Chapter 8 No Filter #2
“You need to put this back on.” My voice comes out lower than I intend. The harmonic is there, the one she described, the one that goes to places that make sitting down complicated. The vibration travels through my hands into hers, and her breath catches.
“You’re the one holding my wrists,” she points out, which is accurate and devastating. “I can’t put anything on if you don’t let go.”
Correct. Let go. Release her wrists, step back, re-establish the five metres that were already insufficient. These are the actions of a male with discipline.
My thumbs slide across her pulse points instead. Involuntary. Her heartbeat hammers against my skin, fast and strong, and the sensation travels up my arms and settles in my chest like something taking root.
“Your pulse is elevated.”
“You’re holding my wrists and looking at me like that, so yes. Dramatically elevated. Astronomically. Setting personal records.” She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t push closer. Holds absolutely still, staring up at me with those enormous green eyes. “Are you going to let go?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
Good question. My hands aren’t listening to my brain. My hands are listening to the pulse beneath her skin, to the heat of her, to the way her fingers have curled around mine as if my grip is something she wants to hold onto rather than escape.
I let go. Step back. The absence of her pulse against my thumbs registers as a physical loss, a gap in sensory input that my body immediately classifies as wrong.
“Jumpsuit,” I manage. “Back on.”
“You can’t give me orders about my own clothes.
” But she tugs the jumpsuit back over her shoulders, watching my face the entire time, cataloguing whatever she sees with the attention she gives malfunctioning systems. “For someone who wants me to get dressed, your markings are sending a very contradictory message.”
“My markings are not part of this conversation.”
“Your markings are broadcasting this conversation to anyone with functional vision.” She zips the jumpsuit halfway up, a compromise that is worse than no compromise because it draws attention to the specific terrain the zipper is traversing. “There. Decent. Ish. Happy?”
No.
I lower myself back against the far wall. Five metres. Reset. My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against the stone until the tremor subsides or at least becomes less visible.
“Your horns.” Her entire demeanour shifts. The playful heat sharpens into something more intent, more focused, and I know what’s coming before she says it. “Can I touch them?”
“No.”
“You keep saying that. But you never fully explain why.” She tilts her head, and the firelight catches her hair, and the combination of genuine curiosity and stripped-away self-consciousness is going to be the thing that finally ends me after everything else failed.
“Last time you said they’re sensitive. Like the inside of a wrist. But that’s not the whole truth.
I can see it in your markings; they went darker. ”
She’s right. She reads me better than anyone I’ve ever known.
“Varkaani horns are a bonding point.” Every word chosen with the care of someone handling something volatile, because it is.
“The nerve density is extreme. Being touched there is comparable to—” A human analogue that communicates the intensity without clinical detachment.
“If the most sensitive part of your body and the deepest emotional centre in your brain were connected by a single nerve, and touching one activated the other simultaneously. That’s what horn contact is. ”
She processes this. Reaches the conclusion at the speed of a woman whose brain never stops engineering.
“So when I asked to touch your horns, what I was actually asking—”
“Was the most intimate thing one being can ask another in my culture. Yes.”
“Oh.” The flush on her cheeks deepens from rose to scarlet. “Oh. And I asked. Twice. Casually. Like—‘hey, nice horns, can I just—’” She covers her face with both hands. “Oh stars.”
“You didn’t know.”
“But you felt—” Her hands drop from her face. She’s staring at my horns with an expression that has transformed entirely from casual curiosity to something charged and specific and deeply dangerous. “Every time I asked, what you experienced was—”
“Equivalent to you asking me to make love to you. Yes.” Blunt, because she’s on truth fruit and anything less than direct will be misinterpreted. “The request activated every bonding pathway I have. Both times.”
“And you said no.”
“Because you didn’t understand what you were asking.”
“What if I understand now?” The fruit is making her brave, but the steadiness underneath is hers. “What if I’m asking with full knowledge of what it means?”
“Then I’d tell you that horn-touch during intimacy initiates pair-bonding.
Neurological. Permanent.” Each word precise, delivered the way I give information that determines survival.
Because this does. “My nervous system would attune to yours. Echoes of your emotional state. Instinctive awareness of your location. A physical need for proximity that doesn’t diminish.
