Anna started out by taking Eric into her arms, wrapping her tail around his, and kissing him senseless. There was a gnawing discomfort starting to take hold somewhere within her core, but she ignored it and focused on her lover. Once she felt that Eric was good and worked up again—could tell by the way he was moaning into her mouth when they kissed—she lowered herself down on his body to lap and tease at his fish-slit, causing Eric to gasp and lose all coherent thought. She played at his vent with her tongue, enjoying the salty taste that still lingered there, turning all of Eric's muscles to jelly in her arms.
Then she stopped, looked up at Eric until he opened his eyes to meet hers, and grinned a grin of wicked mischief. While Eric looked down at her questioningly, Anna broke away from him, put her hands up behind her head (so that her chest was thrust out in a porn-actress pose), and flicked her fins just once to put her at a short distance away from him.
Then she closed her eyes and let her body sway to a music that she imagined was slow and romantic, a rhythm that only she could hear. She let her hips move hypnotically this way and that, let her tummy muscles gyrate, and jiggled her boobs enticingly. It was a sexy mermaid dance that suddenly came to her on the spot, she didn't quite know how, and Eric stared, astonished and mesmerized. If they'd been on the surface, Anna was pretty sure he'd be drooling.
For whatever reason, now that Anna's eggs were out, she was feeling pretty tired—and awfully hungry—and so she wasn't experiencing the renewed arousal that she felt she should have been from kissing Eric. Was that it for her? she wondered. Was her part in their lovemaking essentially over, so that now it fell to her to get her mate off and wrap up the whole affair?
If so, she decided, she was determined to make it as good as she could for her beloved.
She held out her arms and practically sang, "Come to me, Eric!" (She had no idea where that singing voice even came from!)
Eric eagerly returned to her embrace, and after another round of sweet making out, while Anna both kissed his face and teased his nipples with her thumbs, she suddenly swam around to embrace Eric from behind. Eric, getting some idea of what she had in mind, allowed himself to float almost horizontally above their nest, with his midsection aligned with the eggs, about a foot above them. He placed his arms in the sand to hold his body in position, and he let his tail intertwine with Anna's.
She began to kiss at his gills from behind, while at the same time running her hands all up and down his body, from playing with his nipples down his chest and abs and scaly waist, down to teasing the sensitive parts of Eric's fishtail. There were only two such features, and Anna discovered the more sensitive of them quite by accident. She had intended to drift her fingers down to play with Eric's sperm slit, just a few light brushes of her fingertips (which made him shiver in arms) until she tried to actually push a finger in—just to see how he'd react—but she couldn't actually manage it. So she ran her hands down the sides of his fishtail, where his hips and the outsides of his thighs would have been if he'd been human, and that actually caused pretty much the same quivering reaction in Eric. Anna had discovered that merfolk too have lateral lines, a sensitive organ that runs up and down the sides of their tails. Normally, its purpose was to detect movement and vibration in the water; but during sex, it was at least as erogenous as Eric's gills.
Eric gasped and couldn't even form moans, never mind articulate cries. And Anna giggled from behind him and continued to lightly kiss and tongue at Eric's neck, and to play with the funny lines in the scales that ran up and down his sides, until he couldn't take that anymore and moved Anna's back up to his chest. There, she teased at his nipples until they were pebble-hard, and each flick of her fingers was eliciting a loud, gasping cry from her mate, until at last his body shuddered violently, and his tail thrashed, and he suddenly came all over Anna's eggs.
Eric spun around in the water so that he would miss the nest when he inevitably sank down to the seabed. Anna let herself land on top of him as she drifted down. She kissed his cheek and asked rhetorically, "Did you like that?"
The best answer Eric could manage was a pathetic, "—Gah—"
"I'll take that as a yes," said Anna. She cuddled her head into the crook of Eric's neck, when suddenly—
GGGRRRROOOOOWWWWWLLLLLLLLLLL.
Eric's eyes snapped open. "What was that?"
Anna looked down at her body, embarrassed. Also, why did her tummy look so … emaciated now? She could practically count her ribs! "I think that was me," said Anna. "I must be really hungry."
"Uh-oh," said Eric. "You didn't feed!"
"Feed?"
"Before mating, mermaids need to eat. A lot. Or else egg-laying takes too much energy, and they can't keep going."
"Keep going?" echoed Anna, intrigued. "What's that all about?"
"I'm not too clear on the details," said Eric, "since I've never done it before. But the mating cycle is supposed to last until after the full moon is passed, I know that much."
Anna propped herself up on her arms. "Don't tell me I'm gonna lay MORE eggs!"
Eric shrugged. "I don't know."
"Well maybe we should find someone and ask!" shouted Anna. "I've only got two boobs, I can't take care of a dozen—hrk—" GGGRRRROOOOOOWWWWWWLLLLLL.
"Maybe we should find some food first," Eric suggested, just a hint of a wry tone in his voice.
Anna clutched at her painfully contracted stomach muscles, panted, and gasped out, "Good—idea—"