8. Waking
Waking
Xor
Forty-seven minutes.
I have been awake for forty-seven minutes.
She has been asleep for approximately two hours.
I have not moved, and the reason I have not moved is pressed against me from shoulder to ankle with her face in my throat and her fingers laced through mine and her hip fitted against the exact part of my anatomy that is least capable of clinical detachment right now.
We did not sleep for a long time. After the dust belt, after the silence, after the purr settled into something neither of us acknowledged and neither of us stopped — we lay in the dark and breathed and did not move and did not speak, and the awareness between us was alive, a presence with its own heat signature.
She fell asleep first. I know the exact moment — 0347, her breathing lengthened, her grip on my hand softened, and the tension in her spine dissolved into the boneless surrender of unconsciousness.
I have been awake since.
Forty-seven minutes ago, her body changed.
The sleeping architecture shifted from still to seeking — her hips beginning a slow, rhythmic press into me, and the sound she is making, soft and throaty and involuntary, vibrates against my throat where her mouth rests against the fuzz and each one lands like ordnance.
The friction. Through two layers of fabric, which is not enough, which is catastrophically not enough, because Xarthian anatomy is not subtle and the ridges are — she is pressed against the ridges, and she rolls against me in her sleep and the sensation travels the full length of my shaft to the base and the knot is thickening, and I cannot — I need her to stop moving. I need her to never stop moving.
My tail wrapped itself around her sometime in the first hour.
Hip to waist to the soft crease where her ribs narrow, the full spiral, gripping with a possessive strength my waking brain would never authorize.
I cannot unwrap without waking her and this is the excuse I am using, and I know it is an excuse, and I am using it anyway.
Her smell. Before she slept, it was the scent I have been cataloging since the cockpit — peppermint, wool, the warm base note of her skin.
Now, after hours of shared heat and the grinding that has been going on for nearly an hour, something has shifted.
The darker note has risen to the surface.
The one my Xarthian biology catalogues before my brain can intercept the data.
Not faint. Not subtle. The thick, sweet-dark evidence that her body has been responding to me while she sleeps — to the purr, to the pressure, to the anatomy she registered with clear-eyed certainty before she drifted off and chose to stay.
My nostrils flare. She is wet. I can smell it.
The knowledge rewrites my entire thermal regulation and my markings flood dark and my claws extend into the mattress and puncture fabric.
Retract. Extend. The bunk is dense with us by now — her want and my pheromone output, the compatible-mate signal that has been pouring off my skin for hours in the enclosed space.
The mattress will not survive this. I do not care about the mattress.
I cannot go back to the absence of her.
This is not a tactical assessment. I do not know what it is.
I have been lying still because the training says: hold position. Maintain cover. Do not alert the asset. The training has stopped being the reason.
I press my lips to the top of her head.
Not a reflex. Not the tail, not the arm, not the olfactory system making decisions before my brain can intercept the data.
Me. I choose this. Her hair is warm against my mouth, the specific warmth of a sleeping person, and she smells of peppermint and shared heat and something darker that my biology has been cataloguing since 0347 without my authorization.
I stay there. My mouth against her hair for three seconds, four, and the choice is the most deliberate thing I have done in thirty years of taking orders.
I pull back before she can feel it. The training, at least, is still useful for that.
She wakes the way she does everything. Without announcement.
Without drama. One breath she is asleep, the next her fingers tighten in mine — a single squeeze, deliberate — and the grinding stops, which means she was not conscious of it, which means her body has been chasing mine in her sleep and the evidence is on both of us.
Her breathing changes. Shorter. Shallower.
The pattern of a woman taking inventory — his arm across her ribs, his anatomy against her hip, the wet heat between her own thighs that she cannot hide from a Xarthian’s senses.
She knew last night. She lay against me and felt every ridge and chose to stay and now it is morning and the choosing is still here.
Neither of us moves.
“Good morning, lovey.”
Her voice is rough from sleep. Warm and low and scraped raw at the edges, and the sound of it vibrates against my throat where her mouth is close enough that I can feel the movement of her lips shaping the words.
