13. Say Please
Say Please
Tael
Flossie signs off.
The cockpit speakers cut. The drive hum comes back. Iris-Nine sits in the scope — fourteen hours out, dark, a station that has been declared scrapped and is not scrapped — and Thane’s vessel is at the staging point, because Flossie sent him the coordinates between the silk and the comm.
She came back aboard at Parr’s Anchor carrying an MP-issue blade she did not have when we docked — seated in an ankle sheath under her pant cuff, squared to the bone at the angle she squares everything.
I clocked it in the airlock. I did not comment.
A female who arms herself before a rescue is a female who has already decided how far she is willing to go.
Natalie sets the comm down.
She does not look at me.
She turns her head a quarter-degree. The corner of her mouth twitches — the twitch I have calibrated to read as I see you trying, Vosk, and I am going to let you keep trying — and she unbuckles.
She stands.
She walks.
Three steps across the cockpit, her hair coming loose from the pin where my fingers were an hour ago, her dark eyes level with my throat because I am at the console and she is closing the distance at the pace where she decided she is done waiting.
I catch her at the console.
Her hand at the back of my neck. Fingers finding the shorter hair there, gripping as if she has been planning the grip for days. She pulls me down to her. Her mouth on mine is not the airlock kiss. The airlock was permission. The bunk, an hour ago, was an interruption. This is demand.
Her teeth at my lower lip.
Hard enough to mark if her teeth had my anatomy. I groan into her mouth. My cock, which never fully went down after Flossie called, goes rigid against her hip.
“Vosk—“
The word on a breath. I catch it on the next kiss and let it go. I want my name. I am going to make her give it to me.
Her hands at the hem of my shirt. My shirt is off my head before my own hands have caught up with the plan.
Her palm flat on my chest. Her fingers tracing the rosette at my sternum, the one she patched two days ago, and then down the line of my abdomen to the band of my pants.
She cups me through the fabric. Squeezes once. My hips jerk.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
The small not-right of a human tongue trying to shape the Draelith consonant at the middle of my name. Not broken. Her consonant. The way she says it.
Remember this, the back of my brain says.
I do not let the thought finish.
My discipline — the thing that has held the line since her office — cracks on the syllable.
Her fingers working my buckle open. Efficient. The deft competence of a Head of Station Security who has handled this piece of clothing personally. My buckle clicks. Her palm goes under the fabric, wraps around me bare, and her eyes widen and her hand stills on me for two seconds.
“You—“
“I know, Natalie.”
“You are—“
“I know.”
“Big.”
The smirk on my mouth is the most unbearable smirk I have ever deployed on a female.
“I am built for you, sweetheart. Thick. Ridged. Going to stretch you until you forget how to run a station.”
“Oh.”
“Good girl.”
It falls out of me — low, against her mouth, the gravel at the bottom of my register.
The word I gave her in this corridor an hour ago because she demanded it.
Not demanded this time. Given. Her pupils blow wide anyway.
Her pulse at the hollow of her throat jumps.
Her whole body, pressed against mine at the console, answers it. Her hand tightens around my cock.
Her mouth opens on a small sound. “Oh.”
“You liked that. You liked being called good while you had your hand on my cock.”
“Shut up, Tael.”
“Noted. Keep stroking.”
“And kiss me.”
“Noted, sweetheart.”
I kiss her. Filthy. Tongue and canine and the sound she makes when I suck her lower lip into my mouth. She strokes me once, twice, and I have to lock my jaw against coming in her hand like an unbonded adolescent.
She runs the next four minutes.
Her hands pull my pants down at my hips.
Her mouth on my throat. Her teeth at the collarbone where the bond-mark spot is, exploring, not biting.
She is, by her own direct operational instruction, taking what she wants in the order she wants it, and I am — amused, patient, letting her run the rhythm — the male delivering. For now.
I walk her backward out of the cockpit, because the console is not where this starts.
The corridor.
Four meters. Her back to the bulkhead. My hand on her jaw. Her thigh rising at my waist because her body is meeting me halfway. I grind against the lace I already know is there. She gasps.
“Been hard since you sat on that comm with my fingers still wet,” I tell her. “Been thinking about finishing what I started. About putting you on your back and making you come on my tongue before you could even get the jacket off.”
“Tael—“
My tail uncoils.
Three and a half feet of prehensile muscle. It wraps her thigh at the knee and lifts — holding her thigh exactly where I want it while both my hands are free. I roll my hips into her. She feels every ridge through the lace.
