by H. E. Trent
She emitted a relieved-sounding exhalation as she sat and plucked a killer-looking three-pronged pin from her hair. “There’s a saying in Jekhan that loosely translates into ‘we are the water.’ I think we’re born with an awareness of how water replenishes us. We respect and crave being in it. Elken seems to be bucking the trend.”
“Elken’s being Elken. She’s got her own mind, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.” He couldn’t believe how close the woman was sitting, nude and utterly casual about the predicament. They’d had sex, yes, and perhaps he was inexperienced, but he hadn’t expected such an immediate openness about nakedness. He didn’t know what it meant or if it meant anything at all. She didn’t seem affected one way or another, but he was already hard as steel and hoping she didn’t notice his crude crumpling of his washcloth onto his crotch.
She reached for his shampoo and he watched her work the concentrate into a lather, and then onto the ends of her hair. “Being Elken. But what does that mean?”
He drew in a breath and rolled his gaze to the ceiling—away from her and the breasts that bobbed so enticingly as she scrubbed her hair. “She’s a curious kid who has a lot of energy. She wants to be doing things—moving from one distraction to the next. I think that’s normal.”
“Truly?”
“Mm-hmm. I didn’t work with many kids as young as her, but I think there are a lot of children like her. Once she finds subjects she’s really interested in, she’ll be more settled. You can’t know what you like until you see what your options are.”
“And she was deprived of learning them earlier.”
“Exactly.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
Good. Change the subject.
He didn’t want to talk about Elken when his body was in such a lurid state. He tapped his toes faster and risked a glance over to Sera.
She was scowling at the ends of her hair. “Need a trim,” she said softly.
“I hope you don’t cut off too much.”
“Oh?”
He shrugged and quirked the corner of his lips up. “I like the way your hair hangs around your face. Makes you look…mysterious, I suppose.”
She laughed. “Some people would say that Jekhan women are already too mysterious.”
“I think there’s some truth in that.”
“I’m not so hard to figure out.” Her smile fell away. “Do you think I’m difficult to figure out?”
“Yes.” The word was truth, but saying it felt almost as bad as a lie because it made her cheeks go red, and he didn’t get off on making people nervous. He spent enough time in the condition himself that he tended to not wish it on anyone else.
“Why?”
He pushed his fingers through his greasy hair and let out a breath. “You’re not the only one I struggle with. All women confuse me, but maybe especially you.”
“Again, why?”
“Because I’m trying not to mess this up. I admit I’m not doing a very good job. I don’t…know what I’m doing. That should be clear to you by now.”
“You were gone. Where were you?”
“Working. I needed to work. To keep my hands busy. That way, I don’t think about how scared I am.”
“Scared,” she whispered, staring at the water.
Sera put her head beneath the water and pushed the suds out of her hair. Surfacing, she cleared the water from her eyes and stared at him in assessing for so long that he wondered if she were thinking of some way to let him off the hook for the situation.
He’d admitted he was scared. He’d admitted he was weak and maybe too inflexible for what she needed.
But then she stood and, slowly, insinuated herself between his knees. She put a hand on the bench at either side of his hips.
“Your arm—”
“It hurts,” she panted, leaning closer. “It hurts like hell, but you won’t let me crumble, will you?”
“Of course I won’t. I won’t let you fall.”
“Good.” She leaned closer and, slanting her lips over his, pulled in a breath. “I’ve been…thinking about this. For days now.”
“What?” he whispered as he bracketed his hands around her wrists, supporting her, ensnaring her.
“Kissing you. I enjoy kissing you. It’s all I can think about at times. Tender things, like being held. And the way you touch me as though I’m fragile.”
“Because I don’t want to break you.” He traced the tip of his tongue across her lower lip and ate the little expulsion of air she made as a consequence—a startled sound, a noise of eagerness that ignited thrumming in his core that settled down low between his hips, at the base of his spine.
Her tongue seared through the parted seam of his lips as she moved her body closer, more between his spread thighs.
Her eyes closed, so he closed his, too, and concentrated on the feel of her. Silken and warm, the heat of the room empathizing her intoxicatingly sweet aroma, tempting him to bite, and so he did. He pulled her lower lip between his teeth and gently tamped into the tender flesh as his hands scooped her bottom up and onto his lap.
Her knees straddled his thighs, her sex rubbed teasingly against his legs as she nipped at the edge of his jaw. Sensual pricks that were the right shade of painful and that made it even harder because her focus was solely on him and his pleasure. He wanted to please her—wanted her to take whatever she needed from his body and to come back for more again and again.
“When I think of you, my mind goes to salacious places,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“If you saw yourself the way I see you, you’d understand. Will you think badly of me if I act on my whims?”
“I don’t deserve it, but I wish you would. I want you to.”
Draping her arms over his shoulders, he put his head back and let her kiss down his neck and shoulders, let her grind her pert nipples against his slick chest, let her massage her clit against his protruding cock.
He sat there, taking and trying to figure out what to give back. If she noticed his hesitation—his perpetual inexperience—she didn’t mock him. She just acted, and he learned what she liked from each trial.