My nostrils flare. Her scent has intensified since she woke — open now, conscious, undisguised — and it floods the back of my throat and my hips flex against her before I can lock them down.
A fraction of an inch. Enough that the ridges drag against the curve of her and her breath hitches.
She felt that. She liked that. The hitch was not alarm. It was the intake of a woman who has spent the night pressed against proof that I want her and has woken up wanting more.
“...Morning.”
A contraction. I used a contraction. Director Trell would note this as evidence of environmental contamination.
“You’re very warm.” She says it the way she says everything — plain, honest, her body pressing back against mine as though the sentence and the movement are the same communication in two languages.
“Xarthian body temperature runs —“
“I wasn’t complaining.”
Three words and her hips shift against me and the contact is specific and intentional and my markings burn hot from collar to jaw and the arm I have around her waist tightens, pulling her closer, and I did not authorize that, my arm made the decision and the result is her back flush against my chest and every ridge of me pressed hard against the curve of her body and the sound that escapes me is not language.
She stretches against me.
The full, unhurried length of her. Arms extending, spine arching, her body rolling against mine in a wave that starts at her shoulders and ends at her hips and I stop breathing because the friction travels every ridge and the knot throbs at the base and my claws punch through the mattress and the stretch lifts the hem of her shirt and my forearm is against bare skin.
Bare. Skin.
My arm against her stomach. 103 degrees meeting 98.
6, the thermal gradient a five-degree drop that my body interprets as fragile, careful, hold here.
The fuzz along my forearm presses against the soft plane below her navel and she makes a sound — quiet, involuntary, her stomach muscles tightening under my arm — and I can feel her pulse through the skin of her belly. Rapid. As rapid as mine.
Her hand finds my chest. Fingers spread against the fuzz, and she traces — not idly, with the focused attention she gives her notebook entries.
Cataloguing. Mapping. Someone should be paying attention to this.
Fingers threading through the grain, finding the ridge of a marking, following it.
A thumbnail drags across one of the heat-dispersal lines and the sensation shorts through my chest to my groin and the sound I make is loud enough to fill the bunk.
“That sound.” Her fingers stop. Her voice has dropped to something that is not sleep-warm. That is want. Raw and certain and unhidden. “Xor.”
The way she says my name. One syllable. No title. No classification. Laid against my skin to see where it fits.
My nostrils fill with her. Dense and dark and unmistakable — want, not faint, not unconscious, present — and the knowledge that she desires me, that this woman who has not been touched in a decade is lying in my arms with her pulse hammering and her body screaming and her hand on my chest and she wants me, is the thing that finally, comprehensively destroys the framework.
Not my wanting. I could survive my wanting. Weapons want.
Being wanted. That is the thing no training prepared me for.
“I cannot control it.” The words scrape out. Raw. The admission costs more than any operational intelligence I have disclosed in nine years.
“I know.” Her thumb traces a slow, deliberate circle through the fuzz. The purr surges, shredded and desperate. “That’s why I like it.”
That is why she —
Processing failure.
She likes the sound I cannot control. She likes the evidence of my malfunction.
She has taken the thing I have spent thirty years killing and called it the reason she likes — and I am lying in a bunk with my tail wrapped around her waist and my arm against her bare stomach and every ridge of me pressed against the curve of her body and she wants me, and the word like is a cargo crate when I need something with no walls.
Her hand slides higher. Over the fuzz at my collarbone.
Up the side of my throat. Fingertips against the pulse point where my blood is running too fast for anything my training would classify as operational, and then higher, into the sensitive skin beneath my jaw and — her fingers brush the base of my left horn.
The nerve cluster there is dense and raw and nobody has touched it since — I inhale through my teeth.
A sharp, animal sound. The sensation radiates from the horn base down my throat, down my spine, pooling hot and heavy at the base of my shaft, and my hips push forward against her.
Not a fraction this time. A thrust. Involuntary and undeniable and she gasps and presses back and the friction —