She laughs as she does it, and I laugh with her. Perhaps someone else might see the horror in the situation instead of the hilarity, but that is part of why I adore Tess. My hands are bound and my dragon is trapped and the only reason we so much as kissed is because tomorrow, we will face death together, in one manner or another. Tess has always been able to look into the darkness and grin, even if what she sees there is frightening. Her laughter fades as she plants another kiss on my lips. This one is quick and purposeful, a promise of more to come later. Her next move is to drop to her knees, where she begins to remove the remainder of my armor.
Whereas before she had dropped pieces and missed clasps in her enthusiasm, here, she chooses to move with meticulous slowness. I feel the bulge in my underlying spacesuit grow larger, pressing against the fabric, uncomfortably brushing against the hard plating of my armor that protects the sensitive area from trauma during a battle. It has been minutes, and I already wanted to bury myself within her, to feel her clench around me as she comes. Her face was close to my cock proximity wise, and when at last she unfastened the right things in the right order, it was freed, standing at attention, heedless of our dank surroundings.
She pulls the spacesuit down from my waist, leaving it tangled about my knees.
She pauses to give my cock a lingering look, and one slow, luxurious lick that nearly makes me spill at once. A moan drops from my mouth. My hands twitch, aching to reach for her, but getting nowhere in their current position.
“I truly wish your lock picking skills were a bit more comprehensive.”
Tess simply smirks up at me, before sucking a mark onto the inside of my newly revealed thigh. The sensation goes straight to my cock. With my rate of healing, it will fade in mere minutes, but part of me wishes she would keep trying until one sticks.
“And I wish,” she says, “that I were the one in handcuffs. But we’ll both have to make do with what we have.”
Fuck — the thought of her being the one in handcuffs makes me somehow even harder.
She darts down again, ignoring my achingly hard cock and focusing instead on freeing my thighs and shins from the armor and spacesuit. Her fingers tease as they do their work, peeling layer after layer away with painful slowness before trailing lightly over the skin, just barely scratching with the end of one fingernail. They almost tickle trailing over the backs of my knees. Were my hands free, I would grip her by the hair and pull her too me—my mouth, my cock, any place more useful.
“You’re absolutely infuriating,” I tell her. She has finally reached my boots and the wall behind me is scarcely holding me up.
She looks up at me, her hair in disarray from its usual tied back style, strands springing loose so that a few curls fall into her eyes while others spring out in odd directions. Her eyes are brown, but constantly shifting like liquid metal, like melted gold. “I know,” she says. “You’ve said that.”
Her hands unlace my boots, and I carefully step out of each one. I want so much to touch her as she kneels there that I can scarcely stand it a moment longer. I think this, but as her lips began to slide upward at the same leisurely pace with which they moved down before, I am sure I cannot wait a moment longer.
“Tess,” I say, my voice a low growl of warning.
She stops at my hip, cheek resting against the bone. “Why don’t you ask me?” she says.
I stare down at her, her head tilted up while mine angles down, our eyes meeting. She is infuriating and amazing and with one more press of her lips to my opposite hip, I say the word she has asked for.
“Please.”
She grins in answer and swallows my length in one smooth, ambitious movement. Her mouth fits over the tip and moves steadily downward, her eyes holding mine all the while. When she reaches its end and hollows her cheeks, I cannot hold her gaze any longer. Her eyes wink out of sight as my own eyes close, rolling back. My head tilts upward, against the wall behind me. When my eyes open once more, they are focused on the ceiling of the ship as though I can see the endless stretch of stars above us through the metal.
She feathers her tongue against me, and I force my eyes down again, watching hers as they flutter briefly closed and then open, each time searching for a moment before locking back onto mine. Were my hands free, I would have tangled them in the tresses of her hair, cradled her jaw. The feeling of her around me is almost perfection; I can think of only one thing that would be better, but I am at her mercy. Tess runs her tongue along a particularly sensitive space, giving as much pleasure as she can. I am already a second from losing control, holding on to the last dredges of it with white-knuckled determination, when she pulls her mouth from my cock.
“I know you’d prefer to wait,” she says, “but I’m going to make you cum. And then, if you’re up for it, perhaps you can have me another way.”
Without waiting for me to gain the capacity to formulate a response, she dives down again, this time engaging one hand in the ministrations as well. It wraps around my cock at its base, moving in time with the bob of her neck. Her grip there is perfection. Her words have already brought me even closer than I was moments before, closer than I hoped to be in the relatively short span of time since her lips first wrapped themselves around my length. I have to remind myself that she has been teasing me for what seemed like hours just prior to this, with her slow, practiced removal of my armor.
It takes only a few quick twirls of her tongue, pulls of her hands, before I lose myself into her waiting mouth. She does not pull away, despite the warning I issue with my eyes and my tongue, a quick look and a desperate “Tess, I—” before my tight control slips away. She pulls away slowly, still sucking as she does so, and I find my hips still twitching forward in spite of how sensitive my cock feels from the ordeal. She merely smiles, and rests her head for a moment against my thigh, working her tired jaw back and forth while we both take a moment to recover. The wall at my back feels like the only thing still holding me upright.
