CHAPTER FIFTEEN | Dalk
Perhaps I’d taken a worse blow to the head during combat than I’d realized. Because I thought that I’d just hallucinated Fiona jumping up and saying that she would tend to my wounds. There she still stood, not-real-Fiona, up out of her seat and staring at me with very red cheeks.
Only, if it was a delusion, then it was a delusion shared by more than one man, because Gahn Thaleo turned to me and said, “As champion of this round, you are the one who gets to choose who cleans and heals your wounds. I suppose one of the new women could refuse to go with you, but either way-” he gestured his tail towards Fiona “-it does not have to be her.”
“Yes it does,” I said, my heart beating so fast there was a good chance it would push all my blood out of my body at this rate. “It has to be her.”
“Very well,” Gahn Thaleo said, and he said it rather quickly, as if wanting to agree with me before I changed my mind. Perhaps before I decided to choose Nasrin as my attendant instead of Fiona. Not that I would. But as his sight stars once again went to Nasrin, I was sure that was the direction his thoughts had gone.
I stood motionless, still holding my ruined scrap of a loincloth in front of myself. It was too shredded to tie up again but it also did not seem right to stand in front of all these Deep Sky people and their children without some sort of covering.
Zaria handed Fiona something. It looked like a jar of Vrika’s blood and a pile of clean squares of hide. Then Zaria pointed further down the valley, past a ledge of shimmering blue stone. Fiona moved her head up and down, bundled her jar and hides into the crook of one arm, then raised the other in my direction, flapping her hand in an obvious come here sort of gesture.
Like someone had fastened a cord to my spine and tugged it forward through my guts, my body jerked into motion, following her. She hurried on her flat little feet, almost as if trying to keep ahead of me a few paces as I advanced on her from behind. It did not take long, even in my injured state, to catch up to her. I may have been bloodied but my legs worked just fine.
“Zaria said that there’s a special little clearing over here with a cool spring where the champion goes to have a ceremonial bath and get his wounds cleaned,” she said, her voice slightly squeaky. “I figured you wouldn’t be interested in the bath part, though.”
“Correct,” I grunted. I knew the general direction we were walking. I’d flown this way on the back of the braxilk in the race, but I hadn’t had much of a chance to look down at the landscape during the flight. I’d been too focused on not falling off the cursed thing, watching for signs that it would simply heave me off its back mid-flight. So when Fiona gasped and said, “Oh, wow, this must be it!” and stopped walking, it was not in a place I recognized.
But she was right – this had to be it. If ever a Deep Sky person could have conceived of somewhere for a ceremonial bath, this would have been it, because there was so much foul water flowing through the place it was practically unavoidable.
The clearing was small, largely protected by close walls of mountain stone, much of the area cast into shade. At least the shade I could appreciate, because that would be good for Fiona, and her vulnerable skin would not burn while she tried to heal mine. There was not much stone to sit or walk upon – just enough for two people – and most of the space was dominated by a large, clear pool of cold water. The water was not still. It bubbled and frothed as more of the stuff rolled down the side of one of the mountains in a silvery river, agitating its surface. That side of the clearing, the one with the water rolling down the mountain, was cast in sunlight, and wherever the water crashed into rock or the pool, it misted upwards and turned multi-coloured, shimmering and bright.
All in all, a rather ugly scene.
But there was one beautiful thing in it, and she was walking towards the water with a look of wonder on her human face. She put down her jar and her hides in the shade and pushed back her hood.
“That’s a gorgeous waterfall,” she said, her eyes on the water.
“Is that what it is called?”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess so. That’s what we call them on Earth so I just put the Sea Sand words water and fall together. You don’t have a word for it?”
“There are no waterfalls in the Sea Sands. There are the heated springs you new women seem so fond of, but nothing like this.” I flicked my claws distastefully at the display, feeling dry, sticky blood cracking along my knuckles as I stretched them.
“Alright. Well. Enough admiring the sights. Time to get to work.” Fiona pulled at the tab on her cloak at the base of her throat, peeling the garment away from her body and folding it upon the stone.
“Here,” she said. “You can sit there.”
“I’m not going to sit on your cloak,” I told her, shocked that she’d even suggest such a thing. “I’ll get it filthy.”
“You’re injured! I’m not just going to make you sit on the hard stone!”
I looked at her, looked at her cloak, and then very pointedly sat down on the bare stone beside it.
“Use it yourself,” I told her, still awkwardly holding my loincloth in front of myself. “You’ll need a cushion for your knees.” I leaned back against a jagged incline of glinting stone behind me, watching with slightly confused amusement when she nearly jumped out of her own hide in response.
