I am interested in what she says. Far too interested. And yet, something tugs at me. Something is wrong again. It is the last thing she said. Home. I am her home now just as she is mine, yet she still speaks of another place. Of her human colony.
“You will tell me why Kuaku led me to believe you were dissatisfied.”
“Probably because she’s in love with you,” she says and I realize there is so much I do not understand about humans because immediately afterwards, she looks frustrated that she has said this. I will need to speak with the human-Voraxian advisor, Svera, and learn more. Quickly.
“What is love?” I ask a question, something an Okkari does not do.
“What do you mean?”
“It does not translate for me.”
She sucks in a breath. Small bumps form on the outsides of her arms. Curious, I brush them with my fingertips, only to be startled when she shivers all over. Despite the screa surrounding us, she must still be cold. Quickly, I pull a zyth fur from our nest and drape it over her shoulders.
“Thank…” she starts, then falters, hair where her ridges should be scrunching together over her nose.
“What is mine, is yours.”
She looks down at her lap and inhales. I do too. The potency of her arousal is cloying and I hiss. She glances at my xora and I feel my own seed bead at its tip. It takes all of my control not to fist it and demand my right to rut her then.
Instead, I say, “This beast is called zyth. You find it further west, in Nobu’s forests. I hunted this creature in my sixth rotation in honor of my future Xiveri mate.” She blinks at me widely and I cannot help my pleasure expression, it cracks across my face and for just a heartbeat, I see a corner of her mouth quirk up too.
“I have enough to cover our nest and those of our future kits. It was the largest kill any have seen since.” What am I saying? I have never uttered words in such shameless self-aggrandizement before, but it is because I suddenly, very desperately want to impress her, that I say them at all.
I clear my throat. “Now tell me of this love.”
She sucks in a breath, holds it, and speaks on a rapid exhale. “When two people love each other it’s like the whole rest of the world isn’t there. They’d do anything for each other. They want everything from each other.”
I make the pleasure expression again and gently, boldly, place my hand high on her thigh. I do not miss the way she spreads her legs slightly, or whimpers almost inaudibly at my touch. Kuaku, the treasonous hasheba. She does not deserve the title. And yet, what could she hope to gain by attempting to deceive me in such a way? Is my Xiveri mate correct in her assessment of the hasheba’s feelings towards me? I feel pride and relief. Nox, my Xiveri mate does want me. She is pleased by me. And she is clever to have seen in Kuaku what I could not.
“I was not so naive to think that Kuaku did not want to be made Xhea. Many females vied for such a position. But my sires were fortunate enough to be Xiveri mates and I desired to replicate the depth of their union with a Xiveri mate of my own. So I selected no mate, choosing instead to wait for her. To wait for you. I thought that, upon finding you, the interest Kuaku has shown in me over the rotations would resolve itself and that she would understand that her place was not in my nest. That is only for you.”
I slide my hand up towards the juncture of her thighs. She spreads them for me and her eyes flutter. She grips the edges of the zyth fur draped around her and bites her lower mouth pillow.
“I have this love emotion for you, Kiki.”
“How? We don’t even know each other.” She says, voice breaking as I reach forward to touch her heat with my hands. I have blunted the claws of two fingers carefully, so as to better explore her folds without hurting her. And I do so now.
“Oh stars,” she whimpers.
Purple pleasure beams down my arms, radiating through my chest and up the length of my stiff xora. “We will. With time. For now we can only listen to the Xanaxana. It has guided me to you and I know with absolute certainty that I would do anything for you.”
“But I’m a human. And you’re an alien,” she says with eyes closed. Her legs are wide now and she is pumping her hips in a way that appears subconscious.
My control slips and I growl out a question. “Why does that matter?”
“I…I…” My fingers slip through the wetness that coats the furs below, balance on the tip of the little nub I have come to know so well, and finally push past the barrier of her outer lips into her hot, wet core. She rattles off a curse and shakes her head feverishly, clutching my forearm with both hands.
