Chapter 26 #3
But right now? Holding back felt like a waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
His eyes widened as I threw my arms around his neck and yanked him toward me. He stumbled, caught himself with a hand on the wall, and started to speak, but I didn’t let him. I lifted onto my toes and pressed my mouth against his.
This time, there was nothing tentative about it.
No slow burn. No teasing.
Just a woman who’d been crushing on the hot bartender for a year and now had him up against her in a stairwell.
I thought he’d resist, but he didn’t. He responded immediately, his fingers tangling in my braid, a raw groan catching in his throat and tumbling past my lips.
That sound lit me up like a supernova.
I touched his jaw, fingertips scraping over stubble then gliding lower, down his chest. Beneath his open shirt, he was all warm skin and hard, twitching muscle. Synth-skin or not, he felt real.
His soft exhale wasn’t quite steady as his hand slid deeper into my hair, tipping my head back. My belly flipped as his tongue tangled with mine. His heart pounded against my palm, matching the frenzied cadence of mine.
In a night that’d been filled with impossibilities and nothing short of the unbelievable, he felt real.
And I very much needed something real.
Like he agreed, he sank deeper, kissed me harder. An embarrassingly needy whimper slipped out of me, one I hoped he translated correctly as: yes, more of that.
He appeared to be fluent in horny Raven because, with a muffled curse, he dropped the arm braced above my head and bent, gripping beneath my thigh. The world lurched as he lifted me, and my back hit the wall with a soft thump.
It shocked me enough, I gasped into his mouth.
He’d just…hoisted me like I weighed nothing. All without breaking the kiss. Somehow, I didn’t combust, but I did moan, because he settled my legs around him…and he’d just answered a few very pressing questions.
It sure felt like his physiology was compatible. Very compatible, if that friction told me anything. And it was telling me all sorts of things. Mainly that we were wearing way too much clothing.
I clamped my knees tighter around him. Combustion was now a very real possibility.
Sky’s hand flexed on my thigh, and he broke the kiss, just long enough I caught the faint gleam of his heavy-lidded eyes, felt the rush of his breath on my cheek, and then he claimed my mouth again.
His hips gave the tiniest roll, pressing me harder into the wall, and my thighs trembled around him at the answering burst of sensation.
Perfect. He felt perfect, tasted perfect, and this was so incredibly reckless. Such a terrible idea. Such a wonderful, terrible idea.
I didn’t want it to end.
My fingers found his hair—just as silky as I’d thought it’d be—and my marked palm skated across his bare torso. His skin pebbled beneath my hand.
Speaking of hands, his were wandering. The one on my thigh had found my hip, and the other drifted down my side, toying with my shirt’s hem. I gave him an enthusiastic wiggle, rubbing against the hardness trapped between us.
“Raven,” he choked out against my lips. That sent a pulse straight through me, and it settled between my legs.
I knew then I wasn’t going to stop this. I couldn’t. I was all in. Alien or not, I didn’t care. It was still Sky.
And I was on fire. He was on fire, too. We were burning.
I could feel it in my blood.
I could feel it buzzing—
Wait, buzzing—?
My breath hitched, and I jerked back. My hand rested on his stomach, and my palm…
Holy shit—my hand was glowing again. White light, brilliant and unmistakable, spilled from me and shimmered across his skin.
His silver, alien skin.
My lips parted in shock. Under my fingertips, the disguise had slipped. Vanished. His abs glittered like diamond-studded metal.
It’d happened again.
Sky inhaled sharply, breathing it out as an oath that sounded just as stunned as I felt. But I couldn’t look up yet to see his expression. I could only gape at the sight in front of me.
His stomach was as warm and hard as ever beneath my hand—but it felt different now, subtly textured. Up close, his Pladian skin was even more intricately detailed, beautiful in a frightening, impossible way. Like layers of stardust painted over all that muscle.
I was touching alien skin.
Like I was in a dream, I finally lifted my spinning head.
Most of him still looked like human Sky…except for his eyes. The whites had darkened to black, just like they had behind Oasis. Incandescent cerulean swirled in place of his irises, and his lips—still kiss-swollen—parted in what looked like wonder.
That was enough to snap me out of it.
Realizing he still had me pinned, I squirmed. He got the message and let go. I slid back down to my feet and collapsed against the wall behind me, gawking between my still-glowing hand and Sky’s alien parts.
“What…?” I whispered, throat drying out. I fisted my hand around the fierce glow.
Sky lurched back a step, widening the gap between us. “I don’t understand.” He looked at me, then down at himself. “How does this keep happening?”
I assumed it was rhetorical because hell if I knew. We both stared as the silver dissolved, his skin becoming tan and whole and…human once more. His abs flexed when he craned his neck to watch his own stomach smooth back out.
