23. The Quiet Pattern #2
The lights come up at twenty percent.
I stand in the middle of my own quarters in the uniform of a Head of Security whose deputy, in the last hour, has become a closed-loop investigation.
I’m not sure what to do with my hands.
Tael takes my hands.
“Eat first,” he says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You ate at 1230. That was nearly seven hours ago. You are hungry.”
“Tael.”
“Sit.”
I sit on the small couch by the window because he has, with the same hand he took mine with, walked me to it. He goes to my small kitchen alcove. SENTRY brings the lights up to thirty percent for the alcove only. He opens the cupboard he should not know the layout of.
JINX, on the public room speaker, dry: “I gave him the layout this morning.”
SENTRY, dry: “I noted that.”
JINX: “Sentry.”
SENTRY: “JINX.”
JINX: “Domestic coordination.”
SENTRY: “Domestic coordination, JINX.”
I lean my head against the back of the couch and I close my eyes.
Tael comes back to the couch with a bowl of the noodle leftovers from my kitchen, heated, and a glass of the cold barley tea I keep in the second drawer for nights I can’t sleep. He puts the bowl in my hands, sits beside me but doesn’t speak.
I eat.
I had not, until I started eating, known I was hungry.
He waits until the bowl is empty. He takes it from my hands. He sets it on the floor beside the couch.
“Stand up, sweetheart.”
I stand.
He does not, in the next several minutes, ask me to make a single decision.
He gets the uniform jacket off. Hands at my collar, methodical.
Slow enough that his knuckles brush the mark when the fabric clears my throat, and the brush is not an accident.
The boots come off, his hands at my ankles, one and then the other, thumbs stroking the bone like he is already thinking about where his tail is going.
The under-layer goes over my head. My nipples tighten in the cooler air.
He looks at that. He does not touch yet.
The pants go. The cotton bra. The cotton underwear, which is already damp, which he registers with a breath through his nose that is not polite.
He folds each piece as it comes off and sets it on the couch where the bowl is no longer.
He looks at me.
Naked in my own quarters. Mark warm. Cunt already wet from nothing except his hands taking my clothes off and the way he is looking.
His silver eyes do a slow scan, top to bottom. He has been doing the scan since the morning of day one and he has, in six days, gone from a male doing it without permission to a male doing it because the mate it lands on is, by every part of her body, going to let him.
I have not said no to him since Helia’s Reach. I always say yes to him.
He knows it. I know he knows it. The standing yes is the standing yes we have, in six days, built between us.
“On the bed, sweetheart.”
“Tael.”
“Face down.”
I look at him.
The half-grin is at the corner of his mouth. Under it, hunger.
“I have watched the way your shoulders carry the day. Tonight, I am going to take it off you. Then I am going to put my mouth on you until you forget the deputy. Face down. On the bed.”
“Tael—“
“That was not a request, Natalie.”
The half-grin holds.
I go to the bed. I get face down. The pillow under my collarbones, my arms loose at my sides, the blanket pushed off the bed entirely because his hands are going to require access. I am already wet enough that I can feel it on my inner thighs when I settle.
He kneels at the side of the mattress.
His hands settled on my shoulders.
I have registered Tael Vosk’s hands at every operational angle a Draelith’s hands can be in: the cache, the airlock, the chamber, the cockpit, the bunk on Helia’s Reach, the morning at his quarters. This feels new.
He spent nine years as a Tier 2 tracker, nine years training his hands to read bodies. Other species’ bodies. Operational bodies.
Tonight, the body in front of him is mine. His thumbs find the muscle at my neck. He presses. Not gently. Not roughly. At the exact pressure the muscle has been begging for since 0830. I make a sound into the pillow. Not composed.
“Mm,” he says. “I thought so.”
“Tael.”
“Quiet, sweetheart. I am working.”
He works.
His thumbs at the muscle along my spine, working out from the center. His palms at my shoulder blades, heavy then light then heavy. His knuckles at the knot beside my left scapula, which has been with me since I made Head of Security four years ago. He finds it in forty seconds.
“Mm.”
“It is going to take some weeks, sweetheart.”
“All right.”
“I am going to enjoy taking the weeks.”
The half-grin is in his voice. The purr. The mark on my throat, pressed into the pillow, warms as if his mouth is already there.
He works the knot. Not breaking it. Loosening. The bonded purr runs through the mattress into my ribs. I get wetter against the sheet. He can smell it. His breath changes. His tail comes up off the floor as if it were waiting for the order.
It starts at the back of my calf. Slow. Heavy. The full length of him laying itself along the back of my leg, five degrees warmer than I am. Ankle. Calf. The back of my knee, where he pauses and strokes once, just to feel me twitch.