“I don’t know,” she gasps. “Fuck, I don’t know…”
I cannot take it anymore and lurch up onto my feet. My xora is at her eye level and I love the expression that cloaks her when she blinks her eyes open and sees it. Need. I tilt her face up and meet her gaze with mine. Let her see what she has done to me.
“I will tell you the answer. It does not. You are my Xiveri mate and I treasure you more than I treasure my own life. Now you will tell me that you understand my words and believe them.”
She licks her mouth pillows and I nearly ejaculate then. A vision of her large, dark breasts coated in my blue seed sends a spasm down my left leg. Seeing it, her eyes widen. She nods.
“Xhivey. Now you will tell me how you would like to be pleasured and I will take you to our nest and spend the coming lunar bringing this pleasure to you.”
Her breathing comes in short, shallow bursts and she surprises me to my core when she reaches forward and takes my xora in her trembling fist. “Everything you do…did…up on the mountain pleased me.”
She swallows audibly, as if admitting something wretched instead of the most beautiful truth. I have never heard words more lovely. And then I have never seen anything more lovely when she leans forward and licks her pink, ridgeless tongue up the length of my shaft, swallowing the seed that now coats the head. Urgent need slams into me. I cannot allow her to continue without emptying across her chest. I rise and sweep her with me.
She grabs onto my shoulders, looping one arm around my neck. I set her down on the edge of our nest roughly, drop to my knees on the stone floor and press my face to the seam of her thighs. Her fingers slide into my hair and I growl out my approval. Quickly, she pulls them back and I snarl. Looking up at her, I grab her retreating hand in one of mine and return it to where it was.
She does not need white ridges to express her shock, but I don’t care. I am slowly sinking into the scent of her, which grows stronger at the juncture of her legs. I nose my way forward until I reach her mound glistening with moisture that smells of miaba and salt and spice and makes saliva pool beneath my tongue. My xora bucks, releasing more seed that should be spilled inside of her. It will be. Deep inside of her.
I glance up the length of her body to see her chest rising and falling in waves. “Your mound is already wet,” I inform her. “Does this mean your body is ready to receive mine?”
She hesitates. Propped up on her elbows, she stares at me down the length of her body, then nods before she looks away.
“Kiki,” I hiss, refusing to call her human or by any other name if she does not find pleasure in it. “You will look at me when I mount you.”
She flicks her gaze to mine, breathing hard. I make the pleasure expression and bite down on the inside of her thigh. She chokes out a mewling whimper and I cannot help the Xanaxana from rattling through my entire chest, threatening to tear me apart from the inside.
In a tone so gruff it is nearly indiscernible, I ask her, “I am eager to taste you. Do I have your permission?”
She nods and breath jerks into her lungs, making the dark-tipped mounds on her chest bounce and jiggle. These mounds are so very soft, and with no plates covering them, seem so precious. I feel at a loss, wanting and wishing to explore them with tongue and hands…perhaps even placing my xora between their fullness and using them to pump seed all over her ioni skin… The thought is a pleasure as much as a
torture to me. I need to feast.
I lick her slightly and her eyes roll back. She wavers, falling onto the furs but I nip at the skin above her hip, making her jerk. “Kiki, what did I say? You will watch me as I bring you pleasure.” I place my hand on top of her lower stomach, just above the thatch of her glistening curls. Then I push up, pulling the skin away from her mound and further exposing that small little nub she found so much delight in earlier.
She moans so loudly I am startled. Startled and pleased. I splay her thighs apart with my hands until the point I feel them resisting. She moans louder and whispers, “Harder.”
“Repeat yourself.”
“Harder” she says, clearing her throat.
I spread her legs until I am sure I cause her pain and then pull back, but she says, “Don’t. It feels…it feels…”
“I will not bring you pain.”
“You won’t.”
I make the pleasure expression. My Xiveri mate knows me. And I cannot help myself. “You will give me your answer.”
“What…what answer?”
“You will tell me that you want me to taste you.”
