“By the Fates you’re one, aren’t you,” Mel hissed through her teeth. “Selfish, uncaring of you may hurt in your rash decisions. Martyr yourself so lyrists would sing your praises through the ages.”
Kylla’s mouth fell open, and she spun her seat to face her friend. “What would you expect of your leader, but one that would stand up for what’s right? What’s just, even if it means their own life?”
“My leader? My leader?” Mel yanked her seatbelt free. “You are not my leader, Kylla.” She reached for Kylla’s seatbelt, freeing it. “You will never be my leader.”
Fire flashed in Mel’s eyes, hotter than she’d ever seen it. A shiver ran through her, carrying with it anticipation. A desire she’d suppressed since she’d blossomed into womanly awareness years before. One didn’t have such feelings for a female best friend.
“By Fates what am I then?” Kylla asked.
Her friend was tall, and much stronger than Kylla, and when she took hold of her arm, she could do little but offer up a feeble struggle. At first she thought Mel meant to hug her, but when she forced her face down over her lap, she realized her friend had another intention. She made an earnest attempt to get free, though the confines of the ship’s helm made it impossible to get the leverage she needed. Mel’s hand came down in a hard slap on her bottom. The material of Kylla’s pants did little to cushion the stinging slap, and Kylla yelped.
Mel didn’t relent, and one blow followed another until tears stung Kylla’s eyes, and the tender skin on her bottom burned with the punishment. She didn’t want to cry, leaders didn’t cry, and even awaiting her sentence before the lifeless black stare of the Master hadn’t brought on her tears.
But Mel was different. She was the one being in all of the universe able to bring out emotions Kylla had no description for. And no control over. A sob caught in her throat before the dam burst, and she was crying like an infant. Mel pulled her upright, cradling her close.
“I’m sorry, baby,” her friend crooned, stroking her back. “So very sorry, I lost myself. I was frightened….” She trailed off, and rocked her like a child.
Mel possessed unwavering solidity, an ability to think things through when Kylla was quick to react. If only she had half of the wit her lifelong friend had, she’d prove herself the best of leaders. If only the Fates would’ve saw fit to make them one person, and not two.
When the worst of the tempest passed, Kylla pushed back and stared into her friend’s eyes, finding them glassy with tears. She’d known those moss green eyes a lifetime.
“What am I to you, Mel?” she asked.
Mel blinked then wiped her tears away. “What do you mean?”
“If I am not your leader, then am I only your friend?” Kylla dared to reach up and swipe away one last trail of wetness on Mel’s satiny cheek. “Will I ever be only a friend?”
The blur of stars filled her peripheral vision as she watched the play of emotion over Mel’s face. Confusion, and then the dawn of understanding.
Would their friendship survive if the answer was indeed yes? Could Kylla ever survive without her solid other half should Mel turn her away? Leaders should be strong, and with Mel at her side, they’d take back their solar system from the Master. Kylla knew without her to balance her own shortcomings, not only would she crumble, but so would her people.
“Let this be my answer,” Mel said, barely above a breath. Her velvet lips were on hers, their kiss sweet, long, and incredible. A kiss to seal a shared lifetime of love.
Author Bio
Olivia Starke calls the Ozarks home. One of the most beautiful areas in the country, she loves hiking trails with her dogs, kayaking on the numerous waterways, and enjoying southern Missouri's fresh air and sunshine.
She's also 'Mom' to four dogs, a growing number of kitties that show up at her door, and four VERY spoiled horses that do little to earn their keep. Not that she'd ever hold that against them.
She's a HUGE fangirl of Doctor Who and to a lesser extent Supernatural, and has a pretty interesting love triangle (or square?) going on in her head between the Doctor and the Winchesters. She is also sort of completely in love with BBC’s Sherlock.
www.authoroliviastarke.com
www.twitter.com/OliviaStarke
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Flame on a Fire
By
Carole Cummings
Kimolijah looses a fairly embarrassing little yawp of surprise as he’s flipped to his back and pinned by every inch of Bas’s rather considerable weight.
“You’ve been slinging sex about all bleeding night like you’re pitching horseshoes,” Bas growls, “and now you’re going to tease me?”
