Chapter 15 Settling In #2
The first ridge catches her inner wall and she cries out—sharp, breathless, her body clenching around the node as it drags through.
Second ridge. Third. Each one a bump of textured heat that her body grips and releases, the friction generating those small, wrecked sounds that I have catalogued and memorised and replay in my head during every hour she’s off-station.
“Fast,” she demands, pulling me deeper with her legs. “Hard. I’ve been thinking about this since breakfast when you reached over me for the coffee and I could feel you against my—”
I slam home. Every ridge buried, the basal knot pressing deep, and she arches with a moan that would carry through the hull if not for the sound insulation.
I brace one hand beside her head—claws sinking into the cockpit wall, the screech of metal lost under the sound of her breathing—and the other grips her hip, thumb pressing the crease of her thigh, holding her open and tilted at the angle that lets the third ridge catch her G-spot on every stroke.
“There—right there—don’t change anything—”
I don’t change anything. I give her exactly what she’s asked for—hard, fast, each thrust a full-length drag of ridged heat that makes her clench and gasp and dig her nails into my shoulders.
The patterns under her fingers blaze gold, the pleasure-pain of her touch on my markings feeding back through the bond in a loop that doubles, triples, makes my cock throb harder inside her until the ridges are swelling toward lock.
“I can feel you getting bigger,” she breathes. “The ridges—they’re—oh God, Cetus—”
“They respond to you. To how wet you are, how tight. They won’t stop swelling until—”
“Until you come inside me.” Her eyes lock on mine. Dark. Fierce. “Do it.”
The words detonate through my biology. Every node engorges fully—locking, sealing, the pressurised grip of ridge against wall that holds me deep and triggers the cascading release.
I bury my face against the claiming mark and groan as my cock pulses—wave after wave, thirty seconds of rhythmic contractions that the bond amplifies into shared sensation, her pleasure and mine overlapping until I can’t distinguish which orgasm belongs to whom.
She comes with me. Around me. Her body clenching in spasms that milk each ridge, that extend the lock and draw out the release until we’re both shaking, both gasping, my markings blazing bright enough to illuminate the cockpit like an emergency beacon.
“This is never going to get old,” she whispers into my neck.
We stay locked together. Four minutes, twelve seconds—I count, because I count everything, because that’s who I am and she loves me for it. The ridges soften. Release. Each node deflating in sequence, and the slide of withdrawal draws twin shivers.
“Eighty-three minutes remaining,” I murmur.
“Don’t tempt me.” But her hand is already tracing the markings on my chest, following the patterns down my sternum, and the touch is gentle enough to be affectionate and precise enough to be a promise. “Round two after the colonist meeting.”
“That meeting is four hours long.”
“Then you’ll have four hours to think about it.”
She is going to be the end of me. I accept this willingly.
We are three minutes late to retrieve Tavia from the greenhouse. Dove’s collar is adjusted to cover the flush on her throat. My markings have dimmed to a level I classify as “plausibly professional.” The cockpit console will require recalibration.
Tavia emerges from the lab with soil samples, four data-pad sketches of fungal networks, and a request that catches us both off guard.
“I want to come on the next OOPS run.”
Dove, to her credit, doesn’t immediately say no. She looks at me. I look at her. The parental negotiation is silent and takes approximately two seconds.
“You’re eight,” I say.
“Almost nine.”
“You’re eight and three-quarters.”
“Pickles says the Rolling Pin’s life support can accommodate three passengers. I checked.”
“You checked,” Dove repeats.
“I also packed a bag.” Tavia produces a small rucksack from behind the lab bench. It appears to contain three data pads, a stuffed animal, a jar of soil, and what I recognise as emergency ration bars pilfered from the supply depot. “I’m ready to go.”
“Small person,” Pickles says, “while I admire the initiative, I must note that your bag contains no clothing, no hygiene supplies, and enough emergency rations for approximately four hours. Your preparation score is two out of ten.”
“I don’t need clothes. It’s space. Nobody cares what you wear in space.”
“OOPS courier regulations require all vessel occupants to be over the age of sixteen unless accompanied by a licensed guardian during approved non-hazardous transit windows,” Dove says.
She’s using her official voice—the one that handled Inspector Patel and three Blackstar enforcers—and Tavia recognises it.
