Page 27 of Fought and Found

“...Morning.”

A contraction. I used a contraction. Director Trell would note this as evidence of environmental contamination.

“You’re very warm.” She says it the way she says everything — plain, honest, her body pressing back against mine as though the sentence and the movement are the same communication in two languages.

“Xarthian body temperature runs —“

“I wasn’t complaining.”

Three words and her hips shift against me and the contact is specific and intentional and my markings burn hot from collar to jaw and the arm I have around her waist tightens, pulling her closer, and I did not authorize that, my arm made the decision and the result is her back flush against my chest and every ridge of me pressed hard against the curve of her body and the sound that escapes me is not language.

She stretches against me.

The full, unhurried length of her. Arms extending, spine arching, her body rolling against mine in a wave that starts at her shoulders and ends at her hips and I stop breathing because the friction travels every ridge and the knot throbs at the base and my claws punch through the mattress and the stretch lifts the hem of her shirt and my forearm is against bare skin.

Bare. Skin.

My arm against her stomach. 103 degrees meeting 98.6, the thermal gradient a five-degree drop that my body interprets as fragile, careful, hold here. The fuzz along my forearm presses against the soft plane below her navel and she makes a sound — quiet, involuntary, her stomach muscles tightening under my arm — and I can feel her pulse through the skin of her belly. Rapid. As rapid as mine.

Her hand finds my chest. Fingers spread against the fuzz, and she traces — not idly, with the focused attention she gives her notebook entries. Cataloguing. Mapping. Someone should be paying attention to this. Fingers threading through the grain, finding the ridge of a marking, following it. A thumbnail drags across one of the heat-dispersal lines and the sensation shorts through my chest to my groin and the sound I make is loud enough to fill the bunk.

“That sound.” Her fingers stop. Her voice has dropped to something that is not sleep-warm. That is want. Raw and certain and unhidden. “Xor.”

The way she says my name. One syllable. No title. No classification. Laid against my skin to see where it fits.

My nostrils fill with her. Dense and dark and unmistakable — want, not faint, not unconscious, present — and the knowledge that she desires me, that this woman who has not been touched in a decade is lying in my arms with her pulse hammering and her body screaming and her hand on my chest and she wants me, is the thing that finally, comprehensively destroys the framework. Not my wanting. I could survive my wanting. Weapons want.

Being wanted. That is the thing no training prepared me for.

“I cannot control it.” The words scrape out. Raw. The admission costs more than any operational intelligence I have disclosed in nine years.

“I know.” Her thumb traces a slow, deliberate circle through the fuzz. The purr surges, shredded and desperate. “That’s why I like it.”

That is why she —

Processing failure.

She likes the sound I cannot control. She likes the evidence of my malfunction. She has taken the thing I have spent thirty years killing and called it the reason she likes — and I am lying in a bunk with my tail wrapped around her waist and my arm against her bare stomach and every ridge of me pressed against the curve of her body and she wants me, and the word like is a cargo crate when I need something with no walls.

Her hand slides higher. Over the fuzz at my collarbone. Up the side of my throat. Fingertips against the pulse point where my bloodis running too fast for anything my training would classify as operational, and then higher, into the sensitive skin beneath my jaw and — her fingers brush the base of my left horn.

The nerve cluster there is dense and raw and nobody has touched it since — I inhale through my teeth. A sharp, animal sound. The sensation radiates from the horn base down my throat, down my spine, pooling hot and heavy at the base of my shaft, and my hips push forward against her. Not a fraction this time. A thrust. Involuntary and undeniable and she gasps and presses back and the friction —

“Flossie.” Her name in my mouth. Not a warning. Not a title. A sound I have no context for making — rough, wrecked, the tactical vocabulary stripped to the single word that matters.

She tips her face up. Slowly. Deliberately. The movement of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and is giving me time to stop her.

I do not stop her.

Her mouth is inches from mine. Close enough that I can see the pale freckle on her lower lip, the way her pupils have widened in the amber half-light until the brown is almost gone. Her breath crosses my lips. Warm. Peppermint. The smell of her want thick enough that every inhale is an act of destruction.

My hand moves from her stomach to her jaw. Claws retracted — every point, both hands, a choice my body makes before my brain catches up. My thumb against the hinge of her jaw, the pad of it tracing the line of bone, and she leans into my palm. Like my hand on her face is a thing she has been waiting for. Like she is not afraid of the man attached to it.

The gap between our mouths is two inches. Then one. My chin tilts down. Her nose brushes mine and the contact is so small, so nothing, and it sends a tremor through my arm that I cannot suppress.

She smiles against the almost-kiss. I can feel the shape of it. The curve of her lips an inch from mine, close enough that the warmth of her mouth is on my skin, and she is smiling, and I am going to —

“Incoming transmission from SRS.” Sprout’s voice, clipped and bright, from the corridor. The orb pulses tactical white. “Priority channel. Shall I route to the console, or would you prefer to remain horizontal?”