Chapter 5 #2
His presence was a physical thing. Not invasive — he kept a deliberate two feet of distance that I suspected cost him more than he showed — but substantial, the way a storm front is substantial, the way you feel weather before it arrives.
The way I imagined it would feel trying to ignore a Bengal tiger pacing in one’s living room.
The heat of him displaced the cool morning air against my side.
His scent reached me on every slight shift of the breeze —something dark and rich that had no equivalent in my experience, something that bypassed my professional filters entirely and spoke directly to a part of me that had been inconveniently, recently awoken.
A hungry part. Longing. Want. Desire. A thousand names for things I hadn’t felt for a man in years, if ever.
I focused on the scanner in my hands.
The scanner became the most interesting object I had ever encountered in my life.
The crystal formations on the cliff face were growing clearer in the data — extraordinary conductivity readings, electromagnetic profiles unlike anything in the xenomineralogy database.
I was building a mental extraction model, running interference calculations, doing the precise and demanding intellectual work that had always been my most reliable armor against things I didn't want to feel.
That armor was damn near useless this morning. He was too… everything.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked, when twenty minutes of walking had done nothing to quiet the low electric hum that seemed to live in my pussy like a live electric wire constantly letting off sparks.
Sparks. Everywhere. In my chest. In my core.
Pulsing in my veins like blood. Sparks of lust. Desire.
Obsession. Need. Him. They were all him.
"Yes."
I kept my eyes on the path. "The Skybond. Is it always like this?"
Silence stretched. I felt as if he weighed his words carefully. "Yes. The bond is immediate and powerful."
"Always? For everyone?"
"Based on the teachings of the elders, yes.
Always." His voice was careful and very even, as if he wase afraid he was going to scare me.
Joke was on him. I was already freaking the fuck out.
"It does not build over time. It does not resemble something else.
When it happens, our mating nodes recognize the match and that recognition is—" another pause, and underneath his control I heard something primal.
Instinctive. "—total. My nodes have been at full resonance since the moment I saw you. "
His words had me rubbing my thighs together to try to get some relief. Discharge some of the energy building in my body. I felt like a pressure cooker about to explode.
"I have never in my life carried this much energy," he admitted.
I didn't look at him. I absolutely could not look at him right now. "That sounds uncomfortable." I knew, because I was about to crawl out of my own skin. I wondered if the feeling was better or worse for him. More natural? Less… alien?
"It is." Flat. Honest. "It is also the most alive I have ever felt."
My breath did something complicated and my pussy clenched around empty space. I stared at his shoulder. The marks. The light arcing under his muscles like tiny lightning storms. I wanted to touch them. Needed to touch them.
No. No. Fuck no. If I started touching, I wouldn’t stop.
I looked at the scanner in my hand. Wrapped my fingers around it until the hard edges pressed painfully into my palms. The scanner had never been more important. The scanner was saving my life.
"How old are you?" I asked, because deflection was a legitimate scientific tool.
We talked about time — his counting of storm cycles, my conversion of them into years.
Thirty years for him. Twenty-nine for me.
He told me that warriors who spend their lives on the cliffs in electrical storms tended to live less than the two hundred cycles a sheltered life might promise.
He said it with the same matter-of-fact evenness with which he said everything, like a man who had looked at the cost of his choices and had made them anyway, expected nothing from the universe in return.
Something in his no nonsense decision making, his sense of duty to his people, was uncomfortably familiar. Space explorers didn't live long, happy lives. The pay was high. The life span was short. I'd made peace with the danger, just like he had.
Understanding anything about him was a mistake. Made me want to close the space between us and damn the consequences. Taste his lips. Touch his skin. Give him everything.
The path curved and tall reeds closed in on both sides — dense stands of them, eight feet tall, their hollow stalks a pale silver-green that would have been beautiful if he hadn't told me what they did.
They grew wherever the bioelectric current ran close to the surface, he'd said.
Thrived on the energy. Their root systems tapped directly into the planet's charge network the way other plants tapped water.
The stalks stored what they collected, building and building until the threshold tipped and the stored energy discharged outward in a single convulsive release.
Harmless to native fauna, which had evolved alongside them for millennia. Not harmless to anything that hadn't.
Like me.
He'd pointed them out an hour back, before the path narrowed. Don't walk close to a cluster, he'd said. You won't hear it coming until it's too late.
He hadn't looked at me when he said it. He'd said it the way he said everything, practical — flat and direct and entirely without drama.
He expected to be taken seriously. I'd taken it seriously.
I'd been taking it seriously for an hour, keeping to the center of the path, watching the pale stalks the way he watched them, the way he watched everything.
The stormglass trees overhead filtered the light into something dim and blue-edged, their crystalline bark alive with the slow pulse of conducted current — the planet's own heartbeat, moving through every living thing that rooted here.
The trees were still singing to me in a way I found eerily beautiful but still did not understand.
Energy pulses moved through the ground. Through the reeds.
Pulses moved through the trees. Moved through him, his storm nodes synced to frequencies I was only beginning to understand.
I felt them.
I watched the reeds.
I watched him.
I was doing both when the nearest cluster shifted — a barely perceptible lean, the stalks tilting a fraction of a degree toward each other the way he'd described, the bioelectric charge reaching critical density, the air between them going tight and brittle.
The pulse reed hit its hum without warning.
One moment he stood beside me. The next he was in front of me — his arm swept back in a motion so fast and certain it didn't feel like a decision.
It felt like reflex. Like breathing. Like a body doing what it was built to do without consulting the mind at all.
His palm pressed flat against my sternum.
He pushed me back and behind him in a single fluid movement.
The discharge cracked through the air with a sharp electric snap.
It arced then disappeared, flowing into the ground where I'd stood.
Silence.
I pressed against his back.
Not by choice. By physics. By the fact that he'd moved me there and my body simply — followed.
Collided. Landed against the solid wall of him, my hands grabbing onto his sides without any input from my brain whatsoever.
My cheek rested against his spine. The storm nodes blazed directly beneath my face, silver-white and hot.
The heat of them radiated into my skin like I'd pressed my face against sun-warmed stone.
Underneath the heat, the faint charge of him, metallic and alive, was something my body recognized before my mind caught up.
He went very still.
His heartbeat did not.
I felt his heart race through his back, through my cheek, through the contact point of my hands at his sides where my palms pressed flat against muscle and strength I had no conscious memory of grabbing. My heart pounded, fast and hard in a race to match his.
His pulse was not at all the measured rhythm of a man who was unaffected. His chest expanded with a breath that was controlled and deliberate. Entirely unlike his breathing had been thirty seconds ago. I breathed with him without meaning to, my inhale timed to his, my exhale slow against his spine.
"Are you hurt?" His voice had changed. Still low. But the level quality was gone — scraped away. It left something rough and immediate underneath. Something that resonated in my chest the same way the planet's hum did, but hotter. More dangerous.
"No." My voice came out steadier than it had any right to. My lips moved against his back. Not a kiss. Not. A. Kiss. "I'm fine."
He breathed. In and out. Slow and deliberate. A man who pulled himself back from an edge with both hands.
I didn't move. My lips hovered. I didn’t dare lick them. If I tasted him there, I might not pull away.
I should have moved. There was no objective reason I remained pressed against his back with my hands pressed to his sides.
No logical reason I felt my own pulse in the palms of my hands — or in my throat, or in the middle of my sternum where his palm had been.
No scientific explanation for why my body had made a decision about where it wanted to be and simply — stayed there.
Disobeyed direct orders. Found a comfortable place hugging his back and refused to vacate it.
Three seconds.
It was three seconds, maybe four. They were the longest seconds of my recent memory.