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She still likes to go for walks by the sea every day, barefoot on the shore and looking out at the waves as they lap gently up on the beach. Often she goes alone but sometimes Eric comes with her, twines his fingers with hers and kicks off his boots to experience the ocean like she does. Like she does now, that is, because not even she can experience it the way she used to.
Today the waves are less lapping on the shore than crashing, the sky dark and the wind fierce. Eric tried to talk her out of her daily walk but after two years of marriage he knows better than to stop her when she gets something into her head. Surely he knew even before they wed. She'll always be that girl from the sea, waving to the gulls and blowing kisses to the coral reefs.
"You're tangling," he says, fingers catching in a lock of her hair after it's twisted by the wind. She just laughs and shakes him off so it swirls up into the air again.
"Let it," she says, and grasps the fingers of his other hand too, swinging their arms as they pause there on the sand. She feels a raindrop on her cheek, just one, and catches it with her tongue as it meanders down towards her chin. "This is like the day we met."
"I almost drowned the day we met," he says. When he looks up at the sky a raindrop falls onto his forehead, slides down his temple and drops to the sand. "I feel like I might be drowning now, too."
They married young, or she married young, but Ariel's always known what she wants, and she's always done what she had to do to get it. She's always felt like it's okay to want things that other people don't want, to just be herself in the face of immense pressure to be something else.
"You're not drowning," she says, "you're swimming. I'd never let you drown, Eric."
"I believe you," he says, and frees his hand to curl it around the back of her neck and kiss her.
Things don't always live up to your fantasy. Ariel's learned that as she's grown to adulthood, those last few years between idealistic girl and grown woman, but Eric has never disappointed her. And because Eric has never disappointed her, she can believe that other fantasies are still possible, and that you don't have to grow out of everything.
Ariel can feel the storm in her veins, feel the rushing and thundering inside her body as much as outside of it. There's electricity in the air in a very literal way, making the hairs on her arms stand up even as the damp and the ocean spray try to keep them down.
"Let's not go back to the palace," she says, and pulls his hand to her chest, clutching it meaningfully. "Not yet."
"They'll come looking for us," says Eric, whispering the words against her blowing hair.
"Not until after the storm," says Ariel, and they'll be home by then, no one the wiser. "We're safe here."
"Promise?" he says, and smiles at her and she knows when it comes to the sea he still gives over that domain to her, has always known that it's hers.
Eric has never been the kind of person who needs to remind everyone that he's the prince of the land, which might be why it's so obvious that he is. He's the sort of man who wields power carefully and thoughtfully, whom people follow because they want to and not because they have to. He tells her that she's that sort of princess too, and Ariel wants to believes him.
"Nobody's watching," she says, and if he knows it's a little white lie he doesn't say anything, just looks from side to side and then kisses her bare throat. Ariel tugs at the front of her shirt, one of Eric's with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and hanging loosely off her body, and undoes a couple of buttons so that he's encouraged to kiss her more.
He does, and she moves backwards a few steps until she's up against a large rock near the sparse line of trees, Eric stumbling with her the whole way.
"We'll start rumors," he murmurs, but Ariel's sure that they won't. Even if there were any humans to witness them here, none of his loving subjects would choose to speak out against their prince; no, any rumours would never reach his ears, or the ears of anyone on land. Any rumours would circulate in entirely different circles, and Ariel just hopes that they'll never reach her father's.
The gulls cry out overhead and Ariel arches her back and looks up at the dark sky, cold wind on her face. She feels one raindrop on her cheek, then two, then Eric is leaning in and kissing her and the raindrops hit the back of his head instead.
A crab scuttles over the sand by their feet, pausing before entrenching himself for the storm, and Ariel smiles at him. The sea is a beautiful place and the world is electric and Ariel just wants to soak up all of it. Her world is a beautiful, wonderful place.
"Eric," she murmurs, undoes another button. He closes her shirt with one hand but she laughs and pulls it open again. "Please?"
"I didn’t know what I was getting into when I found you," he says, with a smile in his voice and in his eyes.
"You didn't find me," says Ariel. "I found you."
She likes the idea of being found, though, like one of the treasures she used to keep. She doesn't keep them anymore, doesn't have a special room in the palace to secretly collect her things. She's a woman of two worlds and she doesn't have to keep one secret from the other anymore. Her treasures now are ideas, they're moments.
She's making a treasure right now, with Eric.
