17. Mine
Mine
Xor
Tonight has arrived, and I am sitting on the edge of her berth and my hands will not stop shaking.
They have been shaking since the call. But the register has changed.
In the cockpit it was demolition. This is the absence of every framework I have ever used.
The protocols are gone. The clinical detachment is gone.
What remains is a male on a narrow bunk in fairy-light glow with his tail coiled around his own calf and his heart rate at a level that would trigger a medical alert on any SRS diagnostic.
I have been sitting here for twenty-three minutes. I counted. On the shelf beside the berth, my earpiece pulses blue — Trell’s channel, wanting its answer. I do not give it one.
The berth is too small. The ceiling clears my horns by inches. My knees sit above my hips on the low mattress. Seven feet of Xarthian on furniture built for a woman who is five-foot-four and wears cardigans with embroidered foxes.
She enters.
The thin shirt. Nothing else. Hem at mid-thigh, moving when she walks. Bare legs, fairy light on the curve of her calves. She is the most terrifying thing I have faced in forty-six years of living.
She stands between my knees. Her chin level with my collarbone. The top of her head would tuck beneath my jaw. I am looking down, and she is looking up, and the scale of her — the devastating smallness — short-circuits everything essential.
The thermal-thread seam above her eye catches the fairy light. My thread. My work, done with steady hands an hour after I nearly killed a colleague for putting her on the deck. She watches me find it. She does not cover it.
Her hands land on my face. Both palms against my jaw, each one spanning chin to ear and no further. Small. Warm. Certain.
“Stop being careful. I’m not fragile. And you’ve been careful your whole life.”
“I don’t know how to do this without being careful.”
“Then let me show you.”
She kisses me.
She kisses the way she flies — bold, precise, adjusted for conditions.
Her tongue finds mine and the purr erupts, and she swallows the vibration, hums against it.
She has to rise on her toes to reach my mouth and the stretch lifts the hem of her shirt past her hips.
I can see her bare thighs and the shadow between them, already glistening.
The scent of her arousal floods my nostrils — sharp, sweet-dark, thick with hours of wanting.
She is soaked. The knowledge lands in my hindbrain like a struck match.
My hands find her waist. Both palms, claws sheathed. My fingers span from hipbone to ribs — the entire width of her torso in my hand. The possessive centers of my brain ignite.
She strips my shirt. Her hands track down my chest, mapping markings and fuzz. She finds my horns. Both hands, firm grip around the bases — the most sensitive non-genital point on a Xarthian body — and she squeezes.
My spine arches. My tail lashes. My claws drive into the mattress. The sound I make is not language.
“Again?”
“If you do that again I will not be responsible for —”
“Promise?”
She twists. Both hands, a quarter turn. My vision whites.
My hips buck. I grab her — not carefully — my hands close around her waist and lift.
She weighs nothing in the strength ratio.
I swing her onto the bunk beneath me and my horns score the ceiling and I am over her.
My shoulders wider than the berth. My arms braced on either side of her head.
She is looking up at me — hair fanned, eyes wide, shirt rucked past her hips, bare from the waist down, cunt already glistening for me.
She hooks her leg over my hip and pulls me down. The contact of her wet heat against my cock empties us both of air.
“Hi.” From underneath me. Her leg around my hip.
“Hello.”
“Fast for a male who doesn’t usually do this.”
“All tactical restraint is void when horns are involved.”
“Noted. For future reference.”
Future.
I pull the shirt over her head and the framework dissolves. Not strains. Dissolves. The clinical narration goes silent. Sensation without filter. For the first time in my life I am inside the moment without observing it from above.
She is golden in the fairy light. Soft where I am hard. The curve of her belly, the flare of her hips. The freckles scattered across her chest like distant stars I intend to chart. My thumbs meet at her navel. My fingers wrap past her sides. The scale is obscene and perfect.
My mouth finds the seam above her eye — lightly, my thread under my lips, and her breath catches.
Then her throat. Her collarbone. The bite mark from the shower — I kiss that too and she shivers.
The slope of her breast — I take her nipple into my mouth and suck hard, tongue lashing the stiff peak while the purr vibrates through my tongue into her flesh.
