5. Out of Arguments
OUT OF ARGUMENTS
The dwelling was warm.
That was the only coherent thought I could hold onto as Keth carried me through the door – warm, as if the air itself were heated from within. Everything else was sliding, fragmenting, my thoughts breaking apart before I could finish them. I was burning. I was freezing. I needed… I needed…
He set me down on something soft. A pallet, maybe, piled high with furs. The texture against my oversensitised skin was almost too much, every individual hair its own separate point of contact. I curled onto my side, pulling my knees up, trying to make myself smaller.
"Mara." His voice, low and close, reaching me through my skin as much as my ears. "I need to – the heat will get worse before it peaks. I can help, or I can leave you. The choice is yours."
I laughed. It came out ragged, breathless.
"Choice," I managed. "Right. Because I'm in a great position to make choices right now."
"You are always in a position to make choices.
" His hand touched my shoulder, just that, just the lightest brush of his fingers through the fabric of my coveralls, and I arched into it as if I'd been shocked.
The heat flared, rolling through me in a wave that whited out the edges of my vision.
"Tell me to go, and I will go. I will wait outside until it passes. "
"How long?"
"Days. Perhaps longer. It varies."
Days. Days of this. Days of burning alive from the inside, my body screaming for something I couldn't name, my skin so sensitive that even the air moving across it felt like a caress.
"And if I don't tell you to go?"
His hand stilled on my shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than I'd heard it.
"Then I will tend to you. The heat is–" He paused, the word eluding him. "It is meant to be shared. Your body and mine, in alignment. I can give you what you need."
I should have said no. Should have told him to leave, suffered through this alone the way I'd suffered through everything else in my life. I was good at alone. I was built for alone.
But the heat was rising again, a slow and pulling tide, and somewhere in the middle of it my body had made its own decision.
"Stay," I said.
He undressed me without hurrying.
I'd expected urgency, from him, from myself, from the fire under my skin.
But his hands moved with care, peeling back the layers of my station coveralls, exposing my skin to the warm air inch by inch.
His fingers were huge against my body, rough-textured, impossibly gentle.
When he reached my breasts, swollen and aching, straining against the fabric, he paused.
"They hurt," I said. It came out like an accusation.
"I know." His thumbs brushed the undersides, tracing the curve where they met my ribs. "Your body is preparing. The serum has–" He stopped. His pupils blew wide, those huge dark eyes turning almost completely black. "You smell ready."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means–" His hands cupped my breasts, lifting them slightly, testing their weight. The pressure sent a spike through me, pleasure and pain tangled together, impossible to separate. "It means your body knows what it wants. Even if you don't."
I opened my mouth to argue, and he lowered his head and put his mouth on me.
Stars.
His tongue was broader than a human's, rougher, and when he dragged it across my nipple the sensation was so intense I nearly came off the pallet.
My hands flew up without my permission, grabbing at the thick fur across his shoulders, holding on.
He made a sound low in his chest, that rumble I was learning to read as contentment, and did it again.
And again. Licking, suckling, his mouth hot and wet against my oversensitised skin.
The heat crested.
I felt it happen, the moment my body stopped fighting and started demanding.
The warmth in my belly became a pulse, an ache that centred between my legs and spread outward until I couldn't tell where the need ended and I began.
I was making sounds, I knew distantly. Whimpering.
Gasping. My hips were moving against nothing, seeking friction that wasn't there.
"Keth." His name in my mouth, desperate. "Keth, please–"
He lifted his head from my breast. His eyes were nearly all pupil now, dark and liquid in the low light of the dwelling. His tail lashed behind him in short, sharp arcs.
"Please what?"
I didn't have words. I had heat and need and a body screaming at me to get closer, to take whatever he would give. I pulled at his shoulders, trying to drag him down to me, and he came down, careful, bracing himself above me on arms thick with muscle and dense brown fur.
He was so big. Even now, even lost in the heat, I felt it.
His chest was level with my face when he hovered over me, the barrel depth of his torso blocking the light.
His horns curved black against the dim ceiling, and when he dipped his head his broad nostrils flared, drinking in the scent of me.
Nothing about him was human – the blunt muzzle, the cattle-dark eyes gone almost fully black, the dense fur warm under my fingers where I clung to his shoulders.
A month ago the sight of him would have stopped my heart with fear.
Now my body strained towards him, and that frightened me more than he did.
His hips were–
I looked down.
Oh.
His cock was proportional to the rest of him.
Thick and heavy, already hard, jutting from the sheath at his groin.
It wasn't shaped quite like a human's, broader at the base, with a slight curve, the head blunter.
And there was something else, a swelling near the root that I didn't have the brain cells to think about right then.
"It will fit," he said, reading my face. "The serum adapted your body. You were made for this."
"I wasn't made for anything–"
He shifted his weight, and the head of his cock pressed against me, and every thought in my head shattered.
He worked me open without rushing.
I don't know how long it took. Time had gone strange, breaking into moments of sensation with nothing connecting them.
His fingers first, one, then two, then more, stretching me in ways I'd never been stretched, my body yielding to him with an ease that should have frightened me.
