and his release spills all over my hand.

  Underwater our cum always sluffs off and floats away. But here on land it stays warm and gooey on my hand. I lift my fingers to my mouth to taste him. There’s something incredibly intimate about the flavor of him on shore. I can’t taste the brine of the ocean water. There’s only the musky essence of Stingray’s pleasure in my mouth.

  “I love you,” he signs.

  I kiss him, bringing my hand back down to his cock, which is still hard. I need to penetrate him. And not just his human form, but his scales. If only this place wasn’t so dry.

  Stingray pushes at my chest, and signs. “We need to find water.”

  He’s right. Is there water here? In the stories my father used to tell me about mermen going to shore, there was a sad tale about a merman who fell in love with a prince. The prince kept him in a small ocean inside his house. The legend said the small ocean was the size of a whale, and was contained in an object made of the same iron as a human sword.

  When Seafoam guided us through this dwelling, there were closed off parts we couldn’t see. Could one of those parts have a small ocean in it?

  I wipe the rest of Stingray’s cum on the sleeping rock’s seaweed wraps. There are seaweed wraps on everything in this place. It’s ridiculous.

  “I will find you water,” I sign. I notice that a thin layer of his cum has stayed on my hand. It looks like the calcium that grows on rocks around the catacombs.

  The sooner we can get back in the water, the better.

  I climb off the sleeping rock, and take uneven steps toward what Seafoam’s mate called a “door.” I feel a little queasy on my feet. The legends said that mermen once got “land-sick” from the utter stillness of the shore. Now I can see why.

  Stingray follows behind me, pulling up his seaweed wrap.

  “I can find it for you,” I assure him.

  He kisses my shoulder as I fiddle with the metal knob on the door that Seafoam touched to get us in here. After a few moments, Stingray gently shoos me away, and closes his hand around the knob. He twists and the door swings open. In the distance I hear Seafoam using the strange language of the humans. Leave it to Seafoam to not only bond with a human, but learn their language too.

  We walk through the dwelling, finding several other doors. I try the knob of the one on the right, and twist it like Stingray did. Inside is a very different section of the dwelling. The floor is made of what looks like white shells, and there is a magical thing hung on the wall that shows me a big man when I walk closer to it.

  Stingray laughs in delight. “Look! It’s you!”

  I stare closely at the man in the magic wall. His face is sharp and serious. When I move my arm, his arm moves as well. What sorcery is this?

  Stingray walks up to me and appears in the magical wall to my right. With the two of us side-by-side I can see how wide my face is compared to his. My shoulders are much bigger too. Everything about me is larger.

  I look like an alpha.

  My dad has said it a million times, but seeing it right in front of my eyes is different. I’ve always suspected that my attraction to omegas was just one of my many alpha characteristics, but now I wonder if I was wrong about my presentation. Just like every other omega, I developed gills on the underside of my cock instead of around the base, the way an alpha does. But I also grew a faint outline of something at the base. Not gills, but it’s definitely something, and it’s really sensitive. What if my body messed up somehow, and I’m really an alpha?

  “There’s water,” Stingray signs, pointing to a big white object with a metal tentacle. The tentacle drips. Next to it there are knobs like the ones that open the doors. Do those knobs let the water come through? I walk over and twist one. A stream of water falls from the tentacle’s tip.

  Seafoam’s mate must be very powerful if he can control the water with iron knobs and cover his walls with magic.

  Stingray twists the other knob, and more water shoots through the tentacle.

  “If only we could collect it somehow. It’s not enough for us to shift,” Stingray signs.

  The tent
acle is pouring water into a large, concave rock. It would probably be able to hold the water, but there’s a hole at the bottom, and all of the water is escaping through there. Maybe I could stop it with my seaweed wrap. It takes me a second to get the stupid thing over my head. It has all of these weird holes, and one of them gets stuck on my elbow. But Stingray helps me out of it. I push the wrap into the hole, and the water starts collecting.

  Stingray smiles at me. “Do you think there’s enough space to have sex in that thing?”

  I swing my leg over the edge of the rock and step inside. The water is warm under my toes. I wobble a little bit with the second leg. I’m very uncomfortable in my human form. “I don’t know. But I think we should try.”

