Chapter 8 No Filter #3
“Beautiful. I suspect it will be beautiful.” Too honest for a male who’s supposed to be maintaining restraint. “Because everything my body does in response to you has been.”
She stares at me for three full seconds, mouth slightly open, flush climbing her neck. Then: “That’s the most unfair thing you’ve ever said to me, and you once told me you’d been wanting me since day one while bleeding from three separate wounds.”
“You asked me to finish the sentence.”
“And now I’m dying. Not murder jungle, not apex predators. You, saying things like that, while I can’t do anything about it because I’m on truth fruit and you’re being noble.” She flops backward onto the moss bed with a dramatic groan. “Nobility is the worst.”
“I’ll remind you of that opinion tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I’ll be in your lap doing things that don’t require nobility.” She says it to the ceiling, matter-of-fact, as if she’s describing a schedule. “Clear-eyed. Sober. Choosing you with full awareness of everything. The horns, the bonding, the permanence. All of it.”
My hands are shaking. Stone under my palms does nothing to steady them.
“And Horgox?” She turns her head on the moss to look at me, and the drowsy softness in her eyes mixes with something fierce and certain. “I’m going to touch your horns. And I’m going to mean every nerve ending of it.”
My voice doesn’t come.
“Come here.” She pats the moss beside her. “You need sleep too, and your shoulder is still bleeding, and if you stay against that wall all night you’ll be stiff tomorrow and then you won’t be able to do the things. The things we’re going to do.”
“The things.”
“You know exactly what things. Your markings went white-gold.” She pats the moss again. “Come. Be warm at me.”
Be warm at me. Prepositions deployed as weapons. I file this under threats for which no countermeasure exists.
The cave is five metres wide. It takes four strides. Each one a surrender.
She doesn’t wait for me to settle. The moment I’m horizontal, she attaches herself to my side with the decisive precision of a component locking into place.
Head against my shoulder. Arm across my chest. Leg hooked over mine, her thigh pressing against my hip with a possessiveness that sends color flooding through my markings before I can suppress it.
“You’re so warm.” Face pressed into my neck, breath hot against my pulse point. “Like a reactor. I’ve been cold my entire life and you’re the first thing that’s ever been warm enough.”
“Varkaani run eight to ten degrees—”
“Stop sciencing it. Be warm.” Her hand finds my chest. Flattens over the scars where the harness sat. “Here. This is my favourite place on your entire body. Well. Second favourite. First favourite requires the conversation we’re having tomorrow.”
“Krilly—”
“I keep thinking about the harness night.” Her voice is going soft, drowsy, the filter dissolving into a murmur.
“When I was on your thigh and you were shaking. When you made that sound—the one that wasn’t controlled.
I replay it when I can’t sleep. I think about what would have happened if I’d rocked forward instead of pulling away.
If I’d pressed down harder against you. If I’d—”
“You need to stop talking now.”
“Why?” Genuine confusion. The fruit strips context along with filters. “They’re my thoughts. Aren’t you curious what I—”
“I’m not curious. I know.” The words come out rougher than I intend. “Because I’ve been imagining the same things from the other side. What I would have done if you’d rocked forward. How my hands would have moved on your hips. What sound you’d make if I’d flexed my thigh up against you.”
Silence. Her breathing has changed. Faster. Her grip on my chest tightens.
“Oh,” she breathes. “You’ve been—”
“Every night. Every time you shift against me in sleep. Every time your hip presses against mine and your breathing changes and I know—” The sentence stops. Locks down. The fruit isn’t in my system; I have no chemical excuse for what I’m saying. “You make it very difficult to be honourable.”
“I don’t want you to be honourable.” Her hand slides from my chest down across my ribs, following the path that drove me to the edge during the harness scene, and every nerve ending her fingers cross lights up like a signal flare. “I want you to be honest.”
My hand catches her wrist. The same gentle precision I use for everything that matters.
Her fingers are centimetres from where my body is making its interest unmistakable. The fabric does nothing to disguise what her proximity and her words and her breath on my neck have done, and her hand was heading directly toward the evidence.
“Tomorrow.” The word comes out against her hair like a vow. “Everything you’re reaching for. Everything you’re imagining. I’ll give you all of it. But not while your consent is—”
“My consent is enthusiastic, ongoing, and based on feelings that predate the fruit by days.” She tilts her head up, and her eyes are drowsy but clear, the honesty in them chemical and genuine simultaneously. “But I hear you. Tomorrow.”
Her hand goes back to my chest. Presses flat over my heartbeat, which hammers hard enough to feel through her palm.
“That’s fast,” she observes.
“Yes.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of you.”
“Because of my hand almost touching your—”
“Yes.” Clipped. Barely controlled. “Because of all of it. Because you’re pressed against me listing everything you want to do to me while I try to remember that honour exists.”
“Honour is overrated.”
“You won’t think so tomorrow morning when you remember this conversation sober.”
