by Ruby Dixon
I swallow hard. There’s a knot in my throat because I want to say yes. Oh gosh, I want to so bad. Even if it’s just for a short while, I want to have fun with S’bren. I want to bask in his adoration. I want to show him all the dirty, filthy ways we can have sex and enjoy each other.
And then I’ll get rejected all over again unless my cootie kicks in.
It’ll utterly break me to go through that again. It’ll break him, too, because S’bren’s ardent and devoted and loyal and if we end this now, he won’t fall in love. That’s the part that makes me stop. Hungry, selfish Penny wants to fling him down on this rock and run my hands all over him, but that’s not fair to him. “It’s too soon,” I eventually say. “Please don’t ask me that yet.”
For some reason, this satisfies him. He nods and brushes his lips over my knuckles again, sending shivers up my spine. “I will give you time.”
He gets to his feet and I smile brightly, deciding to switch the subject. “Do your people have a wedding tradition?”
S'bren thinks for a moment, and then shakes his head. "No ceremony like that one. It is much as it is here. When resonance happens, the pair are celebrated with good food and drink, but that is it." He rubs his jaw, thinking. "There might have been more customs with our ancestors, but I do not know of them. I did not listen well as a young kit and when I joined the proving games, I was only a stripling. I would not remember. M'tok would, though." He smiles down at me. "I do remember that there were never very many Tall Horn females. The young ones that were unmated were kept away from the unmated males so the males would not bother them with constant requests for attention. After they resonated, the females were free to go as they pleased, and I remember my mother telling me it was a very joyous thing for her. You would have hated it with our tribe."
I laugh, feeling more at ease. "I'll bet that got old. I hate having an escort everywhere. Feels like no one trusts me to have enough sense to look after myself."
The big alien's expression turns grave. "I am sorry."
I wave a hand in the air. "Don't apologize. It's not your fault. Raahosh and R'jaal came up with that rule. And while I understand it, it's still frustrating. Back home, I lived on my own and didn't have a boyfriend." Though it wasn't for lack of trying. "I got used to doing my own thing and being independent. It's hard to give that up once you've had it."
"And I stole you."
I lightly tap him with the back of my hand. "Stop with the guilt. You saved me from all that and now we get to have an adventure."
"Is it an adventure to be here with me?"
"I like to think so. You're not so bad." I wink at him and then jump into the water again, because I'm tired of having deep conversations. Right now I just want to swim and pig out on fruit.
12
S'BREN
P'nee frolics in the water all day long. I swim with her, but sometimes I am content just to watch her enjoy herself. She is free with her naked body now that we are alone in the fruit cave and the humid heat makes leathers uncomfortable. I should not stare at her body as much as I do, but I cannot help myself. Every time P'nee's teats jiggle, I stare. Every time water sluices down the valley between her teats, I stare. Every time I catch a glimpse of the curve of her belly and the damp curls between her thighs, I want to put my mouth on her.
Not yet, she told me. But there was a spark of interest in her gaze that was not there before. I am encouraged by that.
She has noticed my arousal, too. She mentioned it, and I saw her looking at my body, too. I hope she finds me as fine and appealing as I find her. But I do not ask. For now, I will not push P'nee. I will show her what a good companion S'bren is, and try to entice her into my furs on her own. I want her to come to me. I asked her, told her of my heart. Told her that I would mate to her in the hyoo-mans fashion, and now all I can do is wait.
After more swimming, we try the fruit. The vines here are heavy with all kinds of fruit, so much that my mother would have wept to see such a bounty. Fruit was often picked over on the island, and it meant traveling far that day simply to fill a bag. The birds and the flyers all loved the taste of fruit, so hunters competed with them to get to the food before it was eaten.