Tess stands slowly, her full lips red and moist and smirking as she leaves a kiss on the corner of my mouth. I surprise her by turning into it, finding the energy and the enthusiasm to run my tongue along her lips, pressing slowly inside and finding the taste there oddly pleasing. I only wish it was her I am tasting and not the evidence of my own pleasure. The thought of doing this again, of taking Tess apart with my tongue and my hands before finally thrusting into her, is a kind of motivation to live in itself. When she pulls away, the breath has gone from both of us. I can see the slight flush on her cheeks beneath the brown of her skin. The room is not by any means warm, but there is a thin sheen of sweat beginning to accumulate on her forehead, making several curls stick there in oddly shaped spirals.
“Sit down,” she says.
I oblige the request, the order, and slide down the wall, all thoughts of a dignified descent lost in the arousal that clouds my thoughts. I am exhausted as well, but while before it had seemed like a sickness brought on by the apathy of sitting in a room and waiting for death, now it seems pleasant. It makes the world less sharp and focused.
Once I am there, Tess’s hand goes to the ties at the back of her space suit. She gives me a teasing, knowing smile and begins to remove it with the same taunting slowness that she used to strip me of my armor. I find myself watching the graceful progress of her hands as opposed to the skin she reveals. They are slender but calloused, with scars crisscrossing the knuckles from far too many fights to count. The nails are bitten, and there is a bit of old chipped polish remaining on a few fingers. The color looks to have been purple at one point, though it is now hard for even my eyes to tell. They move with dexterity that I do not have myself, making quick work of the thin ties that would be too difficult for my large hands to hold without tearing. The top of her suit falls free, revealing ample breasts, strong, muscled arms and shoulders. The rest of her middle is toned as well, and when she removes her bra, my eyes go straight to the rising peaks of her nipples.
I am a Velorian, and
I am not surprised to feel my cock already beginning to grow hard again. Tess smiles at the sight and begins to lower the suit further. She reveals tantalizing glimpses of the firm plane of her stomach before baring it in full. It was perhaps a little softer than it had been during her years as a soldier. The sight of her pushing the fabric gently down over her hips, has my cock flushed and fully hard before I so much as glimpse the fabric of her underwear. They are grey and practical. They should not be nearly so sexy as she makes them appear, revealing them inch by inch before stripping the space-suit further down. When I see the wetness making a visible dark spot on her underwear, I cannot bite back the groan of arousal and frustration that rises up.
The sound makes Tess pause, her own skin flushed and shining with sweat, her breathing growing shallow, but it does not push her to move any faster. Her hands skim down her thighs, slowly stripping off the last of the suit. As she goes to pull down the second leg, it catches on the top of her prosthesis and she stumbles, catching herself with one hand on the wall. Our eyes meet. Tess’s lips are trembling, and for a moment, I think her face is contorting in embarrassment before she lets out a laugh, so loud that it echoes.
“Be careful,” I tell her, when the sound has subsided.
She shakes her head, sighing around the chuckle that still lives in her voice. “We’ve done it. We’ve ruined the mood.”
For anyone else it might have, but I have known Tess for so long that she feels like part of myself. I catch her eye and give my cock, still hard and leaking fluid, a pointed look. She grins and continues the game, more carefully rolling down the fabric over her prosthesis. I am careful not to allow my eyes to linger on it, knowing that such a thing will make her uncomfortable. If we live, and if this continues, even as nothing but an arrangement agreed upon for the mutual benefit of two friends, it will be a conversation for a later date.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her, when she stands before me in nothing but her underwear.
She ducks her head, as if the words aren’t the sort she hears very often. Perhaps she doesn’t. In the myriad of things that Tess and I have chatted about at various meetings over the years, her dating life has never featured prominently. She talks about hook-ups, the same as any soldier on a long mission does when starved of that sort of contact, but she’s never talked about love.
“I’m human,” she says. “Now you—” She nods at me. “—are a specimen worth gushing over.”
Her fingers hook in the elastic of the underwear, tugging it down. I stare at the line of neatly trimmed hair, like an arrow pointing downward. There is moisture visible there, nearly dripping, like the tip of my cock. She does not move forward, and we seem to each be stuck staring at the other. My chest is heaving.
“Tess,” I say. “Get over here, please, before my dragon tries to break free.” It is not an exaggeration. Never before I have been so tempted by a sight. Never before I have felt so utterly unable to resist having something before it has been given. Then again, I’ve never been asked to.
“You’re not the one giving orders just now,” she says. “Ask me nicely.”
I have no trouble conceding to that. “Please, Tess,” I say, but that is as far as I get before the thick haze of arousal steals my thoughts again. It seems to be good enough for her.
“My pleasure,” she answers, and walks forward.
