by Robin Lovett
I push him down onto his back and climb over him. “I want your cock inside me, like I should’ve had it from the first time I met you.”
He runs his hands up my thighs, feeling beneath my hospital garment, finding out I’m wearing nothing underneath. “The same way I should’ve known I would fall in love with you from the first moment I saw you. I’ve never felt I could get enough of you. You were right about my dreams. I’ve never dreamed of anyone else the way I have dreamed of you. My love for you has been there from the beginning.”
I peel open his Fellamana clothes, exposing his ready and hardened cock.
“I’m afraid,” he blurts out, a bit of that sickly pale color swirling through the purple. His chest heaves with every tortured breath.
“Of what?” I ask softly.
“I’m Fellamana. I can’t— What if these feelings are temporary? What if they disappear? What if I can’t return this incredible gift you’re giving me?”
I shake my head. It’s my greatest fear. He can no longer steal my will to live, since the mating bond is gone, but he could still rip my heart in two if he rejects my love. I’ve given him that power over me. He could be my greatest pain.
But he’s also been my truest pleasure.
“Koviye,” I say, placing a palm on his chest, over his heart. “If you can only love me in this moment, I would rather one experience of loving you and feeling you love me then never having you at all.”
His green eyes grow even more brilliant. Almost as if they’ve filled with tears. “Then I pledge to you, in this moment, you have me. All of me. I’m yours.”
It’s bittersweet, that admission. He could wake up one day soon and have had enough. He could leave.
But I have to take this chance. I have to try. I have to step into the unknown.
It’s what I do, after all.
I take my hospital garment off, over my head, and expose my naked body to him. I stroke his cock and declare, “Mine,” with a possessive purr, wanting to lighten the moment, to forget my fear.
He reaches for me, his hands wandering my hips, my breasts. “Gods above, yes, you’re mine.”
I straddle his hips and crawl over him on all fours.
He slides his fingers to the apex of my thighs. “Can I?”
“Fuck, please.”
He slides his fingers inside me where I’m so wet, where my body has been screaming for him for days, weeks, a lifetime, and only ever satisfied in my dreams. Which is—not satisfied at all.
I lean on my hands over him, and he inserts one finger, two, into my soaked folds, caressing and stroking me on his way in. He massages the tender spot inside me, and I roll my hips into his touch.
“What is this?” he murmurs, his face lighting up, and he repeats the massage pattern with his fingers. I moan again, and he breathes with sensual delight, “This is a pleasure spot on you I didn’t know about.”
“They’re connected.” I pump my hips on his hand, relishing the feel of him, any part of him within me. “My clit and my g-spot.”
He leans up on his other arm to be closer to me. “I like learning your words for your body.” He rests his thumb on my clit and his fingers on my g-spot at the same time. “So, here and here?”
“Yes.” I circle my hips against his hand, unable to hold still while he touches me.
“And how does it feel if I do this?” He sends a bolt of his Exstare between his thumb and fingers, igniting the connection between the two spots, sending off an orgasm that has me shaking on all fours and crying out his name.
My whole nervous system short-circuits. I hang my head, my hair unbound, curtaining around his face.
“Did you like that?” he teases, a mixture between a gloat and a thrill.
“Almost as much as I’ll like your cock.”
He chuckles deep in his throat. “Oh, you’re going to like my cock a hell of a lot more than that.”
“Then put it in me,” I demand, done with waiting and foreplay.
He whispers against my lips, “You sure you don’t want another orgasm, or three, first? Remember how big I am.”
I glance down at his thick shaft, now glowing a violet color, lying erect and elongated against his abs. I lick my lips. “I want it now.”
I expect him to tease me again, but he doesn’t. A seriousness slides over his face, and he does as I say. He removes his fingers and holds up his cock, notching himself into the swollen lips of my sex. But he hesitates.
Air stutters in my lungs, and I meet his eyes. There’s a small anxiety there; it’s in me too.
“You’re sure about this?” he asks. “You want me inside you? Forever?”
I balk, afraid there’s a misunderstanding. “I didn’t think forever was an option for you. This doesn’t have to be…”
“No, no, Jenie.” His complexion deepens to a plum midnight. “What purple means for me… When I say faithfulness, it’s… It feels…” He swallows stiffly, nervously, and the crimson circle in the center of his chest pulses like a throbbing heart. He puts one hand on my chest, where my heart beats. “I think I am committed to you. I don’t think I’ll be able to leave you.”
I don’t know if I dare believe it. “It’s not possible for the Fellamana.” It goes against everything he led me to believe about his culture and biology.
“Can I try? You’re the only person who’s ever made me want to try.”
A flush of happiness rolls through my chest. The almost boyish pleasure on his face at the thought crushes my inner skeptic. “I just know I want you. Forever.”
His face opens to his most vulnerable, love-stricken expression—almost like a heartsick pain. “Forever,” he whispers, like he’s reverent of the word.
Unable to wait anymore, unable to stand another moment of desperation to have him, unable to spend one more second dwelling in fear, I drop down on his cock, sheathing him inside me.
We both gasp a gut-wrenching moan, but we don’t unlock our gazes.
