Chapter 10 The Claiming Color
The Claiming Color
Krilly
His mouth finds mine before the word here stops echoing off the cave walls, and nine days of restraint end in a single point of contact.
Not careful. Not previewed. The kiss of two people who have exhausted every reason to wait and found none of them sufficient.
His hands frame my face with the precise, deliberate grip that I've learned means he's done calculating and started committing, and the certainty in the way he holds me sends heat cascading down my spine.
The beacon pulses behind us, broadcasting our position into the void. Rescue is coming. The clock is running. And for the first time since I crashed on this planet, the clock doesn't matter.
"Not here," he murmurs against my mouth. "Somewhere with sky."
He leads me through the passage to the clearing we scouted this afternoon. Bioluminescent vines casting blue-green light across the moss. Three moons low on the horizon. The kind of alien beauty that would take my breath if his proximity hadn't already stolen it.
He turns to face me, and the color in his markings has shifted into something I've never seen in daylight: the jade brightened, that prismatic shimmer at the edges glowing stronger than firelight can account for. The unnamed color, waiting to become.
My hands find the catches of his shirt. Not fumbling.
Purposeful, the way I approach any system I intend to take apart.
He watches me work the fastenings with an expression that's equal parts want and something more fragile, more exposed.
The expression of a male watching someone choose him and still not quite believing it.
"I'm sure," I tell him, because he needs to hear it, and because speaking it aloud makes it real in a way that silent wanting doesn't. "In case the nine days of escalating desperation left any ambiguity."
"I didn't want to assume—"
"Horgox. I licked your palm. I told you I was going to bond the hell out of you.
I described my dream about the cave wall before you physically stopped me from finishing the sentence.
" His shirt parts under my hands, and the first touch of bare emerald skin against my palms makes us both go still. "There is no ambiguity."
The stillness lasts two heartbeats. Then his control, the discipline that has held through arenas and captivity and three months of solitary survival, bends.
Not shatters. Bends, like a structure reaching its design tolerance and yielding to the force it was built to withstand but never meant to bear forever.
His hands move to my jumpsuit. Unfastening catches with the same precision he uses for everything, except his fingers aren't steady. The fabric parts, slides off my shoulders. Cool night air hits my skin, and his inhale is audible. Sharp. Reverent.
"I've imagined this," he says, voice dropped into the bass register that I feel in my sternum. "Every night since the harness. What you'd look like. What your skin would feel like under my hands."
"And?" The jumpsuit pools at my feet. I'm standing in my undershirt and shorts under alien starlight, and his gaze moves over me with an intensity that feels like a physical weight.
"I wasn't prepared." Quiet. Honest. The male beneath the gladiator, looking at something he didn't believe he was allowed to want. "Imagining didn't prepare me for the real thing."
This is fast. My engineer brain registers the thought the way it registers a system operating outside normal parameters.
A few days isn't long enough for permanent neurological bonding by any rational metric.
But rationality is the thing that tells you to wait for the next budget cycle to replace the failing parts.
Rationality is the thing that killed my parents, because someone decided the emergency beacon could last another quarter.
I grew up learning that waiting for perfect conditions gets people killed, and I became a courier because someone has to commit to the run when everyone else is calculating risk margins.
Horgox Ka'reen isn't a risk. He's the clearest signal I've ever read.
"Your turn." I reach for his waistband, and his hands cover mine. Not stopping. Steadying. His fingers laced through mine as we push the fabric down together, and the collaborative intimacy of undressing each other settles something in my chest that I didn't know was unsettled.
When he's bare in the moonlight, I look. Not stealing a glance. Looking, with the same focused attention I bring to any system I intend to understand completely.
Emerald skin over muscle that moves with fluid power, designed for violence but holding me with a gentleness that cracks something open every time.
Jade patterns flowing over his chest, down his arms, each one a sensory organ and emotional tell.
