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—I…fuck, Daddy. Come…can I?

—Yes, love. Come.

The orgasm ricochets through both of us. I am lost to our pleasure, but even louder than our trembling, twitching bodies is an overwhelming sense of mate mine Aleks boy and mate mine Javier Daddy, twining together into the kind of braid never intended to be unravelled. Even as the aftershocks fade and my body goes boneless, cock going soft and slipping from Aleks’ hole, I feel myself being rewritten into something I never imagined for myself and my life.

We are moving then, Aleks slowly swimming our still-intertwined bodies up toward the dark sky. As I crest the surface, our mouths part and I take in a shaky breath. My lungs ache, the air above water thin in comparison to what Aleks shared with me.

“Come here,” I grumble, pulling him back into a deep kiss. My feet find the bottom of the pool, guiding us to the edge. This time, when he pulls away I can see how exhausted my mate looks. Happy, and thoroughly fucked, too, but still exhausted.

When he yawns, I take over.

I help Aleks out of the water first. He transforms as soon as his tail breaches the surface of the pool, and I admire his naked body as I—much less gracefully—climb out. I slip my discarded shirt around Aleks’s wet body, leaving it unbuttoned as I help him into the shorts he was wearing earlier. I make quick work of dressing myself, and then, weaving our fingers together, I pause.

I am not sure I will ever get used to this—hearing him like this, feeling him with me in my body. But I am deeply grateful for the insight as I pick up on the hunger and sleepy contentment coming from my boy.

He is uncharacteristically quiet as I lead us toward the bungalow. I would be worried, but the peace of his breathing and heartbeat reassures me.

He is here. My mate is here.

Aleks’ eyes go wide. “What did you put on this?”

I lean back against the couch cushion. Aleks sits on my lap, his bare legs straddling my thighs. “Dried chile de arbol, salt, and lime,” I say, putting another sliced cucumber against his lips.

“Where did you get chile de arbol?”

My grin is smug. “I brought it with me.”

“Seriously?”

“En serio.” I pop a cucumber into my mouth and chew slowly before swallowing. “My abuela sends me bags in the mail.”

“Lucky,” he murmurs, taking the offered food. He makes a quiet, satisfied hum as he chews. “We have Tajin in Soledad.”

“It is not the same.”

He rolls his eyes. “Are you a food snob, Daddy?”

It still fills my chest with a tight, overwhelming warmth when he calls me that. Offering him my chile-and-lime-crusted fingertips, I smile as he licks them clean. “I cannot help it if no one makes food as good as my abuela does.”

He regards me with his head cocked to one side. “You grew up with her, right? Your dad’s mom?”

I nod. “She took me in as soon as it was clear I was not welcome at the colony.”

“Were they good to you?”

It is such a specific question to ask. Not: Did you like growing up with them? Or: How was it being raised by them? No, my boy wants to know if they were good to me.

“They were the best. My father was not around much. He worked as a miner, gone most of the time, but he was never unkind. And my abuela—well, she is the most wonderful woman in the world. Kind, sharp, and generous.”

I think back to some of my earliest memories: my mother handing me off with nothing but a sack of my clothes and the worn stuffed bunny someone had given me. I will never forget what she said to me as she stood there, watching me with the same detached look she gave everyone else. “This is for the best, Javier. She will love you in a way I never can.” I never could have imagined, then, how right she would turn out to be. The love my grandmother gave me wrapped around me like another layer of skin, shielding me from the harsh pain of the world.

“Does she know about…” Aleks waves a hand uncertainly between us.

“About you?”

“About the mate thing.”

I let out a loud laugh. “The mate thing? Is this what we are calling our relationship now?”