Chapter 7 #2
"I spent most of my life not choosing. Doing what I was told, fighting who they pointed me at, enduring what they built into me.
Three months alone in this jungle was the first time I had choices, and I chose to survive because surviving was all I knew.
" My hand finds hers on my chest, presses it down over the cuts she's treating, over the scars beneath them, over the skin where the harness used to sit.
"Then you crashed into my jungle, and I chose you. Not survival. You."
"Horgox—"
"I need you to hear this while I'm still brave enough to say it.
" The words are ragged now, coming apart at the seams the way controlled things do when the pressure exceeds their design tolerance.
"I chose to catch you when you ran. I chose to teach you instead of hauling you to safety.
I chose to let you take apart my harness even though it terrified me.
I chose to stay when every instinct said run, because running means running from you, and I can't—"
She kisses me.
Not the careful, tentative contact of a first exploration.
The full-collision kiss of someone who has heard enough and is done waiting.
Her hands fist in the fabric at my shoulders, pulling herself up to reach my mouth, and the stretch of it, the way she has to rise on her knees and I have to bend to meet her, the size difference that should be awkward but instead makes the contact feel like something hard-won—
Her mouth is warm. Insistent. Tastes like mineral water and the copper tang of adrenaline and something underneath that is specifically, unmistakably her, and my brain shorts out for three full seconds before instinct takes over.
My hands find her waist. Grip. Pull her into my lap where she fits against me, knees bracketing my hips, her body flush against my chest. The contact stings where it presses against the cuts, and I don't care. I would bleed from a hundred wounds for the feeling of her mouth on mine.
The sound she makes against my lips is devastation.
Small, needy, a sound that says I've wanted this since the root cave and I'm furious it took this long.
My hand slides up her spine, cupping the back of her neck, angling the kiss deeper, and when her lips part I taste her with a thoroughness that makes my markings flare.
She bites my lower lip. Gentle, testing, and the sound I make is not controlled.
Not suppressible. Harmonic undertones bleeding through, the bass-frequency response that my species produces when something triggers every pleasure centre simultaneously.
She feels the vibration and presses closer, chasing it, her hips shifting against mine in a way that—
She pulls back.
Gasping. Flushed from her hairline to the open collar of her jumpsuit, lips swollen, pupils so wide the green is a thin ring. Her hands are shaking where they grip my shoulders.
"I need—" She swallows. "I need a second."
"Take whatever you need."
"Because if I don't stop now I'm not going to stop, and you're bleeding from three separate wounds and we're in a cave that was just attacked and this is not how I imagined—" She stops herself. Presses her forehead against mine. "This is not how I imagined our first time would go."
Our first time. Not if. Not maybe. Stated as an inevitability, something she's already decided will happen when the conditions are right.
"How did you imagine it?" My voice has gone rough enough to scrape.
"Not covered in blood in a cave that smells like murder lizard." But she's smiling, shaky and incandescent. "Something with slightly fewer near-death experiences immediately beforehand."
"I can wait." The understatement of my entire existence. "I've been waiting since the root cave."
"The root cave? That was day one."
"Yes."
"You—" Her expression shifts through several emotions too fast to catalogue. "Day one. You've been—since day one."
"Since you slammed into me running like prey and looked up with those green eyes and didn't flinch." My thumb traces her jaw. "I knew then."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be something more dangerous.
Then she kisses me again, softer this time, a promise rather than a collision.
Her mouth moves against mine with a deliberateness that says I'm choosing this clearly, with full awareness of what it means, and when she pulls back the second time, her hands are steady.
"When this is over," she says. "When we're not bleeding.
When Bebo's not recording our vital signs for posterity.
When I've had a chance to wash the murder lizard off both of us.
" Her thumb traces the cut across my cheekbone, following the line of the circuit tracery beneath it.
"I want you to finish what you started saying. "
"I said everything that matters."
"You said you chose me. You didn't tell me what that means. In your culture. In your species." Her eyes hold mine, and there is nothing tentative in them. "I want to know what choosing means for a Varkaani."