Then it keeps going.
The back of my thigh. The crease where my thigh meets my ass. The tail tip, thick, dexterous, deliberate, slides to the inside of my thigh and does not ask.
It finds how wet I am. I make a sound into the pillow that is not a briefing sound.
“Mm,” he says, above me. His thumbs at the scapula have not paused. “Four minutes. I had given it six.”
“Tael.”
“You will need to be more specific, sweetheart.”
The tail tip strokes through the slick and then higher. It paints my cunt. Rests there for one breath, hot, living, against lips that are already open for it.
Then it pushes.
Not all at once. The tip only. A slow, filthy breach.
Thicker than a finger, hotter than a finger, moving because he wants it to.
I shove my face into the pillow and moan as it sinks into me, inch by inch, until I am stretched around the first length of his tail and his hands are still working my shoulders like this is a massage.
“Fuck—“
“Language.” His mouth is near my ear. Calm. Mean. “You take my tail like you were built for it. Stay still.”
I try. The tail curls inside me, a living press against the spot his ridges found last night, and my hips jerk anyway.
“Still, Natalie.”
“I am—trying—“
“Try harder.”
The tail fucks me. Slow. Shallow. Then deeper.
His hands never stop on my back. The split ruins me: the day coming off my shoulders, tail stroking into my cunt like it has all night.
Heat builds in my belly. My thighs shake.
I am going to come on his tail face-down in my own quarters with his jacket still on him.
“Tael—I am going to—“
“Not yet.”
The tail stills. Inside me. Not moving. Not leaving. Just held there while I throb around it and get nothing.
I make a wrecked sound.
“Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please move.”
“Not yet, sweetheart.”
He waits. I clench around him helplessly. The edge recedes one ugly inch. Only then does the tail start again, slower, meaner, the tip rubbing that spot in a circle that has nothing to do with mercy.
I climb faster this time. I rock back onto it. I hear myself.
“Tael—please—I need—“
“Not yet.”
It withdraws. All the way. Leaves me empty and dripping and furious.
I almost curse him. What comes out is worse.
“Please put it back. Please. I was so close. Tael—“
“I know you were.” His thumbs find the hamstring. Unhurried. “That is why it came out. You do not come until I say. Say you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Say the rest.”
“I don’t come until you say.”
“Good.”
The tail slides up the inside of my thigh again, shines through my slick, and pushes back into me in one long, thick stroke.
I sob. It fucks me harder now. Not fast. Deep.
The curl of it dragging over that spot on every withdrawal.
His hand flattens at the small of my back and pins me so I cannot chase.
I get there again. Shaking. Soundless. The start of it is already in my core.
“Please let me come. Please. I’ll—I’ll be good—just don’t stop—“
The tail pulls out.
I cry out into the pillow. Actual sound. Not composed. Not Head of Security.
He kisses the nape of my neck, gentle, which is unkind.
“Roll over, sweetheart. I want to see your face when you beg.”
His silver eyes are dark.
The half-grin is full. He is hard in his field pants. Ridged. Obvious. He has taken nothing off. I am naked and shaking and wet to the thighs, and he is still dressed like he came from SNAG, and that is, I realize, the point.
“Better.”
“Tael—“
“Shh.”
His hand at my hip. Thumb on the bone. The other hand flat on my sternum, between my breasts, so the purr pours straight into my ribs. The frequency hits my nipples, my cunt, the mark. All at once.
His mouth comes down to the mark.
He kisses it.
Then his lower canines set there, not biting, holding, and my pulse jumps so hard I feel it in my clit.
“Mm,” he says against the wound he made. “Every time.”
“Tael.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“You are doing this on purpose.”
“I am very good at it. Open your legs.”
I open them.
His tail comes across the inside of my thigh and pulls my knee wider, exactly the angle he wants, and holds it there. His mouth moves down. Collarbone. The hollow he found last night. His tongue, slow, until I moan. Then lower.
He takes my nipple into his mouth and sucks.
Hard.
I fist the sheet. His thumb works the other nipple at the same time, rolling, pinching just enough, and the purr vibrates into the breast he has in his mouth until I am writhing under a male who still has his jacket on.
And his tail comes back.
I can see it this time. Dark. Thick. Sliding up the wet inside of my thigh in the dim. The tip finds my clit and starts that same small circle, and now I have his mouth on my breast and his tail on my clit and his hand pinning my other knee open and I cannot think.
“Tael—fuck—“
“Language, Head of Security.”
“Do not—do not call me that while your tail is—“