She makes a sound.
“Tael — your — your tail—“
“You have been watching it for days, sweetheart. Did you think it was decorative. Did you think I wasn’t going to use it to hold you open and fuck you with it if you asked nicely enough.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me yes.”
“Yes.”
The Vosk is gone.
She is not going to say it again.
My hand takes her pants off one-handed while my tail holds her and my mouth is at her neck. The lace is the only thing left below her waist, and the lace stays until the bunk, because the bunk is where I keep my promise about the lace.
The bra goes now.
“Watch, sweetheart. I told you I would take this off with my teeth.”
Her eyes hold mine. I bite through what is left of the bow at the center front. The clasp gives. The silk falls off her shoulders. Her ribs bare against the bulkhead. Her nipples are tight. I groan.
“Packed this for me. Wore it for six hours. Let me find it with my hand and then put Flossie on comm before I could get my mouth on it. Cruel girl.”
My mouth at her breast.
Her nipple under my tongue, the canine grazing — controlled, the small careful edge. I could break skin and choose not to. I suck hard. She arches off the bulkhead. Her hand in my hair tightens.
“Tael — keep — keep doing that—“
“Say please.”
“Please. Please don’t stop.”
The purr does the thing now — the one that transfers through skin contact. My mouth on her breast. The purr going through her sternum at the frequency her nervous system is not built to filter.
Her whole body comes off the bulkhead.
“Tael — what — what is that—“
“The purr at full. Through skin contact. Another male cannot do that for you. No human mouth is going to make your cunt clench like this.”
“Oh—“
“You have never had a mate built for you before. You are never going to want one who isn’t.”
“Bunk, Tael. Now.”
“Copy, sweetheart.”
I get my arm under her thighs. My tail stays at her knees.
The walk to the bunk is four meters, and I do not remember any of them, because my mouth is at her pulse and her hand is in my hair and the rosettes along my forearms are releasing the scent compounds at saturation.
I can smell how wet she is. I have been able to smell it since the corridor.
I kick the bunk hatch closed.
I set her on the mattress, flat on her back. Her hair spread. The lace at her hips the only thing left on her body. Her dark eyes on mine with pupils at full dilation.
I go down on my knees at the foot of the bunk.
Remember this.
I take the eight seconds I did not take in the corridor. Her collarbones. The flush under her skin. The architecture of her ribcage. Her hipbones. The lace at her hips and the crease where the lace meets skin. The dark, wet patch already showing through.
“Stop looking, Tael.”
“No.”
“Tael—“
“I have been looking at you since you walked into that briefing room, Natalie. You are not going to win this one. I am going to map every inch of you. I am going to taste every inch of you. You are going to let me.”
Her face goes pink.
“Start, then.”
The smirk is fully deployed.
“Copy, sweetheart.”
I start at her feet.
Her ankle. The tenderness of a human female’s ankle that I have never had cause to map. The arch of her foot. My mouth. The purr through the contact. Her breath catches.
“My feet?”
“All of you. I said every inch. I meant every inch.”
The back of her knee next. The hollow there — the pulse-point no male has ever bothered to find. My mouth at it. The purr through skin contact. She arches off the mattress and makes a sound that is not quite a word.
Her inner thigh. Slow. My canine grazing — the possibility of the pressure without the pressure. Her hand in my hair. Her breath shaking. I can smell her. Salt and heat and want.
My tail comes up.
It wraps her other thigh — the one my shoulder is not between — and lifts and holds. Positioning. The pressure of a third limb that can open her for me at the angle I want while my hands are on her hipbones.
She feels it.
“Tael. Your tail—“
“Is holding you open for me, sweetheart. Yes. So I can look at how wet you are before I put my mouth on you.”
“Oh.”
I hook one claw at the hip of the lace.
“I told you I would ruin these.”
“You did.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Ruin them. Please.”
The lace gives with a sound like a held breath. It lands wherever. She is bare and glistening, and I have to close my eyes for one second, so I do not come just from looking.
“Fuck. Look at you.”
My mouth at her inner thigh. My tail holding her other thigh at the angle I want.
My tongue finds the place her body has been waiting for my tongue to find since the bunk an hour ago.
The Draelith tongue is longer and rougher than a human’s, and the difference is a register her anatomy reads as specific to me.
I lick a slow stripe up her cunt and she comes off the mattress with a sound that is not for any channel her operational life has previously known.
“Tael — oh — Tael—“
“Don’t stop.”