Chapter 83 - Both - What The Hell?

~~

Ocean

~~

I snatched the towel out of Makai's hands and stomped back into the other room. He was pissing me off right now. I knew that he had more experience than me last night when he fucking sucked me off. A guy that is that willing and knowledgeable about it is definitely experienced. He even confirmed it and everything. So why did he have to keep throwing it in my face?

I mean, he was probably right to stop me. If we did it again I don't know how much pain I would be in after the fact. But still, to just stop me like that and tell me he knows what it's like to go too far. Why did he know? How does he know? Who did he find it out with? These are things I both did and didn't want to have answered.

Right now I didn't care if I got water all over his chair. I just plopped down in it and started to dry myself off. I had just set the towel against my leg when I saw something was on me.

"What the hell?" I tried to wipe it off in a hurry. It was like a weird bug or something. But it wasn't coming off. And there were more than one. There were several of them. White and shining in the light. "What the hell is this?"

I started to try and get them off of me, and in the process, I noticed that I had them on my arms too.

"Get off of me." I was wiping at the white dots that were all over me so much that I was practically hopping around, and I fell out of the chair.

I landed on the floor still flipping out over the marks on me when Kai came running into his room.

"What's wrong?" He was on his knees next to me with his hands hovering above me like he wanted to help, but didn't know what to do.

"I can't get them off of me. What are they?"

He noticed then that I was frantically trying to get those white things off of me and laughed slightly.

"Ocean, stop. You need to calm down. Now that you're dried off they will go away when you calm down. Stop!" He pulled my hands away from my body so I stopped hurting myself in the process of trying to remove the spots.

"What the hell are they? How did they get on me?" I was still flipping out, but he was trying hard to stop me.

"Ocean, calm down. You need to stop. Look at me. Stop this."

Makai grabbed my face and made me look at him. His face was calm, his eyes were serious, and there were silvery green scales scattered all over his face.

"Stop." He told me again. 

"What the hell?"

I was backing away from him, scared shitless, until I ran into his bed.

"Why the hell do you have scales on your face?" I looked at the rest of him, thankful there was a towel around his waist right now, but I did see that there were scales on his chest, arms, and legs as well as his face. He wasn't covered in them, but he had them scattered all over the same as I did.

"You have scales too, Ocean. Calm down."

"Yeah, but why?" My heart was pounding as he came closer to me.

"It's because of what we are." It was like he was trying to explain something to a small child and trying to calm a rabid dog at the same time. His movements were slow and steady, and he sounded like he was trying not to laugh.

"What we are? Aren't we human?"

"Ocean, don't you know what you are? Hasn't anyone ever told you? Your parents should have. They have to know what you are, don't they?"

For a moment he looked uncertain, his eyes filled with worry.

"Ocean, do you really think that you're just a human?"

"Why the hell wouldn't I?! Aren't you human? What are you?"

"I'm a merman, and you're something similar to me, if not the same."

As he inches closer now, I saw that his scales were gone, and he looked normal. How had I never seen them before?

"A m..m..mer.. A m..m..mer.. A m..m..merman?" There was a ringing in my ears as I tried to repeat the word.

"Yes. You can tell by my birthmark. It's the same mark you have."

"Mine isn't a tattoo like yours. Mine is just a mole." I denied any connection to what he was saying.

"It was, until last night. That was when you came into your power. You turned eighteen and that unlocked the seal. The same happened to me. Mine was brown before I was eighteen and now it's green and blue."

"You mean green. There is no blue." I glared at him, shouldn't he know his own mark better than me.

"There wasn't, until today. Last night your mark turned blue and shined like mine. Now, your mark is lined in green and has a green M; mine has an O and is lined in your blue. We're connected Ocean. Our marks have responded to each other."

I couldn't wrap my head around what he was saying. This made absolutely no sense to me at all.

"Didn't your parents tell you what you are? Aren't they merfolk? Or at least one of them?"

"What the hell are you talking about?! I'm adopted, and my parents aren't anything but human. I thought I was too. What the hell? What did you do to me?!"

~~

Makai

~~

"I didn't do anything to you, you were born like this." Ocean was panicking. It never occurred to me that he didn't even know what he was. What would have happened to him if I hadn't met him?

"The fuck you didn't. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Now I'm getting scales after we had.., after we had s..s..s.., after we had s..s..s.., what did you do to me?" I could see tears in his eyes as he tried hard to understand what was going on.

"Ocean, listen to me. I didn't do this to you. This was who you were, what you were, since you were born. I didn't know that you didn't know what you were. If I did, I would have told you."

I had known what I was my whole life. I had known that I was a man meant for the water. That's why I love swimming so much, and it's why Ocean does too. He just didn't know that about himself. How the hell could someone let this happen to him? Where are his real parents? Why did they let this happen to him? Where is his clan? Why didn't they have him raised by someone else in the clan if his parents couldn't or wouldn't raise him.

I watched as the guy that I loved was trembling with fear in front of me. I wanted to make him feel better. I wanted to make all of this go away. I just didn't know how. For one, maybe he would feel better if one or both of us got dressed and weren't sitting here naked. He tended to be more nervous when the clothes were removed.

I got up and walked quickly to my dresser. I didn't feel like looking for his clothes at the moment so I just grabbed two sets of clothes from my dresser and tossed a set at him.

"Here, get dressed. We have a lot of talking to do." He caught the clothes and just stared at me like he didn't believe what I had just done. "What? Would you prefer that we continue talking while naked?"

I dropped the towel that was barely around my waist and started to get dressed right in front of him. His eyes popped open as he saw what I was doing and obviously understood what that meant. He looked down at himself and started to pull on the shorts that I tossed him.

Once Ocean had the shirt pulled over his head and was fully covered he just stood there, staring at me as if he were a statue: rigid, stiff, and unnatural looking.

"Come on, let's talk about all of this while we eat something. I don't know about you, but I am starving." I tried to beckon him out of the room, but he wasn't moving. "I'm not going to hurt you, Ocean."

"I..I didn't think that you were going to." He looked embarrassed now. "I..i..i..it's just that I..I..I don't kn..kn..know what is going on here." He was shaking again, the fear of the unknown was more than he could handle right now.

"Just come with me, Ocean. I will explain as much as I can. I don't want to see you scared like this anymore. It pains me to see you like this." Finally, he seemed to have calmed down at least a little. Nervously, with slow tentative steps, he walked toward me. I was glad that he wasn't trying to run away from me right now. I don't know if my heart could take it if he ran away from me. I would want to follow him, but that would just make things worse. I needed him to trust me so that I could make him understand what was happening to him. It was the only way for us to move forward together.