20. Mine #2
Of course she is asking. She is a woman who pre-files a lunch order.
She is going to walk into the most permanent configuration her body will ever be in with the procedure understood, and she wants it explained while my hips are grinding a slow answer into the seam of her is the single most Natalie Torres thing that has happened in five days.
My hips do not stop. I have the rest of my life. That sentence is new.
“My canines pierce the skin at the spot at your throat. Two punctures, two centimeters apart. The compound at my canines sets the pair-signature into the wound. Your chemistry locks to mine. The mark heals in some hours. The scars are small. They are permanent.”
“All right.”
“For me, your teeth do not, by the anatomy your species carries, pierce Draelith skin. The compound in your saliva is the conduit. You have to bite. Nip. Lick. Suck. Whatever shape your mouth makes at the spot, the chemistry in your saliva is the medium. The intent is the setter. You set the mark in your head. The chemistry goes through the intent.”
“My mouth at the spot.”
“Yes.”
“My teeth.”
“Yes.”
“Should I leave a mark on you?”
“I am not opposed to a mark on me. I want your teeth on me, Natalie. I want to wear you. I want every male who looks at my throat for the rest of my life to know I was claimed by a woman who walked into my quarters and told me to take my shirt off.”
Her eyes close. Her hips lift. My tail feels what that does to the cotton and tightens on its own.
“You first.”
“All right.”
I go down her throat.
My mouth at her jaw. My mouth at her pulse, open, wet, sucking there until there is a human bruise beside the alien one, and her hands say she wants both.
Then the spot. The hollow where a Draelith sets his mark, which I have known the location of on her body since a bar on Velarkis and have not looked directly at since, the way a male does not look directly at a thing he has decided not to have.
I kiss it. Once. Slow. Then the flat of my tongue drags across it and her back comes off the bunk.
The welt is under my lips.
Her own nails made it in my shower this morning, trying to get another male off her skin, and she made it in front of me and I could not stop her fast enough. My head lifts an inch. My thumb traces the edge, and my thumb has never been this careful with anything.
“The mark chemistry takes the whole site,” I tell her. “When it closes, it closes everything. This too.”
Her breath changes. Whatever that sentence does to her, it does a great deal.
“Do it.”
My canines drop.
Nine years at SRS. Three years freelance.
Forty-one years of a body built and calibrated and maintained for exactly one function, which is this one, and which I have never performed, and which I had until this morning accepted I would die without performing.
Every Draelith male carries the mechanism.
Most of us use it once. A male who never uses it dies with his hand at his own throat, and I have seen that.
Her eyes are on mine. She has gone somewhere for half a second, and I know precisely where, because his canines were the last ones she saw at that distance.
Then she comes back. She looks at my eyes and she comes back, and whatever she settles about the teeth in front of her, she settles without me.
“Tell me yes,” I say.
“Yes. Bite me. Make me yours. I want to feel you in my blood.”
I set my canines in her throat.
The skin gives at the pressure my anatomy is calibrated for.
Two punctures. The compound delivers, and I feel it deliver, a thing no briefing prepared me for, because the mechanism reports back.
My chemistry goes out of me and into her, and my body registers the leaving the way it would register a limb it has been carrying folded for four decades finally straightening.
She moans.
My hips grind once against her, helpless, and the growl goes through the bite into the wound, and I hold for a count of three with my mate’s blood in my mouth and her pulse against my teeth.
I lift my head.
Her blood is on my lower lip. I take it with my tongue, because it belongs there, and because there is no version of me that was ever going to do anything else.
The mark is set.
Two small punctures closing under my eyes at a rate her species closes nothing, the site running two degrees above the surrounding skin. The welt is going with it. My chemistry is doing that. Mine, in her, rewriting the last thing that room did to her.
She is half-marked.
Half is not a configuration. Half is a male standing on one foot. Every register I run is now oriented at my throat and she has not yet put her mouth on it. The wanting is not sexual, or is not only sexual; it is the unbearable incompleteness of a circuit with one terminal live.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Come here.”
I come. My face above hers. My weight on my forearm above her head. My throat over her at the angle the bunk allows.
Her hand comes to the back of my neck.
She pulls me down.
Her mouth at the hollow of my throat.
