Page 61 of Fought and Found

The berth is too small. The ceiling clears my horns by inches. My knees sit above my hips on the low mattress. Seven feet of Xarthian on furniture built for a woman who is five-foot-four and wears cardigans with embroidered foxes.

She enters.

The thin shirt. Nothing else. Hem at mid-thigh, moving when she walks. Bare legs, fairy light on the curve of her calves. She is the most terrifying thing I have faced in forty-six years of living.

She stands between my knees. Her chin level with my collarbone. The top of her head would tuck beneath my jaw. I am looking down, and she is looking up, and the scale of her — the devastating smallness — short-circuits everything essential.

The thermal-thread seam above her eye catches the fairy light. My thread. My work, done with steady hands an hour after I nearly killed a colleague for putting her on the deck. She watches me find it. She does not cover it.

Her hands land on my face. Both palms against my jaw, each one spanning chin to ear and no further. Small. Warm. Certain.

“Stop being careful. I’m not fragile. And you’ve been careful your whole life.”

“I don’t know how to do this without being careful.”

“Then let me show you.”

She kisses me.

She kisses the way she flies — bold, precise, adjusted for conditions. Her tongue finds mine and the purr erupts, and she swallows the vibration, hums against it. She has to rise on her toes to reach my mouth and the stretch lifts the hem of her shirt past her hips. I can see her bare thighs and the shadow between them, already glistening. The scent of her arousal floods my nostrils — sharp, sweet-dark, thick withhours of wanting. She is soaked. The knowledge lands in my hindbrain like a struck match.

My hands find her waist. Both palms, claws sheathed. My fingers span from hipbone to ribs — the entire width of her torso in my hand. The possessive centers of my brain ignite.

She strips my shirt. Her hands track down my chest, mapping markings and fuzz. She finds my horns. Both hands, firm grip around the bases — the most sensitive non-genital point on a Xarthian body — and she squeezes.

My spine arches. My tail lashes. My claws drive into the mattress. The sound I make is not language.

“Again?”

“If you do that again I will not be responsible for —”

“Promise?”

She twists. Both hands, a quarter turn. My vision whites. My hips buck. I grab her — not carefully — my hands close around her waist and lift. She weighs nothing in the strength ratio. I swing her onto the bunk beneath me and my horns score the ceiling and I am over her. My shoulders wider than the berth. My arms braced on either side of her head. She is looking up at me — hair fanned, eyes wide, shirt rucked past her hips, bare from the waist down, cunt already glistening for me.

She hooks her leg over my hip and pulls me down. The contact of her wet heat against my cock empties us both of air.

“Hi.” From underneath me. Her leg around my hip.

“Hello.”

“Fast for a male who doesn’t usually do this.”

“All tactical restraint is void when horns are involved.”

“Noted. For future reference.”

Future.

I pull the shirt over her head and the framework dissolves. Not strains. Dissolves. The clinical narration goes silent. Sensation without filter. For the first time in my life I am inside the moment without observing it from above.

She is golden in the fairy light. Soft where I am hard. The curve of her belly, the flare of her hips. The freckles scattered across her chest like distant stars I intend to chart. My thumbs meet at her navel. My fingers wrap past her sides. The scale is obscene and perfect.

My mouth finds the seam above her eye — lightly, my thread under my lips, and her breath catches. Then her throat. Her collarbone. The bite mark from the shower — I kiss that too and she shivers. The slope of her breast — I take her nipple into my mouth and suck hard, tongue lashing the stiff peak while the purr vibrates through my tongue into her flesh. She cries out, back arching and her hand flies to my horn and the feedback loop nearly blinds me. I switch — the other breast, my palm covering the one my mouth has left, the nipple hard against my lifeline, my hand larger than the curve of her.

“More. Xor — more.”

Lower. My mouth tracks her belly, the crease of her hip. My knees hit the floor. I push her legs apart, and I descend on her cunt like a male who has been starving for his mate his entire life.