20. Mine #3
She is not getting one because the cotton is what she was wearing under everything when she decided, in a room by herself, with nobody watching and nothing to prove, to come down one floor and give me my life back.
I lift it off her the way I would lift a thing out of an evidence bag.
Her underwear is wet through. My pupils do something.
I set it on the bunk beside us rather than on the deck.
“Tael.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Stop reading my laundry choices.”
“I am not reading your laundry choices, Natalie. I am putting your underwear down with the same care I am about to put my mouth on you with.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
I put my mouth on her.
The mark first, a kiss at her throat that is a promise about the next twenty minutes.
Then down. Her collarbone. Her sternum. Her nipple in my mouth, and she cries out, and the bond delivers the cry back into me so I do it again, teeth grazing, tongue flat, the purr pouring into her breast until she is writhing under my hands.
The other. The inside of her elbow. Her ribs.
Last night I mapped this body and told her I would redraw every line when she asked. Another male wrote over the map. This morning I washed my own work off her to get at what he left.
She asked.
So I redraw it. Slowly. Every line, in order, with my mouth, and I take my time about it, because there is time. There is an unspecified enormous quantity of time.
Then I shoulder her thighs apart and look at her.
“Natalie.”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare file a report.”
“I am going to put this in my permanent memory.” My thumb spreads her, and the sound I make at what I find is not language. “Pink. Wet. Dripping on my bunk. For me.”
I lick her.
One long, slow stripe, and the bond detonates in both directions at once. Her taste on my tongue and, half a beat behind it, her feeling my tongue, and behind that her feeling how much I like it, and the loop closes and doubles and the last of my discipline goes over the edge without a sound.
I am not polite about the rest.
My tongue flat, then pointed, then pushing into her while my thumb works her clit in a tight, deliberate circle.
The ridges at my upper palate drag across her, and she was not briefed on those, and she is being briefed now.
Her fist in my hair. Her hips coming off the bunk, and my tail pins her thigh and my forearm bands across her hips so that she has to take it.
“Tael. Tael, fuck—“
I hum into her. The purr goes where my mouth is.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You have to come up here.”
“In a moment.”
“Tael. I am going to come on your mouth.”
“That is the idea.” My eyes travel up her body. “Give it to me. I want it in my throat when I mark the rest of you with my cock.”
Her eyes close.
I take the time. I suck her clit into my mouth and flick it and the bond slams into both of us in the same instant, and she comes apart with her heels on my back and my name in pieces, and I feel it happen to her from inside her, which is a thing no male of my species has language for and every male of my species is built to receive.
The chemistry does not let it stay one. It rolls. It wrings a second peak out of the first while I work her through it, and I do not stop until she is pulling at my hair because she cannot take another second and cannot bear for me to stop.
When I come up she takes my mouth and tastes herself on it, and sucks my lower lip, and I jump against her thigh like a male half my age.
“Tael.”
“Yes.”
“Now.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
I push my cock into her.
Slow. The head of me breaches her and the sound she makes goes directly into my spine. The first ridge catches at her entrance and pops through and she swears, and I watch her face because her face is the only data stream that has ever mattered. The second ridge. The third.
“Look at you,” I tell her, and my voice has stopped being a voice. “Taking me. Opening for me. Like you were built for this. Built for me.”
“I was. I am. Don’t you dare stop.”
I feed her the rest of me in increments until I am seated and her hips are flush to mine, and through the bond I have how tight she is around me from her side and how the ridges are locked in the flutter of her and how close I already am, because her pleasure is in my blood now and she is full of me at every register there is. I can feel her registering it.
I move at the rhythm her body sets. Slow. Deep. A male who has unexpectedly gained decades, and is going to take her where she is going at the pace she chooses.
“Harder.”
My eyes meet hers.
“Say it again.”
“Harder. I want the tracker. I want the feral. I want the male who has been smelling me for five days and not taking. Take.”
The thing I have been holding since a bar on Velarkis goes.
My tail cinches her thigh and hauls her hips to the angle I want.
The next thrust bottoms out and stays there, and the bunk objects.
She laughs once, wrecked, and then stops laughing.
My mouth goes to her mark, licking, nipping, not piercing, running the live wire I put in her throat as a second circuit into everything else I am doing to her.
“Mine,” I say into the wound. “Mine. Say it.”
“Yours. I’m yours. Tael—“
“Again.”
“Yours. Your mate. Your good—“