“Can I touch you?” he whispered, swirling his fingertips at the base of her spine. “I was wrong to avoid you. You should be angry with me, but will you let me touch you?”
Her breath heated his ear and a tickle chased down his neck and ribs. He gripped her tighter against him, and gritted his teeth at his body’s urgent thrum.
“Between my legs.” She leaned her weight onto her knees and tightened her hold around his neck. “Put your fingers in me. Please. Better yours than mine.”
“Tell me what to do. Tell me where you want me to touch.”
“Here. I’ll show you.” With a small gasp of pain, she let her weak arm prop her up against him as she used her right hand to guide his hand to her sex. She used his index finger like a stylus, tracing lightly around the fleshy nub and then back to her slit. She drew his finger along it and then back, not breaching, but grazing, and moving her hips the opposite way at the same time. “Such large hands,” she said with a laugh.
“Fits with the rest of me.”
“Yes. You’re perfectly proportioned. I’m certain all the women in town will be oozing with jealousy once they find out who I’ve landed.”
He doubted that, but if she wanted to lie to him, he wasn’t going to stop her. He liked the way she grinned when she told her little fibs. He liked the way she took charge of her pleasure, and that she wanted a kind of pleasure that only he could give her.
“Here,” she murmured as her hips stilled and she moved his finger into a warm, tight place and then sat a bit. “Gods.”
“What do you want me to do?” He held his finger still, but didn’t wait completely motionless. The ruddy brown nipples taunted, and he was only a man, and even he had his limits. He pulled one into his mouth and sucked, letting reflexes and desire take over. No thinking. No pondering of technique, only oral satis
faction.
He worked his tongue beneath the nub and suckled until the nub went hard in his mouth, and her breath shuddered. Her sex tightened around his finger as her head tipped back.
“Other one, too,” she said in a breathy pant as she began to slide up and down his finger, swirling as she went as if to test the limits of herself. Or perhaps to stretch herself.
Doing as she commanded, he pulled her other nipple into his mouth and worked the flesh to a fast, hard peak with quick flicks of the tip of his tongue.
His thumb joint was starting to cramp from being held at such a severe angle away from her body. He flexed it, brushing the back of the digit against her clit as she rocked, and then put it back.
“No!” she said in a near screech. “Put that back.”
“Like this?” Slowly, he settled the rough pad of his thumb over her clit and pressed, and she made that noise again.
“Gods, just like that.” Her arm tightened around his neck, and her chest could have suffocated him the way she held him, but he didn’t mind. His feeling of breathlessness somehow added to his arousal—to the urgency of his imminent release—but that couldn’t have been right. Given his asthma, perhaps he was strange for liking that, but he found himself holding his breath and seeking that lightheaded feeling as she rode his hand, and her body tightened.
But then she pulled her tantalizing breasts away and tapped his shoulder as if to reclaim the attention she’d never lost. “Put me on my back. I want you inside me.”
He must have hesitated too long, because she as already in motion, wriggling off his finger and using her right hand to create a pallet of towels at the edge of the bathing pool.
She heaved herself out of the water and sat at the edge, pushing her knees apart and staring at him with anticipation. “If you get on your knees, the height of the bench should be about right.”
“You want me to—”
“At the risk of sounding crass, fuck me. Please. Chase away this neediness I’ve been carrying around for days. Make me feel you. Make me never forget what you feel like.”
“I think I want you to forget.” Slowly, he turned to face her, his hands going immediately to the tops of her thighs. “If you forget, you’ll come back to me, won’t you? You’ll come back so you can remind yourself of what you want.”
She might have wanted him inside her, but reflexively, he bent and he put his mouth where she’d wanted his dick to go.
He didn’t know if tasting there was something that was done on Jekh, but the textures and tastes of her made him high and hungry, eager for more of her.
She didn’t tell him to stop. As his tongue probed into her folds and he licked her up and down, she gripped the back of his head and pulled him even closer to her sex, not that there’d been much air between them.
“Your beard…” she whispered in rasp when he worked his chin side to side against her pussy and kissed her lower belly.
“You want me to stop?”
“No!” What she was lacking in upper body strength, she made up for in spades with flexibility. She hooked a leg around his neck and leaned back onto her arms, gasping up at the ceiling as her hips made figure eights.
He stiffened his tongue against her clit again and again until her gyrations changed, and his tongue was at her opening. He pressed his fingers there, parting her so he could taste farther, so he could see how deep the silk went, and her leg went tighter around him, and her sex dripped.
Some slow-to-escape surge of water from the tub, he figured, as he latched his mouth onto her and sucked, and licked, and ate.
Her heel thrashed at his back, and her hands clawed at the tub side.
He didn’t know what she was saying—what any of those guttural sounds she was making meant—but guessed that she liked his mouth, and his fingers, too, because he shoved two into her to keep her primed while he fixed his suction over her clit. He loved that little bud. Loved the way her body shuddered whenever he tongued the underside, and the way his name slid out of her mouth in a groan.
“Marco.” She sounded like her teeth were clenched, and teeth gave him an idea. Something to try. A different way to feel her.
