“You smell like mine.” His voice against my throat. Inhaling me like atmospheric data he needs to catalogue. “Mine andthis—” His nose traces up the side of my neck. “Vanilla. Soil. Sweat. Everything growing in this room and underneath it all—” His hand slides between my thighs from behind and I gasp, arching into his touch, my fingers scattering a tray of seedling pots across the table. His fingers find me slick and swollen and he makes a sound — low and rumbling, that chest-deep purr he doesn’t realize he does. “This. This is what I want to smell.”
He strips me with the efficiency of six months’ practice. Knows my clasps, my zips, the exact angle to pull my shirt over my head without catching my hair. My clothes drop onto the greenhouse floor — bare feet on warm grating, humid air kissing sweat-damp skin, and the surreal awareness that I’m naked in a room made of glass, surrounded by growing things and filtered alien sunlight.
I turn to undress him but his hand catches both my wrists. One hand. Easily. His fingers wrap completely around both of them and he pins them against the small of my back, holding me in place with casual strength while his other hand works his own coveralls open.
“I didn’t say you could move.”
My breath catches. He’s watching me with those predator’s eyes — gold eaten almost entirely by pupil, and the markings along his shoulders and arms pulse in rhythms I can feel through the greenhouse air like radiant heat. The coveralls fall and he’s hard, the ridges already swelling, the textured line of nodes along the underside of his cock flushed dark and pronounced.
Six months ago, those ridges overwhelmed me. Too much sensation, too much texture, too mucheverything.Now I dream about them. Wake up aching for the specific, extraordinary friction of Lividian biology designed to make its partner come apart.
He releases my wrists and lifts me onto the worktable. More pots scatter. Something ceramic hits the floor and shatters and neither of us flinches. The height puts him exactly where I need him — standing between my thighs, his cock aligned with my entrance, the blunt head radiating heat I can feel without contact.
The greenhouse hums around us. Water cycling through the irrigation system. Fans moving humid air. The soft click of growth monitors recording data. His world — the world he built from nothing — breathing and alive and watching while he takes me apart in the middle of it.
“Tell me what you want.” His hands grip my thighs, spreading them wider. Claws sheathed. Fingers bruising-tight. Soil smeared across both our skin now — dark earth against teal, against brown, ground into the creases of my palms from gripping the table.
“You know what I want.”
“I want to hear you say it.” The sub-harmonic drops. I feel it in my core, a vibration that tightens everything low in my belly. “In this room. Where everything grows.”
The metaphor hits me like a fist. This greenhouse. These seeds I delivered. This atmosphere he’s building. This family we planted in dead soil and watered with stubbornness.
“Fuck me,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I expect. “Use the ridges. Don’t be gentle. Make me feel it tomorrow.”
His control cracks. I see it happen — the discipline fracturing behind those yellow eyes, the markings flaring from amber to blazing white-gold, his claws extending and scoring shallow grooves in the table edge as his hands yank me forward. He enters me in one slow, devastating thrust and every ridge drags through me in sequence — catch, stretch, pressure, release, catch — and my head drops back and Imoan, loud and graceless,a sound that bounces off greenhouse glass and gets absorbed by growing things.
“There.” His forehead drops to mine. His voice is barely language. “Right there. That sound. That’s the one I hear when I’m trying to work.”
He doesn’t give me time to recover. Doesn’t need to — my body knows him now, accommodates faster, opens around the heat and the texture with a familiarity that makes the sensation sharper instead of duller. Every ridge is a conversation. Every thrust is a sentence in a language we’ve spent six months learning to speak.
He controls the pace. Slow withdrawal — each ridge popping free in sequence, dragging friction across nerve endings that light up like his markings — then a deep, grinding thrust that seats him fully and presses the thickest nodes against the spot inside me that makes rational thought irrelevant. The table shudders. A watering can falls. Somewhere behind us, a shelf of seedling trays rattles in rhythm with his hips and I’d laugh if I could breathe.
And then — this. The thing he’s learned to do that no human lover could replicate. He holds one ridge swollen while the others soften. Targeted, deliberate pressure — a single node locked at full engorgement, pulsing against my g-spot with rhythmic precision while he rocks into me with short, controlled movements. Scientist’s hands braced on the table. Predator’s eyes cataloguing every microexpression. Adjusting the angle by fractions of degrees until—
“Cetus —God— right there, don’t stop, don’t youdare—”
“I have no intention of stopping.” His voice is wrecked but his grip is steady. He leans in, mouth against my ear, and the next words come with a sub-harmonic so low I feel it in my teeth: “I could keep you here for hours. One ridge at a time. Until every plant in this greenhouse has heard you come.”
The orgasm hits me like an atmospheric breach — sudden, total, whiting out my vision. I grab his shoulders and my nails rake down his chest, dragging across the bioluminescent patterns, and his entire marking system detonates — blazing gold so bright it turns the greenhouse into a lantern, light pulsing through condensation-fogged glass. I bite his shoulder, teeth sinking into teal skin hard enough to bruise —myclaiming mark, reversed, human teeth in alien flesh — and his restraintshatters.
His claws extend. Score deep grooves into the worktable on either side of my hips — the controlled danger of a man who could tear me apart and never, ever will. The careful, deliberate pace goes feral. His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise and he drives into me with a force that shoves the worktable back three inches, scattering soil and seedling trays and data pads onto the floor. Ridges fully engorged, all control gone. The purring becomes a growl, then becomes words in Lividian — harsh, guttural syllables I don’t understand but feel in every nerve because the bond translates theemotionunderneath:mine, claimed, never letting go, mine.
The ridges lock.
All of them. Simultaneous. Swelling to full engorgement inside me, creating a seal of textured pressure that holds him deep while his orgasm hits — and through the claiming bond I feel it double, his pleasure layering over mine in cascading feedback loops until I can’t tell where my body ends and his begins. I come again, or still, or continuously — it doesn’t matter, the sensation is a single sustained detonation that goes on for thirty, forty seconds while his biology does what it’s designed to do, pulsing release in rhythmic waves, the ridges maintaining that devastating lock until every aftershock has passed.
We stay connected. His forehead against mine, both breathing hard, his markings cycling through chaotic post-orgasmpatterns I’ve privately namedfireworks mode.The ridges soften slowly — each node deflating in sequence, and the slide of separation draws twin shivers.
Around us, the greenhouse is wrecked. Soil on the floor. Seedling trays scattered. Claw marks gouged into the worktable. Condensation dripping from glass panels that are now fogged opaque from two bodies generating considerably more heat than the irrigation system was designed to manage.
“We destroyed the xenobotany station,” I inform him.
“The worktable survived. The seedlings are resilient.” He surveys the damage with the expression of a man professionally assessing the aftermath of an environmental event. “The Kepler-7b hybrids appear unharmed.”
“Tavia’s going to notice the claw marks.”
“I’ll tell her it was a structural test.”
