19. Taylor
TAYLOR
The thing about kissing an alien is that your brain keeps trying to file it under "weird" but your body overrides that classification immediately.
Because there was nothing weird about how Kel kissed: hot and demanding, one hand cradling the back of my head like I was something precious he'd been given permission to finally hold.
His mouth was warm, warmer than a human's, and there was a faint vibration when he breathed that I felt against my lips.
A resonance thing, maybe. Or just a Valorian thing.
Either way, it did things to my nerve endings that made my brain shut down entirely.
At some point I got his shirt off, or he helped, or the resonance did it through sheer force of mutual impatience.
I was trying very hard to maintain some cool about that, but the markings.
God, the markings. They ran everywhere. Down his chest in sweeping geometric lines, across his ribs, over the planes of his stomach.
They glowed in response to my touch, chasing my fingers, and his skin was silver-gray and smooth and warm and I wanted to trace every single line with my mouth.
So I did.
He made a sound when my lips followed a marking from his collarbone toward his chest. Not the controlled, suppressed sounds he'd been making for days.
A real sound. Raw. His head tipped back and his hands gripped my waist and through the bond I felt what he was feeling — the intensity of my mouth on his markings, pleasure so acute it bordered on overwhelming.
"Still good?" I asked against his skin.
"Do not stop."
Well, when he put it that way.
I was nervous. I was going to be honest about that because I'm always honest, at least with myself, and this was — this was a lot.
He was an alien. A beautiful and glowing inhuman alien who also had very human-looking hands that were currently sliding under the hem of my destroyed t-shirt with a question in his touch.
"Yes," I said, and he pulled the shirt over my head.
I should have been self-conscious. I was filthy, despite the pool earlier. I had bug bites. I had scrapes and bruises. My bra was a structural disaster being held together by one good underwire and sheer determination. I hadn't shaved anything since Colombia.
He didn't seem to notice any of that. He was looking at me like I was the Kethari ruins — with wonder, and reverence, and an intensity that made my breath catch. His fingers traced along my shoulder, down my arm, over the scrape that was still healing.
His hand glowed. The marking on his palm warmed against the wound and I felt it — a gentle heat, a tingling, the faint sensation of something knitting together at a cellular level. The sting faded. The edges of the scrape smoothed.
"Oh," I breathed. "There it is."
His hand stilled immediately. "Pain?"
"No. The healing thing. I remember. Just — do that again."
He'd already told me on the trail — Tier 2, proximity healing, the bond encouraging cellular repair through direct contact. I knew the science. But knowing it and feeling it while his hands moved over my skin in firelight were two entirely different categories of experience.
He smiled. Not the ghost of one this time — a real one, small and brief and gone. And I filed it in the deepest part of my heart because it was the most beautiful thing his face had ever done.
He touched every scrape. Traced every bruise. His hands glowed against each one, warm and healing, and I sat there in the firelight being gently repaired by an alien warrior who was simultaneously looking at me like I was the answer to a question he'd spent his whole life asking.
"Your turn," I said, reaching for the shoulder wound I'd tended by the fire.
"Taylor, you don't have the ability to—"
"I know I can't glow-heal you. But I can touch you while you help it finish knitting."
He blinked. "That is not how it—"
I kissed the wound on his shoulder. Gently. His whole body shuddered and his markings flared in a quick, helpless cascade, and through the bond I felt a pulse of emotion so intense I nearly pulled back.
He didn't let me. His hand caught the back of my head, holding me there, and I pressed my lips to the healing skin and felt the resonance sing between us.
We got the rest of it off each other by firelight and moonlight and the light of his markings, which were doing their absolute best to illuminate the entire plateau.
It was fumbling and imperfect, the clasps on his greaves were confusing, I couldn't figure out the alien boot mechanism and he had to help, my bra required explanation ("It is a structural support garment for my chest." "Why does it need supporting?
" "Gravity, Kel. Human gravity."), and it was perfect.
Every clumsy awkward moment of it was perfect.
When I saw all of him for the first time, I went quiet.
Not from shock: well, partly from shock.
He was beautiful. The patterns on his skin continued below his waist, down his hips, along his thighs, and they were all glowing for me.
Silver-gray skin and lean, powerful muscle and lines of light like a constellation made flesh.
He was also — the anatomy situation. Compatible, yes. Clearly compatible. But with notable differences that my brain helpfully flagged as Interesting and my body flagged as Oh My God.
"That's..." I gestured vaguely. "Different. From human."
"Incompatible?" Something that might have been anxiety flickered through the bond.
"I didn't say that." I looked up at him. "I said different. Different is not bad. Different might be very, very good."
The anxiety vanished. Something darker and warmer replaced it.
"Lie down," he said, and his voice was a thing I felt in my spine.
I lay down on the thermal blanket he'd spread by the fire.
He followed me down and the full length of his body covered mine and every point of contact was a conversation between his markings and my skin.
He was warm, so warm, and everywhere his markings touched me I felt that gentle hum of resonance, like his body was singing to mine at a frequency below hearing.
