13. Say Please #3
“Tael.”
“Your turn on your back.”
I lift her off my lap. I lay her on her back.
Her dark eyes on mine. Pupils blown. Mouth swollen. Her hair across the pillow. Her thighs part for me without the part being asked for. She is dripping. Some of it is her. Some of it is going to be me.
I get on top of her. My forearm at the bulkhead. My other hand at her hip. Her thighs at my ribs. The angle of a Draelith male on a human female in a bunk that was not built for the purpose.
I push back into her.
The ridges catch at a familiar angle — we have done this already, her body knows what to expect now — and she arches for me without the arch being asked for. Her hand at the back of my neck. Her eyes on mine. She is not looking away.
“Tael.”
“Watch me, sweetheart.”
“I am.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I am not going to stop.”
I move at the pace that has, in the last hour, become the pace her body agrees with.
Slow first, then less slow, then the rhythm that comes out of the synced pulse and my purr at full through her sternum and the ridges catching at every stroke.
Her eyes stay on mine. Her hand at the back of my neck stays.
Her other hand at my shoulder, fingernails at the rosette there, her nails through the skin.
“Harder,” she says.
I give her harder.
She is watching me.
She has not, all night, looked at me the way she is looking at me right now.
The attention of my mate, who wants to see what her male is going to look like when he comes apart for her.
She is running a different operational question from the one she has been running — she is studying me, and the study is going to undo me.
The build comes fast.
My body has been running on the edge for ninety minutes.
Every sound she has made. Every time she has said my name in a register closer to correct.
The discipline has been holding because I told her I would not come before her, and I did not, and her second time on my lap released the obligation. The biology has been waiting.
The purr — which has been at the transfer register for twenty minutes — goes deeper. Deep enough that her ribcage, pressed to mine, vibrates with it. Her eyes widen.
“Tael — let me see.”
The sentence I was not prepared to receive.
A Draelith male does not — in any account I have ever heard — come apart for his mate’s observation.
The come-apart is private. The come-apart is the thing a male does with his face in his mate’s throat or in the pillow, because the register it takes him to is not a register a male has ever wanted another set of eyes on.
Let me see is the register her dark human eyes are asking me for.
I let her see.
I keep my eyes on her. I let her watch my face shift — the loosening of the operational composure; the jaw going slack; the pupils blowing to full, the rosettes at my forearms saturating the cabin, my canines dropping to the involuntary threshold because her pulse is synced to mine at the bond-chemistry configuration and my body is asking for the mark.
She watches.
Her hand at the back of my neck holds me there, not letting me look away.
“Tael.”
“Natalie.”
“I see you.”
I come inside her on those three words.
The sound out of me is low, more gravel than language — a sound I have never made, because I have never had a mate watching my face while I came apart.
My hips lock. My arm at the bulkhead trembles.
The purr at a register the bulkhead is vibrating with.
The pheromone broadcast saturates the cabin at a level JINX is, somewhere in the background, logging as a new baseline.
My canines at the mate-mark spot at the side of her throat — the spot her hand at the back of my neck has angled me toward — drop to the threshold where one more degree would break skin.
I do not bite.
My discipline holds at the millimeter.
I empty inside her. Pulse after pulse. She takes all of it.
She feels it.
I know she feels it because her body does the thing — the small aftershock, the cardio response of a human female whose nervous system has just registered her mate’s release at the chemical level her biology did not previously have a filing category for.
Her hand tightens at the back of my neck.
Her other hand finds my face. Her thumb at the corner of my mouth. She is — and I can read this in every channel my biology has available — proud.
“Good girl.”
It falls out of me. Low. Said against her mouth. Earned not on what I did for her but on what she did for me — on letting me see, on the gift of watching me come apart for her with her eyes on mine.
She shivers at it.
Her hand at my face.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You came apart for me.”
“I did.”
“I want to see it again.”
A warm feeling turns over in my core. My smirk rebuilds — not the cocky version, the other one, the one I have not used on anyone in years. The quiet one. The one a Draelith male deploys when his mate has asked for something only she is going to get.
“Copy, sweetheart. You are going to see it every time you ask.”