My Soulmate Has a Tail by Nina Soelian
My Soulmate Has a Tail
Description
Joey Morrison is the worst swimmer at an elite sports college. Sebastian Cole is the best-and also, as Joey discovers one night at the pool, not entirely human. Tail. Scales. The full merman package. Now Sebastian wants him silent, Joey wants to survive the semester, and neither of them can explain why they can't stop looking at each other. Forced to train together in secret, they strike a deal: Sebastian teaches Joey to control his own impossible transformation before it exposes them both. But the closer they get, the harder it becomes to ignore what their blood already knows-they're fated. With qualifiers approaching, a secret that could get them killed, and a pull neither can fight, Joey has to decide what terrifies him more: the water, the boy in it, or what happens if he lets himself want both.
Chapter 1
Jun 26, 2026
[Joey’s POV]
"I'm going to fucking kill you!"
The voice behind me is wet and a nightmare-wrong, and it’s only getting closer. Fuck!
I'm sprinting down the dark corridor of the pool building, phone in my fist, bare feet slapping tile. Behind me inhumanly fast footsteps, closing the gap like physics is optional for whatever's chasing me.
Being a newbie in this college, I expected the bullying, the whispers, the judging looks. I’ve got used to it eventually.
What I did not expect was walking into the pool after hours and finding a merman.
Yeah, I said what I said. A goddamn mermen, all fishy scales and tail and the entire mythology-was-right package, cutting through the water like the pool was his personal kingdom. I'd barely raised my phone before those eyes snapped to me.
This is it. This is how I go out. In swim trunks, taken out by a fish-person. Fuck!
My dad always said I'd amount to nothing impressive, but I don't think even he imagined the nothing would be this specific. Murdered by a merman in a hallway—not even in the water, in a hallway—and that's the part that really stings.
I round a corner and slam my shoulder into the wall catching myself. When I look over my shoulder, the corridor stretches behind me is empty—no footsteps, no sound, just the buzz of lights and my own ragged breathing.
And just when I was about to continue running, a hand landed on my shoulder from behind with an iron grip and every molecule of air abandons my body at once. When I’m turned around to face the death sentence that has been chasing me, I can’t believe my eyes once more this evening.
Is the merman really him?! Well, shit… I’d wished to live a little bit longer.
* Three weeks ago *
I'd always loved water. That's the thing people don't understand when they find out about the fear.
They think it's a phobia, like spiders or heights, like something you simply hate. But I don't hate water. I love it the way my mother did: the ocean, the tide, the weight and the pull and the feeling that something enormous is breathing underneath you.
She drowned when I was seven. The ocean took her and didn't give her back.
And I've been a bad swimmer since then. Every time I get in past my waist, something in my chest convinces me I'm dying, and no amount of rational thought fixes that. My body just... refuses. It decides the water is the same water. Every time.
After the funeral, my dad put me in a pool six weeks later and couldn't understand why his son screamed, why feared pools ever since. His solution, apparently, was to send me to a sports college after I graduate high school.
He didn't ask. He enrolled me, told me at dinner, and said it like he was doing me a favour. "Face it head-on. Sink or swim."
Yeah. He actually said that last part. Sink or swim.
I don't know exactly why I agreed. Maybe to prove that I could actually do it, could overcome this fear. Maybe to prove to him, to the version of his face that's never been proud of me once in nineteen years, that I wasn't a complete embarrassment of a son.
So here I am. Walk-on swimmer at Harwick College, a school that has produced three Olympic medalists in the last decade, standing on a starting block and supposed to dive like everyone else. Yet my body disobeyed as usual.
"Hey, nepobaby!" Sebastian's voice cuts up from poolside, and the whole team goes quiet. "Planning to dive sometime today, or should I send up a pillow and a blanket, pussy?"
The only monsters in my life are a chlorinated rectangle and the boy standing next to it.
Sebastian Cole. Swimming team captain and the kind of person whose name gets said with a slight reverence even when people are complaining about him.
Thanks to my father making a few phone calls I’m on the team too.
Zero qualifying times. Zero actual race history. Just my dad's connections with some administrator and a spot that should've gone to someone who actually deserved it.
