My claws half-extend. When my hands slide down her ribs, she feels the tips — the scrape of claw on skin, light, leaving pink trails that fade in moments. She gasps at the first scrape. Leans into the second. By the third, she is pressing her body into my hands, chasing the sensation.
A growl comes out of me. Low. From the chest. Vibrating through my mouth against her breast. She shudders.
“That sound. Make that sound again.”
I make it again. Against her stomach. Descending. My mouth working down her body — tongue, teeth, claw-tips along her sides — and she is trembling and gripping the sheets and her thighs are spreadingwider to make room for me between them and the willingness in the spreading is going to be the end of me.
“Lorri.” Against her hip. The bruise from the Vrennak. My tongue traces the edge — gentle, tending, the mate-instinct to heal overlapping with the instinct to taste. “Lie back.”
She lies back. On my sheets. Her hair on my pillow. Her body bare from the waist up, flushed, her chest heaving. She is looking at me standing between her knees at the edge of my bunk, and the look on her face is not shy, and not careful, and not sorry.
“I told you what comes next,” I say. My hands on her waistband. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
I pull her trousers down. Slow. Over her hips. Over the bruise. Over her thighs. She lifts her hips to help and the lift exposes her, and the scent that hits me when the last layer comes away is —
I close my eyes. Both hands on the edge of the bunk. Claws sinking into the mattress frame. The scent of her arousal — unfiltered, undiluted, inches from my face — is a drug that rewrites my brain chemistry in real time. I have been tasting this through recycled air and fabric barriers for hours, and the unfiltered version is so far beyond what I was tracking that my tongue flicks involuntarily and both tips taste the air between her thighs and my whole body locks.
She is soaked. She is dripping. And the taste — copper-sweet, warm, complex, layered the way the nebula is layered — is a taste I am going to chase through every corridor of every station for the rest of my existence.
“Spread your legs for me.” Low. A request wrapped in a growl. “Wide. I want room.”
She spreads. Her thighs opening. Her hands gripping the sheets above her head. Her chest heaving and her eyes on the ceiling, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“Look at me.”
She looks at me. From the pillow. Down the length of her own body to where I am kneeling between her thighs with my mouth inches from the center of her. Her eyes are dark and wide, and her lips are swollen from the kissing, and she is looking at me, and I hold her gaze and put my mouth on her.
Both tips. First contact. The taste hits my tongue, and a sound comes out of me — deep, raw, the hunting rumble but lower, more guttural — and the vibration of the sound transfers directly into her, and she cries out. Full-throated. Her hips come off the mattress. My hands find them — firm, pressing down, holding her open for my mouth.
Both tips working her — one circling, the other pressing, then switching, then both together. She cannot anticipate me, cannot predict where the next sensation will come from because each tip is finding a different nerve and working it, and the rhythm keeps changing — building, shifting, each new pattern drawing a unique sound out of her. She can only lie on my sheets and grip the fabric and take it.
“Jazil — Jazil, oh God, oh — both, you can, oh —”
Her thighs lock around my head. Her hands leave the sheets and find my hair, and she grips so hard my scalp burns, and I do not care. I press deeper. My tongue working her open. Tasting inside her. The taste here is stronger — concentrated, the essence of her — and I am making sounds against her I cannot control, low continuous growls of a male who has found the thing he was built to taste and is not going to stop.
She is loud. She is exactly as loud as I told her she would be. Every sound earned. Every gasp and moan and broken syllable of my name, a gift that I am learning not with my brain but with my tongue. The gasps, the moans are all sweet-deep. My name —Jazil, Jazil— tastes like the warmth of her pulse, and I want to hear it forever.
“Please —” She is begging. Not because I made her. Because her body has arrived at the place where begging is the only option left. “Please, please, please —”
I give her what she’s begging for. Both tips pressing together on the spot I’ve been circling. Firm. Rhythmic. Relentless. Her thighs clamp. Her back arches off the mattress. Her hands in my hair lock and pull, and the pull goes through me like lightning.
She comes against my mouth. Hard. The hardest yet. Her whole body convulsing, her thighs shaking around my head, my name torn out of her in a voice that fills the cabin and bounces off the bulkheads and I hold her through it — tongue working her down, hands on her hips, my mouth gentling as the waves subside.
The taste of her when she comes. I will never have words for it. Every language I know fails. It is the taste of being alive. Of being wanted. Of being the male who made this female fall apart on his sheets and who is going to do it again.
I kiss up her body. Slow now. Tasting the aftermath on her skin. The salt of sweat. The flush of heat. Stomach. Ribs. The space between her breasts, the hollow of her throat. The freckle. Her mouth. She tastes herself on my tongue and makes a sound — half-moan, half-laugh — that vibrates between us.
“That,” she says against my mouth, wrecked, barely a voice, “was —”
“The beginning.”
“There’s — more?”
My fingers find her. Still sensitive. She gasps and grabs my wrist.
“I can’t — I just —”