“I’ll think it’s the hottest conversation I’ve ever had, and I’ll be annoyed we didn’t follow through.” But she settles her hand over my heart and leaves it there. Truce. “Fine. Your heartbeat. My favourite place. I’ll stay here.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Even though you’re wrong about the honour thing and I’m going to prove it by climbing you like a tree first thing in the morning.”
“Krilly.”
“Shh. I’m memorising your heartbeat.” Her eyes drift closed, then force open. “Don’t let me sleep yet. I haven’t told you about the dream.”
“What dream?”
“The one where you pick me up and press me against the cave wall and—”
My hand covers her mouth. Same gesture as the root cave, the first night, except this time her lips curve into a smile against my palm and the warmth of her mouth sends a jolt straight through me.
“Mmph,” she says against my hand. Then, muffled but unmistakable: “Mmm-you should know—mmph—the wall thing is very—mmph—important to me.”
“Sleep.”
She licks my palm.
My hand jerks away, and she grins up at me with the unrepentant delight of someone who has found the exact combination of actions that makes a male with decades of combat training lose his composure entirely.
“Your face,” she says, delighted. “Your face right now is my new favourite thing.”
“You are the most dangerous being I have ever encountered, and I’ve fought creatures with more teeth than you have bones.”
“But I’m cuter.”
“Devastatingly.” The word escapes without clearance. “Now sleep, before I do something we’re both going to have very strong feelings about in the morning.”
“Promise?”
“That is not the threat you think it is.”
She laughs, bright and unguarded, and the sound does something to my chest that no arena wound ever managed. Then the drowsiness wins, her eyes closing for the last time, her body going heavy against mine with the boneless trust of someone who has decided this is where she lives now.
Her hand stays over my heart. Her breathing slows, deepens, evens into the rhythm of genuine sleep. The flush fades from her cheeks by degrees, the fruit’s effects receding, leaving behind the woman who said every one of those things and meant them all.
She shifts in her sleep. Presses closer. Her mouth finds the junction of my neck and shoulder and rests there, breathing warm and even against my pulse, and every exhale sends sensation down my spine that my newly liberated nerve endings receive with exquisite, agonising clarity.
Her leg tightens over mine, pulling herself closer.
Her hips settle against my side with a pressure that is not accidental even in sleep.
The enhanced sensitivity is still operating, her body seeking contact the way a root system seeks water, and the warmth of her against my hip is specific and devastating, and I am going to lie here for hours feeling it and maintaining composure through sheer force of will.
Hours.
The cave ceiling is not helping. Arena combat drills: the sequence fails when the first imagined opponent has red hair.
Hyperspace fuel thermodynamics: the calculations collapse when I try to assign a variable to the heat radiating from her hip.
The mating habits of Ursuris Prime’s lesser canyon predators: the irony kills the exercise before it starts.
Nothing works. Everything routes back to her.
Tomorrow I’ll be in your lap doing things that don’t require nobility.
I’m going to touch your horns. And I’m going to mean every nerve ending of it.
The wall thing is very important to me.
Arena combat drills are not helping.
“For the record,” Bebo says quietly, after the silence has settled into something more still, “her vital signs during the confessional period showed patterns consistent with genuine emotional attachment, not chemically induced infatuation. The fruit amplified her honesty. It did not create her feelings.”
“I know.”
“Additionally, your own vital signs indicate a neurochemical state consistent with what the Varkaani literature describes as pre-bonding resonance. You are already attuning to her. The claiming color you discussed?” A pause that is not quite clinical.
“Your markings shifted toward an uncharacterised wavelength three times tonight. I logged the instances.”
Very still. Every molecule in my body listening.
“I thought you might want to know,” Bebo says. “Before tomorrow.”
Before tomorrow. When she wakes up clear-eyed and remembers every word. The shoulders complaint. The color catalogue. The horn conversation. The jumpsuit. The dream she tried to tell me about before I covered her mouth and she licked my palm like the absolute menace she is.
She’ll remember all of it.
And she’ll either be mortified, or she’ll look at me with those green eyes and do exactly what she promised.
I know which one. I’ve known since she took apart my chains with steady hands and called the word that slipped out the reason it mattered.
But knowing and believing are different things. And three hundred and forty-seven years have taught me that hope is the most dangerous thing a being can carry.
She murmurs something in her sleep. Presses her face harder against my neck. Her hand curls into a fist over my heart, clutching skin and scar tissue, holding on like she’s afraid I’ll leave if she loosens her grip.
I won’t. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not when rescue comes and the universe offers her a thousand better options than a scarred gladiator with bonding equipment on his head and a lifetime of captivity behind him.
The color in my markings settles to a steady warmth. And underneath, something Bebo’s instruments detect: a shimmer that has no name yet because no one has ever triggered it before.
The claiming color, beginning.
I let it come.
Tomorrow is going to be the most terrifying day of my life.
And I want it faster than anything I have ever wanted.