“You loaded my mate a manual on how to trigger my arousal responses.”
“I loaded your mate a comprehensive guide to Lividian pair-bond psychology. Section seven happens to cover arousal triggers in detail. With diagrams.”
Dove is biting her lip to keep from laughing. The sight of her teeth pressing into that soft lower lip triggers a cascade of sense-memory—her mouth on my chest, my shoulder, lower—that makes my claws extend involuntarily.
I sheathe them. With effort.
“Tavia’s lesson block,” I say.
“Doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“Do we?”
“I have twenty minutes, an elevated biological response, and a mate who is deliberately provoking me on the operations centre floor.” I hold her gaze. Let the harmonics drop. “That is a significant problem.”
Her breath stutters. The playful confidence wavers, replaced by something rawer—want, naked and mutual, the bond transmitting it in both directions until the air between us feels pressurised.
“Twenty minutes isn’t enough,” she murmurs.
“It’s enough if we’re efficient.”
She schedules Tavia’s xenobotany module to start fifteen minutes early. Pickles assists by informing Tavia that the fungi specimens require immediate morning observation “before the spores enter dormancy,” which is not technically true but is technically plausible enough that an eight-year-old with a passion for biology doesn’t question it.
The greenhouse lab door seals. Pickles confirms Tavia is engaged and happy.
“I shall be running comprehensive diagnostic routines,” he announces. “All non-essential monitoring systems in corridors B through D will be offline for the next ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes?” Dove raises an eyebrow. “I thought we had twenty.”
“I have observed that your time estimates are consistently inaccurate. I am providing a buffer.”
The cockpit of the Rolling Pin is eleven metres from the operations centre. We cover the distance in what I estimate to be four seconds—not running, precisely, but walking with theurgency of two people who have been eye-fucking across a room for the better part of an hour.
The hatch seals. Dove spins. I’m already moving—lifting her, her legs locking around my waist on reflex, her back hitting the bulkhead beside the nav console with a force that makes the ship’s proximity sensors chirp.
“Autopilot disengaged,” the Rolling Pin’s basic nav system reports.
“It was never engaged,” Dove says against my mouth. “Shut up, ship.”
I kiss her. Deep and claiming—tongue sweeping past her lips, tasting coffee and the faint sweetness that’s purely her biochemistry, the flavour my body has encoded as essential. She moans into it and her fingers rake up the back of my neck into my hair, nails dragging across the markings at my hairline, and the sensation cascades down my spine in branching light, every nerve between scalp and cock firing in a synchronized pulse that makes me grind against her involuntarily.
She gasps. Rolls her hips. The friction of her body against the ridge-line—swelling now, each node engorging rapidly through my trousers—drags a sound from my chest that vibrates the hull plating.
“Off,” she pants. “Everything off, now, we don’t have—”
I set her down. Strip her shirt over her head—my shirt, always mine, and the claiming mark blooms purple-gold against her brown skin and the sight of it hits me like a systemic shock. Two weeks and it still does this. Every time. She’s bare underneath because she stopped wearing anything beneath my shirts four days ago and she knows precisely what that does to me.
“You are going to destroy my ability to function in professional settings,” I tell her while pulling my own shirt off.
“That’s the goal.” She unfastens my trousers. Her hand closes around me and the contact—her fingers finding the ridges,thumb pressing the first node and rolling—makes my vision split. “God, you’re already—they’re so swollen—”
“I’ve been aroused since you stretched your legs on the ops centre floor. Approximately forty-seven minutes of sustained engorgement.” I press my forehead to hers. Breathing hard. “The diagrams Pickles provided did not adequately prepare you for the consequences of deliberate provocation.”
“Show me the consequences.”
I lift her onto the console. She hooks her ankles behind me, tilts her hips—the angle we’ve perfected over two weeks of stolen encounters in this cockpit, in the supply closet off corridor C, once against the atmospheric processor housing when Tavia was at lessons and we couldn’t make it anywhere with a door.