As I wait, I feather light licks across her folds, delving between them to taste more of her essence. “I can’t admit that…I can’t.”
“Then I will stop my wetting of your mound,” I say, and I do.
“Oh stars…fuck,” she curses, hands fisting the zyth fur below.
“That is not an answer,” I say, pleased.
She groans and kicks her feet, “Yes, I want you to kiss it. Please.”
“You need your Xiveri mate.”
She hesitates, and then releases a tiny, strangled, “Yes.”
“You need me.”
When she does not answer, I pull back even more. I glance up at her and she has her eyes shut. “Kiki, do not make me repeat myself again.”
Her eyes open slowly and she meets my gaze. She looks fevered and wild and in pain. My xora feels so sensitive the slightest stroke of the zyth fur against it sends electricity firing through me. I understand her pain, but before I can save either of us, I need her to tell me.
“Tell me you need me.”
Water fills her gaze again. She reaches one hand for her chest mound and kneads it in a way I find mesmerizing. I blow very lightly onto her dripping core and her head kicks back on a gasp and when she returns her gaze to mine, I see the resolved set of her jaw.
“I need you,” she says and I dive forward, mouth latching onto her mound.
I lathe her little nub with my tongue and I realize that with my tempo and touch and speed I can control the writhing of this little warrior’s body. I know then that Kuaku was violently wrong. Because my Xiveri mate receives pleasure from me and it makes me feel powerful. More powerful than all my titles, all my lands, all my rights.
When I slow, she moans deeply, when I quicken, her fingers clench and her back arches. When I nibble the folds of her lips, she cries out to the stars. And then when I worship her little nub, she shatters. Her whole body shivers and shakes and I see liquid prick the corners of her eyes and drip down her smooth, curved cheeks.
Curious to see if this liquid tastes as good as the rush of salty, sticky cream that has spilled from between her lower folds, I finish lapping up the moisture at her thighs, careful to devour all of it hungrily, before prowling up the length of her. She is so beautiful. Lying there, arms splayed to either side, utterly defenseless and so vulnerable, ready and ripe for the taking. I reach a hand forward and sink it into the depth of her thick, rich curls. Her eyes are open, blinking slowly up at me.
I cradle the back of her head and tilt her face to mine. Gently, I press my mouth to the water on her face and take it away. She makes a troubling sound, but before I know what has happened she is pushing on my shoulders, urging me onto my back. Her hand reaches between us and I am stunned when she pushes my palm aside and again takes my xora for her own. Her skin is so soft around my shaft that my whole body lurches. Before her, I have never felt another’s hand on my xora before. Not nearly so pleasurable as the raw, wet heat of her core, but pleasurable all the same.
“Kiki,” I growl as she swings one leg over my hips. What is this? I do not know. I do not know but I stop her as I sense she will lower down onto my xora all on her own. I have to ask, though it humiliates me to do so, “Do I fail you in our rutting?”
She freezes, as if stunned. “No.”
“Yet, you wish to lead…”
She nods.
“You wish to lead even though it is the male’s responsibility to guide the breeding.”
Her eyes crinkle. She makes the pleasure expression and I am so stunned by the beauty of it I don’t hear what she says next and have to debase myself yet again by asking her to repeat herself.
“Human females are known to lead the rutting too, sometimes. I never have… But I just… I thought. I mean, I wanted to try.” She poses her voice as a question and the request makes something tighten in my chest. I reach up and stroke the tip of her chest mound, her stomach, the edge of her jaw.
“Hexa. My body is yours.” She blinks, but the water that fills her gaze does not spill down her cheeks. Instead, she makes the smallest pleasure expression as she rises up onto my xora and slides down onto it smoothly. She moans and this time it is I who grips the zyth fur below me, as if fearing that it will fly away or I will. Because as I fill her tight, wet heat, and issue a bellowed roar into our cavern, I am lost to her. Completely. Nothing more than driftwood, washed up onto paradise’s shore.