Well, yes, all right, teasing had rather been the plan, and Kimolijah wouldn’t say he’d been “slinging sex”—and what an odd way to put that at any rate; horseshoes?—but he might have been… well… lobbing it a bit, and up until this very second, Bas had seemed happy enough to go along with it. Bas is always happy to go along with it. Well, not happy, really, since the teasing is designed to make him pissy and twitchy, but Kimolijah rather thinks the mind-blowing sex that always results serves to tame Bas quite nicely for days afterwards. Or not tame him, as it were. It’s just better when Bas is irritated, when he’s driving into it like he’s trying to blot everything from Kimolijah’s mind but himself—when he’s out to prove something. And he always proves it damned definitively.
The second the silk goes around his wrist, Kimolijah knows that this time, he has seriously miscalculated.
“We’ll just see about teasing, won’t we?” Bas says, almost to himself, it seems, muttering something through his teeth about “busy hands”, eyes dark and mouth set, hands rough and almost cruel.
Before Kimolijah even really realizes what’s happening, he’s got one wrist wound in Bas’s scarf, jammed up against the spindles of the headboard.
And everything just sort of… shifts.
This isn’t teasing anymore, and it isn’t any sort of game, and maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why Kimolijah’s chest is suddenly constricted and why his stomach has cramped up and gone cold. His gridTech bubbles in his veins, blue sparks flittering at his fingertips and fizzing in his palm. Defensive reflex; he can’t help it. It happens sometimes. Even before his mind registers threat, it just happens. He’s working on it.
Except.
There’s abruptly something close to outrage pounding against his temples, he can’t help it, it’s there, anger, maybe, but it’s knocking relentlessly against something even more sudden and thoroughly confusing, a flash of erotic hunger that’s gone through Kimolijah’s groin and turned him so hard it actually hurts. And that makes it all much worse, more mystifying.
He’s not a prisoner anymore. He’s not slowly dying, or wishing he was dying, and chipping away at everything he thought he was out in some desert wasteland, captive to a robber baron who’s stolen his life, his Tech, his mind, everything about him. He’s not there anymore. Bas made sure of that.
But this.
This.
A bitter little shard of angerbetrayal spikes through Kimolijah, something sharp and hot that he doesn’t take the time to identify, but it almost feels like adding vague insult to imagined injury: he’d hated that stupid scarf, from the moment Bas had donned it. One of those ugly, long-droopy-wide things, all pretension and artifice, and Bas is neither of those things, so it kind of pisses Kimolijah off. And from the moment Bas had mulishly insisted upon wearing the awful thing to the Directorate’s reception—
You’re a Directorate Tracker. You’re being promoted an entire grade. This makes you look like a rookie who’s trying too hard.
Shut up, my mam gave it to me.
That doesn’t mean you have to wear it!
My mam gave it to me.
—Kimolijah had spent a ridiculous amount of time all afternoon and evening thinking about how he was going to find a way to burn it later. And to
not only find himself abruptly held down like this, but to find himself held down by that bloody ugly scarf.
He has no idea what to do with the jumble of visceral emotion rapidly hazing his vision red, so he directs the anger at the scarf and at Bas, but something in him knows it isn’t that simple. The clash of sudden and inexplicable burning lust against something that feels like real and too-deep fear sends his mind retreating, even as tumblers roll and click in his head, unlocking something he doesn’t know if he wants to let loose, forcing him into a place he’d been happy not to go five seconds ago.
Bas isn’t joking, Kimolijah can tell, he’s dead serious, and the conflict in Kimolijah’s gut is making it curl and clench, even as his free hand is curling and clenching itself into a tight fist, filaments of gridstream turning to sparks at the tips of his fingers.
A weapon.
Should he need it.
He won’t. He knows he won’t.
It doesn’t really help.