He presses his hands into my hips, holding me down, and rolls his hips into me, pressing himself deeper, as far up inside me as he’ll fit.
My whole body sighs in relief, its agony and longing to be filled by him appeased for the first time. I clench around him, owning him, claiming his cock for mine, grasping at him until I have to move. I have to come on him, I have to feel him come in me, I have to make him mine.
I lift my hips, and he slides out, raking pleasure up my spine, then I drop back down on him, hard.
He swears and gasps, “Dominaq, are you trying to kill me?”
“Am I?” I do it again, and the bliss of having him moving inside me, my moving over him, having him, taking him, consumes me.
I can’t speak anymore. There’s nothing left but my instinct to mate with him and feel him within me, feel him filling me over and over again. Like my body was made for this, made for him.
He thrusts upward into me, his hips a piston against mine in time to my downward thrusts. His face wrenches in agony and he pants, “I can’t—hold back. The Exstare—can I—?”
“Yes!”
He ignites me, sends his energy from his cock all through me. It ricochets inside me—fixing my broken pieces, filling my empty places, and healing all my jagged scars. He completes me and makes me come like I can never stop.
There is no sating this. My need for him. His need for me.
The drive to express the inexpressible, the communion of heart, body and soul. I wouldn’t know how to stop. I won’t ever want to stop.
He makes love to me a dozen different ways—his body as insatiable as mine. I make him come in my ass again—or actually, for the first time—and I fill my belly with his come sliding down my throat, the drugging aphrodisiac of his fluids spreading through my blood.
He stares at me in wonder and tells me, “I never knew sex could be like this, a satisfaction of not just the body, but the soul and the heart.”
“With you and me, it can’t be any other way.”
&
nbsp; I lie with him in a blissed-out haze for I don’t know how long.
Ilena checks on us. I apologize for being mean to her and thank her for caring for me, but also inform her she is not to disturb us again.
But after she leaves, I start to remember things. Complicated things. Things that I forgot about in my delirium with the mating bond and my joy at him returning my love, saying he’d try to commit to me, forever.
I pick myself up off his shoulder and stare at him in horror. “You have to go back to the Fellamana. They need you. You can’t come with me!”
“Shh.” He caresses my arms. “They’re a step away from excommunicating me anyway, after I left to come see you again without permission. It’s better if I don’t go back.”
“You can’t just leave them. They’re your people! They depend on you.”
“They’ll survive without me. They—” His commlink starts to blink, and he tries to cover it up.
“That’s them, isn’t it? Answer it.”
“This, with you, is more important to me.”
I glare down at him and bite, “Answer them.”
He groans and clicks the answer button, but he greets them in Fellamana. The conversation happens in Fellamana. I have no idea what he’s saying. He puts his face in his hands; something is wrong. And I don’t know what. I can only assume I’m about to lose him again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Koviye
“Are you sitting down?” Povape’s voice pipes through the intercom.
“Yes.” It’s true, considering I’m lying naked on my back, with Jenie’s bare body touching the length of my side, and my gaze full of her confused face. Fuck, she’s not going to understand this conversation.
I try to give her a comforting smile, the opposite of what I’m actually feeling, and speak into the comm. “What’s happening?”
“The council knows you’ve snuck back to the Liberator, and they’ve agreed this is strike two against you.”
I sit away from Jenie and cover my face. It’s just as well. I want to go with her, not go back. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to learn my own people are afraid of me enough to think I’m one strike away from deserving execution.
“Are you there?” he asks.
“Yeah, I just—yeah. I’m here.”
“You’ve fallen hard for this human, haven’t you?”
“I—” I caress her hand with mine. “I’m mated to her.” I don’t care if her biological bond is gone. My love is a link to her stronger than nature.
“Mated? Like as in a monogamous relationship?”
“Yes.”
He coughs hard. “You can’t. You have the Exstare. It’s impossible for you.”
“Povape.” I change tack, trying to explain it in Fellamana terms he’ll understand. “I’ve turned purple.” He understands the certainty of what my purple complexion and its loyalty means. He feels it for his daughter, our family, and his work with the council in the way I never have.
He gasps and repeats, “Purple?”
“Yes.”
“You must be mistaken,” he corrects me. “You must just esteem her highly in friendship.”
I glance at my love, hoping to ease her anxiety. “My heart beats for Lt. General Jenie now. Maybe it’s the Exstare that allows me to feel this.”
“You’re certain you’re purple? You’re sure it’s not a deep shade of blue?” As if I were a young one who’s yet to learn his colors or emotion names.
I growl and snap an image of myself using the communicator, keeping Jenie out of the frame, and send it to him. “Incoming image.” I wait the moment it takes for him to receive it and open it.
He gasps in surprise and murmurs, “It’s true. You really aren’t coming back to us.” There’s a finality to his tone.
“I’m going to stay with her, so no, I’m not coming back.” But even as I say it, even as I know it’s true, I can’t ignore the guilt which filters through my veins as though I’m abandoning my people, even if they are pushing me away.