“Don’t do that!” she gasped. “Your back is all torn up! Don’t go leaning it up against random-ass rocks!”
“Why not? Just start with the wounds at my front,” I suggested. The wounds on my back were pulsing something fierce, but that wasn’t enough to detract from the fact that it actually felt rather good to sit down and lean back. I let go of my loincloth, letting it drape over my cock, then placed my hands behind my head, stretching my legs out in front.
I hadn’t felt any fatigue during the combat round, but now that my fighting instincts had died down, my body was weary. It was not an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was one I savoured. That buzzing sort of heaviness in the limbs. I’d often thought, while feeling this way after a good hunt or a fight, that the perfect accompaniment to such a sensation would be a soft female curled against me in the quiet.
And here one was.
Though she was not quietly curled against me. No, she was pacing back and forth, pointing and gesticulating, admonishing me about wound care and infections and haven’t I ever heard of a little thing called sepsis? Which, no, I had not heard of that, but I did not interrupt her tirade to tell her so.
She finished speaking and frowned fiercely at me, at least as fiercely as a face as rounded and sweet as hers could manage. When it became clear that I had no plans to remove my back from the stone, at least, not yet, she sighed and got down on her knees on top of her folded cloak beside me, snatching at the jar and fiddling with the dozen or so squares of hide.
She still wore that pokey little frown, and I wondered why she’d volunteered to do this at all if it seemed to give her so much displeasure.
“Why are you here?”
Her head jerked up, her long brown hair shifting with the motion. She wore her hair in a way that I’d never seen before, with a fringe of it cut short and blunt above her slender eyebrows. If someone had tried to describe such a look to me, I would have scoffed at how absurd it sounded. Who would cut a chunk of their hair short above their eyes? What would be the purpose of such a thing? But somehow, she made it look nice. It framed her face and led my gaze down to her absorbing, dark sight stars in those milky pools of white.
“What?” she asked. “Like, on this planet? You don’t know the story?”
“I know it,” I growled. Oh, yes. I knew it. I knew how men had hurt the new women, dragged them out of their world and dumped them here to die. I hated those faceless cowards more than I’d ever hated anyone, even Gahn Thaleo. But whenever I thought about it, the most peculiar war of emotions erupted inside me.
Any male who took her, who hurt her, was a male to be destroyed.
But if those males had not done such a thing, then she wouldn’t be here now. With me.
“I mean, why did you volunteer to tend to me?” I clarified.
“Oh.” She seemed suddenly unable to meet my gaze. “Honestly... I don’t even know. I kind of did it without thinking.” A small smile touched her lips. “Well, maybe it’s only fair. You cleaned my wound this morning, after all.”
Cleaned her wound. Oh, yes, I’d done a good and thorough job of that. Licked my tongues nearly all the way up to her cunt in the process.
“But I’m not going to lick you,” she said, her voice firm, but the smile still there.
I grunted noncommittally, trying (and rather unfortunately failing) to ignore the stranglehold of desire the thought of Fiona running her wet, pink tongue all over my body had.
I never thought I would live to see a day when I regretted the fact I had no wound upon my cock.
Gut me like a dakrival. Now I was imagining her tongue on my cock. It thickened hopefully beneath my shredded loincloth, and my muscles went taut in response.
Fiona’s smile vanished instantly.
“What is it? Does something hurt? Like, more than before?” she asked, peering at the deepest wounds on my chest. “Shit. I shouldn’t be sitting around here just chatting to you! Let’s get these wounds healed then we’ll clean you up.”
With her tongue...
My cock twitched.
She really needed to stop talking about cleaning me.
“Now, I’m no healer,” she said as she dumped Vrika’s blood onto a clean square of hide. “I know some super basic first aid stuff. And I know about tattoo aftercare. But that’s about it. So if I’m doing something wrong, you have to let me know.” She paused, then shook her head. “Who am I kidding? Of course you’ll let me know.”
The words themselves were innocuous enough, but something in her tone that I could not quite identify bothered me.
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean, if you’re willing to tell me how stupid the placement of my ears is, something I can’t even help or control, then no doubt you’ll let me know if I’m not dealing with your wounds correctly.”
She began to dab the Vrika’s blood across my chest.
“I do not believe I used the word stupid,” I said, thinking back on the earlier conversation.
“Close enough,” she said.