He scraped his top teeth over her mons and caught the top of her clit, and she nearly ripped his hair out of his head.
He laughed. “No?”
“Fuck. Me.” Panting, and with her dark, wet hair plastered against the sides of her face, looking deranged and beautiful, she sat up and grabbed his side, pulling him toward her. “You wish to kill me, I believe, with this torture of your mouth.”
“I wanted to taste you.”
“Is that what normal Terran men do? Taste women until they can’t think straight? Until they forget what they wanted? You are trying to distract me.”
He shook his head. “I’m not that cunning. And I wasn’t done.”
She was wet, but he could have licked her some more until every sweet bit of flesh glistened, and then he’d start over again.
“Done?” She looked genuinely perplexed. Her wrist COM buzzed, and she idly tapped thrice to suppress whatever the interruption was.
He grimaced, not sure how to explain. “I think you could come like that. I mean, I believe some women can, but I don’t know. I’ve never made anyone come like that.”
“Is that done? I mean, do people do that?”
“On Earth? Yeah.”
Her gaze rolled to the ceiling and she pulled her lower lip between her teeth. Her expression was pensive, as if she were filing that information away or deciding if she should do anything with it.
Then she looked down at him and freed her lip from its restraint. Her teeth had left a bloodless white line, and he wanted to lick her lip until circulation returned, but that was a distraction.
Everything about her was a distraction. If that wasn’t normal, he didn’t care to find out. He was done with sabotaging himself.
“We will do that again on Tuesday,” she said.
“Tuesday?” He furrowed his brow. “Why Tuesday?”
“Dorro said that the supplement he’s given to Elken to help her sleep will be fully in her system by then. We’ll have the night to explore.”
“Are you telling me that I can’t finish now?”
“I’d prefer to finish with you inside me. I like that feeling. I can’t get that on my own—that fullness when the quivers start, or the weight of your body on mine. That adds to the pleasure.”
Her COM pealed again, and once more, she did that dismissive triple-tap.
“Do you need to see who that is?”
“No.” She lay back and gestured for him to press into her. “When I go off on my own, my sisters do not interrupt. If there is some emergency, they will seek me.”
“You sure?”
“Marco.” She slid her fingers down her belly and over her mound, parting herself for him. “Inside me, please, and forgive me for asking. Our women aren’t supposed to ask.”
“Stop worrying about ‘supposed to.’ I sure as shit am trying to.” Gripping his cock at the base, he forced a swallow down his tight throat and gathered some of her wetness onto his tip. If he slid into her tight pinkness, he risked exploding on impact. Filling her with seed before she’d even had a chance to feel that pressure she’d wanted.
“We should get a condom, though,” he murmured. That would make him less sensitive.
“Why?” She hooked her ankle around his waist and pulled him forward, an inch into her.
She moaned.
“Why?” He pressed his hands to the edge of the tub and adjusted his knees to get lower, so his cock’s entry angle was less assertive. “You really don’t care if you get pregnant?”
“Only in the best way, because this time, the choice would be mine.”
Oh.
He had cock in hand, his belly burning with anticipation and shaft throbbing with fullness, and her COM chirped once more.
He laughed and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. “You wanna get that? I have a re
putation for being able to ignore things when I’m busy, but with circumstances being what they are, that kind of kills the mood.”
Sighing, she propped her left wrist up with her other hand and tapped the band with her thumb. “Yes.”
“Ah! There you are,” came Jasper’s cheerful voice.
Marco hung his head and murmured some choice words about timing. He should have kept his fat mouth shut.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing at all,” Jasper said. “I’m in Little Gitano.”
Furrowing her brow, Sera sat up. Naturally, the closing of her legs followed shortly after.
Marco grunted, erection already flagging. If the sound of the man’s voice could do that to him when Marco and Sera were in the heat of things, he didn’t know if he’d be able to actually live with the man.
Gotta figure this shit out.
“What are you doing in Little Gitano?” she asked.
“I was restless. I needed to be doing something. Anyway, I popped in on the wager meeting—”
“You, too?”
He laughed. “Yeah. I guess there was a bit of a run on the place today, and I’m asshole enough that I had to film the chaos for posterity. Trust me, the scene was a shit show. Brenna was so mad that the veins in her neck were bulging. I’ve never seen her so energized. She really got into it with those guys, and was saying that once the tables were turned every man in that room would beg to lick her feet. That confused me a little, but that’s Brenna for you.”
“So what happened with the wager pool?” Marco asked. “Did they disband, or…”
“Hey, Marco. Didn’t know you were there.”
Marco ground his teeth, and said through them, “Sera’s here, so here I am.”
Sera beamed, but there was a long pause from Jasper.
Marco wasn’t going any-damn-where.
Jasper cleared his throat. “Yeah. So, for all intents and purposes, the pool is officially disbanded. I’m sure there are a bunch of guys who are spitting mad at me right now. I’ll probably get some static from them for the next few weeks, but they had to have all realized that this situation couldn’t have lasted indefinitely. Jekhan men aren’t known for violence, but they do fight for their women. Kent had to know the scheme was a powder keg in the making.”