21. Taylor #2
He took his time. The urgency shifted to something slower, more thorough, as if the first time had been the flood and this time was the deep current underneath.
His mouth everywhere. His hands mapping me with a precision that was half warrior, half worshipper.
The healing warmth of his markings against the newest bruises and scrapes — the ones two more days of hard trail had added after he'd repaired the rest — leaving comfort in their wake.
When he finally entered me, slow and deep, I felt the bond sing like a struck bell and I made a sound that I would have been embarrassed about if I'd had any capacity left for embarrassment.
I did not. I was beyond embarrassment, beyond thought, in a place where the only thing that existed was his body and mine and the light between us.
Later — I'd lost track of time in a way that had nothing to do with alien clocks — I pushed him onto his back and took my turn.
He went. This enormous alien warrior who could probably bench-press the escape pod let me push him down into the mattress and lay there looking up at me like something the universe had issued him without instructions.
I took my time. I traced the markings on his chest with my mouth and learned which ones made him gasp, which ones made him say my name in that wrecked, harmonic-heavy voice, and which one — low on his hip, where the pattern spiraled — made every muscle in his body lock and the light in his skin stutter like a power surge.
"Taylor." A warning. A plea. He was hard and heavy in my hand, radiating that impossible internal heat, and I stroked his cock slowly and watched his face while the feedback through the bond doubled and redoubled until neither of us could tell whose want was whose.
"I need—" he started.
"I know exactly what you need. Bond, remember?"
I sank down onto him and we both made sounds that the neighbors — if this outpost had neighbors — were going to remember.
Riding him was a revelation: that internal ridging at an entirely new angle, the deep pulse of him answering every roll of my hips, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to almost bruise and gentling, every single time, at the last second.
He watched me the whole way through. Markings blazing, pupils blown, reverent and ruined.
When I came it took him by surprise — I felt his awe crash through the bond like weather — and then he flipped us with that terrifying, effortless strength and finished what I'd started, deep and relentless, my name on his lips when he followed me over.
After, we lay tangled in sheets that were probably meant for a species with different limbs. He was on his back. I was sprawled across his chest, tracing the marking that ran along his sternum. His hand was in my hair, slow and rhythmic.
"Tell me about your life," I said. "Not the mission stuff. Your actual life."
He was quiet for a moment, and the bond went warm in the startled way it did when he had not been asked something before.
"I trained for military service from age twelve. It is standard for Valorian youth. My aptitude was for solo operations: retrieval, extraction, reconnaissance. I was commissioned to the Authority at twenty-two. I have been working alone since."
"Alone."
"Retrieval specialists operate independently. It is considered optimal for the work."
"But you like it? Being alone?"
Another pause. Longer. "I was efficient alone. Whether I liked it is a question I never considered relevant."
"That's not the same as liking it."
He looked down at me. His violet eyes were soft in the room's dim light. "No. It is not."
I traced the marking over his heart. "Tell me about Valorian food. Is it all compressed misery rectangles?"
"The emergency rations are not representative." Almost defensive. "Valorian cuisine is complex and varied. There is a dish called vel'thara — roasted grain with fermented fruit reduction and—"
"Does your planet have anything hot to drink? Like a warm beverage? In the morning?"
"We have kel'shor. A stimulant brewed from the bark of the—"
"Is it bitter?"
"Moderately."
"Is it hot?"
"It is served at high temperature, yes."
"Kel." I propped myself up on his chest. "Your planet has alien coffee?"
"I would not equate—"
"YOUR PLANET HAS ALIEN COFFEE."
His expression was somewhere between alarmed and amused. "The chemical composition is likely quite different from—"
"I don't care. I need you to understand that you just became thirty percent more attractive. And you were already at an unreasonable level."
He stared at me. Then he laughed. A real laugh, quiet and low and startled out of him. Through the bond: joy. Pure, unguarded joy that he didn't know what to do with.
I kissed him because he was laughing and because the joy in the bond was infectious and because I was in love with him. I was in love with a glowing alien warrior who could feel my emotions and had alien coffee on his planet and laughed like someone who didn't get enough practice at it.
I didn't say it yet. I held it close, this warm and terrifying certainty, and let the bond carry it for me.
But when he pulled me closer, when his arms tightened and his markings brightened around us, he felt it anyway.
I told him about Minnesota. About the winters — not because snow was new to him, but because he was appalled that humans voluntarily built cities where exposed skin could freeze — and the summers and the lakes and the way the light looked in October.
I told him about my mother again, on purpose this time, who called every Sunday and would find a way to blame this entire situation on my refusal to wear layers.
I told him about my tiny apartment and my student loans and the grant proposals that never got funded and the career that never quite launched.
"You are an archaeologist," he said. "A galactic archaeologist now, if you choose."
"If I choose."
"There is an entire galaxy of dead civilizations waiting to be studied. The Kethari are one of hundreds. Your expertise has value far beyond your planet, Taylor."
I stared at the ceiling. An alien ceiling. In an alien room. On an alien planet.
"That's... a lot."
"You do not have to decide now."
"I know." I rolled over, pressed my face into his chest. "But Kel.
I can't go back to Earth and pretend this didn't happen.
Even if they offered to send me back. Even without the memory wipe thing.
I can't unknow this. I can't unknow that there's a whole galaxy out there, and ruins to study, and alien coffee to drink, and—" I looked up at him. "And you."
His markings pulsed. Hope came through the bond, fierce and fragile.
"Ask me the question," I whispered. "The one you've been carrying since the plateau."
His breath caught. "How did you—"
"Bond, remember? I can feel you holding something. Something big. Something that scares you."
He was quiet for a long time. His hand on my back, his markings glowing, his heartbeat steady under my ear.
"Not tonight," he said softly. "Tonight I just want this."
I let him have it. Tonight. Tomorrow we'd face whatever was coming — the Authority, the protocols, the political storm of a Valorian bonding with a human. Tomorrow he'd ask the question and I'd answer it and the universe would rearrange itself around the choice.
But tonight, in a room above a grimy frontier outpost, clean and warm and held, I let myself just be happy.
It had been a while. It felt good.