And so you do your best to adjust to your new life under the sea, waiting and hoping.
It's amazing, after all, that you can live in the ocean now and breathe under water, and you never have to worry about drowning or freezing or the pressure or the darkness or even pruny fingers. You're perfectly adapted to sea-life, as comfortable in the salty sea as you were as a man on land. The fact that you don't need clothing anymore is something you think of less and less as each day slowly winds by—although, just as it was the last time you were a merman, the slight of all the mermaids and especially the lovely Clia swimming around with their naked breasts bobbling languidly in the water, hardly affected by gravity, is enough to set your brain on fire with the memory of a raging hard-on.
But your body, that's another matter; it just doesn't respond that way anymore.
Most mornings you've awakened next to Clia and begun the day with a bit of cuddling and making out, but lately you've been afraid to go too far. You always reach a limit where, no matter what you do, you simply can't take any more stimulation, and neither can Clia. You can't get off; you can't get her off. It's nigh infuriating.
Then, one day, four days after you first started seriously fooling around with your sexy mermaid lover, you wake up one morning and Clia isn't in your bed. There's a large pearlescent seashell on the coral nightstand next to the bed you share, with some scratches on the inside of it—you recognize that it's writing, but you don't read the mer-language yet, except for the last marking, where Clia has scratched the symbol that means her name. So you understand that she's left you a note, but you can't read a word of it.
Oh, well; all alone and nothing to do. At first, you think about getting up and deciding to distract yourself with something, anything: a new hobby, or maybe tracking down that dickless jerkass Eric and rubbing your relationship with Clia in his stupid face. But then you sigh and decide that getting out of bed is hardly worth it. Life is easy and comfortable now and Clia is just the sort of woman who could make any many happy, but your lack of a proper sex life is still just too plain depressing.
Of course . . . you haven't actually been alone, like alone-alone, in a good long while. You're starting to realize that the merfolk are very social people and they like their company, and you've hardly been without Clia by your side in a number of days. Maybe . . . maybe this is a good time to just explore and figure things out, in a no-pressure situation.
You start by feeling around your tail, just below your waist. You've had this thing for days, after all, but it's still unfamiliar territory. You can sort of feel the sensation of your hands as you touch your scales, but it's a dull sort of feeling, less acute than feeling your skin, but still more sensitive than feeling skin through clothing when you were human. Under the water your scales also feel a bit slick and slimy, but for some reason that doesn't seem to gross you out like you feel it should.
You reach around and grab your backside, something that Clia definitely liked to do a lot of when you have your aimless makeout sessions together. You have buttocks of a sort, but they're really just one solid lump covered in scales, no cleft between them, and just below that a long dorsal fin begins and runs down most of the length of the back of your tail. Touching the spot at the top of that fin, just at the bottom of your, well, what's become of your butt, you find that it's a bit sensitive—more ticklish than anything else, though it does weirdly remind you of touching your taint. Still, not a whole lot of sensation there.
You turn your attention to the front of your tail. On either side of where your groin used to be, coming out of your "thighs," are two smallish fins. While your scales are a shimmering emerald green, your tailfin and dorsal fin and these two little front fins are more of a matte greenish-yellow. You try stroking the fins: feeling their sides, running a hand along the spiny ends. They have sensation, of a sort: you're dimly aware of your hands on them. But there aren't a lot of nerve endings in fins, and so the sensation is even weaker than when you touch your scales. Nope, nothing exciting going on there.
Before you move on, you realize that you're holding your breath, and your gills hitch. A flutter of bubbles escapes them. You know what you have to do next, but you're afraid to do it. Clia has felt and kissed and rubbed and ground and gyrated her way down the front of your tail; but you've hardly had anything to do with it (except when nature calls, and even then, the ocean currents just sort of take care of that). So you gather your courage and start poking around.
At first, it seems like nothing more than a flat surface of scales. The scales running down the belly of your tail are smaller, lighter in color, and softer to the touch than those on your sides and back. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking them for skin. They are armor of a sort, whose purpose to protect the sea-life they contain and not to be felt by a mammal seeking comfort and sensation. You are acutely aware of the fact that your penis, your "little man," is quite gone, as is your ballsack. But you're still a male creature, after all, and still a living thing with bodily functions. You know that something is there.
A discreet probing finger makes apparent the location of two orifices, the urogenital vent above and the anus below. It's possible to pry them both open; both are tiny. The prospect of inserting even a single finger is untenable, and at any rate you wonder if there would even be a point. You had found these two openings on the front of Clia's tail during your earlier explorations, but trying to stimulate them in any way didn't seem to interest her, and when you tried to tongue the opening of her egg-vent, she said that it didn't feel very pleasant at all. So you've just sort of ignored your own anatomy in the meanwhile.
(Frankly, there was very little in the way of external differences between the two of you, except that Clia's upper opening was perhaps a bit larger than yours, so that it could dispense roe instead of milt. And that is rather an unnerving thought, because now you're wondering whether you can even really call yourself a man at all.)
It is just about then that you notice, feeling around the scales on either side of your slit, something familiar is still there, under the surface of the scales. You prod around a bit, and the sensation is unmistakable: your testicles are definitely still in there, roughly where you'd expect them to be, internally. Locked away inside your flesh, at least a centimeter down. You push down a little, wiggle them around inside of you (not that they have too much room to move). That doesn't feel half bad, though it's hardly the same as having a woman cup them in her hand or get them into her mouth. But it's something, a place to start, and after a few minutes of this pleasant self-ministration, you find yourself getting properly excited.
Well how about that, you think, as one hand drifts up to play with your now-hardening nipple and the other stays on your imprisoned balls. Masturbating as a merman; who'd have ever thought?
Over the next several minutes, your hands are divided between rubbing your scaly groin and teasing your own chest. Something is definitely building, but it's very slow. You're also hesitant and don't have a lot of hope.
At some point, and you've definitely lost track of time now, you notice a peculiar smell in the water, something you recognize from only a few occasions, when you and Clia have gotten particularly hot and heavy, and always right before you reach the limits of your frustrated and orgasm-denied body. Glancing down, you can see that your genital vent is gaping, a tiny little opening, and there's a small cloud of fluid there. You touch it; it's slick. Precum? Could be, but it's hard to tell that apart from the mucous normally produced by your fish-scales.
More interesting is the fact that when you felt your opening, it was . . . good. Not great, but not as unpleasant as you would have guessed from the way Clia had reacted. You reach down and feel the tiny slit. Even your pinky finger would never get in there, no matter how you tried to stretch it, but—you half expect pain, like trying to stick something in a human urethra, and instead the sensation is different. It reminds you of . . . well, the closest thing you can think of is gently flicking the tip of your cock.
And might just be the best thing you've felt in days.
You carry on with yourself for at least another half an hour. Between your testes, your nipples, and the minimal hint of sexual stimulation you feel when you finger your slit, you start to feel your arousal build again. It takes a while to reach a plateau, and when it does—well, it stays there. You come to the edge, but try as you might, you just can't go over. It's like trying to wank off through bluejeans while also wearing two condoms. You're exited as hell, probably more horny than you'e ever been in your whole damned life, and still you just can't come.
And eventually, there's nothing for it, you just have to give up. You wish Clia were here to hold onto now, because you feel a bit like crying. But you still don't get out of bed.
The mating time comes in three days, and God damn it something had better happen, because if not, you vow: one way or another, you will have an orgasm again. You'll either find a way to have one as a merman (and hopefully give one to your mermaid as well), or you'll find some other way to become human. This was no way to live.