He asked permission. For everything. His mouth on my neck, "May I?" My breathless yes. His hand sliding down my stomach, a pause, a question in his eyes. My hips lifting toward him in answer. His mouth moving lower — "Taylor, is this—" "If you stop I will kill you."
He did not stop.
His mouth was warmer than a human's, and the harmonic — the vibration that lived under his voice — lived in his lips and tongue too.
He used it. Deliberately. He worked me with the same focus he gave perimeter sweeps, thorough and unhurried, reading every gasp through the bond and adjusting in real time, and when the vibration deepened exactly where I needed it I came apart against his mouth with my fingers buried in his hair and his name breaking in half on its way out of me.
He didn't stop until my thighs stopped shaking.
Then he kissed the inside of my knee like a thank-you, which was so unfairly tender I almost came again on principle.
I was not quiet. This should surprise no one.
I am not a quiet person in any context and in this context I was spectacularly, gloriously loud.
Each gasp, each moan, each involuntary "oh god" translated through the resonance as pleasure-desire-more, and the feedback loop was devastating.
I felt good, which made him feel good, which made me feel better, which made him—
"Kel. Kel, if you don't... I need you to—"
He understood. He always understood. The resonance made sure of that.
When he settled between my thighs, he paused. Looked at me. The light on his skin was so bright I could see every detail of his face — the sharp cheekbones, the violet eyes gone almost black with dilated pupils, the expression of such focused, reverent want that my heart cracked open.
"I have you," he said.
"I know."
He entered me slowly and we both stopped breathing.
He was big — not comedy-big, not concerning-big, but big enough that slow was the only option, big enough that I felt every fraction of the stretch as my body worked to take him.
His arms trembled with the effort of staying still.
Through the bond I could feel what the stillness cost him, the leash he had himself on, and knowing that — feeling him hold back a want that size for my sake — undid me more than the stretch did.
Different. Yes. Different. My brain tried to catalog the specifics and then gave up because the specifics were — there was a subtle texture, a ridging that created friction in places human anatomy didn't account for, and a warmth that was more than body temperature, deeper, radiating from inside his biology into mine.
And when he was fully inside me, his body did something — a rhythmic pulse, involuntary, muscular, a slow clench-and-release that pressed against nerve endings I didn't know I had — and my entire nervous system went white.
"Oh my GOD."
"Is that—"
"Do not ask me if that's okay. That is so far beyond okay that okay needs to update its definition."
He moved. I moved with him. It was clumsy at first, two bodies learning each other, two rhythms trying to find a shared tempo.
But the resonance helped. He could feel what worked for me as it happened, adjust, respond.
And I was learning to read the bond from my end, the surge when I rolled my hips a certain way, the spike when I gripped his shoulders, the near-desperate pulse when I said his name.
"Kel."
His rhythm faltered. Light ran hard through every visible marking.
"Kel."
"You cannot keep saying my name like that and expect me to maintain—"
"Kel."
Whatever he'd been maintaining shattered.
He drove into me and the pace shifted from careful to urgent, and the feedback loop through the bond spiraled until I couldn't tell where my pleasure ended and his began, until the fire and the moons and the alien jungle disappeared and there was nothing but us — sweat and light and the rhythm of two bodies doing something that was apparently universal across species.
I was tangled with an alien on a wild, glowing planet, and it was the most spectacular impossible thing that had ever happened to me.
The thought was absurd enough to make me laugh.
He felt the laughter through the bond and his surprise shifted to delight and he laughed too — a short, startled sound, and through the bond I felt his own astonishment at it, how new laughing during sex was for him, and somehow that was what tipped me over the edge.
I came with his name in my mouth and his light in my eyes and his emotions flooding the bond — a cascade of pleasure-awe-belonging-mine that I felt in every cell.
He followed seconds later with a groan that vibrated through his chest into mine and markings that blazed so bright I saw it through my closed eyelids.
Aftermath.
The monitor band on my upper arm remained green and silent.
Kel checked it once, because of course he did, then rolled to his side, taking me with him, pulling me against his chest. His body's light dimmed to a soft, steady glow — post-orgasm bioluminescence, which was a phrase I had never expected to use and would now never forget.
I pressed my face into the crook of his neck. His skin was still warm. The marking along his jaw pulsed gently against my forehead.
"So," I said, muffled against his skin. "The biological life-bonding part is settled. What do we call the two people inside it?"
His arm tightened around me. His response reached me before he spoke: warmth and hope and careful vulnerability he was trying not to show.
"Where do you want to be?"
I pressed closer. Let the bond carry what I wasn't ready to say in words — the warmth, the wanting, the terrifying possibility that I had found my person on the wrong side of the galaxy.
"Ask me again when we're not running for our lives," I said. "I chose forever. I just want to name the rest of it when nobody is hunting us."
He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. His markings glowed steady against my skin.
The answer was already there. We both knew it. The bond made sure of that.
But some things you should get to say out loud, in your own time, with your own words. Not because your biology told you to.
We lay tangled together by the dying fire, the thermal blanket over us and his light spilling out around the edges, and I fell asleep feeling safe for the first time since Earth.