The claiming. The bonding. The permanence of it, the biological reality of what my body is already preparing for, the changes happening beneath my skin since the night she freed the pathways in my chest and the word little flare escaped before I could stop it.
"Soon," I tell her. "When we're both ready."
"I'm ready now."
"You're ready to hear it now. You're not ready for what comes after hearing it." My hand settles against her hip, steadying her in my lap where every point of contact burns. "Some truths change things permanently. I want you to choose that change with clear eyes."
She studies my face for a long moment. Then nods, accepting, and the acceptance is its own form of trust.
"I need to check the perimeter," I say, because if she stays in my lap for another thirty seconds, my restraint is going to fail in ways that involve significantly less clothing.
"Probably wise." She climbs off me with a reluctance that registers in every nerve ending I possess, and the loss of her weight, her warmth, the specific pressure of her body against mine, is the worst thing I've felt since the arena.
"And Horgox?" She's at the cave entrance, haloed by the dim light filtering through the canyon overhead. "For the record. Day one for me too."
She disappears into the inner passage before I can respond.
The perimeter takes longer than it should, my shoulder protesting every movement, but the physical work is necessary. Not for the cave's security. For mine. Every quiet moment, my brain replays the taste of her. The sound she made against my mouth. The way her hips shifted in my lap.
Our first time. She said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like something already decided, requiring only the right coordinates to land.
I set warning triggers at the tunnel entrances, check the spring, confirm the inner chamber's structural integrity. Force my body through tactical motions while my chest burns with something that has nothing to do with the cuts.
By the time I return, the smell hits me at the entrance.
Sweet. Vegetal. Wrong in a way I can't immediately identify.
Krilly is sitting on the moss bed, staring at her hands with an expression I haven't seen before. Pupils dilated. Cheeks flushed. A smile curving her mouth that looks simultaneously delighted and alarmed.
Half-eaten fruit sits on the stone beside her. Purple skin, pale flesh, seeds like tiny stars.
"Krilly. What did you eat?"
"Fruit." She looks up, and the smile widens. "Delicious fruit. Bebo said it was safe. I had two before he finished the full scan."
"Preliminary analysis confirmed edibility for human consumption," Bebo crackles from the core unit.
"However, secondary chemical analysis indicates psychoactive alkaloid compounds.
Effects include reduced inhibition, increased verbal honesty, elevated dopamine and oxytocin, mild euphoric states, and—" A pause that manages to sound apologetic. "Enhanced physical sensitivity."
"Truth fruit." My blood drops three degrees. The facility botanical database listed it as Veridex euphoria, native to the lowland canopy. It does not grow in the canyon system. She must have found it near the passage entrance where the lowland vegetation encroaches. "How much did you eat?"
"Two. And a half." She holds up the remainder, cheerful and doomed.
"Effects duration at that dosage: three to six hours," Bebo supplies. "Peak onset within thirty minutes. The physical sensitivity component manifests as increased tactile awareness and reduced personal space boundaries."
Reduced personal space boundaries. With a woman who kissed me twenty minutes ago and told me she'd been wanting it since day one. Who is currently sitting on the moss bed within arm's reach, looking at me with chemically dilated pupils and a smile that promises absolute catastrophe.
"I should—" I start backing toward the passage.
"If you leave this cave, you'll be in an unsecured canyon system with an open shoulder wound and active predators," Bebo announces. "I am obligated to note that this would be medically inadvisable."
Krilly's smile turns triumphant. "You're trapped in here with me."
She's right. Tactically, infuriatingly right. My shoulder needs rest, not a solo patrol through hostile territory.
Which means I am spending the next three to six hours in ten feet of space with an uninhibited Krilly Baxter.
"This is going to be a very long night," I say.
"On the contrary," Bebo responds. "I predict it will feel remarkably short."
Krilly laughs, bright and uninhibited and devastating, and the color in my markings deepens before I can suppress it.
Three to six hours.
I have survived arenas, facilities, three months in a murder jungle, and an apex predator named Pudding trying to tear out my throat.
None of it prepared me for this.