Epilogue Three Months Later #2
Not the way it came off her the first time, one piece at a time with my hands doing all the deciding and her not required to make a single one.
She is not, tonight, a woman who needs the deciding taken off her.
She kicks her own boots at the foot of the bed while I am still on the collar, and the collar is the only part I am unwilling to delegate, because the collar is where the mark is.
Second button. Then the rest. My mouth goes to the mark as the fabric opens and I suck until her hips come up off the mattress and her hands fist in my shirt.
The under-layer goes over her head and she throws it at the chair and misses the chair.
“Vosk.”
“Sweetheart.”
“The pants are not, in any minute you spend admiring them, going to remove themselves.”
“I am enjoying the interval.”
“Enjoy it faster.”
I enjoy it faster.
The pants. The cotton.
The cotton is wet.
I hold it up between two fingers. I look at her. She looks at the ceiling like the ceiling is going to save her.
“Nine hours,” I say.
“Do not start a report.”
“You sat at that desk like this.”
“Vosk.”
“For me.”
“For the day.”
“For me.” I put the cotton down with the rest. “Say it.”
A beat. Her throat works.
“For you.”
“Good girl.”
Naked under me by 1917. Flushed. Mark dark. Cunt shining when I push her knees apart and look. Three months and I still have to take a breath before I put my hands on her or I am going to mount her without the rest of what she needs.
She needs the rest.
Her hands at my collar. Her teeth at my lower lip. I let her strip the shirt. I take the trousers myself. I am hard enough that the ridges are a problem against the fabric and a worse problem when the fabric is gone. Her eyes drop. She reaches. I catch her wrist.
“Not yet.”
“Tael—“
“I am going to take you apart first. Then you can have it. Hands on the headboard.”
She puts her hands on the headboard.
I reward that with my mouth on the mark and my tail up the inside of her thigh in the same second. The tail finds how wet she is and does not pretend to be polite about it. It paints her. Circles her clit. She jerks. I pin her hip with one hand and keep the tail moving, small, mean, exact.
“Stay.”
“I am—staying—“
“You are lifting. Stay.”
She stays. Barely. The tail pushes into her, slow, thick, the tip first and then more, and the sound she makes is the sound I have been carrying since the doorway. I fuck her with it while I suck her nipple and the purr pours into her ribs and her knuckles go white on the headboard.
She climbs fast. Three months has taught her body the map. I feel the lock starting through the bond, that bright, helpless pull.
I still the tail. Buried. Not moving.
She sobs.
“Please.”
“Please what.”
“Please move. Please let me come. Tael—I have been thinking about this since the lift—“
“I know. I could smell you in the corridor.” I kiss the mark. The tail does not move. “Ask again when you can say it without shaking.”
She shakes harder.
I wait until the edge drops. Then I start again. Deeper. The tail curls against the spot that makes her vision go. My mouth on her other breast. My thumb on her clit now, just enough, and she lasts less than the first time.
“Please—I’m going to—please don’t stop—“
I stop.
She almost hits me. What she does instead is worse. She turns her face into her arm and says, wrecked:
“Please, I’ll be good. I’ll keep my hands where you put them. Please put your mouth on me. Please let your good girl come.”
The words land in my spine.
“There she is.”
I put my mouth on her.
I am not gentle. I lick her open and I suck her clit and the tail fucks into her in a rhythm that does not match my tongue on purpose.
The bond dumps her taste into me and her want into me and the fact that she is holding the headboard because I told her to.
I take her to the edge and I hold her there with my mouth just off her, breathing on her, tail still.
“Tael—“
“Hold it.”
“I can’t—“
“You can. You have. Hold it for me.”
She holds it. Tears at the corners of her eyes. Pulse at one hundred and twenty in my throat. The discs are on the chair across the room and I am going to put them on her after I ruin her and I want her ruined first, properly, so the brass goes onto a female who has already come apart for me.
“Now,” I say. “Come on my tongue.”
She does.
Hard. Long. Her thighs clamp on my head and I hold them open and I lick her through it while the tail keeps its rhythm and she makes a sound I am going to take to my grave.
The bond locks the climax and feeds it back into me until my cock kicks against the sheet and I have to plant a hand and breathe.
I do not stop.
“Again.”
“Tael I can’t—“
“Ask.”
“Please—please I can’t take another—“
“You can. Ask properly.”
“Please let me come again. Please. Your mouth. Your tail. Please, I’m yours, I’m your good girl, please—“
“Good girl.” I suck her clit. The tail drives in. “Now.”