He can see the moment when realization flashes through Bas’s mind, the moment when everything that’s just flared hot and bright through Kimolijah hits him, and Kimolijah wonders if it burns Bas, too, this scritch of fearwant that blitzes his senses and makes it hard to breathe. The dark, heavy lust in Bas’s eyes goes wavery and chaotic, awareness flitting through a stormy blue-black haze, and they both go still, breathless, the air suddenly far too heavy for Kimolijah to suck in a good gulp of it, and weighted, like there’s an anvil on his chest. He can hear the trepidation in Bas’s ragged breathing, can see it in the asking-demanding in Bas’s eyes, can feel it in the lurching slip-thud of his own heart, and Kimolijah’s skin goes all clammy, like a wash of cold oil is misting up from his pores.
Kimolijah bucks up, tries to pull himself out of Bas’s hold, but Bas doesn’t move, doesn’t let go, and somehow it goes right to Kimolijah’s groin, sends tingling heat through him, and he almost hates Bas for it, for making him feel it, for making him know it. The resistance is instinctive and feral, something so fundamentally a part of Kimolijah that he doesn’t even really think about it, can’t really think about it, it won’t make definable shapes in his mind, because if he thinks, he’ll have to remember, and he won’t, he refuses. But the profound craving is no less elemental, deep-seated and near-brutal, and that makes it all somehow frighteningly mortifying.
Hold me, make me yours, prove it, just for now, just for right now, it thrums through Kimolijah’s blood, and he flinches away from it, and Trust me, I won’t let go, and we can pretend it doesn’t mean anything tomorrow answers him back in one small hint of a tear trapped in the lashes at the corner of Bas’s eye.
And they’re in their dark heart, that place they never talk about, never even acknowledge, but it defines them—Them, KimolijahandBas—that place that only exists when they’re inside each others’ skins. If they speak it, if they even let themselves think it, it could end them, because neither one of them can admit they want it, need it, burn for it, not even to themselves, especially not to themselves, and especially not to each other.
Yet here it is, threatening to make itself something solid and real between them, and how will they ever deny it if this goes wrong?
He can feel every fiber in the fabric against his wrist, can see every thought that caroms through Bas’s mind like it’s written in fiery ink on his dilated pupils: Trust me, and I’ll make it good, and Let me, and I promise.
Kimolijah wants to believe it, he really does, that hard knot in his belly unfisting in the wash of confused ravenous yearning that crashes over him through the stillness and ringing silence like waves over a breakwater. And the fact that he does want to believe it makes the humiliation almost tangible, he can taste it, all sour-sweet and bitter, because this isn’t a simple thing, it could mean everything if it turns out to mean nothing, and what if it does? What if that’s all it turns out to be: a moment of abandon that ruins trust forever?
“Don’t,” Bas breathes, hands tightening, eyes locked to Kimolijah’s, near-black with intensity and wanting and purpose, and he dips down low, nearly blinding Kimolijah to everything but the gravity and frankness of that gaze. “I know.”
And there it is, right there. An eternity of unfurling potential, of maybe, of what if?, this wide, thick swath of possibility that fans out and distends itself, curls through Kimolijah’s chest and just… waits. Because yeah, Bas does know, even if Kimolijah likes to pretend no one could, and maybe that’s all right, maybe it’s even good, and maybe Kimolijah can stop it from being nothing if he doesn’t make it everything.
Bas’s eyes change, go all fierce and glittery, and he growls a little. “Stop,” he tells Kimolijah. “You think too much, you always have,” and he ignores the deadly current teasing at Kimolijah’s fingertips, like he knows. And God, like it fucking obeys Bas and not Kimolijah, the stream snuffs out beneath Bas’s hands, tingling up Kimolijah’s wrists and following a phantom path of ink and scars that do nothing more than remind Kimolijah of exactly what it is he’s trying to forget.
Like he knows, like he’s trying to obliterate the memory with nothing but his touch, Bas’s hands tighten again at Kimolijah’s wrists, push them up towards the headboard, and before Kimolijah can even make his mind consider what all of it might really mean, Bas is kissing him. Not even kissing him, really—devouring him, seducing his sanity away from him with hot swipes and dips of the tongue, brutal scrapes of teeth that somehow don’t hurt but flare fierce craving through him and make his hips lift off the bed, and push. Bas groans, the vibrations of it careening through Kimolijah’s chest and dragging all through him. It’s as if there’s this wide chasm inside Kimolijah, and he’s been pretending it doesn’t exist for so long that it’s staggering his mind to have it suddenly filled with all this astonishing possibility.