The rain hits her shoulders and she sees the first flash of lightning out of the corner of her eye. She can't help it and lets out a little "oh!" of pleasure and surprise, and Eric lifts his head to meet her eyes. She just bats her eyelashes at him and smiles and reaches up to push her hair back off her face. "Don’t stop now," she says.
"We should," he says, sneaking an arm in behind her to lift her off the rock by the small of her back, "but you know I can't say no to you."
"That's because I never ask for anything you want to say no to," she says, tilting her chin up and just waiting, because she knows he's not going to take her home now. Her skin is tingling and aching for his touch, and as a faint rumble of thunder rolls over him, she lets out a soft, contented sigh.
"Out of the rain, though," he says, taking her hand and leading her further up the beach, to the first tree they find, with low-hanging leaves that catch the rain. She can still feel the spray that the wind brings in, and hear the heavy raindrops splashing on the wide leaves. "All right?"
"Everything's all right when it's with you," she says, the sound of gulls overhead again. She looks towards the sea and sees someone frolicking in the waves. For a moment she wonders if it's someone she knows.
She undoes the last of the buttons and lets the shirt fall open, the wind catching one half and blowing it outwards. Eric catches it, but he doesn't pull it closed this time. Instead he clutches the linen in his fist and kisses his way down her throat, arm wrapping around the small of her back again even as she presses her shoulders into the smooth bark of the tree.
It should be cool but she feels warm all over, in the places where Eric's hand and lips touch her and everywhere else too. The grass up on the cliff nearby rustles, maybe be the wind or a mouse scuttling through, and Ariel lets out a soft sound, a soft "oh", and wraps a leg around Eric's, high on his thigh, so that he can push her skirt up.
She never did get the hang of wearing underwear.
Thunder crashes and Eric's hand slips up inside her, two fingers curled just so, and Ariel's eyes flutter closed as rain drops from the leaves down onto them. Sometimes she imagines what it would be like if she were in her original body, the ways she would wrap herself around him, but she makes do with the limitations of legs because of everything else they bring her, like him.
The lightning makes his eyes look golden, fierce, and she knows how fierce he can be when he lets himself go. He thinks that the bedroom is the place he ought to let it all out but he's wrong, it's here, on this shore with her in the places she loves best. This is where she can be everything she is, and wants that for Eric, too.
"Don't be afraid for me," she says. Or of me. Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid of this.
She's old enough to want to be desired now, not just loved, and when Eric growls lowly, in sync with the thunder that echoes somewhere off in the distance, she draws him closer, draws him deeper. He wants this, she can feel it in the heat off his body and in his heartbeat, and in the way his teeth graze against the skin of her shoulder.
"More," she whispers, and he takes out his fingers and she wraps her other leg around him so he's holding her up entirely and then he's entering her, fast and easy, driving her up against the tree the way she'd desperately been hoping he would. A bird takes off from its branches into the storm, resettling somewhere nearby and sheltered from the rain to give them their privacy. Ariel wouldn't have minded if he stayed; she had strayed into his territory and not the other way around.
"I shouldn't," says Eric and she silences him with a kiss because of course he should, of course they should, there is nothing more natural to her than this, out in the open sea air and uncovered. Unencumbered.
"I want to," she says, and he bends his forehead to her shoulder and drives into her hot and hard and she lets out a soft cry that sends something scuttling away along the sand. The bark of the tree scratches at her exposed shoulders and she can't bring herself to mind. She chose the land. She likes it when she feels like it's choosing her in return.
"You," says Eric, breathless, "are the only one. Ariel, you are the only one."
She tilts her body forward and grinds down against him and she comes first, so very ready for it and wanting it so very much. Her orgasm is thunder and lightning and crashing waves and seagull cries. His is sandy beaches and wolves and castle spires.
"You are the only one," she says, and he shivers against her and lifts his head and kisses her until she's hot all over again.
Finally he lets her legs down again and they're nearly as weak as the first time she used them, trembling on the wet sand as she rests her weight against the tree.
"Isn't it wonderful?" says Ariel, as he starts to fix her shirt, and he's caught his breath enough to laugh.
"Next time maybe I'll bring an umbrella," he says. She hears the words 'next time' the most. He is the only one, the only one who would ever let her have everything, who would let her give everything back.
They're both rain-spattered enough, soon to be drenched to the skin enough, that no one could possibly tell what they've been doing, but Eric still fusses, tugging on this and straightening that, till Ariel takes his hand and swings their arms and starts leading him back up the beach, towards home.
There are dolphins leaping in the water as they go.