I know this. The team knows this. Sebastian knows it, and that’s exactly my problem.
He's at the pool edge, arms crossed over his chest, still wet from his last set. Droplets tracks down his collarbone and wet muscular abdomen and I notice it with an unexpectedly dry mouth.
I also immediately despise myself for noticing it, because he is literally bullying me right now and apparently that does nothing to fix whatever is broken in my brain. What's been broken since the day before my first college year.
When I met him for the first time, passing through the natatorium with my suitcase, I was stunned.
He got out of the water in one graceful motion that couldn’t not catch my eye. He shook his head, trying to clear his eyes, dark hair scattering drops, and I stopped walking, eyes glued to his strong arms and broad shoulders.
Yet never before I've… I should explain something.
I have never once looked at a person and felt that. Not girls, not guys, not anyone. Then I read about it, and I understood: nothing was wrong with me. I’m just asexual. And I'd made my peace with it years ago. No big deal.
So when my eyes dragged up his body without permission and something low in my stomach tightened, I had absolutely no framework for it. My brain went completely offline.
Is this what people mean? This specific thing low right here?
The thought was so startling that I stood there staring like an idiot. Then he looked up, and his eyes found mine, and they were the most beautiful blue-green color and he winked at me.
Playful. Unhurried. Like he knew exactly that my heart was in his pocket at that point.
I tripped over my own suitcase and the noise it made was catastrophic. Dying of embarrassment, I fled to my dorm and swore to never meet him again.
Except it turned out him to be the Sebastian Cole and I had no choice but to meet him.
No choice but to become his target the moment he learned how I got in the team.
"Just getting my footing." My voice, on the contrary, comes out thin and embarrassingly small
"Your footing… Four fucking minutes of footing?" He tilts his head and the light catches on his skin so prettily, I forget to take a breath. "What's your fifty free? Hundred fly? Or did daddy just fax over your baby photo and a pretty please?
Laughter rolls across the deck, a sound of a crowd picking the target. Heat climbs up my neck.
My dad also taught me to tread water over the spot where his wife died, but sure, let's talk about phone calls
"I can swim," I said defensively.
"You can swim." He nods slowly and turns to the team. "Everybody hear that? Walk-on with zero qualifying times says he can swim but he won't get off the board!"
A blond guy cups his hands. "Prove it, nepobaby!"
The word bounces off the tile and two more guys pick it up—nepo, nepo—a chant building, rhythmic and vicious. Someone splashes water up at me. Someone else whistles, sharp and mocking.
"Enough." Sebastian raises one hand and the chanting stops immediately like he owns every single person here.
He walks to me, slow and deliberate, and up close he's even bigger. My pulse kicks up, and I can smell chlorine and something sweeter underneath it, something that makes the already-useless part of my brain want to lean forward.
Don't. Noticing his scent when he’s about to make a cautionary tale out of you is not helpful in the slightest
But I can’t help but imagine breathing that scent fully in. Is that… vanilla?
"This team qualifies as a unit." His voice is low. Just for me. "Every member, every race. One weak link and everything I've built goes down."
"You can't put that on me." The words come out before I can stop them. "I didn't ask to be here. You think I chose this? Standing here while twenty people chant at me?"
"Then leave." His eyes scan me head to toe, slow enough to feel like being peeled open, and my skin prickles everywhere his gaze touches. "Nobody's keeping you."
"Maybe I don't want to leave." I look at him, which is a mistake because his eyes do something to the air in my lungs. "Maybe I want to earn my spot."
His eyebrows lift just a bit, and I’ll be damned if that’s a tiny bit of respect in his eyes.
Although it might just be my vision going blurry from the stress.
"Cute speech." He nods once. "Still can't swim, though. And if you can't perform, you don't belong here."
I open my mouth in indignation and that’s exactly the moment when his hand grabs the back of my neck. A tight grip, fingers pressing into skin, and the contact sends a jolt straight down my spine that has nothing to do with fear.
Then he lets go, and I'm falling.
I hit the water chest-first and then I'm under—arms churning and legs kicking at nothing. The panic seizes my lungs, and this is certainly not how I wanted to prove anything to anyone.
My Soulmate Has a Tail
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