His hands are useless lumps, lying docile while Bas works at the fabric, only curling in on themselves, and Kimolijah wonders if it’s some kind of blind, ass-backwards lunatic instinct that makes him tense and wary, yet prevents him from doing anything about it. He can get loose, for five more seconds, before Bas completes that last knot Kimolijah can feel weaving against his skin, he can get loose, and something in him is screaming, Why aren’t you? What’s wrong with you? and something else is throttling it into silence.
It’s this kiss, he thinks vaguely, it’s making me insane, stealing my sense, and it is, sort of, because his mind doesn’t seem to want to work properly, and all he can seem to make himself do is groan into Bas’s mouth, let him take whatever he wants, give him whatever he wants, beg him to take it, and why has Bas never kissed him like this before? It’s hot and all-encompassing, Bas’s mouth somehow soft and cruel all at once, teeth nipping and tongue swiping, as Bas’s hands start to move, begin the process of stripping Kimolijah of every last bit of will.
They scour down his arms, nothing soft or gentle about the touch, pausing now and then to knead at a muscle, thumbs digging in and grinding tendon into bone, and it makes Kimolijah arch up, stutter in a sharp breath. Bas has lifted himself away, mouth and hands the only things touching Kimolijah, and it should be enough, it really should, what with the thorough job of debauchery they’re doing, but Kimolijah actually aches with wanting more. He wants the kiss to go deeper until he chokes and has to breathe it, wants the hands to dig in harder until they start peeling back skin, and every inch of him that Bas isn’t touching is burning, stinging with want and a tiny seed of rage at the frustration of it all. So he keeps arching, stretching, but Bas is still stroking at biceps and elbows and shoulders, ignoring Kimolijah’s muffled growls and moaning pleas, and Kimolijah can’t do a bloody thing about it because this kiss has made him completely unbalanced.
He can’t shake the feeling that he should be abashed, that a mere strip of silk should not spark this vicious lust, should not empty his mind so easily, and what does this make of him, that he’s so willing to yield like this after... everything? That he’s so willing to believe and trust, wh
en three years of captivity—slavery, just say it, a slightly less ugly word doesn’t make it a less ugly thing—when three years of slavery have given him every reason not to? And yet one earnest look of significance, one deep, mind-numbing kiss, a few skillful touches, and he’s suddenly digging faith from some abandoned abyss and risking everything.
The question winds through him, coils like a spring and tenses his limbs, and something like a strangled little moan lurks at the back of his throat, but he doesn’t let it loose. Bas draws back, plots a line of nipping kisses from Kimolijah’s jaw to his collarbone, tongue flicking and swiping, and fingertips following, firm and almost too sensate, like he has every intention of tracing every vein and muscle beneath Kimolijah’s skin.
“Stop thinking,” Bas says again, almost a snarl this time, right against Kimolijah’s throat, and it makes Kimolijah feel ridiculously vulnerable, Bas’s teeth right up against his jugular like that, but then Bas is sucking, too, pushing his thigh into Kimolijah’s groin. And yes, fuck yes, that’s a superb idea, a bloody brilliant idea, because Kimolijah really can’t think anymore, anyway, not with Bas’s mouth so hot and sure and demanding, blocking out everything but the heat of it, and the nonsense whispers Bas is breathing against Kimolijah’s skin, almost like chanting, sending Kimolijah into a state that’s thick and enfolding and almost dreamlike.
Kimolijah closes his eyes, tips his head back, and… Just. Stops. Thinking.
Bas gives a little mmm of approval, like he knows, and that’s somehow comforting, helps the springs to uncoil a bit and knock down the tensile humming in Kimolijah’s chest a few notches. He concentrates on the heat of Bas’s mouth, how he can tell when Bas takes a breath because that heat disappears for a millisecond, makes Kimolijah’s skin prickle with the loss of the intensity, and then ripple hot with its return.