The blue circuit traceries running along his ribs, cold and artificial against the warmth of living skin, permanent evidence of what they did to him.
Scars crossing everything like a map of survival.
And lower, where the jade patterns continue, ridged along the length of him, tapered, a thicker ridge at the base.
Proportionate to his frame, which means significantly larger than human standard.
"Scared?" he asks. Without judgment. Giving me the option.
"No." My hand wraps around him, and the texture under my palm is extraordinary. Ridged and warm and already slick with viscous lubrication that his body has been producing since I touched his chest. He makes a sound like a male being hit, and his hips jerk. "Curious. And impressed."
"If you approach this as an engineering assessment—"
"Then you'll get the most thorough, systematic attention of your life. Consider it a benefit of the profession." I stroke, feeling the ridges drag against my palm, and his jaw clenches hard enough that I can see the muscle jump. "Tell me about this. The lubrication."
"Autonomic." His voice has gone rough. "My body calibrates to yours. Reads your pheromones. Adjusts temperature, proportion, viscosity." Another stroke, and his breath fractures. "If you keep doing that, I won't last long enough to be inside you, and I've been waiting too long for that."
The directness of it. The raw specificity, from a male who speaks in clipped tactical assessments and lets his markings say what his words won't. My body responds to the honesty of it the way it always has, heat pooling low and deep.
"Then take me to the ground," I say, "and stop waiting."
He lowers me to the moss with a care that contradicts his size.
My undershirt goes over my head, his hands helping, and when I'm bare beneath him, the temperature differential becomes its own sensation.
His body radiating heat like a reactor core, my cooler skin prickling against the night air.
Where we touch, the contrast registers as a line of fire.
His skin against mine, hot and textured, the jade patterns slightly raised so that every point of contact has dimension.
"Beautiful," he breathes. His mouth follows the path he previewed at the hot spring. Throat, collarbone, the hollow where my pulse hammers. His lips are hot; his tongue is hotter, and the ridged texture of it against my skin makes me arch into him.
He mouths a line down my sternum, and his breath is furnace-warm between my breasts. "I've had this route planned for days, little flare. Every path. Every detour."
"I remember the preview." My hands find his hair, guiding him. "The real thing is better."
His mouth closes over my nipple, and the sound I make echoes off canyon walls.
His tongue does something involving texture and heat and a flickering motion that no human tongue could replicate, each ridge reading my response and adjusting in real time.
The precision of it, the way his body is literally mapping mine through sensation, makes my back bow.
"The patterns on your tongue," I gasp, because my brain catalogues even when my body is coming apart. "Same as your fingers. Functional jade. Bioresponsive."
"Every ridge reads your responses." His voice vibrates against my breast. "Temperature, pressure, arousal. I can feel what you like and adjust." He demonstrates, shifting angle and rhythm based on whatever his tongue is detecting, and the targeted precision undoes me. "Like this."
"Like— yes— there—"
He gives both breasts the same devastating attention before moving lower. Down my ribs, across my stomach. His hands settle on my hips, thumbs in the hollows beside my hipbones, and he looks up at me from between my thighs with an expression that makes my entire body clench.
"I want to taste you," he says. Reading my response through the hands on my hips. Confirming, not asking. "Everywhere."
"Please."
His tongue finds me, and the world narrows to a single point of focused sensation.
Long. Flexible in ways human tongues aren't. And ridged, the bioresponsive jade patterns reading my body and adjusting in real time.
Broad strokes that make me gasp, then targeted precision on the exact nerve cluster that makes my hips come off the ground.
His hands grip me, holding me where he wants me, and the combination of strength and attentiveness is its own form of devastation.
"Oh— your tongue—"
He makes a sound against me that vibrates through tissue and bone, and the combination of texture and resonance and focused heat is unlike anything I've experienced.
Not a comparison to anything human. Something entirely its own.
When his tongue slides inside me, the ridges dragging against sensitive tissue, my fingers twist in his hair and I lose the ability to form words.