The second one wrings. Meaner. She sobs my name and soaks my jaw and goes loose against the mattress like someone cut a wire.
I kiss up her body. Belly. Sternum. Mark. Mouth. She tastes herself on me and groans into the kiss.
“Now you can have it,” I tell her.
I push into her.
Slow, because she is still fluttering from the second one, and because I want to feel every ridge catch.
Head. First ridge. She moans. Second. Third.
I seat myself to the hip and stay there, buried, and the purr stutters because she is tight and wet and mine and I have been thinking about this since I put the discs in my pocket at Velran’s stall.
“Look at me.”
She looks at me.
“This is mine.” I roll my hips once, deep. “Say it.”
“Yours. Everything. Move. Please move.”
I move.
Deep. Steady. The end-of-shift rhythm she asks for and the filthy rhythm under it she does not have to ask for anymore.
Tail on her clit. Mouth on the mark. Thumb on the brass-shaped hollow of her throat where the disc is going to sit.
Each stroke drags the ridges over the spot inside her until she is making those small broken sounds into my mouth.
She gets close.
I feel it.
I still.
“Tael—“
“Ask.”
“Please let me come on you. Please. I’ve been good. I’ve held it. Please fuck me and let me come.”
“My good girl.”
I give her the last of it. Harder. The bunk complains. I put my canines on the mark without piercing and I say it into the wound.
“Come.”
She comes.
The bond detonates. I feel her lock around every ridge and I follow her with my eyes open, heat pumping into her, the whole of me delivered, the discs forgotten on the chair and the rest of my span narrowing to her throat and her cunt and her hands finally off the headboard and in my hair.
I stay inside her.
I stay until the shaking drops.
I kiss the mark.
I am satisfied.
Not finished. Satisfied.
After.
Her head at my shoulder. Her hand at my chest. The blanket at our hips. The mark at her throat warm. The mark at mine warm. The bonded purr at my chest at the after-register, slowing.
Her hand traces a slow circle at my sternum.
“Tael?”
“Mm.”
“You took the long route from the level six concourse.”
“I did.”
“You had an errand.”
“I had an errand.”
“At Master Velran’s stall.”
I do not answer. Instead I ask “How long have you known?”
“I did the math at the Tuesday session. Florence mentioned, in passing, that Master Velran had been on her cleared-contractor list for some weeks. I am, Vosk, the Head of Security on this station. The math was not hard.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You have been carrying something against your sternum for three months. The fabric of your shirt at the hollow of your throat sits a hairsbreadth differently than it sat the morning of day one. You are, by every operational instinct I have built in fifteen years, a male who has been waiting.”
“Mm.”
“Tonight you came at 1859 instead of 1830.”
“Yes.”
“You took the long route.”
“Yes.”
“It is, Vosk, ready.”
I do not breathe.
I sit up.
I cross the room in three steps. The jacket on the chair. The inside pocket. The two discs.
The discs are, against my palm, the warmest objects in my body for the second time this evening.
I bring them back to the bed.
I sit on the edge.
She sits up. The blanket at her waist. Her hair at her shoulders. The mark at her throat still warm. She is still flushed from me. I want that on her when the brass goes on.
I open my palm.
The two discs sit in it. Side by side. The matched pair Master Velran finished in the first week of the commission, brass to brass, the leather cords coiled neatly at his bench protocol.
She does not, for three seconds, breathe.
Her eyes are at the discs.
Her hand has gone to her bond mark.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“There are two.”
“There are two.”
“Why are there two.”
“Because, by Draelith protocol, the bonded pair-tag is always a matched pair. The male commissions both. The male offers both. The male gives the female her disc. This one.”
I lift hers from my palm and hold it up between us. Brass. The Junction One pair-sigil at one face. Taelveth in the old Draelith script at the other.
“This is yours, sweetheart.”
She takes it.
Her hand closes around it. The brass against her palm. The disc warms the second her hand is on it, by the chemistry of the brass and registered the bonded female it has been calibrated to.
She makes a sound. The sound of a bonded female whose body has in one second, registered her bonded male’s species’ biology something that she previously had not known.
Her dark eyes are wet.
“Tael.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Put it on me.”
I take the disc. I lift the leather cord over her head. The cord settles at the back of her neck, under her hair. The disc settles at the hollow above her sternum, between her collarbones, just above where her uniform collar will, on every shift she works for the rest of her life, sit.
The disc against her skin.
The disc warms.
The mark at her throat warms in the answering register the mark runs at when the pheromone-tag of a bonded male’s commissioned brass arrives at the female’s body for the first time.
She makes another sound.