She steps carefully, each footfall made with purpose, and lowers herself onto my waiting lap. She spends a long, drawn out moment merely kissing me, as if returning from a long absence, her nails trailing gentle scratches down my chest. Just when I think that I might finish without her hands even touching my cock, she grips it with one sure hand, and guides me inside. There is not much I can do from my current position, but my hips thrust upward anyway, a desperate, uneven rhythm. Tess sighs with pleasure and kisses me hard; a touch of her lips to mine that demands my attention and my reciprocation. I become so absorbed in exploring her mouth with my tongue that I am shocked when she begins to move, raising and lowering herself over my lap, driving me further into the wet heat of her with each dip of her hips. She clutches at my shoulders, digging her nails in as she moves, my name the only sound on her lips.
She is filled with me and I am full of her—not my body, but all of my senses. My ears are overwhelmed with the sound of her panting groans, the scent of her arousal filling the small room. I am drowning in the brown-eyed gaze that holds my own hostage. She surrounds me, and I realize abruptly that I never want the feeling to fade.
I cannot touch her, not with my hands, but I lean forward and plant kiss after kiss on her neck, sucking at the flesh and making her shudder as I trail down to take her nipple in my mouth, squeezing it lightly between two teeth. Tess shakes around me, her body trembling through an abrupt but lasting orgasm, each tremor of her around me bringing me closer to the edge myself.
“I fucking love you,” she blurts out. Her eyes are still rolling with pleasure but her voice is as earnest as I have heard it, and I know without a doubt that the words are true, that as she says them, she means it, even if the emotion does not last.
As she says it, though, I do not think she means a love of camaraderie or friendship. I think that perhaps she feels something different, like the confusing mass of warmth growing larger in my chest. I do not say the words in return. My body is too wracked with sensation. Her words, the feel of her climax hitting her while she is still coming around me, is what drive me over the edge.
For a moment, the feeling takes me far from our current disaster. I forget about the metal walls, and the fact that we are sharing the ship with cult members whose misplaced dreams for Veloria, whose hatred of anything different, might ruin it. I forget the ache in my shoulders and the bruise on Tess’s jaw and the looming possibility that we might die tomorrow before we ever have a chance to repeat this. When the pleasure fades, it is like the constantly shifting world has finally slotted into place. Tess is breathing hard, her pulse fluttering in her throat, when she finally meets my eyes once more.
“Did you feel that?” she asks.
“Feel what?”
“Something new,” she answers. “I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but like, visiting your family after a mission that’s dragged on too long, or seeing a friend, when you were worried for their safety, or tossing back the last drink on a good night. Better than all that combined.” She pauses, and appears almost worried for a moment, that she might be the only one who has ever experienced such a thing. “Did you feel it?”
I duck my head a moment to compose myself before looking back at her. “I suppose everyone feels something indescribable when they bond with their soulmate.”
Tess stares at me. “That’s…” she attempts to begin, but then trails off, looking thoughtful. “I thought that was supposed to be some cosmic, destined, you know as soon as you meet, kind of thing?”
Fire Velorians have a different view on soul bonds. While many ice Velorians will refrain from mating with anyone who isn’t their mate, or who they don’t strongly suspect to be their mate, fire Velorians more often believe that you should live your life in the meantime. Mating happens for each person when it is meant to happen. There are even some who claim that you can mate with your intended when the time is not right, and not realize the significance until you meet again. Then again, I have also heard that bonding with your mate and then leaving them can cause both parties distress. Things seem to vary from person to person, but perhaps the theory explains why I always miss Tess so badly when fate does not drag us together for a long period of time, more so than any other person I care for.
“Sometimes,” I answer carefully. “Admittedly, I have had feelings for you in the past that have made me wonder.”
She snorts, eyebrows shooting up. She looks torn between a mixture of amused shock and actual irritation. “You didn’t think to mention this at some point? Hell,” she continues, “you could have told me on a vid-call.” She stands up, stepping back into her under
wear as she moves to the door, picking up the water canteens that the cult member had tossed inside and taking a long drink. When she’s finished, she helps me take a drink as well, holding the opening to my lips and tilting it up slowly, so that I can take a few long pulls without much risk of choking.
“I did not think the feelings were reciprocated,” I answer. “Also, in the past, such a realization—had we chosen to act upon it—would have affected your ability to remain in the military. It could have jeopardized both our careers.”
She is shaking her head, but she is smiling now. “You idiot,” she says fondly. “You could stand to be a little selfish every once in a while. And for the record, I’ve been interested in you practically since we met, after Mahdi anyway.”
Tess has moved to sit beside me, and lays her head on my shoulder. “You’re my mate,” she whispers, like she needs to hear the words aloud to know the truth of them.
The difference in height between us is enough that she scarcely reaches, even when the two of us are sitting down. The layer of sweat on her skin is cooling as it dries, and I can feel the slight drop in her body temperature as she begins to shiver. I make my own body adjust in response, raising the heat of my skin a few degrees. The difference is almost immediately noticeable. Tess burrows closer, turns her head to press her lips against my arm.
“Wish I could get you out of those,” she comments, meaning the handcuffs. “We’re gonna need a better plan.”
Primal Planet Captive: SciFi Alien Fated Romance Page 7