“You certainly cannot control the placement of your ears, this is true,” I conceded, “but you can control whether you use them to your best advantage or not. I see you have not taken my advice to braid your hair, or to at least tuck it behind your ears.”
She heaved a sigh, putting down her healing supplies to shove the silky brown strands back.
“There!” she said with false cheer. “All the better to hear your criticism with.”
“You... are angry,” I said, observing the emotion in her but utterly mystified as to its origin.
She sighed again, but it was gentler this time. She resumed her attention to my chest, and my skin prickled in response, tendrils of sensation shooting down to my groin.
“No. I mean yes, but no. I’m just being weirdly sensitive. And the thing is, I don’t even think I’d be mad if any other alien guy had said the same thing. Like, yeah, no duh, a lot of our anatomy isn’t as primo as yours. Ears, eyes, strength, whatever. There’s no arguing with that fact. I just...”
She fell silent for a long moment, focused on spreading Vrika’s blood over my chest. My shallow wounds were already closing up, but now the pain was replaced by maddening sensitivity as her gentle touch soothed and smoothed.
“You just what?” I rasped, needing to focus on something, anything, besides her touch on my ragged skin and the rapid hardening of my cock.
She pressed her lips into a thin line, like she was physically trying to hold her next words back. But then, either her strength failed or she just gave up, because the words flew out of her mouth anyway.
“Do you like me?”
She looked suddenly younger, plaintive and uncertain and maybe even embarrassed. Seeing her like that awakened some agonizingly tender instinct inside me. Primal and protective. I wanted to gather her up in my arms, clutch her close, and hiss at anyone who dared come near. I wanted to braid her hair for her, to make sure those little ears were as unhindered as possible so that she could be just a little safer in this world. And I wanted to tell her that she would always be safe in this world, so long as I was in it.
I wanted so much. And I didn’t want any of it as much as I wanted her.
I wanted her in the way a male wanted his mate. Wanted her inked skin and her pink tongue and the welcoming squeeze of her cunt. Her gasping nights and her quiet mornings. Her smiles and her sighs and her arms around me in a gesture that meant haven, that meant home.
Home. So far from the lands of my birth and in the embrace of one not even from this world.
Did I like her?
How in the great span of the Sea Sands was a man meant to answer a question like that?
Like. The word was bloodless. Toothless. Safe.
And nowhere near the truth.
“Why do you ask?” I hedged.
“I’m just being sensitive,” she said again. She was finished with my chest now, and she tapped on my shoulder for me to lean forwards. I took my hands out from behind my head, hinging at the hips as she went on. “It just seems like you disapprove of everything I do, and I just... I think you’re a really cool guy and I... Did somebody bite you?”
I looked down at my shoulder and made a gruff sound in the affirmative.
“Oh wow,” she said softly. “I noticed this wound earlier but I wasn’t sure.”
“I can thank Oxriel for that,” I told her, remembering that moment of our fight when his mouth, usually so prone to inane grins, suddenly latched onto my shoulder with the force of a zeelk’s claws. “Or Ox, as you seem so fond of calling him.”
I could not keep the malice from my voice, and she seized on it.
“See! That’s what I’m talking about! You’re so freaking grumpy. You even get annoyed at me for giving Oxriel a nickname.”
She swiped a Vrika’s-blood-soaked cloth over the bite marks, and the sting there faded. She got to work on my back, and maybe being unable to see my face emboldened her, because she spoke quickly now, without hesitation.
“If you don’t like me just let a girl know, alright? It’s OK. I mean, it’s not, but it’s fine. Sort of. At least knowing would be better than this, because I’m honestly worried that you’re about to call HR on my ass. OK. You’re not going to get that reference. But-”
“Fiona-”
“-but it’s just like at New Year’s Eve when I threw myself at you and kissed you. And I didn’t even get consent first! I just fucking grabbed you and snogged you like a creeper-”
“Fiona-”
“-when you obviously didn’t even want it and now things are so weird and I just need to know if-”
“Fiona!”
It took me seizing upon her shoulders and physically dragging her around to my front, plopping her down between my legs, before she finally stopped talking. I grasped her jaw firmly with one hand and bent until we were eye-to-eye.
“Do not ever,” I bit out with quiet ferocity, “tell a Sea Sand male what it is he does or does not want.”
I held her there for a moment, making sure she was not about to explode into another bout of utter nonsense, before I released her jaw and spoke.
“You were the one,” I reminded her, “that said the kiss would never happen again. You made that choice and did not even ask my opinion on the matter.”
“Because your opinion seemed so obvious,” she said, though she sounded unsure, her skin puckering between her brows. “I mean... you didn’t...”