#Here, it is a feast, and we dine like Kki, the fat flyer that K'thar has tamed. I eat old favorites that I remember from home, but P'nee wishes to try everything. She is impulsive, snapping off fruit and taking a bite before I realize, only to get a mouthful of rind. The faces she makes are funny, and I have to show her how to eat a treefruit properly, or how one peels a sun-fruit. Then, our bellies full, we lie back down on the warm rocks and talk of easy things, like weather and fishing.
I doze off between conversations. P'nee does, too. The heat lulls us to sleep and it is easy to fall into its grip. I dream of home, of tall trees with wide, green leaves, of warm waters teeming with fish, and the ever-present dark cloud that hung over the Great Smoking Mountain. I dream of chasing behind M’tok, determined to catch up and yet somehow never able to. I reach for his long mane to yank him backward so I can run ahead and—
A loud bellow wakes me up.
I jerk upright, looking around for my spear. My hunter’s reflexes flare to life and I scent the air, my camouflage shifting as I look for the animal that has made such a cry.
It happens again, and I look up.
There, atop one of the cliffs, P’nee stands, a vine held in her hand. She makes the same strange deep cry, beating at her chest with a fist, and then calls out, “Woo! Penny of the jungle!”
Then, as if I am in a nightmare that I cannot break free of, she grabs the vine with her small hands and swings off the ledge.
“No!”
It does not snap. The vine holds, but P’nee does not. The moment she leaves the ledge, her hands slide down the vine, stripping leaves. She flails in the air, and then lands in the water with a wild splat and a massive splash.
Terrified, I jump into the water after her, then swim to where she landed. Her hands claw at the water as she swims upward and I loop one of my arms around her waist, seizing her to my side. I haul her up to the surface as she coughs, and then drag her to the rock lip we have been basking upon like a pair of kaari. “P’nee,” I manage, setting her gently on the rock. “Are you all right?”
She coughs, raising a fist to her mouth, and gives me a watery smile. “They make that look so easy in the movies.”
“You meant to do that?” I loom over her, skimming her body with my gaze, looking for cuts, for bruises or abrasions where the rocks might have hurt her.
“In my mind, it was far more graceful.” P’nee wipes water out of her face and beams at me.
“You risked yourself,” I growl at her, furious at how helpless I feel. While I lay sleeping as a kit, she climbed the cliffs. Those handholds look far too spaced apart for small human hands, and P’nee is not the tallest of her people, or the strongest. My heart thuds angrily in my chest as I realize how badly she could have hurt herself. “I cannot believe you did that!”
She reaches up and pats my chest. “Oh, don’t be upset, S’bren. I knew you’d take care of me.” Her gaze drops to her hand, where it rests against my wet skin, over one of my flat pectorals. Her expression changes to one of heat, and suddenly I am acutely aware of how I am still crouched over her naked, wet, enticing body. Her lips part and she gazes at my mouth. “Tell me that I shouldn’t show you how to kiss properly.”
I groan, because she is asking too much from me. Tell her not to kiss me? I could sooner tell her to resonate to another. “Yes, you should.”
P’nee reaches up and touches my wet mane. A breath later, her fingers curl in the tangle of it and then she pulls me down toward her, pressing her lips to mine. Her kiss is not gentle. It is hungry and eager, as P’nee approaches everything. Her lips are soft under mine despite her eagerness, and then her mouth parts and her tongue slicks against mine, grazing past my lips.
Heat blazes through me, raw and fierce. I cannot stop the noise that escapes my t
hroat, any more than I can stop myself from holding her jaw and steadying her as I slick my tongue against hers. She whimpers, her hands curling tighter in my mane, and then our tongues stroke over and over again, and each drag of her smooth one is as if she is tasting my cock as she did that night.
My people do not kiss as humans do. I know that the humans who live on the beach like to kiss their mates, and I have dreamed of kissing P’nee…but never in my mind did it even come close to the reality. She is lush and enthusiastic, the taste of her exquisite. I want to lick at her mouth forever, to touch her until the twin suns fall from the skies.
She moans my name. “S’bren.”