He takes a deep breath. “I will miss you, Koviye.” His words come freely, not tight with frustration or disappointment like I expect. “The gods must be smiling on you. You left before I could tell you. Something miraculous happened.”
I stiffen, my heart going faster. “What?”
“Niva displayed the first signs of the Exstare.” His voice floods with pride.
“Our Niva?”
“Yes. She kept it to herself for a few days. We didn’t want to inform the council yet before we were sure. But she healed a lover with an orgasm at the mere touch of her hand.”
“Are you sure? Sometimes it can—”
He laughs. “Oh, it’s certain. She also blew the glass out of the wall in her bedroom testing her new abilities, but we’re not holding it against her. I informed the council this morning.”
I leap from the bed and cheer at the top of my lungs. “Povape, felicitations!” I can’t help jumping up and down again.
If his grown daughter has the Exstare, I’m not the only one anymore. It means I’m truly free. I’m not abandoning them. They have someone else. There only has to be one person with the Exstare at a time on the entire planet. Fate has always made it so. It’s as though she knew, as though the gods predicted I would need to leave the Fellamana, so they provided more than one of us with the Exstare.
“The council has decreed—” Povape says for the fourth time to cut through my exuberance. “You are to remain with the humans and travel with them on their explorations as an ambassador for the Fellamana.”
“That is—perfect. Beyond perfect. Povape, how can I thank you?”
“Don’t thank me, thank the gods, thank my daughter!” He laughs with a father’s joy. “But the council also decided, it’s best you not come back down to the planet before you go. People’s opinions of you aren’t favorable.”
“Agreed.” I don’t want to go back anyway. Beside me, Jenie looks bewildered with frustration. “Povape, I have to tell Jenie. I’ll call you later.”
“Koviye,” he cuts me off before I hang up. “I’ve never been able to tell you this because I thought commitment would never be possible for you. But the loyalty I feel to our collective family and the work of the council has been the pleasure of my life. It will be for you, too. With your Jenie. Congratulations.”
I’m filled with a renewed joy. I have my family’s blessing. “Thank you. I won’t forget it.” I hang up and sit beside Jenie on the bed.
She’s nervous, biting her lips, her eyes narrowed at the corners. “What happened?”
“I’m free!” I cheer. “I can go with you wherever you go. They want me to be an ambassador.”
“What?!” she cries and her face explodes with pleasure and delight. “But don’t you want to go back? They’re your people. How can you just decide to leave them like this?”
“My love…” I use the endearment in her language, hoping it will help her understand. “You are my people now. Someday I’ll go back and share with them everything we learn and discover. But I want and need no one but you.”
“You mean you’re mine? All mine? I don’t have to share you with anyone?”
“No one, Jenie. I am yours.” I look deeply into her eyes and say the words I’ve never said before and believed. But as surely as the constant beat of my heart and the life-giving breath in my lungs, I know I mean them. “I promise you. Forever.”
“How can you be sure?” The hope on her face, the desire in her eyes… How could I ever have doubted my love for this woman?
“I’ll use my lifetime to prove it to you.”
Epilogue
Jenie
Our bond, though not a chemically induced link, merely a meeting of loving hearts, is as strong as any biological imperative. It demands days of lovemaking to sate—and even then, it’s not sated, just satisfied enough I can function and return to my duties again. My body’s instinct to form a mating bond has been assuaged by the antidote,
but we have more of it in case I need another dose.
Nemona and Oten are more understanding than I imagine any other commanding officers would be. They know what this is like, being bonded as they are.
Koviye and I emerge from our sequestered quarters well-sexed and high off a love attachment that feels tighter than the gravitational pulls of the universe. Which defies physics but whatever.
We walk down the hall, and I grab his hand, the one that not moments ago was inside me. “I’m not going to be able to let you out of my sight for a while. I hope the captains can work with that.”
He squeezes my hand back. “I’ll demand the same. It’s how you and I will need to work for quite some time.”
We reach the bridge and find Oten and Nemona discussing readouts on the navigation system with another officer.
“Jenie!” Nemona smiles when she sees me and teases, “Welcome back to the land of the walking.”
I laugh, still not familiar with this Nemona, who cracks jokes and smiles, as opposed to the former stern, hard-ass Ten Systems general. “Barely and briefly,” I reply. “It’s going to take some re-adjusting to learn how to function normally while being so loved.” I glance at Koviye, and I have a thought that I should probably let go of his hand but realize, not only do I not want to, but I’m not sure I physically can.
She puts a hand on my shoulder, not disturbing my attachment to Koviye. “Take all the time you need.” She gestures toward the viewing screen beyond the new twin captain’s chair she and Oten installed. “We’re just leaving orbit.”
“We are?” I stare, noticing the nearby planets changing in size. “Where are we going?”
“To the Ssedez world,” she says with a knowing tilt to her lips.
I can’t help gasping with excitement. “Does that mean…?”
“You can visit with Assura.”
I pull her in a one-armed hug. “Thank you.”
“It’s for us, too.” She gestures to her mate, the big gold, brawny alien, whom she now matches in skin tone, who is talking with Koviye. “We need some more time there; he needs some more time there, before we’ll be ready to move on.”