The ocean raged like a wounded beast miles above them, whipped up by the violent thunderstorm passing overhead, but the tempest barely registered eight hundred fathoms beneath the surface. It certainly did not register to Tess, intent as she was on the moonlight colored pearl she held lightly between her teeth, readying herself to push it with a trembling tongue into the waiting labial lips of Eperia, her secret lover and the captain of the underwater seaship known as the Kraken.
The true black pearl, ones not artificially dyed, can only be from one source: the Tahitian black-lipped oyster, or Pinctada margaritifera, found in the waters surrounding Tahiti. The black lips of the oyster lend their color to the pearl; the farther away from the lips, the less black they are. Some become a lovely silvery gray, not unlike the color of moonlight, or shadow, or fog.
Eperia had harvested the oysters in Tahiti, and made them a new home deep in the substructure of the Kraken, where they were kept on a bed of their native rock and sand, continually bathed in freely flowing seawater. She had strung the most beautiful of the pearls together to form a long necklace, each pearl different in size and sheen, texture and hue.
“You are my black pearl,” Tessa whispered to her Captain. She cherished the contrast of the colors of their skin when they were together, her own pale white hand pressed against the Captain’s coffee colored thigh, blonde hair spilling down to tickle Eperia's belly. She held the first pearl between her teeth, examining it with her curious feline tongue, exploring the contours and textures and taste before sending it off into the warm, fragrant interior of Eperia’s pussy. She took the next pearl between her teeth. There were currently twenty-three pearls on the strand, though new pearls were always being added.
Twenty-two to go.
Tess took her time. Between pearls she lavished Eperia with her tongue and lips and teeth, sucking at her clit, biting at her warm folds, sliding her tongue deep into her captain’s wetness, revisiting the precious smoky orbs she had already placed inside. When the entire strand had been lovingly inserted into place, Tess capped the act with a kiss on the clit. Eperia moaned, thrashing at the sensation of it.
“More. I need more. Fill me,” she commanded.
Tess complied. She inserted one slippery finger between Eperia’s lips, then a second. Eperia eagerly spread her legs wide, pushing into Tess’s fingers, taking her deep, keening in pleasure. Tess licked Eperia’s juices off her own dripping fingers as they slid in and out of her pussy. Waves of sensation rippled across the surface of Eperia’s chocolate skin, the muscles of her thighs and exquisite ebony torso. Tess teased the puckered entrance to Eperia’s ass, playing at the rim, inserting her finger just inside it. Epheria arched her back in response and let out a fevered cry, her legs scissoring around eager Tess’s head. Tess managed her captain’s pleasure expertly, keeping her fingers inside her, prolonging the sensation, tickling the spasming muscles that squeezed at her flesh.
She was so close.
Tess deftly plucked the end of the strand of pearls between her two fingers and delicately began to pull it out. Eperia whimpered with the withdrawal of each separate pearl, her body awash in tremors of pleasure.
When Tess had retrieved delicate strand, she took the lead pearl again between her teeth and pushed it against the tight rim of Eperia’s ass, pushing against it with the tip of her tongue. Eperia reacted with a sharp intake of breath. Her muscles relaxed as she took the first pearl into her ass, the second, the third. Tess felt the Captain’s body reacting, the familiar sweet tension begin to form deep inside her. Her nerves tingled in concert with her lover.
“Fill me again,” she cried. “I need you inside me.”
Tess plunged two fingers between Eperia’s pouting pussy lips as she slid yet another pearl inside her captain’s ass.
“Oh, yes, all of me,” she sighed. “Fill all of me, all my emptiness. Take me. Bring your Captain to her climax.”
Tess thrust her fingers deeply inside Eperia--her captain, her lover, her mentor, her friend—as she liberally wetted her Captain’s tight hole with her tongue. She eased in another pearl, then another. Eperia could no longer single out which sensation was caused by what action, fingers and tongues and pearls all joining together into a symphony of feeling, her whole being enveloped, every nerve tingling, every neuron firing, every muscle spasming. Her fall into orgasm was akin to diving into deep, dark waters.
At the exact moment she surrendered and came, the thundering opening chords of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor hammered against the thin alloyed metal hull of the Kraken, echoing down her hallways, thrumming across her bulkheads and doorways, vibrating in harmonic rhythms through the entire vessel like a tuning fork. Dekker, the ship’s biologist, played it every evening on the outsized organ located in the ship’s study. His timing was nearly always uncanny, every night.
As their hearts slowed Tess and Eperia lay next to each other in the Captain’s bunk, the wall curving over them at the same familiar and comforting angle of arc that all the walls of the seaship maintained. The same arc repeated through every hall and every room of the vessel. Eperia had designed the seaship with the Golden Mean in mind, the ratio that appeared throughout the natural world, in music and painting and architecture, the orbit of planets, the structures of crystals and shells and the leaves of plants. As a result, the Kraken looked, from the outside, like a living thing, an elongated Nautilus shell. Each chambered rooms mirrored the ratio, every surface and structure save one: the large harpoon array that emerged straight out of the circular conning tower in the topmost area of the ship like a dagger, its stark, hard lines in dramatic contrast to the curving convex lines from which it emerged.
A curious by-product of the ship’s classical design was the resultant acoustics. Even though the galloping chords of Bach’s work rumbled through the ship, aided by the harmonics in the structure, Tess and Eperia were able to converse in whispers and perfectly understand each other.
***
“That was lovely,” said Eperia. “I am still reeling. Would you like for me to return your sweet favors?” She kissed Tess, her hand creeping toward her lover’s body, naked underneath the thick blanket.
“No,” said Tess, taking the Captain’s hand in her own to stop its forward progression. This scene had been repeated many times between them. Tess considered it a great honor to bring her Captain pleasure, but she was far more reticent about Eperia ministering to her own pleasures, and would only occasionally allow her to do so. Her childhood was spent in the overprotective bosom of a deeply religious family, puritanical and punishing and distrustful of pleasure. Tess had run away from home in her teenage years and headed west until she reached the ocean and could go no further. She found work in various California shipyards. While she may have escaped her family, the judgmental values they had instilled in her remained.
Her strict upbringing was what drew her to Eperia. She was awestruck by the Captain’s disavowal of society’s rules and strictures, the refusal to hew to conventional morals. Eperia had created an entire world, her own world, inside her underwater home. No country. No religion. No kings. No priests. No generals.
Eperia grew up a slave in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her headstrong nature and native intelligence soon revealed itself in her refusal to learn the trades typically taught a young slave girl, and she was allowed to work in her grandfather’s blacksmith’s shop, where she learned the fundamentals of iron working and the forging of steel. Her mother taught her to read, and kept her supplied with books stolen from the plantation’s vast library. Her fierce intellect and unquenchable curiosity soon drew the attentions of slaves and slave-holders alike, and her caregivers decided she needed to be secreted away from the plantation before her skills resulted either in punishment or in the aid of the Confederates in the burgeoning War Between the States.
She traveled north by underground railroad, escaping forever the shackles of slavery, and made her way to the Union shipyards of John Erickson, where she, as his apprentice, learned of metallurgy and shipbuilding and navigaton, resulting in the first truly modern ironclad warship, the Monitor.
