Page 55 of Fought and Found

He is standing in my shower in his trousers because he will not take them off.

“You can’t clean the rib wounds through fabric.”

“The rib wounds are accessible through the tears.”

“Xor.”

“The removal of clothing in this environment would create—“ he pauses, jaw locking, “—complications.”

The complications are pressing against the wet fabric with a visibility that makes my mouth go dry. I have felt them—the ridges, the hard length of him against my backside in the bunk, against my belly in the corridor. I know the shape through cloth. The prospect of the shape without cloth is making it difficult to maintain the Morrison voice.

“Complications noted.” I step into the shower. The space contracts to almost nothing. His heat fills it—amplified by the steam, dense and close, and I am in a tank top and knickers because I am forty-two years old and this is my ship and my shower and my choice and my choice is to stand mostly undressed in front of a male whose pheromones have been making me clench since the bunk.

The water hits my shoulders. Warm. Not enough. I want his temperature—the 103 degrees of him, the furnace heat that I pressed myself against in the bunk and have been cold without since.

“Shirt off. I need to see the ribs.”

He pulls the undershirt over his head.

I have seen his skin—through tears, at the shoulder gap, the nape where my fingers buried. Pieces of him. Not this. Not the whole map at once.

He fills the shower. Crimson skin and black geometric markings converging at his sternum, branching down his ribs like a diagram of something sacred. The fuzz covers the skin between the lines—dense at the centre of his chest, thinning toward the waist, disappearing into the waistband where the markings continue and the rest of him continues and the waistband is the only barrier between my composure and its complete destruction.

Water runs over him. Down the channel of his spine, catching in the fuzz, darkening it. The combat wounds across his ribs—three shallow slashes, mineral dust glinting. His shoulder reopened through my thermal thread. Blood and water in thin pink rivers.

My hands are steady. My hands are always steady. Between my legs is not steady. Between my legs has been running its own agenda since the corridor.

“Turn. Hands on the wall.”

He turns. The view from behind is the broad span of his back, the fuzz trailing his spine, the markings branching over his shoulder blades, the tail locked against his leg with rigid discipline. Every muscle in him vibrating with the effort of standing still.

I clean the wounds. Careful. The mineral dust comes away and each touch draws a sound from him—not pain. The sharp inhale of a male being touched with care in a place that expects violence. His ribs flinch not because it hurts but because gentleness in a vulnerable place is a language his body doesn’t speak.

“When was the last time someone did this for you?” My fingers move from the wound to the unmarked skin beside it. I trace one geometric line from his ribs toward his spine. Not medical. I’m done pretending this is medical.

“The question does not have an answer.”

“That’s the answer, lovey.”

I press my forehead between his shoulder blades. The wet fuzz against my skin. His purr starting—not from his chest but somewhere deeper, vibrating through his spine into my skull, down through my jaw and my throat and my breasts and straight into the ache between my hips. The purr is a physical thing and my body receives it like a frequency it was built to respond to. I press closer. My nipples are hard against his back through the wet tank top and the contact sends a bright jolt from my chest to my clit and I bite my lip to keep the sound inside.

I don’t keep the sound inside.

His entire back goes rigid. He heard it. The small, involuntary noise I made—not a moan, the precursor, the sharp intake—and his tail uncurls from his leg and finds my hip and wraps. The water-slick muscle against my bare skin, hot and heavy, and I press my hips into him and the pressure of his lower back against my belly is not enough and too much and I want his hands on me but that is for tonight. Tonight.

“Hair,” I manage. Against his back. “My turn.”

He turns. Elbows, walls, the temperature spiking and correcting. Then we are facing each other in the steam and he is looking down at me with gold eyes that have abandoned every tactical protocol.

I pull the tie from my braid. Shake my hair loose. It falls past my shoulders, darkening in the water. His nostrils flare—thescent response, my arousal in the steam, and the knowledge that he can smell exactly how wet I am sends a secondary pulse through me that makes my thighs press together.

He sees. His eyes drop to my thighs. Back to my face. His pupils are blown.

“Claws in, please.”

They retract before I’ve finished. Both hands. The full chosen gentleness.

His fingers slide into my hair and I close my eyes and his hands cradle my skull and the blunt pads are slow and thorough and he washes my hair with the same devastating attention he gives everything—from my temples to my nape, working through tangles, finding the tension behind my ears and at the base of my skull. The pads of his fingers press and release and press.