Her markings dim. Not defeated. Regrouping.
“What if I got special permission?”
“From whom?”
“Mother Morrison. She runs OOPS. She can make exceptions.”
“Mother Morrison,” Dove says slowly, “once told a fully grown Kytherian commando that if he didn’t file his cargo manifests in triplicate, she’d have his docking privileges revoked across six systems. She is not going to override age requirements for an eight-year-old who packed a jar of dirt.”
“It’s a soil sample! It has scientific value!”
“Tavia.” I kneel to her level. Her markings are flickering between frustration and the particular yellow-bright intensity that means she’s formulating a counterargument. “When you’re sixteen, Dove will take you on a run. A real one.”
“Sixteen is eight entire years away!”
“During which you will learn navigation, emergency protocols, cargo management, and—”
“I already know cargo management! I managed the cargo when Dove-Mom first landed! I supervised!”
“You sat on a crate and ate a protein bar,” Pickles interjects.
“Supervisory eating!”
Dove kneels beside me. She takes Tavia’s hands—small, the tiny claw-tips retracted, trembling with the force of wanting something she can’t have yet.
“Here’s the deal, small person. I come back every time.
Every run, I come home. But out there isn’t safe enough for you yet—storms between systems, debris fields, stations that aren’t set up for kids.
When you’re old enough, I’ll teach you everything.
Navigation, docking procedures, how to talk your way past a customs official who’s having a bad day. ”
“What about a good day?”
“Those are harder. You’ll need the extra years.”
Tavia’s lip wobbles. She glances between us—father and Dove-Mom, united front, immovable—and employs her final weapon.
“Pickles. Tell them I should go.”
“I cannot in good conscience support a mission plan that rates two out of ten on preparedness,” Pickles says. “However, I will note that the small human’s enthusiasm for interstellar logistics is... commendable. And I look forward to training her myself when the time comes.”
“When I’m sixteen.”
“When you’re sixteen,” Pickles confirms. “At which point I will have had eight additional years to prepare a curriculum so thorough that no customs official, regardless of mood, will stand a chance.”
Tavia sighs with the full dramatic weight of a child denied the stars. She unpacks her rucksack, returns the soil sample to the lab, and pockets the stolen ration bars with a stealth that suggests this particular negotiation is far from over.
The colonist preview meeting runs the full four hours.
Dove commands it from the operations centre, and I watch her do it from the secondary console, where my official role is “technical advisor” and my actual function is trying not to broadcast mating displays on a live feed to four households.
She walks the Vasquez family through housing allocations.
Answers the O’kere’ke family’s questions about medical provisions.
Builds a recreational programme for the Nax’k children in real time when they mention their daughter has mobility limitations.
She is calm and authoritative and prepared for every question, and she runs the entire meeting without referencing a single note because she built every system from raw data and holds it all in her head.
The claiming bond pulses steadily through my markings—gold, warm, proprietary—and I do not conceal it.
“Your father is glowing,” the Vasquez matriarch tells Tavia, who has stationed herself beside the camera with her own data pad and the gravity of a junior attaché.
“He does that,” Tavia says. “It’s a mating display. He can’t help it.”
“Tavia,” I say.
“It’s biology, Papa. You told me we don’t apologise for biology.”
I had said that. In a completely different context. About bioluminescence during thunderstorms. My daughter has weaponised it.
Dove catches my eye across the room. The corner of her mouth twitches. Her heart rate spikes—brief, hot, involuntary—and I feel it through the bond like a fingertip drawn down my sternum.
Four hours. I have four hours to sit in this chair and be professional while the woman I claimed wears my scent and my shirt and my bite mark and runs a community I built but she brought to life.
The ridges stir. I shift in my seat.
It is going to be a very long meeting.
Evening arrives with the rhythms we’ve built—routines that feel less like structure and more like gravity. Something we orbit rather than enforce.
Tavia helps Dove cook. I handle protein preparation because my temperature regulation allows me to test cooking surfaces by touch, which Dove calls “unfairly attractive” and Tavia calls “useful but please stop staring at Dove-Mom while you do it, Papa, you’ll burn something.”
The kitchen fills with steam and laughter and the scent of food that shouldn’t work with station rations but does because Dove treats cooking the way she treats everything—as a problem to be solved with creativity and force of will.