21. The Open Collar
The Open Collar
Natalie
I wake under a ceiling that is not mine.
For three seconds my body runs the drill fifteen years of MP postings trained into it: inventory, exits, threat. Strange bunk. Strange bulkhead. Air running warmer than station standard, because the male generating it runs five degrees above station standard.
Then the rest of it arrives. The chest under my cheek.
The purr, so low it is more foundation than sound.
The scent my nose has only filed since last night: home.
Sex. Him. The salt-heat of a Draelith who spent the night inside his mate and has not, by the evidence currently against my thigh, recovered from the fact.
I am naked. He is naked. My leg is thrown over his hip, so that even sleep was not a sufficient reason to stop touching him. His cock is a hard, ridged line against the inside of my thigh, and it has been there long enough that the skin is warmer on that side.
His pulse is under my palm, my pulse now, the same rhythm at two throats, and it is running a fraction quick for a male pretending to be asleep.
My mouth is at the mark on his throat, which I appear to have set up camp on during the night and never struck.
I can taste him. I can feel, through the bond, the exact second he realizes I am awake, because a want that has been sitting in him for twenty-five minutes spikes so hard my clit throbs in answer.
He has been holding still on purpose. The chest under my cheek hasn’t moved more than the breath he can’t help.
I do not lift my mouth off the mark. I drag my lips across it, slow, and feel his whole body lock the way it locked last night.
“How long have you been up.”
“Twenty-five minutes.”
“Tael.”
“You looked good, sweetheart. I was reading.”
“You weren’t reading.”
“I was reading my mate.”
The word lands somewhere south of my sternum and detonates quietly. I do not react. I am a Head of Station Security. I do not flush in an alien male’s bunk at 0612 because he used a single domestic noun.
His thumb finds his mark on me and runs a slow circle.
The circle shorts out roughly forty percent of the higher cognitive functions I rely on for every part of my professional life.
The other sixty percent is currently occupied because I am wet against his hip and he can feel it, and because the bond is feeding me his patience, which is not infinite.
He has been hard for twenty-five minutes with my mouth on his claiming scar, and he has not moved, because I look peaceful.
I am not peaceful now.
I lick the mark. Once. His cock kicks against my thigh. A sound comes out of his chest that is not a purr. Lower. Frayed.
“I have a 0830 with Morrison.”
“You have a 0830 with Morrison.”
“I cannot show up to a 0830 with Morrison having spent the morning being whatever it is your thumb is doing to me.”
“I am agreeing with you, Natalie.”
“You are not.”
His mouth at my temple. The purr, low, the home register, which is cheating. The thumb slowing. Not stopping. The pad of it presses just over the two small scars, and the live wire last night put there lights all the way down into my cunt.
“How long do you need to be presentable to Morrison?” he says.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“How long does the wash take?”
“Eight.”
“Then we have thirty-seven minutes.”
“Tael.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
His thumb is still at the mark. His other hand has found the small of my back and is holding me on him, not grinding, just present, so I can feel every ridge of what declining would mean walking away from. It is doing something that is undermining my ability to decline.
“I have a 0830 with Morrison.”
“You have mentioned the 0830, sweetheart.”
“I am establishing the parameters.”
“Establish.”
“The parameters are: thirty-seven minutes. The wash. No exposure to anything that will require me to do my hair twice. And I am walking into that office able to sit down.”
“Copy, Natalie.”
“Stop smirking.”
“I am not smirking.”
“I can hear you smirking through the purr. And I can feel you against my leg. Do not insult both of our intelligence.”
He laughs into my hair. Quiet. Guilty. Not sorry.
The shower in his quarters is Junction One staff-grade, a single cubicle built for one body of standard dimensions, which means it was never built for him at all and is, when I step in after him, holding two bodies the engineers did not plan for.
He has to duck.
His shoulders fill the cubicle from wall to wall.
I am against the warm wall of his chest before the water has finished cycling up to temperature.
Bare. His cock, a thick, wet heat against the small of my back the second the spray hits us.
His tail has already found the inside of my thigh, as if it clocked off for the night and reported for duty with the water.
“Sweetheart.”
“Mm.”
“This shower was not built for the two of us.”
“I am aware, Vosk.”
