This is fast. My engineer brain registers the thought the way it registers a system operating outside normal parameters. A few days isn't long enough for permanent neurological bonding by any rational metric. But rationality is the thing that tells you to wait for the next budget cycle to replace the failing parts. Rationality is the thing that killed my parents, because someone decided the emergency beacon could last another quarter. I grewup learning that waiting for perfect conditions gets people killed, and I became a courier because someone has to commit to the run when everyone else is calculating risk margins.
Horgox Ka'reen isn't a risk. He's the clearest signal I've ever read.
"Your turn." I reach for his waistband, and his hands cover mine. Not stopping. Steadying. His fingers laced through mine as we push the fabric down together, and the collaborative intimacy of undressing each other settles something in my chest that I didn't know was unsettled.
When he's bare in the moonlight, I look. Not stealing a glance. Looking, with the same focused attention I bring to any system I intend to understand completely.
Emerald skin over muscle that moves with fluid power, designed for violence but holding me with a gentleness that cracks something open every time. Jade patterns flowing over his chest, down his arms, each one a sensory organ and emotional tell. The blue circuit traceries running along his ribs, cold and artificial against the warmth of living skin, permanent evidence of what they did to him. Scars crossing everything like a map of survival. And lower, where the jade patterns continue, ridged along the length of him, tapered, a thicker ridge at the base. Proportionate to his frame, which means significantly larger than human standard.
"Scared?" he asks. Without judgment. Giving me the option.
"No." My hand wraps around him, and the texture under my palm is extraordinary. Ridged and warm and already slick with viscous lubrication that his body has been producing since I touched his chest. He makes a sound like a male being hit, and his hips jerk. "Curious. And impressed."
"If you approach this as an engineering assessment—"
"Then you'll get the most thorough, systematic attention of your life. Consider it a benefit of the profession." I stroke, feelingthe ridges drag against my palm, and his jaw clenches hard enough that I can see the muscle jump. "Tell me about this. The lubrication."
"Autonomic." His voice has gone rough. "My body calibrates to yours. Reads your pheromones. Adjusts temperature, proportion, viscosity." Another stroke, and his breath fractures. "If you keep doing that, I won't last long enough to be inside you, and I've been waiting too long for that."
The directness of it. The raw specificity, from a male who speaks in clipped tactical assessments and lets his markings say what his words won't. My body responds to the honesty of it the way it always has, heat pooling low and deep.
"Then take me to the ground," I say, "and stop waiting."
He lowers me to the moss with a care that contradicts his size. My undershirt goes over my head, his hands helping, and when I'm bare beneath him, the temperature differential becomes its own sensation. His body radiating heat like a reactor core, my cooler skin prickling against the night air. Where we touch, the contrast registers as a line of fire. His skin against mine, hot and textured, the jade patterns slightly raised so that every point of contact has dimension.
"Beautiful," he breathes. His mouth follows the path he previewed at the hot spring. Throat, collarbone, the hollow where my pulse hammers. His lips are hot; his tongue is hotter, and the ridged texture of it against my skin makes me arch into him.
He mouths a line down my sternum, and his breath is furnace-warm between my breasts. "I've had this route planned for days, little flare. Every path. Every detour."
"I remember the preview." My hands find his hair, guiding him. "The real thing is better."
His mouth closes over my nipple, and the sound I make echoes off canyon walls. His tongue does something involving textureand heat and a flickering motion that no human tongue could replicate, each ridge reading my response and adjusting in real time. The precision of it, the way his body is literally mapping mine through sensation, makes my back bow.
"The patterns on your tongue," I gasp, because my brain catalogues even when my body is coming apart. "Same as your fingers. Functional jade. Bioresponsive."
"Every ridge reads your responses." His voice vibrates against my breast. "Temperature, pressure, arousal. I can feel what you like and adjust." He demonstrates, shifting angle and rhythm based on whatever his tongue is detecting, and the targeted precision undoes me. "Like this."
"Like— yes—there—"
He gives both breasts the same devastating attention before moving lower. Down my ribs, across my stomach. His hands settle on my hips, thumbs in the hollows beside my hipbones, and he looks up at me from between my thighs with an expression that makes my entire body clench.
"I want to taste you," he says. Reading my response through the hands on my hips. Confirming, not asking. "Everywhere."
"Please."
His tongue finds me, and the world narrows to a single point of focused sensation.
Long. Flexible in ways human tongues aren't. And ridged, the bioresponsive jade patterns reading my body and adjusting in real time. Broad strokes that make me gasp, then targeted precision on the exact nerve cluster that makes my hips come off the ground. His hands grip me, holding me where he wants me, and the combination of strength and attentiveness is its own form of devastation.
"Oh— yourtongue—"
He makes a sound against me that vibrates through tissue and bone, and the combination of texture and resonance and focusedheat is unlike anything I've experienced. Not a comparison to anything human. Something entirely its own. When his tongue slides inside me, the ridges dragging against sensitive tissue, my fingers twist in his hair and I lose the ability to form words.
He works me higher with a patience that borders on cruelty. Reading my body, learning what makes me shake and what makes me scream and the exact combination that makes me lose language entirely. When I break, it's with his tongue still inside me, his thumb pressing where I need it most, and the orgasm rolls through me in waves that clamp my thighs around his head.
He works me through it. Doesn't ease up until I'm pushing at his shoulders, oversensitive and shaking.
When he lifts his head, his mouth glistening, the color in his markings blazing white-gold, the look on his face is pure, focused satisfaction. Not smug. Awestruck. The expression of someone who just confirmed something they'd been theorizing about and found reality exceeded the hypothesis.
