15. The Exploration #3
We stand under the cooling water for a long time after that — his bigger body sheltering mine, his hands gentle now as they trace the bruises he left on my hips and the bite mark on my shoulder.
The ache between my legs is deep and delicious, a constant reminder of how thoroughly he claimed me.
My thighs are sticky with his cum even after the water, and every shift of my hips sends a fresh pulse of soreness and satisfaction through me.
No regrets. Only a low, humming want that says tonight is going to be even better.
Eventually he turns off the water. We dress in near-silence — him in the corridor, me still leaning against the shower wall for a moment to catch my breath and steady my legs.
My body feels marked, used, and perfectly claimed.
The stretch lingers. The bite on my shoulder throbs warmly every time I move.
I pull on a clean tank top and knickers, then the blue cardigan with the daisies, and step out.
He is already at the co-pilot’s station when I return to the cockpit, dressed and outwardly composed. But his tail finds me the second I sit down, curling possessively around my calf. The purr is back — low, steady, and unmistakably satisfied.
“Tea?” I ask, voice still a little rough.
“Peppermint. Steeped too long.”
I smile. “Yes, lovey. I know.”
Two mugs. Fingers brushing on ceramic. The domestic ritual feels different now — heavier with promise and the memory of what we just did against the shower wall.
Junction One by morning. Drask’s clock still ticking. A prisoner in the cargo bunk. Morrison waiting at the end of the route.
But right now, with his tail warm around my leg and the delicious ache between my thighs, none of that feels louder than the male sitting in my chair.
The transaction reference has been running in the back of my mind since I wrote it down.
I pull the notebook out and look at it. The buyer code is the part that won’t settle—the format of it more than the content.
I’ve processed enough Tessaro Foundation cargo over the years to know their routing signatures, and this prefix has that feel: institutional, not individual.
Not a person buying through Drask. An organization.
I add a line beneath the code: buyer format = institutional. Tessaro-adjacent? Then I close the notebook. That’s all I have. A loose thread, not a conclusion. I have enough conclusions already.
My shoulder stings where he bit me. My hip aches where he gripped. Between my legs I am swollen and slick and the ache is so specific it has a postcode. I can wait until tonight. I have waited ten years for someone to sit in that chair.
His tail winds up my calf. His purr hums steady—low, constant, the frequency that will never belong to anyone else.
In the pocket of the clean cardigan—the blue one with the daisies—my notebook holds a list of lost things nobody is looking for. Patterns and discrepancies and person-shaped gaps.
The biggest lost thing I ever found is sitting in my co-pilot’s chair holding my hand with cracked tile dust still under his claws.
Sprout doesn’t say anything. The orb doesn’t change color. But the cockpit display flickers—one heartbeat—and Xor goes still.
Not the stillness of the shower or the defection speech. An older stillness. The stillness of a male who has been in this exact moment before, who knows precisely what it means because he has spent thirty years learning what it means from the person who is now in his ear.
“Incoming.” Flat. Not to me. “Private channel.”
I watch his face. I watch his hand on mine. I watch the tail at my calf.
He takes the call on his earpiece. His hand doesn’t release mine—not immediately—but the grip changes.
The warmth drains out of it. Professional.
The hand of an operative rather than a male.
His face reassembles while I watch—jaw setting, eyes flattening to operational gold, the specific blank I recognize now as armor rather than distance.
The male I had in the shower, piece by piece, becoming the weapon again.
His tail unwinds from my calf. One degree at a time.
I don’t hear a word Trell says. I hear what Xor’s body does with the words.
The call is less than two minutes. When it ends he sits for a moment with his hand still—technically—in mine. Not holding. Present. The distinction matters.
“Trell,” I say. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
A beat. The operational pause—the one I’ve learned means he’s choosing what to give me. “He will contact us again at Junction One.”
He doesn’t say what Trell wanted. I don’t ask. I’ve read enough mission files to understand that what Trell wants and what Xor is going to do about it are two different things, and asking before Junction One will only make the distance between this moment and that one harder.
His tail doesn’t return to my calf.
I drink my tea. It’s gone cold. I drink it anyway.
Six hours to Junction One. There are things living in those six hours that I don’t have names for yet.
His hand crosses the console once more—brief, the backs of his knuckles against mine—and then returns to the controls.
The purr has gone quiet. I notice when it starts again, ten minutes later, low and unsteady, finding its footing.
I don’t say anything. I just let it.