He is removing his robe, walking toward me. “Is it true, Anya?”
He lets his robe fall to the floor, and steps easily onto the high wall of the tub, not bothering with the steps. He drops into the water gracefully, not even splashing, staring at me the whole time.
When he touches me, my skin vibrates with pleasure, waves of goosebumps spreading out from his touch. He pulls me by my hips to him, and I put my arms up to his shoulders. I look at his skin, almost like it’s something I’m seeing for the first time, but I have the contours of hiskrythmemorized, and now all I want to do is touch and feel that he’s real, and really here, with my fingertips and my lips.
I forget what he’s asked me as soon as I place my lips on the swath ofkryththat passes over the left of his chest. His body is instantly electrified; his muscles tense, and he folds me into his embrace.
I wrap my legs around him, and his erect cock brushes against my thigh. A throb of longing wells up between my legs, and I shift myself so that he can enter me.
It’s been a long time since I have felt him. But after the thick bulb of his cock passes through my outer lips, rubbery and clean with the water of my hot bath, he enters me easily. My pussy is wet and my body welcomes him. Pleasure seems to pour from between my legs, deep in my core, to invade every part of my body.
He pushes me against the edge of the tub, lifting me slightly so that my torso is turned up to him. With his hands in my hair, he drags his tongue from the pulsing hollow of my throat to my nipples, which he sucks to hard nubs, one at a time. When he begins to fuck me, I’m already lost in a tsunami of pleasure, and my eyes are actually rolling back in my head. My fingers dig into his back, and I hear myself screaming as my whole body shudders and squeezes him.
I don’t know how long this orgasm lasts; it feels like a very long time. My mind is still conscious, but I see him above me, through a fog of sensations that hold my thoughts hostage in the grip of my pleasure. He is looking down at me, almost as if he’s studying me, or worshiping me, or both. His cock throbs with his own pleasure as he observes mine, and then, only after I lie limp in his arms and draped partially on the edge of the tub, exhausted, does he begin to gently fuck me again.
I stare at hiskryth, at the way it ignites as his pleasure builds. In a trance, I’m compelled to lift my lips to hiskrythagain, and when I touch it with my tongue, he groans loudly and the color of it flashes vibrantly, rippling away from my touch, spreading all over his body.
He pulls me to his chest and cradles my head with his enormous hand, his fingers pulling my hair almost to the point of pain, as he thrusts deep inside of me and fills me with his cum. I’m shocked that my body has begun to respond to him again, that I feel like I’m almost ready to come again. I mewl and rock my hips, grinding against him, until at last I’m also satisfied, yet again.
We stay in the sweaty, wet embrace for a long time after both our orgasms subside. Water has been sloshed all over the place—the water level is noticeably drained, even with his enormous mass in the tub.
He pulls away from me at last, to look at me, stroking my damp hair away from my face where it has clung to my skin in wet strands.
“Is it true?” he asks. “You have my baby in your womb?”
I nod solemnly and touch his lips as his mouth falls open in a look of pride and satisfaction that makes my pussy wet again.
I know he’s pleased, but I ask him anyway. “Are you pleased?”
Kerz, I have learned, are not big smilers. In fact, I’ve never seen a smile on any of them. But there is another expression that his mouth makes, and he makes it now: he’s content, and truly happy. I link my ankles—with some trouble, because he’s fit but very large—around his back, because I don’t want him to leave my body.
He twists and pulls me around so that I’m sitting on his lap on the bench in the tub. I settle contentedly against his shoulder, my fingers playing with hiskryth. I feel driven to do this by instinct, knowing that it pleases him, feeling the shudders of pleasure that travel through his body from my fingertips to his cock.
“What happened?” I say quietly. Obviously, something that we wanted, because he’s in my bathtub making love to me, and seems in no hurry to hide it.
His eyes close and he sighs.
“I regret to inform you,” he says solemnly, “that your husband, Zethki Kirigok, was fatally injured in battle.”
My eyes go wide. In spite of everything, I feel a pang of an emotion I have trouble recognizing. Is it fear? Of Rys? Of what he seems capable of doing? Or is it sadness, because in the end Zethki, however mad and however much I did not love him, professed his undying love to me day after day and night after night, and I feel sorry for him?
Or just relief?
Maybe all three, I decide, before I ask timidly, “Did you…?”
His eyes open, and they are alive with the very wild energy that I sometimes fear in him. “I didn’t kill him,” he says. “But I know who did. And this Kerz will be a danger.”
He holds me by my shoulders now, putting me in front of him, looking at me intensely. His eyes wander to my nipples, back up to my eyes, a mixture of lust and possession and love consuming his face. “We will need to be very careful,” he tells me.
My heart drops, and it occurs to me that he has come to tell me that our love must go on in secret, or something even worse. I shudder when I have the errant thought that in Kerz culture, it’s entirely possible that I must now be married to the Kerz who killed Zethki. I don’t know.
He drops a hand to my hip and then moves it up, cradling me at the small of my back. Between my legs, I feel his cock growing hard again—it never really wilted, but now it pulses with new vigor, stroking the tender places he has already explored, awakening my own desires again.
“You are afraid,” he says. “Why?”
My hips are moving; I can’t stop myself or my body’s desires. “What does that mean?” I pant. “That… oh…” I lose my train of thought for a moment as he drives deep inside of me and thekrythwrapped around his cock ignites inside of me, vibrating against my tender g-spot, almost making me cry in pleasure. “That… that… Zeth…kuh… is… dead… now…” I mewl away the end of my question.
He grabs my hair in his fist and we rock together. “You will have to marry, Anya Mann. A Kirigok, his closest male relative.”
