Page 64 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"There will be kel'shor."

"Then I'm in."

The suns finished setting. The bioluminescence started — not as vivid as the jungle, but present. Small points of light in the scrubby vegetation around the station, and in the distance, the glow of the jungle canopy on the horizon.

I leaned against Kel's shoulder. He put his arm around me. His markings cast a soft light across us both — blue-white and steady, the light of a bond that had been declared and witnessed and was now as real as any law in the galaxy.

"Taylor."

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For being brave enough to choose this. To choose me. Despite everything I did wrong."

I turned my face into his neck. Breathed him in. His warm alien scent, uniquely his, was the smell of safety now. Of home.

"You did a lot wrong," I agreed. "But you also dragged a screaming human off a slave ship and kept her alive in an alien jungle for ten days and glow-healed her scrapes and offered to publish her archaeological research. So I think we're even."

"We are not even. I will spend the rest of my life making up⁠—"

"Kel."

"Yes?"

"Shut up and watch the moons with me."

He shut up. We watched the moons. Gold and pink, rising together over the edge of an alien world.

My world now. If I wanted it.

I wanted it.

We made it back to our room approximately four minutes after the second moon cleared the horizon, because I turned to say something about the light and caught him watching me with an expression that made the words evaporate.

"Hi," I said instead.

"Hi," he said, which he had learned from me, and the sound of that dumb human syllable in his careful mouth did something catastrophic to my chest.

We didn't rush. That was the thing about this time — wedding night, my brain kept whispering, you're having a wedding night — nobody was hunting us through it. No storm. No countdown. He undressed me like he was unwrapping something he intended to keep, and when I reached for the clasps of his gear I already knew them, and that felt like its own vow: I know the way into you now.

The markings never dimmed. When I pressed my palm flat over the bond marking on his sternum, the light rose to meet my hand like water.

"Wife," he said. Testing it. The harmonic underneath made the word vibrate in my back teeth.

"Husband." I walked him backward toward the bed. "Logically insufficient, but yes."

He laughed — a real one, still rare enough that I collected each specimen — and then I knelt and put my mouth on the spiral marking at his hip and he stopped laughing entirely.

I took his length in my mouth and learned him — the heat of him, the subtle ridging against my tongue, the way his pulse quickened when I hummed — while his hands fisted in the bedding because, he admitted later, he did not trust them anywhere else. Through the bond his pleasure crashed into mine until I was moaning around him, until the echo of his pleasure made my own thighs shake, until he pulled me up his body with unsteady hands and said, in that wrecked harmonic voice, "Together. Tonight I need it to be together."

Together. I sank down onto him and we found a rhythm slow enough to ache — deep, unhurried, his forehead pressed to mine, the bond wide open, every stroke a sentence in a language only the two of us would ever be fluent in. When it finally broke over us it wasn't a wave. It was a tide coming in — inevitable, mutual, unstoppable — his light flaring so bright behind my closed eyelids that I saw colors I didn't have names for, his shout and mine tangling somewhere in the middle.

After, sprawled across his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow, I said: "For the record, this is what the ring question was about."

"I do not follow."