She cries out, back arching and her hand flies to my horn and the feedback loop nearly blinds me.
I switch — the other breast, my palm covering the one my mouth has left, the nipple hard against my lifeline, my hand larger than the curve of her.
“More. Xor — more.”
Lower. My mouth tracks her belly, the crease of her hip. My knees hit the floor. I push her legs apart, and I descend on her cunt like a male who has been starving for his mate his entire life.
The first long lick through her soaked folds pulls a sharp cry from her as I drag my tongue through her folds from bottom to top in one slow, deliberate stroke. She’s drenched, swollen and glistening.
Her taste. Dark and sweet and salt and the biology underneath — her arousal thick on my tongue, coating it, addictive, and my olfactory memory stamps the chemical signature as permanent.
My tongue is three degrees hotter than a human’s, and she can feel the difference — her hips jerk at the heat, a bitten-off *oh* that I catalog and file and intend to earn again.
I find her clit. Swollen, engorged, the nerve bundle pulsing under my tongue. I circle it — slow, wide, the broad flat of my tongue — and the purr vibrates directly against it.
Her hips leave the mattress. I press my palm flat on her belly — my hand covers navel to hip, the weight pinning her without effort — and she writhes against the restraint. Not fighting. Chasing.
“The vibration — oh fuck — the vibration is —” Her thighs are shaking. Her hand twists on my horn and the sensation fires through my skull to my cock and I growl against her cunt and the added frequency makes her back arch off the bed.
I narrow my focus. The tip of my tongue spearing deep into her tight heat as my nose grinds against her.
I vary the speed. Slow makes her moan — long, drawn, her head pressing back into the pillow.
Fast makes her gasp and buck against my restraining hand, her hips rolling, grinding against my mouth, taking what she needs from me.
Good. Let her take. Everything I am is hers to use.
“There — right there — don’t you dare stop —”
I slide two thick fingers inside, stretching her wide.
Blunt, thick — my fingers are not an insignificant stretch and the feel of her walls gripping me is scalding, wet, muscular.
She gasps at the width. I curl against the textured spot on her front wall and press while my tongue works her clit and the dual stimulation draws a sound from her that I will replay in my memory until I am dead.
“Another.” She is breathless and demanding and glorious. “I can take another.”
I add another finger and the stretch makes her whimper — a high, broken sound — and her walls grip all three fingers with a pressure that makes my cock throb against the mattress.
I devour her. Tongue spearing deep into her heat, then back to her clit; fingers fucking her relentlessly against that spongy spot each time; the constant vibration of my purr pressed against her clit.
Her sounds are escalating — broken syllables, my name, profanity I did not know she possessed, and lovey gasped like a prayer.
She comes hard on my mouth with her thighs clamped around my head, hips grinding frantically as she floods my tongue.
The scream that she muffles with her own hand and then gives up muffling.
I feel it — the rhythmic clenching around my fingers, the pulse against my tongue, the fresh flood of her release coating my tongue and chin.
I do not stop. I work her through it and straight into the next — I can taste the chemistry shifting — and I press my fingers deeper and curve them harder and her body bows off the mattress like she’s been electrified.
The second orgasm rolls through her in a long, shuddering wave that makes her walls grip my fingers hard enough to ache. A third — smaller, unexpected, drawn out by a deliberate shift of my tongue — makes her whole body tremble and her voice crack on a sound that is half laugh, half sob.
“Xor—fuck—please—I need you inside me right now or I’m going to lose my mind.”
I rise over her. My mouth is wet with her. Her taste on my tongue, my chin, my jaw. Her slick glistening on my fingers. My cock is throbbing, dark crimson, ridges prominent and flushed, the heavy knot already swollen and leaking. The evidence of what she does to me, on full display.
“You’ll feel each one.”
She cups my face. “Give me everything.”
She reaches between us. Her fingers wrap me — they don’t close fully, the girth exceeding her grip, and the sight of her small hand stroking the dark crimson of me nearly undoes me before we have begun. She guides the thick head to her entrance. The wet heat of her against me makes us both still.
“All of you,” she breathes, eyes locked on mine. “Don’t hold back.”
I push in.