Wheeling Gull Isle let my imagination run away with you gladly

The Aralez watched as Aditya told his story, her Neptune eyes shimmering even as her body “hummed” along, pirouetting as he circled her so that she was constantly facing him. She broke into a graceful canter and followed him as he circled the tree, fluid and close as his own shadow — and when he fell into the sea, she swam along, cutting her tempo to a rolling adagio as her strides lengthened and eased. He dragged himself to her feet and grew still, his breath rattling in his breast, and she laid her tufted ears back at the memory, heart thudding painfully all over again.

Her breath caught in her chest as he drew himself up with inexorable slowness, his breath warm on her paws, her legs, her chest. Seelie looked down at him, unperturbed by the boldness of his stare, her cerulean eyes misted with emotion and wide with inquiry. Perhaps they didn’t have the answer he wanted to find. She loved him, could admit without shame or hesitation a certain possessiveness over him — after all, she had been the first to find him and care for him, and the sea had placed him upon her shores — but her love language was perhaps different than his, and she remained unaware of the feelings he kept locked tight. She stretched her nose toward him as he reached to kiss her, but he ghosted out of reach, placing his muzzle alongside his left forepaw.

For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, very softly, “Mere — ” she whispered, concentrating hard, extracting syllables from a memory too vibrantly drawn to fade. The other words…well, she didn’t remember them. The first thing he’d said, though…it was something like…

“Mere ba — ?”

She hoped it meant something nice, and she wasn’t inadvertently saying something uncouth in his mother tongue. She stretched out on the budding greenery like an obsidian carving of the jackal god, tail curling against one hip, and stretched forward to bathe his face in kisses as she had the day the water had given him to her. She touched her nose to his in a tender kunik.

“Mere dost?” she breathed.