“You can.” Against her ear. “Trust me.”
She trusts me. My fingers this time — two, sliding inside her, curling, finding the spot that makes her eyes roll back. My thumb where the tongue was — circling, light, building pressure in counterpoint to the curl of my fingers. My mouth on her breast. Tongue on the nipple. Three points of contact — fingers inside, thumb outside, tongue on her chest — and the combination is devastating.
She is arching off the mattress. Gripping my forearm — the ridges — and the contact sends dual fire through both of us. Her hands are on the ridges while my fingers are inside her. The feedback loop closes, and the loop is going to break us both.
“Jazil — I can’t — I’m going to —”
“Let go. I have you.”
She lets go. The next one is harder than the first. Higher. Longer. My name is in it and the sound echoes through the cabin, and she is shaking and gripping the ridges and the grip is sending shockwaves through my arms and I hold her through it, fingers slowing, thumb gentling, my mouth soft on her throat.
She is a beautiful, flushed, trembling wreck on my sheets with her hair on my pillow and tears on her cheeks — the involuntary kind, the kind that come when the body processes too much sensation at once — and she is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.
I pull her against me. Cool arms around warm body. Her face against my neck. Her breathing is ragged and slowing. Her fingers still on my forearm, on the ridges, tracing without purpose.
Her hand drifts. Down my chest. My stomach. The muscles tensing under her fingers. She reaches the waistband. Lower. Her fingers find me.
She stops.
Her hand moves. Explores. Her eyes open. Widen. Her fingers trace the full shape. Both.
“Is that —” Mapping. Learning. “Are there —”
“Yes.”
“Two?”
“Yes.”
Her hand moves more deliberately. One, then the other. The shape, the size, the way they respond independently to her touch. She grips one. My vision whites out. My hips jerk forward. A sound comes out of me — raw, animal, from the chest.
She grips the other. Both hands. Moving in opposite directions. My arms give out. Face against her neck. The sound I make vibrates through both of us.
“Oh,” she says. Softly. Wonderingly. Her hands still moving. Exploring. Learning me with the thorough attention she gives everything — the gauze, the ridges, the cargo manifest. “Oh. You’re built like that.”
“Lorri —” Into her neck. Barely functional. “If you keep —”
“I want to taste you.”
The words hit me like a hull breach. Her mouth. On me. Both. The image floods my brain — warm lips, warm tongue, her looking up at me — and my claws extend fully into the mattress frame, and the metal groans.
“Not yet.” The hardest two words I have ever said. Harder thandefective.Harder than anything. “Lorri. Not yet.”
She stills. Looks at me. Reading my face. Her hands slow down but don’t leave.
“There are things I haven’t told you.” My voice is barely holding on. Her hands are still on me, and every nerve ending I own is screaming. “About what this is. What happens if there’s a bonding? A claiming. If you touch me like that while the instinct is this loud, I will lose the line. And you need to know what you’re choosing before I let that happen.”
“What I’m choosing?”
“A bond. Permanent. One mate. Lifetime. Skiveth claiming is — it’s not a decision you make on a bunk with a male you met this morning.”
She is quiet. Processing. I watch her process — the information clicking alongside the section she skimmed past on the datapad.
“The section I skipped,” she says.
“The section you skipped.”
“The long clinical one about pair bonds and claiming.”