“I didn’t what?” I snapped. “What should I have done? You put your mouth on mine and then you fled, never saying another word about it except to tell me it would never happen again. Like it meant nothing to you. Meanwhile I have thought of little else since that night.”
“You... You’ve thought... of little else?” Her slender throat constricted as she swallowed, and I fought to urge to palm that place, feel the muscles work and contract beneath my touch. “Were they good thoughts?” she squeaked. “Or bad ones?”
“Look at me now,” I hissed. “Look at me and tell me what you think the answer to that question is.”
At first, she did not seem to understand what I meant. She merely scrutinized my face, squinting with concentration. It wasn’t until – my nerves frayed to their barest bleeding edges, impatience biting at me like a beast – I whipped my ripped loincloth away from myself that she finally looked down.
“Oh.”
It was barely a word. More a fleeting exhalation of sound, dissipating the moment it met air.
Having her so close, smelling her, feeling her gaze on my groin like a physical touch, I grew to full hardness. Her face was streaked with redness, her eyes huge.
“So,” she said somewhat shakily, “you do like me? At least, that part of you does.”
She flapped a hand towards my cock, and even the lightness of air stirring over the engorged organ was agony.
“It is more than that part,” I said, my chest hitching.
And it was more than simple like.
I liked hunting. I liked meat. I liked... well, not much else, to be honest.
Fiona had become so far elevated above the concept of mere like that I was no longer sure there was a word for what I felt. Or if there was, it was one I had never used before.
“So you... Erm... Should I... Do you want...”
I did not think I had ever heard so many half-chewed thoughts come out of a mouth in my entire life.
“What do you want?” I said, cutting her off. She sat back on her haunches, blinked her large eyes with those deep and shadowy sight stars, and went red as an axrekal berry.
“I want to kiss you again. And I want to touch you,” she said on a whisper, like it was some hateful confession instead of words I had quite literally dreamed of hearing from her.
“Then do it.”
She advanced maddeningly slowly on her knees towards me, laying her hands on my chest. My heart beat like a mad thing, so feral for her I wondered if she’d be able to hear it beneath the bone and the muscle and the hide.
“Oh! Your poor mouth!” she said when her face was within a claw’s breadth of mine. “I forgot to put the Vrika’s blood on your lip.”
“It is fine,” I growled, my hands going instinctively to her waist to hold her there. A desperate part of me worried that if I let her get distracted, if I let her turn away now, then she would never come back.
“It’s not,” she retorted. “Human mouths are gross. I’m not going to give you all my jurmz when you’ve got an open wound in there!”
I did not know what jurmz were, but if they were hers then I would gladly take them. Maybe it was some mysterious part of human mating or reproduction. I’d always assumed that human women and Sea Sand males mated the same way Sea Sand people did, not that I had any direct personal experience with even that. But I knew enough of mating’s mechanics to know a man gave a woman seed.
Maybe a human had to give her male some jurmz. Like an exchange...
“You would not give me your jurmz?” I asked, feeling oddly bruised by this. But it was always easier to push anger outwards than to acknowledge hurt turned inwards, so my voice hardened and I gruffly snapped, “Why not? I want them. Give them to me.”
“And give you some infection? No thanks!” she said, half-laughing half-startled by my vehemence.
Well, I knew the word infection, at least.
“A female can give a male an infection just from mating?” I asked uncertainly. I wondered how high the fever might get. I’d endure it for her, certainly. Every day of my life if I had to. I just needed to know what was coming so that I could be prepared. I could not remember ever seeing a mated male fall ill after rutting his new woman, though...
“I mean... Technically, actually, yes,” Fiona said, looking thoughtful. “There are sexually transmitted infections on Earth. I don’t have any!” she said quickly. “I was pretty good about getting tested regularly. Plus, the guys who brought us here were nothing if not thorough. Checked all our medical records and stuff before they took us.”
“Then what is the problem?” I said. “Give me your jurmz and stop fretting about it.”
She smiled. A small expression, the tiniest tug of her pink lips upwards. It tugged something deep inside me in response, unspooling warmth.
“Here,” she said, “I have an idea.”
She stretched to the side – I would not release her waist to let her go very far – and grabbed the jar of Vrika’s blood. She dipped her fingers inside, pulled them out slick and glowing, and then rubbed the Vrika’s blood onto her mouth.
Seeing her lips so wet like that was astoundingly erotic. I stared, my whole body taut like the bowstring I’d snapped this morning.
