"I need—" She swallows. "I need a second."
"Take whatever you need."
"Because if I don't stop now I'm not going to stop, and you're bleeding from three separate wounds and we're in a cave that was just attacked and this isnothow I imagined—" She stops herself. Presses her forehead against mine. "This is not how I imagined our first time would go."
Our first time.Notif.Notmaybe.Stated as an inevitability, something she's already decided will happen when the conditions are right.
"How did you imagine it?" My voice has gone rough enough to scrape.
"Not covered in blood in a cave that smells like murder lizard." But she's smiling, shaky and incandescent. "Something with slightly fewer near-death experiences immediately beforehand."
"I can wait." The understatement of my entire existence. "I've been waiting since the root cave."
"The root cave? That was dayone."
"Yes."
"You—" Her expression shifts through several emotions too fast to catalogue. "Day one. You've been—sinceday one."
"Since you slammed into me running like prey and looked up with those green eyes and didn't flinch." My thumb traces her jaw. "I knew then."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be something more dangerous. Then she kisses me again, softer this time, a promise rather than a collision. Her mouth moves against mine with a deliberateness that saysI'm choosing this clearly, with full awareness of what it means, and when she pulls back the second time, her hands are steady.
"When this is over," she says. "When we're not bleeding. When Bebo's not recording our vital signs for posterity. When I've had a chance to wash the murder lizard off both of us." Her thumb traces the cut across my cheekbone, following the line of the circuit tracery beneath it. "I want you to finish what you started saying."
"I said everything that matters."
"You said you chose me. You didn't tell me what that means. In your culture. In your species." Her eyes hold mine, and there is nothing tentative in them. "I want to know what choosing means for a Varkaani."
The claiming. The bonding. The permanence of it, the biological reality of what my body is already preparing for, the changes happening beneath my skin since the night she freed the pathways in my chest and the wordlittle flareescaped before I could stop it.
"Soon," I tell her. "When we're both ready."
"I'm ready now."
"You're ready to hear it now. You're not ready for what comes after hearing it." My hand settles against her hip, steadying her in my lap where every point of contact burns. "Some truths change things permanently. I want you to choose that change with clear eyes."
She studies my face for a long moment. Then nods, accepting, and the acceptance is its own form of trust.
"I need to check the perimeter," I say, because if she stays in my lap for another thirty seconds, my restraint is going to fail in ways that involve significantly less clothing.
"Probably wise." She climbs off me with a reluctance that registers in every nerve ending I possess, and the loss of her weight, her warmth, the specific pressure of her body against mine, is the worst thing I've felt since the arena.
"And Horgox?" She's at the cave entrance, haloed by the dim light filtering through the canyon overhead. "For the record. Day one for me too."
She disappears into the inner passage before I can respond.
The perimeter takes longer than it should, my shoulder protesting every movement, but the physical work is necessary. Not for the cave's security. For mine. Every quiet moment, my brain replays the taste of her. The sound she made against my mouth. The way her hips shifted in my lap.
Our first time.She said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like something already decided, requiring only the right coordinates to land.
I set warning triggers at the tunnel entrances, check the spring, confirm the inner chamber's structural integrity. Force my body through tactical motions while my chest burns with something that has nothing to do with the cuts.
By the time I return, the smell hits me at the entrance.
Sweet. Vegetal. Wrong in a way I can't immediately identify.
Krilly is sitting on the moss bed, staring at her hands with an expression I haven't seen before. Pupils dilated. Cheeks flushed.A smile curving her mouth that looks simultaneously delighted and alarmed.