” A pause. “It doesn’t reverse, Krilly. Ever. ”
The silence that follows has gravity.
“You’re telling me,” she says slowly, “that your horns are basically a commitment device.”
“That is a reductive but not inaccurate characterisation.”
“And that touching them during sex would permanently bond your nervous system to mine.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been walking around with them on your head this entire time, right there, while I slept against your chest and fought beside you and sat in your lap and—”
“Yes.”
“That must have been agonising.”
“It has been the most difficult exercise in restraint of my entire life, and I spent eight years in an arena.”
She makes a sound that’s half laughter and half something that makes my blood run hot. “Horgox Ka’reen. You have permanent bonding equipment on your head, and the woman you want to use it with has been sleeping three feet from it for days.”
“I’m aware.”
“And you never told me—”
“Because you needed to choose it clearly. Not because it was exciting, or because we were surviving, or because truth fruit stripped your filters. Because you understood the permanence and wanted it anyway.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“I want it anyway.”
The words land in my sternum.
“Ask me again tomorrow,” I manage. “When you’re sober.”
“I’ll say the same thing tomorrow.”
“Then tomorrow it will mean more.”
She holds my gaze for a long beat. Underneath the chemical flush and the dilated pupils, something absolutely steady looks out at me. Not the fruit. Her. Making a decision the fruit is simply allowing her to voice.
“Fine. Tomorrow.” She draws her knees up, chin resting on them. “But I’m going to be extremely specific about what I want, and you’re going to listen to every word without that face you make.”
“What face?”
“The face where you’re trying to be noble and restrained while your markings broadcast everything you’re suppressing. That face.” She points at me. “You’re doing it right now.”
“I am not doing—”
“Jade-gold. Bright. You might as well be wearing a sign that says ‘I want to do things to this woman but I have principles.’”
I have never wished more fervently for the ability to turn off my own bioluminescence.
“Moving on,” I say, because this conversation needs to change direction or I am going to combust. “You had questions about compatibility.”
“Oh, I have many questions about compatibility.” The gleam in her eye suggests these questions have been composing themselves for some time. “You’re seven-two. I’m five-two. When we do this—and we are doing this—how does two feet of height difference work? Logistically?”
The sheer matter-of-factness. She’s asking about sex mechanics with the tone she uses for beacon calibration.
“Varkaani biology adapts to partners across species. Our physiology adjusts; it’s autonomic. Temperature, proportion, response. My body will read yours and calibrate.”
“Calibrate.” Her eyes light up. “Like a system reconfiguring for optimal interface.”
“That is the most engineer description of sex I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I am an engineer.” But she’s grinning, bright and devastating. “So you’re saying your body will literally adjust itself to fit mine.”
“Yes.”
“And it only works if I’m genuinely willing.”
“My physiology doesn’t respond to force. Only to authentic desire.” My eyes hold hers. “If you don’t want it, my body won’t function. It’s a biological safeguard.”
“That is—” She blinks. Twice. “That is genuinely the most romantic thing anyone has ever told me about alien reproductive biology, and I once sat through a four-hour OOPS briefing on Kytherian mating protocols.”
“Luzrak’s species?”
“Don’t get me started. Mother Morrison’s romantic life is a masterclass in interspecies logistics.” She yawns, huge and sudden, the euphoric peak cresting into drowsy decline. “Okay, one more question.”
“One.”
“The claiming. You said your markings do something specific during bonding. A color you’ve never seen because you’ve never bonded.
” Her voice is softer now, the manic energy bleeding off into something more tender as the chemicals shift.
“What if it’s ugly? What if the claiming color is, like, puce? ”
The laugh escapes before I can stop it. Actual laughter, rough and unpractised, dragged out of me by the sheer absurdity of the question. Three hundred and forty-seven years of existence, and she’s worried my species’ most sacred biological response might be an unattractive shade.
“It won’t be puce.”
“You don’t know that. You said it varies by pair.”
“I strongly suspect that any color my body produces in response to you will be—” The sentence reaches for a destination I’m not ready to send it.
“Will be what?” She’s watching me, drowsy but sharp. “Finish the sentence.”