“It was barely built for me.”
“That is the second-most observable feature of the cubicle.”
“And the first?”
“That you are smirking at the back of my head.”
“I am not smirking at the back of your head, Natalie.”
“I can feel it through your chest. I can also feel the rest of it through my spine, so we can stop pretending this is a conversation about engineering tolerances.”
His hands go to my hair. Slow. The way a male handles something he intends to be careful with.
He gathers it up, twists it, holds it out of the spray with one fist so I will not have to do it twice.
The other hand spans my stomach. The water runs hot.
The mark at my throat warms at the extra register; the bond runs when his hands are on my body, and his hands are on my body in an arrangement his hands have wanted for the length of the days I have known him.
His mouth at the back of my neck.
Open. Wet. He sucks at the hinge of my shoulder like he is still hungry from last night.
His tail at the inside of my thigh.
Higher.
There is nowhere to retreat to in this cubicle, and I am not looking for it.
“Natalie.”
“Yes?”
“We have twenty-nine minutes.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight, sweetheart.”
“How would you like to spend them?”
Turning around in his arms brings me against the front of him: chest, stomach; the heat Draelith biology runs five degrees above mine.
His cock slides wet between us, ridged and heavy against my belly, and for one stupid, unprofessional second I want to drop to my knees on the tile and ruin the hair parameter on purpose.
His silver eyes go a fraction darker. The half-grin at the corner of his mouth is doing the thing it does when his pupils have just gone darker. He felt it. Of course he felt it.
“Quickly,” I say.
“Quickly.”
“And only one of us gets to finish.”
The half-grin holds. Something behind it does not.
“Sweetheart.”
“Mm.”
“That is a composition I have not been in before.”
“You will live, Vosk.”
“I am going to, yes.”
“This is the deal. I have to sit across from Morrison this morning and use words. I cannot do that if I have just watched you come. I also cannot do that if I walk out of here still this wet. So you are going to take the edge off me, and you are going to keep yours, and you are going to carry it through every corridor on this station until I decide to do something about it.”
“I accept your deal.”
His tail tightens against my thigh. His hand goes between us.
He is very good at this. He is good at paying attention and a fast study.
Two fingers. No prelude worth the name. I am wet enough that he slides into the knuckle on the first press, and my forehead drops against his sternum with a sound I will not be filing.
His thumb finds my clit as if he mapped it last night and kept the coordinates.
The ridges of his fingers, Draelith, slightly textured, warmer than mine, drag on the way out and push on the way in, and the purr drops into my spine and stays there.
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
Water in his lashes. Silver gone dark. The mark at his throat flushed darker than the surrounding skin, and I put my mouth on it because I can, because it is mine, because the bond lights up when I suck and his fingers falter for half a stroke like I just put my hand on his cock.
“Natalie.”
“Keep going.”
He keeps going. Deeper. A twist, then a curl, and he finds the place inside me that made me swear at him last night and works it without mercy.
His tail comes up the back of my leg and cinches my thigh at the knee, hauling it up and out against the tile so that I am open to his hand and cannot close, his tail deciding the shape I am in while his fingers do the rest. His cock is trapped between my stomach and his, twitching every time I clench, and he does not thrust. He holds. He takes it.
“You are going to think about this,” I tell him, because if I do not talk I am going to come in under a minute and I need the minute to feel longer than it is.
“You are going to sit in the SNAG office and be smug and every time the bond ticks you are going to remember you put me against this wall and didn’t get to finish. ”
“I am already thinking about it.”
“Good.”
“I am thinking about collecting after the 0830. I am thinking about putting you on your own desk. I am thinking about your mouth.”
His mouth finds the mark on my throat. He licks it.
Then he sucks, timed with the push of his fingers, and the two circuits hit at once, the live wire in my neck and the tight, mean circle on my clit, and I come apart against the warm wall of his chest with the water running hot and the purr at my front and his mouth at the mark, and I make a noise I have not made in any wash on any station I have ever been posted to.
It wrings through me. My knees go. He takes my weight with the arm that is not inside me and keeps his fingers moving through it, gentler, until the last flutter leaves and I make a broken sound against his rosette that might be his name.
He holds me through it.
He accepted the deal and, true to his word; he does not finish.