  “Are we supposed to take off these things before we get in the water?” Stingray signs, and tries to disentangle himself from the seaweed wrap around his torso too. He also gets stuck, and he laughs as I tug at it, and it finally pulls free.

  He kisses me. “See? We got this. We’ll make it work here.”

  I grab him around his waist, and pull him into the concave rock with me. His hands slide underneath the seaweed wrapping around my ass and he squeezes me. I feel myself slick under his touch. That’s an omega thing. I’m an omega. I have to be.

  Stingray pulls the wrap down, and it drops, gathering around my ankles. I do the same to him, and we both look down at wraps that are now soaked at our feet. My cock is hard, and pokes at Stingray’s stomach. His is half-hard too, even after coming so recently. I bring our cocks together, and grip them with my hand. Stingray’s eyes cloud over with lust. He hooks his hand around my head and presses our foreheads together.

  “Mmmm.”

  Our foreskins move up and down over the heads of our cocks as I stroke us. My other hand grips his hip. I love this part of sex—when our fingers are so busy loving each other that they can’t sign. It’s always been too scary to talk to Stingray about what this is between us. I figured he’d grow tired of me. The first time he stayed in his dwelling with me instead of rising to the surface to sing for an alpha, I couldn’t believe it. We were cuddling on his sleeping rock, and he didn’t move when the vibration of the Sea King’s call moved through the catacombs. I gave him one last kiss, my heart aching at the idea of another merman claiming him so soon after I loved him, and signed that he should go.

  He just cuddled closer to me and ignored me. So I moved away from him, and repeated the suggestion. He signed, “What if I want to stay with you? Would that be okay?”

  A sweet thrill swept through me. “Yeah.”

  I held him all night. The water was cold, and I worried that he regretted staying with me. So I did my best to keep him warm and comfortable, trying to show him how much spending a night with him meant to me. I made love to him two more times, desperately hoping the sex was good enough to satisfy him.

  The next day at the seaweed farm, he asked if I’d come over to his dwelling again that night. I spent the entire day smiling. I didn’t think he’d spend another night with me. But he wanted to see me again, and that meant he liked me, didn’t it?

  We shared our dinner on the way to his dwelling, and made love again. When the vibrations of the Sea King’s call came, Stingray swallowed nervously and signed, “Would it be okay if I stayed here with you again?”

  I kissed him so hard. I wasn’t sure how to tell him what it meant to me. I’m not any good with words. But I tried to show him. I worshipped his beautiful body, and did everything I could to give him the pleasure he deserved.

  Every night that week it was the same. Stingray would ask if I’d come over, and I would say yes. As the week wore on, I dreaded the day Stingray would be done with me. I could feel my heart latching onto him like a starfish to a rock, and I didn’t want whatever it was between us to end.

  Somehow, it didn’t. Stingray kept on asking me over to his place, and kept staying with me through the night. Until the day when he didn’t invite me, and I was crushed, only to have him come to me after work with the expectation that we were going to spend the night together. We had spent every night together for the last month, and he viewed it as an “of course.”

  We didn’t talk about it. Maybe because we knew we’d get in trouble for it. Or maybe because I was afraid if I brought it up, it would all be over. I decided that it didn’t matter why he was with me or how long it would last. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, and I was determined to enjoy being with him for as long as he would let me. I noticed the shells he started decorating his dwelling with the algae he gathered to make his sleeping rock more comfortable, and I knew they were bold. But a part of me understood. Some days it was hard to hold back my joy, and pretend everything was normal.

  But then Seafoam showed up asking for one of my scales. Somehow, I knew that my time was up with Stingray. The next two nights I made love to him with a fierceness that I couldn’t hold back. He seemed to feel it too, because he asked for things he’d never wanted before. He’d fingered me plenty of times, but he didn’t top me until the night after I gave up that scale. I never wanted an alpha inside of me, but my body opened for Stingray, and he felt incredible.

  The Sea King’s guards showed up at the Seaweed farm the next morning with their ultimatum—either sing for the alphas or give up a scale. Stingray’s fingers lowered to his hip. He was about to rip out a scale rather than spend the night with an alpha, but the guard held out his hand. It was the red-tailed Guard of the Song—Orca.