8
Kiki
My dreams are wonderful. Paradise. Hallucinations of an oasis. It’s been too long stuck in the sand, thirsty and starved. This dream feels like fullness. The essence of satisfaction. A wonderful aroma of salt, semen and sweat. He smells like the brown root spice we use most back home.
I’m two rotations old. My grandfather sits outside on the stoop we called a porch, kneading dough on a flat board. Instead of forming a ball, he flattens the bread, coats one side of the dough in root spice, the other in sweet water, rolls it up and bakes it. It’s the first time I ever had root spice and cane bread, the first time I ever had anything sweet. I believed in magic then. That life was a perfect, treasured thing.
I lurch up, my hands reaching out and finding warmth. Cocooned in it, the scratch of inhuman plates against my back let’s me know that I’m against his chest. That his thighs are cupping mine. He has a leg draped over my whole body protectively and an arm clenched around my torso like a vice. Why did I wake up? Why should I ever have to wake up from this?
My chest tightens. I can hardly breathe. A foreign energy flushes through me and I feel alive with it, even if I am being dragged back into lethargy by the hands of sleep itself. Everything is just as it was. Nothing has changed. But everything.
I was on top. He let me take the lead. I rutted him. And he was so nervous about it… The thought crunches as I try to expel it, undigestible and hard to take. I have a decision to make then and it’s too easy to make it. Get up and flee, or just…sink back down into the cocoon of the oasis. Wait for the solar. Instead of fighting, try to reason with him. What am I saying? He’s an alien, he can’t be reasoned with! What is happening to me? Get away! Fight this…fight…
A vision of my mom. A flash of a memory. Some months after the Hunt, I’m still thinking about the red alien, fantasizing about slitting his throat. My mom sets a mug down on the table beside me. I smell the mint and bark spice wafting from the steam on top of it, masking the smell of the earth-rich water but I don’t look at it, or her. Even as she says, “You can’t release your demons if you keep them prisoner.”
I exhale, mind made up, and lower back into the furs the ones he hunted for me. His arms tighten around me but no sooner do I close my eyes and surrender to the dream, than a sharp sensation pulls me back into the present.
A flick against my forehead jerks me awake. I blink and it’s hard to see anything in the low lights swirling t
hroughout the room. They seem to have dimmed. But how? Miari would know. Maybe if I asked him, he would find her and I could show her the lights and the cold white. I could even introduce them.
The flick strikes again and the vision before me focuses. Kuaku. What’s she doing here? I open my mouth to ask but she claps a hand over it. Her forehead is swirling red mixed with murky blobs of copper as she glances at mine and the Okkari’s bodies, intertwined.
She gestures for me to follow her and silently makes her way to the door. Confused, I’m wobbly as I sit up and start to make my way after her. The moment my foot hits the warm rock floor and my last limb extricates itself from the web our bodies have created, Okkari jerks awake.
His forehead becomes white then pink then he looks up and sees me with a gaze that’s sharp and not at all sleepy — one ready for battle. His chest rumbles and he starts to sit up. His ridges are a mutiny of colors now and my stomach lurches, an irreverent desire filling me up.
“Why do you leave our nest?” He says and his voice is low and sensuous.
I have a hard time standing up against the sound of it and hate that, when I speak, I don’t sound half as sure and authoritative as he does. “Bathroom,” I lie. And I hate that I’m lying.
And I hate that I hate it.
And I hate that, looking up at his purple alien face, hate is so hard to find.
He nods, the smooth ridges above his eyes burning blue and a little purple. “Xhivey. I will escort you.”
“No,” I blurt, scrambling as I remember Kuaku standing just out in the hall and the reason she’s here. What I told her I wanted. What she agreed to help me do. “I’ll ask one of the hasheba to help me if I need it.”
He grins with one corner of his mouth and his white teeth flash in the low light. Bubbles fill my stomach and pop in small explosions, each one a symphony of sound. Just lie down. Sleep. Forget about the bitch. She’s after my man. Fuck her.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 8