It was like it hadn’t happened. Well, almost.
Orange light leaked from the cracks between my fingers. The light flickered rapidly, though, dimming like a dying flashlight. Within the span of one heartbeat and another, gloomy shadows swallowed the stairwell again. And us.
The reality of the entire situation crashed back. I slapped my unmarked hand over my mouth.
Holy shit. I’d been dry-humping an alien in my stairwell.
Somehow, that seemed like the least of my worries. Flattening myself against the wall, I tried to process the glowing hand, the silver skin. But that kiss...
Could it be physical contact that caused the marks to glow? My own raging hormones? Because they were raging, all right. Still. Despite the fact he’d gone partial Pladian on me.
Or maybe it was his hormones?
He’d kissed me. I’d kissed him. We’d kissed.
Sky spoke then, and I jerked, wrenching my gaze up from the hand I’d just had pressed to his silver abdominals.
I’d just touched alien skin. After kissing an alien.
“It has to be the halix’s latent energy somehow affecting the synth-skin,” Sky muttered, running a hand down his torso, as if checking to make sure everything was back to normal. In a daze, I followed the movement a little too closely. “It only happens when you touch me.”
That brought my eyes back to his, and I nearly let out an incredulous laugh. Oh, I’d been doing a lot more than just touching him.
I’d wanted to keep going, too.
I crushed the back of my hand to my mouth, the other pulling my sweater back into place and tugging it closed. My lips still tingled. His taste lingered on my tongue.
A clearly confused, traitorous bolt of need shot through me again.
He was an alien. And yet…
When I didn’t say anything, he looked up. His strange eyes hadn’t returned to normal. They glittered in the dim light, eerie and jeweled.
“Are you all right?” he asked softly.
I lowered my hand. I couldn’t look away from that mesmerizing blue. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Has this,” I motioned to his exposed torso, “happened before?”
“Just at Oasis, but—”
“No,” I cut in, a blush crawling its way up my neck. “I mean, like before, when you were—if you…I mean…” I licked my lips and tried for a casual shrug. “I mean…have you…with humans?”
Sky blinked once, mouth parted. My blush reached thermonuclear levels, and I quickly held up a hand, wincing. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.”
What kind of a question was that? I studied my stocking feet and the tile floor beneath them. I blamed the exhaustion. Words just kept falling out.
Silence stretched. Long enough, I reluctantly raised my head. The blackness had bled from Sky’s eyes. His star-flecked indigo gaze was trained on me, his face unreadable.
“I’ve been on this planet for over a decade,” he said quietly.
“I’ve spent that time learning what it means to be human and…
” He paused, glancing up at the stairs. Looking away, like I wasn’t the only one uncomfortable.
“I’ve, uh, had the full experience. I’ve…
” He exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I’ve slept with humans in this form. And no,” he indicated his abdomen, “that’s never happened before.
” His eyes pinged to mine, then away again.
“I think it’s safe to say it’s related to the markings, Rae. The halix’s energy.”
Safe to say. Yeah. I pursed my lips and eyed the shapes on my palm to distract myself from my raging blush.
Well, that answered another question, too. That hadn’t been wishful thinking before. Things worked the same. With this version of him, anyway.
Which I’d assumed because I’d felt his hard—
I squeezed my eyes shut. I did not need to be thinking about hard anythings right now. That was decidedly not appropriate with, you know, a glowing crisis on our hands.
The strange, sinking jealousy wasn’t either. I’d had sex before, too. Also with humans.
He was an alien, sure, but it made sense they had…needs. It was a biological imperative in most species to procreate. Sky having mating urges checked out.
Unfortunately, the thought of Sky doing any mating threatened to make my insides liquify again. Especially because, for an alien, he sure had kissing down. Was that how Pladians did it, too? Or had he just adapted to life on Earth that well—
My pent-up breath spilled out in a rush, and I made myself focus on Sky’s voice instead.
“I’m willing to bet you just emitted a signal again, and I don’t know why this keeps happening,” he was saying when I tuned back in.
It took me a second to realize he wasn’t talking about the kissing.
He burrowed both hands through his messy hair and frowned at me, oblivious to my private analysis of his race’s mating habits.
“I don’t know what’s triggering this.” He jerked his chin at my hand before meeting my eyes again, expression grave.
“But I think we need to find out, because whatever the reason, it puts you in danger.”
Oh, I was in danger, all right.
For more reasons than I could count.
There were alien robots chasing me. My hand was doing a very weird glowy thing.
And there was a very confusing, half-naked alien in my stairwell.
Who, for some insane reason, I still very much wanted to kiss some more.
I was in serious danger, but especially when it came to the latter.