  “It is tradition for omegas to sing for who they love,” he signed. His hands put emphasis on those last three words.

  The other two guards with Orca seemed confused.

  The second guard pulled on Orca’s shoulder. “You mean who they want to love for one night.”

  Orca nods. “Yes. Who they love.”

  The only person I ever wanted to love was Stingray. Which is when I understood what he meant. Orca was suggesting that we sing for each other.

  The idea had never occurred to me before.

  I didn’t think there was a chance Stingray would do that with me. The Sea King would never let us get away with it. But what was the alternative? Stingray was about to rip out a scale rather than sing for an alpha. He couldn’t do that every day for a month. I tried to downplay how badly it hurt when I ripped mine, but Stingray was no stranger to giving up scales. He must have known how much it hurt. It wasn’t something we could do every day for thirty days.

  Stingray’s eyes lit up with recognition. “But what if the Sea King doesn’t like who I sing for?”

  Orca looked straight into Stingray’s eyes while he signed. “What kind of life would you live if you weren’t afraid?”

  The second guard swam in between Orca and Stingray. “Excuse him. He’s had an emotional morning. Maybe it’s too soon for him to be working. But make no mistake, the Sea King expects a song or a scale tonight. You need to decide which one you’re going to give him.”

  Orca glared at the other guard, and swam off.

  “We’ll be back,” the guard signed, and they swam after him.

  Stingray turned to me. “If I wasn’t afraid I’d sing for you. I know you’re not an alpha, and neither am I. But it doesn’t matter, Flounder. I love you.”

  Love was something I’d only heard about in stories. Omegas weren’t allowed to sing for the same alpha more than twice a month. But I loved Stingray too. I had for a long time.

  “I love you with all of my heart. But are you sure about this? If we sing for each other the Sea King might...”

  “He might what?”

  “He might kill us.”

  The guards returned without Orca. At that point the conversation had to be over. But I knew if Stingray was willing to risk everything to be with me, I would do the same.

  And now here we are, standing across from each other in our human form, his beautiful cock pressed against mine. I will try to give him the pleasure he deserves every day for the rest of our lives. The shore is even worse than th
e cold part of the catacombs where the omegas sleep. I wish I could give him more than this. But coming to shore is like that song—if Stingray is willing to do this to be with me, I will do the same.

  I would do anything for this man.

  He kisses me. His lips are even warmer than the water, and wonderfully wet—like the ocean. Like home. His strong farming hands grab my shoulders, his fingers digging into my skin when I pump us faster. I don’t know if it’s just because I have terrible balance on my feet, but my legs soften, and I have a hard time staying upright. All I have to do is watch our cocks together, the tips glistening with precum, and I’m caught between coming and crying. We’re together. And now that we’re in this strange place, the Sea King can never tear us apart.

  Stingray’s breath comes in ragged gasps. He’s close. His groan echoes loud around us, and we come at the same time. The pleasure is blinding. I groan too, but I capture his mouth in mine to muffle it. He kisses me back with such passion, I’m once again questioning whether this is real.

  I got the guy. Me. The awkward farmer who’s not completely alpha or omega. Stingray looks back at me with his beautiful green eyes, and there isn’t disappointment or fear about our situation. Just joy and love.

  Somehow, I make this beautiful man happy.

  Somehow, to Stingray, I’m enough.

  Stingray

  My omega father used to say: “If you want a child, sleep with the alphas. But if you want an orgasm, you’ll have better luck with the omegas.”

  He was quite the philanderer in his day, and I’d like to think he’d approve of this whole affair—especially the part where Flounder is ridiculously attractive and nearly twenty years younger than me. Flounder’s age made me feel guilty at first. I never would have propositioned him myself, and even after he came on to me, I still had my reservations. It was his sweetness that lured me in.

  I never intended to fall in love with him. But Flounder isn’t the kind of man you can simply fuck and be done with. His heart is too big and his kindness is too deep. The first time he made love to me he held me in his arms afterward like I was a lifeline, and I knew that if I hurt him, I’d never forgive myself.