Page 58 of Fought and Found

“Again,” I gasp. “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t.

He fucks me through another orgasm, then another, until my legs are shaking and I’m babbling against his neck. Only when I’m limp and whimpering does he finally let the knot ease. He pulls out slowly, watching with dark satisfaction as his cum leaks down my thighs, mixing with the water.

Then he drops to his knees again.

His mouth is on me instantly — licking up the mess he made, tongue fucking deep into my oversensitive cunt while two thick fingers replace his knot. I come one last time on his tongue, sobbing his name, fingers tangled in his wet hair.

When he finally stands, he kisses me slow and deep, letting me taste both of us. His arms wrap around me, holding me up as my legs refuse to work.

“Tonight was just the beginning,” he murmurs against my lips, voice rough with promise. “When we reach Junction One and this is over… I’m going to take my time with you. Hours. Days. Until the only thing you remember is how perfectly you take my knot.”

I shiver in his arms, already aching for more.

The sound he makes—broken, wrecked, somewhere between a groan and a laugh—is the most human thing I have heard from him.Not Xarthian. Not SRS. The noise of a male who has been given more than he knows how to hold and is trying anyway.

I grin against his wet skin. Smug. Satisfied. Aching between my legs with an intensity that is going to require serious attention tonight.

I shiver in his arms, already aching for more.

We stand under the cooling water for a long time after that — his bigger body sheltering mine, his hands gentle now as they trace the bruises he left on my hips and the bite mark on my shoulder. The ache between my legs is deep and delicious, a constant reminder of how thoroughly he claimed me. My thighs are sticky with his cum even after the water, and every shift of my hips sends a fresh pulse of soreness and satisfaction through me. No regrets. Only a low, humming want that says tonight is going to be even better.

Eventually he turns off the water. We dress in near-silence — him in the corridor, me still leaning against the shower wall for a moment to catch my breath and steady my legs. My body feels marked, used, and perfectly claimed. The stretch lingers. The bite on my shoulder throbs warmly every time I move. I pull on a clean tank top and knickers, then the blue cardigan with the daisies, and step out.

He is already at the co-pilot’s station when I return to the cockpit, dressed and outwardly composed. But his tail finds me the second I sit down, curling possessively around my calf. The purr is back — low, steady, and unmistakably satisfied.

“Tea?” I ask, voice still a little rough.

“Peppermint. Steeped too long.”

I smile. “Yes, lovey. I know.”

Two mugs. Fingers brushing on ceramic. The domestic ritual feels different now — heavier with promise and the memory of what we just did against the shower wall.

Junction One by morning. Drask’s clock still ticking. A prisoner in the cargo bunk. Morrison waiting at the end of the route.

But right now, with his tail warm around my leg and the delicious ache between my thighs, none of that feels louder than the male sitting in my chair.

The transaction reference has been running in the back of my mind since I wrote it down. I pull the notebook out and look at it. The buyer code is the part that won’t settle—the format of it more than the content. I’ve processed enough Tessaro Foundation cargo over the years to know their routing signatures, and this prefix has that feel: institutional, not individual. Not a person buying through Drask. An organization.

I add a line beneath the code: buyer format = institutional. Tessaro-adjacent? Then I close the notebook. That’s all I have. A loose thread, not a conclusion. I have enough conclusions already.

My shoulder stings where he bit me. My hip aches where he gripped. Between my legs I am swollen and slick and the ache is so specific it has a postcode. I can wait until tonight. I have waited ten years for someone to sit in that chair.

His tail winds up my calf. His purr hums steady—low, constant, the frequency that will never belong to anyone else.

In the pocket of the clean cardigan—the blue one with the daisies—my notebook holds a list of lost things nobody is looking for. Patterns and discrepancies and person-shaped gaps.

The biggest lost thing I ever found is sitting in my co-pilot’s chair holding my hand with cracked tile dust still under his claws.

Sprout doesn’t say anything. The orb doesn’t change color. But the cockpit display flickers—one heartbeat—and Xor goes still.

Not the stillness of the shower or the defection speech. An older stillness. The stillness of a male who has been in this exact moment before, who knows precisely what it means because he has spent thirty years learning what it means from the person who is now in his ear.

“Incoming.” Flat. Not to me. “Private channel.”

I watch his face. I watch his hand on mine. I watch the tail at my calf.