I pant as I reluctantly pull my mouth from her sweet lips. I want to kiss her over and over again. I want to taste those gleaming, pink lips. I want to lick her everywhere, and to be licked in return. But I have asked her to be my mate and she said no.
“You said this is not what you wanted,” I tell her, breathless.
The look she gives me is both hungry and frantic. Her hand slides lower, brushing my stiff cock. “I think I don’t know what I want. Clearly I make bad decisions.”
Her words make my chest ache in a new way. I caress her soft cheek, my entire body screaming with frustration, and shake my head. “You say you do not know what you want, so I will give you time to decide.”
And I get to my feet. And walk away.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done.
Ever.
13
PENNY
I feel so guilty after S’bren walks away.
He’s right. I’m giving him mixed signals. I can’t be all over him, kissing him and grabbing at his junk, and then saying I want to wait for resonance. I know I’m impulsive, but I’m going to wreck both of us if I let that happen.
I know what it feels like to be discarded when you’re in love (or at least you think you are). I don’t want to do that to S’bren. I sure don’t want it to happen to me again. Even if I don’t resonate, who’s to say that S’bren won’t resonate to someone else and it’ll be the exact same scenario?
Better to stay as friends.
I touch my kiss-swollen lips and think of his mouth, how hungry his lips were on mine and how good he felt over me. God, this suuuucks. The worst part about it is that I want his kisses. I want him to gaze up at me in that adoring way while I touch him. I want him to keep looking at me like I hung the moon even as he kisses the hell out of me.
But it makes things too difficult.
If I was back on the beach, I’d hang out in the women’s cave for a few days, maybe find ways to make myself scarce so we wouldn’t run into each other. Give things time to cool off. But we’re alone in this cave together. There’s nowhere to hide from each other, no place to give space. I mean, I guess we could, but it feels awfully dickish to deliberately ignore someone a few feet away.
I go for another swim, and then climb back onto the heated rocks to relax. Wringing my hair dry, I notice that S’bren is a short distance away, closer to the waterfall, and he’s brought our packs down. He watches me out of the corner of his eye even as he sharpens his spear.
Always watching over me.
I pull on my tunic, then cross the distance between us and sit close by him. “I’m sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t have done that.”
He nods. “I will not apologize, because I liked it. But we will not allow it to go further.”
“Did I make you uncomfortable?”
S’bren meets my gaze. “Only parts of me.”
I chuckle at that, but it’s not enough to lift my heavy heart. “I wish things were easier, you know? That resonance would just point at someone already. I don’t want to give my heart away and then have the rug pulled out from under me again.”
His head cocks, ever so slightly. “Again?”
I flush, realizing the slip of the tongue. “Figure of speech. I mean just in general.” I’m not telling him about my disastrous Vegas wedding. I’m not. I don’t even like to think about it myself. It’s too embarrassing. “I’m going to wait for resonance,” I say firmly.
“I understand.” S’bren goes back to sharpening his spear, running a big thumb along the edge of the point, then scraping the sharpening rock along it again. “I brought you here to resonate to me, though. I want you. I am prepared to wait until it happens, too.”
That’s both sweet and pig-headed, but it makes me smile. “I know. I’m not resonating to anyone right now though, am I? That’s a little concerning. I mean, what if resonance doesn’t hit me for years? Liz says that sometimes it waits. That you can walk past someone a thousand times and that on that thousand-and-one time, it decides you’re a good match. Or what if I’m the one that doesn’t resonate at all?” That’d be my luck. Penny the bride-obsessed, always a bridesmaid.
“I think you will resonate,” he assures me. “Any khui will see how fine your body and your spirit are.”
“Flatterer.”
“Truth talker,” he says as easily. “Do you…think your khui holds out for another? Someone back on the beach?”
S’bren says the words so casually, but I can see the tension building in his body. He’s waiting to be told the inevitable. That I’m already in love with someone. That my cootie’s already pulling me toward another.
If it is, it hasn’t given me any indications at all. “I don’t think so?”