His mouth on my breasts the whole time, sucking, licking, that rough tongue working my nipples until they were swollen and tender and so sensitive that every touch sent sparks down my spine.
When he finally pressed inside me, the real thing, not his fingers, I sobbed.
He stilled at once. "Pain?"
"No." The word came out broken. "No, not – just – more. I need more."
His tail lashed. His hips pressed forward, feeding me another inch of that impossible cock, and I felt myself stretch around him, my body opening in ways it never had before.
The serum, I thought distantly. The serum did this.
Made me able to take him, made my body into something built for this exact purpose.
I should have been horrified.
I wasn't.
I was full. Fuller than I'd ever been. He was so deep I could feel him against my cervix, that broad head pressing into places no one had ever touched. And he was still going, still feeding me more of himself, that swelling at the base getting closer with every slow thrust.
"The knot," he said, his voice ragged. "When I – it will swell. It will lock us together. The first time is–" He broke off, shuddering, and I felt his cock pulse inside me. "It is intense."
"Do it."
He looked down at me, those huge dark eyes, the heavy curve of his horns above his face. He breathed me in.
"Mara–"
"Do it."
He thrust forward, and the knot breached me, and the world went white.
I came.
Not once. Not twice. I lost count somewhere around five, my body clenching around him in waves that seemed to go on forever.
The knot swelled inside me, holding us together, stretching me to the edge of pain and then past it into a fullness that was too much and perfect at once.
Every time I thought it was over, every time I was sure I couldn't possibly come again, his hips would shift or his cock would pulse and I'd tip over the edge once more.
Somewhere in the middle of it, his mouth found my breast.
He'd been paying attention to them all along, touching and stroking, his rough fingers working them while he fucked me. But now he latched on, sucking hard, and I felt something give.
Warmth. Wet warmth, thin and sweet, flowing from me into his mouth.
He went still.
Completely, absolutely still. His whole body rigid, his mouth sealed around my nipple, his cock buried deep inside me. His tail stopped moving. I wasn't sure he was breathing.
Then he swallowed.
The sound he made was nothing the translator could render. Low and rough and reverent, a groan that vibrated through his chest and into mine. He sucked again, harder, and more warmth flowed, and he shuddered as if he were the one coming.
"Keth?"
He lifted his head. His eyes were wet.
"You produce," he said. His voice was wrecked. "Mara. You produce."
I looked down at myself. A thin trickle of white was leaking from my nipple where his mouth had been, pale, almost translucent, nothing like what I'd imagined milk to look like. My body was making something new. Something that mattered to him in a way I didn't fully understand.
"Is that…” I swallowed. "Is that good?"
"Good." He laughed, a rough sound. "It is–" The word failed him. He tried again in Khorreth, something I didn't know, then came back to my language. "Sacred. You are sacred. You are–"
He lowered his head to my breast again, and I let him. His mouth sealed around my nipple, gentle now, drawing out the thin warmth with slow, steady pulls. The feeling was strange, not quite pleasure, not quite pressure, something between the two that made my whole body go liquid and loose.
I'd expected to hate this. I'd expected to feel used, objectified, reduced to a function.
Instead, I felt…
What I felt instead, I couldn't have said aloud. The way he held me, so careful. The sounds he made against my skin, grateful and awed. The wet on his face when he lifted his head to look at me.
This meant something to him. This meant everything to him.
I didn't know what to do with that.
The knot took nearly an hour to go down.
We lay tangled on the pallet, his cock still seated inside me, his arms wrapped around me to keep our weight distributed. He was heavy, but not unbearably so; he'd rolled us onto our sides at some point, holding me against his chest, his hand splayed across the small of my back.
I should have felt trapped. I didn't.
My body was quiet. For the first time since the heat hit, that burning need had faded to something I could manage, still there, a low simmer under my skin, but no longer screaming.
I was exhausted. Wrung out. My thighs were sticky, my breasts were tender, and there was a pleasant ache between my legs where his knot still held me open.
"It will happen again," he said quietly. His mouth was near my ear, his breath warm against my hair. "The heat comes in waves. This was only the first."
"I know."
"I will tend to you. Every time. For as long as it lasts."
Part of me wanted to argue. To point out that I hadn't asked for any of this – not the serum, not the heat, not the ship. But I'd said stay, and I'd said do it, and I'd meant both, even if I didn't want to look too closely at why.
I was too tired to untangle it anyway. Too tired, too warm, and for once not alone. Some worn-out part of me just wanted to lie here in the dark with his arms around me and let someone else take care of things.
That was the most frightening part of all.
"Okay," I said.
His tail curled around behind us, and I felt him smile against my hair.
The heat would come back. I knew that. And when it did we'd do this again, and my body would respond exactly the way the serum had built it to respond, and I'd come apart in his arms because that was what I was now.
I knew all of that. I knew it was engineered, my heat triggering his rut triggering my deeper heat, a feedback loop neither of us could turn off.
My body didn't care.
My body was quiet and warm and finally, finally satisfied, and I let my eyes close and my breathing slow and my mind stop fighting.
Just for now. Just for a little while.
I'd figure out how to feel about it later.