Her tongue finds it first. Slow. The whole of my body goes rigid, and she registers that, and she does it again, unhurried, because she has just discovered she can.
Then she bites.
Human teeth. Blunt. They cannot pierce me, and both of us know they cannot pierce me.
A Draelith female sets a mark by mechanism.
My mate sets one by deciding to. There is no anatomy doing this.
There is nothing but a woman with her mouth on my throat and her intent behind it, and the intent goes through my skin as if my skin were an administrative formality.
She nips. She sucks. She drags her tongue over the place she has bitten and does it again, messier, because I told her whatever shape her mouth made, and the shape her mouth wants is hungry.
The bond snaps into place.
Everything arrives at once.
My pulse finds hers and locks. Not the handshake, not the drift my overlay has been reporting for five days, and JINX has been logging under headings I muted him for.
The lock. One rhythm in two bodies, and I am going to be on it for the rest of my life, and the rest of my life is a quantity that exists again.
Then her.
Her want comes into me like a door opening in a wall I did not know had a wall.
Five days of tracking with this woman’s pulse and scent and the quarter-inch of a shoulder, five days of building the best model of her a male has ever built out of pure observation, and the model was a chalk outline.
She wants me at a volume that would have embarrassed her an hour ago and does not embarrass her now.
She is proud of what her mouth just did to me.
She is frightened somewhere underneath, but fear is not about me.
The sound out of my chest is not the purr I have been running at her since Velarkis. It has dropped to a register I have never produced, and it is not a performance, and it is not something I could stop, when the arrangement it has been failing to find for five days closes.
Her eyes are wet.
Mine are, by whatever is happening at my face, not dry.
“Natalie.”
“I felt it.”
“Yes.”
“I felt it snap.”
“Yes.”
“Tael.”
Very still, above her, with my throat marked and her pulse in my chest, I say the thing I said once in a lab with another male’s compound in the air and my teeth locked out of her skin.
“I love you.”
Slowly. Eyes open. Nothing in the room but us, and no refusal wrapped around it. A male gets to say it once as a wound. He should be allowed to say it again as a gift.
“I know,” she says. “I heard it the first time. I am glad to have a clean copy for the record.”
The laugh gets out of me before I can decide about it, low and unguarded, against her throat.
Then she puts her mouth back on the mark, and the laugh breaks into something else entirely.
White heat. Straight through the middle of me. My hand plants on the mattress because my arm has stopped being reliable.
“Oh,“ she says. She has felt it arrive in me.
“Yes.”
“You can feel my mouth on the mark.”
“Yes.”
“Like I am in your blood.”
“Yes. Like you put your mouth on my cock. Like you put your mouth on every nerve I have. Natalie—“
She kisses the mark again. Slowly. Then sucks, soft, then harder, and my tail cinches her thigh and slides higher, and the tip of it strokes over soaked cotton and presses, and my mouth opens against her temple.
“Fuck.”
Her mouth curves against my throat.
She has, in the last twenty seconds, located a register in which she can dismantle me at will, and she is smiling about it, and I feel the smile through the bond before I feel it on my skin. She licks the mark once more purely to watch what it does to my face.
Nine years of being the male who reads the room. My mate has the room. She is going to have it for the rest of my life and I would not take it back off her at gunpoint.
“Sweetheart?”
“Mm.”
“You are smiling.”
“I am.”
“At what?”
“At the fact that I have just registered that I get to do this for the rest of my life.”
“Yes, Natalie.”
“And the fact that I get to do it slowly.”
“Yes.”
“And the fact that you are going to let me.”
“I am going to let you do anything you want for the rest of our lives.” My mouth goes to her ear. “And then I am going to do what I want. You walked in here wet for me. Don’t think I can’t smell it. Don’t think the bond isn’t feeding me every filthy thing your body just decided.”
Her hand goes to my buckle.
“Off.”
“All right, sweetheart.”
I get out of the rest of my clothes and she watches, and being watched by her is its own event.
Then I take the rest of hers. My mouth at her hipbone as the soft pants come off. My mouth at the inside of her thigh at the moment they leave her ankles, and I breathe her in there, open, shameless, and the sound that comes out of me is not for her benefit.
“You came to my door like this.”
“Yes.”
“Soaked.”
“Yes.”
The under-layer. Then plain cotton, not the silk from day one. She is braced for a comment.