Page 45 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"No."

"And you're giving me the choice."

"It was always your choice, Taylor. The resonance identified you. It did not claim you. Only you can do that."

Among my people, the concept she was reaching for was almost nonsensical. Choosing a resonance mate would be like choosing whether to have a circulatory system. You accepted the bond the way you accepted gravity.

And yet. Watching her refuse to surrender her agency to a biology she had never consented to, I understood something my culture had never had to confront: a bond that was chosen was worth more than one that was accepted.

She was teaching me something Valorians had never needed to learn.

She looked at me for a long time. Her emotions were a complicated, layered thing that I could only partially parse. Fear and courage. Uncertainty and desire, pulling against each other while she considered what I had asked.

And underneath all of it, something warm and steady that had been growing since the first night in the bioluminescent jungle. Since the first time she'd called me Glow Stick. Since the first time I'd said her name and felt the resonance sing.

"Then I need to say this clearly," she said. "I'm choosing the forever part. Tonight."

I stopped breathing.

"I'm not choosing where we live, what your government gets to call me, or what the rest of my life looks like. I don't know any of that yet." She put her hand flat against my chest, over the marking that ran along my sternum. I felt it like a brand. "But I understand what consummating the bond means. I choose that permanence. I choose you. And right now, I want you to stop holding back."

"Taylor, if I stop holding back⁠—"

"I know." She smiled. And the resonance translated that smile as something so warm, so open, so trusting that I felt it in every marking on my body. "I know what I'm asking for. I can feel it, remember?"

She could feel it. Through the bond. She could feel exactly how much I wanted her and she was not running. She was looking at me with those brown-and-green eyes I still had no word for and she was staying.

I cupped her face in both hands. Her skin was warm under my palms, impossibly soft. My markings cast light across her features, painting her in blue-white. She leaned into my touch.

"If at any point you want me to stop," I said, "I will stop."

"I know you will." She turned her head and pressed her lips to my palm, right over the marking on the heel of my hand. The sensation that shot through me was indecent. "But I don't think I'm going to want you to stop."

She was right.

The choice was hers. The next moment would be hers too. I let the bond open, lowered my mouth to hers, and stopped holding back.

19

TAYLOR

The thing about kissing an alien is that your brain keeps trying to file it under "weird" but your body overrides that classification immediately.

Because there was nothing weird about how Kel kissed: hot and demanding, one hand cradling the back of my head like I was something precious he'd been given permission to finally hold. His mouth was warm, warmer than a human's, and there was a faint vibration when he breathed that I felt against my lips. A resonance thing, maybe. Or just a Valorian thing. Either way, it did things to my nerve endings that made my brain shut down entirely.

At some point I got his shirt off, or he helped, or the resonance did it through sheer force of mutual impatience. I was trying very hard to maintain some cool about that, but the markings. God, the markings. They ran everywhere. Down his chest in sweeping geometric lines, across his ribs, over the planes of his stomach. They glowed in response to my touch, chasing my fingers, and his skin was silver-gray and smooth and warm and I wanted to trace every single line with my mouth.

So I did.

He made a sound when my lips followed a marking from his collarbone toward his chest. Not the controlled, suppressed sounds he'd been making for days. A real sound. Raw. His head tipped back and his hands gripped my waist and through the bond I felt what he was feeling — the intensity of my mouth on his markings, pleasure so acute it bordered on overwhelming.

"Still good?" I asked against his skin.

"Do not stop."

Well, when he put it that way.

I was nervous. I was going to be honest about that because I'm always honest, at least with myself, and this was — this was a lot. He was an alien. A beautiful and glowing inhuman alien who also had very human-looking hands that were currently sliding under the hem of my destroyed t-shirt with a question in his touch.