She returned her hands to me, on my shoulders this time.
“Open your mouth,” she breathed. I did so instantly, like her words had some sort of central command over my body.
And then Fiona kissed me.
She moved slowly at first. Gingerly. I realized that she was focusing on my split lip, transferring the Vrika’s blood from her mouth to mine with tiny little swiping movements. The pressure was exquisite in its softness, especially against the raw places in my mouth. My breathing felt stuttered and strange, so distorted from its usual rhythm that I wondered for one helpless, heady moment if I were dying.
But I did not think a dying man could be as hard as I was. My cock strained and jerked, hot and so very hard with need.
All too soon, she stopped.
I growled, wordlessly threatening to drag her back to me as she leaned back and observed me.
“I just want to make sure the Vrika’s blood did its job,” she panted. She placed her thumb on the outside of my lower lip and then dragged it down, flipping my lip so she could see the inside.
“Well?” I asked, though it didn’t really sound like the actual word at all with my lip pulled all inside-out as it was. But Fiona seemed to have understood my impatiently-garbled question, because she did that up-and-down thing with her head, smiled, and moved her hands to my jaw.
“Better,” she said.
Thank the sands.
Both times Fiona had kissed me, at New Year’s Eve and now, she had been the one to do it while I’d stayed there frozen. But not this time. This time, I dragged her hard against me, relishing her little feminine gasp as her chest collided with mine. And then I swallowed that gasp with my mouth.
This was not like our first closed-mouth kiss. Instantly, Fiona parted her lips. I tasted her wetness and nearly climaxed on the spot, cock pounding between her cunt and my belly as her legs straddled my lap.
Instinct drove my tongues into her, swiping and sliding through that cavern of hot, silken flesh. Her tongue was smooth, small against my three, and easily pinned as I drove further inwards.
She made a choking sound and pulled away.
“Holy fuck, those tongues are long,” she gasped. “I mean, I knew they were but seeing and feeling is very different.”
“I did something wrong,” I surmised out loud, my sight stars scanning her face. “Tell me what it was and I will fix it.”
“Wow,” she said, slender brown brows rising almost past the blunt fringe of her hair on her forehead. “I don’t think I’ve ever been with a guy who actually asked for constructive criticism for kissing.”
“Well, now you’ve met me.”
In fairness, I never usually asked for constructive criticism, either. I typically learned things by charging ahead and failing, often very painfully. It was something my Uncle Taraken had chided me for in my youth. Instead of heeding his warnings about the power of a dakrival’s kick even as it lay dying, for example, I had to let the half-dead thing split my shoulder open when I tried to gut it before I learned some patience.
But I would not fail. Not in this. Not with her.
I did not know how many chances I would get. I had to make every single one count.
Fiona’s eyes took on a hooded, glazed quality that made my cock respond with a hot throb.
“OK,” she murmured. “A little more slowly. Like this.”
Her lips came to mine with gentle pressure, her tongue sliding into my mouth with an exploratory slowness that made my tail and cock spasm in unison. I fought the urge to shove the full lengths of my tongues into her mouth again, even though I wanted to rather badly. If she’d let me, I’d lick them all the way to the back of her throat, just to see what she tasted like there. But based on the choking sound she’d made before, and the way she’d kicked me this morning when surprised, I had a feeling that there was a very good chance I could get one or maybe even all three of my tongues bitten right off.
Well, maybe not all the way off. She did have those laughably blunt little teeth, after all.
I could feel those smooth teeth now, nipping against my newly healed lower lip. I let my tongues unfurl much more slowly this time, dipping them into the sweetness of her. She moaned into my mouth, her slender back arching against my chest. Arousal erupted inside me, answered by the spine-snapping, life-altering feeling of her fingers closing in a silken net around the weeping tip of my cock.
“My God. You’re so hard,” she intoned against my mouth. Her thighs squeezed around me, her hips rocking gently, grinding her cunt through her clothing against the underside of my shaft while she stroked and squeezed the tip.
“Is that... bad?” I managed to heave out. I groaned, long and low, as she rocked harder against me.
“Definitely not!”
I could not ask her anything else after that because she worked her hips in a suddenly new, sensual undulation against me that exploded all thought out of my head. And not just the thoughts themselves, but the ability to think as well. There was nothing but desire left inside me, no mental sharpness I could call upon. There was only her body under my claws, her rapidly rising moans, her fingers stroking up and down my shaft and swirling wetness around the head.
And her high, mewled words, shocking through my system.
“Dalk. I’m going to come.”