It is not the same thing.
It is not the same thing in ways I cannot articulate because my language centres are experiencing system failure.
The second shoulder. She peels the jumpsuit down to her elbows, and the garment underneath is a ribbed undershirt that covers everything and conceals nothing, clinging to the architecture of her body like a topographic map of the terrain I have been refusing to survey. Her skin is damp at the throat, flushed and luminous in the firelight, and the temperature differential between her overheated surface and the cool cave air is producing exactly the kind of visual data my brain has no capacity to process right now.
“Krilly, stop.”
“Why? It’s ashirt. I’m wearing a shirt. You can see that I’m wearing a shirt.” She gestures at the shirt as evidence, which draws my attention to every single thing the shirt is doing, which is the opposite of helpful.
Three strides. That’s all it takes to cross the cave, catch her wrists, and stop the jumpsuit’s descent before it reaches her waist. My hands wrap around both of hers easily, her fingers small and warm against my palms, the jumpsuit bunched between us like a barricade made of insufficient fabric.
Close. Too close. The heat radiating off her skin hits me like walking into a thermal vent, sweet and sharp with the fruit’s chemistry and something underneath that’s purely her. Her head tips back to look up at me—all the way back, the full two-foot differential on display—and the angle puts her throat on offer in a way that shorts every higher function in my brain.
“Oh,” she says softly, staring up at me, her wrists still caught in my grip. “Your markings are doing something new.”
They are. I can feel them pulsing in a pattern I don’t recognise, something brighter and more desperate than the standard jade-gold want spectrum she catalogued, and I cannot make them stop because she is inches from me and my body is responding to every signal hers is broadcasting.
“You need to put this back on.” My voice comes out lower than I intend. The harmonic is there, the one she described, the one that goes to places that make sitting down complicated. The vibration travels through my hands into hers, and her breath catches.
“You’re the one holding my wrists,” she points out, which is accurate and devastating. “I can’t put anything on if you don’t let go.”
Correct. Let go. Release her wrists, step back, re-establish the five metres that were already insufficient. These are the actions of a male with discipline.
My thumbs slide across her pulse points instead. Involuntary. Her heartbeat hammers against my skin, fast and strong, and the sensation travels up my arms and settles in my chest like something taking root.
“Your pulse is elevated.”
“You’re holding my wrists and looking at me like that, so yes. Dramatically elevated. Astronomically. Setting personal records.” She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t push closer. Holdsabsolutely still, staring up at me with those enormous green eyes. “Are you going to let go?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
Good question. My hands aren’t listening to my brain. My hands are listening to the pulse beneath her skin, to the heat of her, to the way her fingers have curled around mine as if my grip is something she wants to hold onto rather than escape.
I let go. Step back. The absence of her pulse against my thumbs registers as a physical loss, a gap in sensory input that my body immediately classifies as wrong.
“Jumpsuit,” I manage. “Back on.”
“You can’t give me orders about my own clothes.” But she tugs the jumpsuit back over her shoulders, watching my face the entire time, cataloguing whatever she sees with the attention she gives malfunctioning systems. “For someone who wants me to get dressed, your markings are sending a very contradictory message.”
“My markings are not part of this conversation.”
“Your markings are broadcasting this conversation to anyone with functional vision.” She zips the jumpsuit halfway up, a compromise that is worse than no compromise because it draws attention to the specific terrain the zipper is traversing. “There. Decent. Ish. Happy?”
No.
I lower myself back against the far wall. Five metres. Reset. My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against the stone until the tremor subsides or at least becomes less visible.
“Your horns.” Her entire demeanour shifts. The playful heat sharpens into something more intent, more focused, and I know what’s coming before she says it. “Can I touch them?”
“No.”
“You keep saying that. But you never fully explainwhy.” She tilts her head, and the firelight catches her hair, and the combination of genuine curiosity and stripped-away self-consciousness is going to be the thing that finally ends me after everything else failed. “Last time you said they’re sensitive. Like the inside of a wrist. But that’s not the whole truth. I can see it in your markings; they went darker.”
She’s right. She reads me better than anyone I’ve ever known.
“Varkaani horns are a bonding point.” Every word chosen with the care of someone handling something volatile, because it is. “The nerve density is extreme. Being touched there is comparable to—” A human analogue that communicates the intensity without clinical detachment. “If the most sensitive part of your body and the deepest emotional centre in your brain were connected by a single nerve, and touching one activated the other simultaneously. That’s what horn contact is.”