“And if you resonated to me? How would that make you feel?”
I consider this, because I want to answer him honestly. Would I be upset? Relieved? I mull it over in my head, thinking, and then come to a conclusion. “I think I’d be cautiously optimistic? I like you. I like your body.” I lick my lips and then add, “God, I like your body.”
He nods, the base of his horns flushing deep again.
“I think I would be happy,” I say. “And I think we could fall in love. But I won’t know until I resonate, and I don’t want to set myself up for heartbreak.”
S’bren’s expression is solemn. “I understand this. I will help you protect your heart, P’nee.”
And that makes me ache even more. Because I suspect that the more S’bren is his gentle, protective self, the more I’m going to lose my heart to him.
I just hope my cootie wakes up and pays attention.
The next few days are a mixture of sheer laziness and the occasional bit of work.
There’s not a lot to do in the fruit cave. There’s no need for a fire for light to see by—the overhead lights never turn off. There’s no need for fire for warmth, either. Being here is like living in a hothouse. We have food supplies, so while it rages and storms outside, we eat our fill of fruit and some of the leaves, we make clothing and nets and weave mats out of even more leaves, and we nap. A lot.
We swim, too. Of course we do. It’s a warm, clear pool with nothing living in it. So I swim every day, loving the warmth of the water on my skin, and scrub every bit of my body a dozen times over. I make a grass skirt—S’bren shows me how—but I don’t wear it much. S’bren doesn’t seem to make a big deal out of my nudity, and he walks around naked himself. It’s no big deal.
I mean, never mind that I stare really, really hard at his naked butt when he’s not looking. Or that I watch the flex of his impossibly wide shoulders. Or that I creep on him when we swim and his beautiful body is wet and blue and hard as a rock and —
Okay, he probably notices my nudity as much as I notice his. But with how warm and humid it is here, it just makes sense to wear as little as possible, and neither of us makes a big deal out of it.
All this fruit is impossibly delicious, and when I mention that the others would be so jealous of me for feasting on all this, we decide to try and dry some fruit to take with us. So S’bren sets up a small smoke-pit near the entrance to the cave and we occasionally add a bit of fruit to it or turn the fruit over so it can slowly dry out.
And then we swim some more.
And nap.
Well, okay, if I have to be honest, t
he fruit cave is nice, but I don’t want to live here. I thought that being somewhere this warm would be utter heaven, but it’s steamy and so I feel as if I’m constantly sweating…which makes me want to swim more. Not that it’s a problem to swim, but the heat makes it hard to sleep on the woven mats. Add in the fact that the lights never go off and my sleep is wrecked. I make myself a sleep mask out of tightly woven leaves, but overall, deep sleep isn’t a thing here and I miss the sound of the ocean. So we catnap a lot.
And we catnap together.
It’s innocent. Mostly. S’bren is every bit the gentleman, and he’s always utterly conscious of giving me my space. I’m the one that creeps over to his mat and asks to sleep next to him. After months and months of the comforting presence of a half-dozen sleeping bodies in the women’s cave, I don’t like the thought of sleeping alone a short distance away from him just because we’re not fucking. I need the presence of another person nearby. I need to hear their even breathing, and I need to know I’m not utterly abandoned when I wake up and there’s no one near me. Every time I do, I have nightmares.
I guess I have a few abandonment issues after being stranded on an ice planet.
But S’bren never pushes the boundaries. He lets me curl up next to him at night, and if I wake up holding onto his arm or snuggled against his side, he never pushes it into more. Every other guy I’ve ever dated would consider me sleeping next to him as “open season” and maul me the moment he got hard, but not S’bren. He’s a perfect gentleman.
He’s gentle and protective and I’m starting to realize he might be everything I ever wanted in a guy.
But my cootie is playing hard to get. It’s completely asleep, and so all I can do is wait for something to kick in.
Hopefully. Or else things are going to get more and more complicated than they already are.