Page 62 of Eat My Moon Dust
Something real…The words wheedled their way into my brain and caught me, hook, line, and sinker.
We could rub each other the wrong way later, I decided. How wrong was it for me to be selfish for a night? Maybe theonlynight in my future, because no one would ever measure up to my little cyclone of chaos and rainbows. I’d been battered like a shell in the tide, and she’d picked me up, taken me home, and wanted to…
To cherish me.
Maybe like I cherished her.
Though surely not as profoundly. She was too young and too untried to understand the depths to which she’d dived to save me. Her soul was intact, and mine was as brittle as sun-dried plas. I survived for everyone else but hadn’tlivedfor myself in years.
And I owed it to her–to me–to believe that she knew how she felt.
I stood up, the toes of my boots encroaching on the entryway, but my shoulders hunched like a predator. All my mane’s desperation filtered into the calm before the storm, the unrivaled focus of a coil ready to chase down his prey.
“Walk away, then,priya,”I rumbled, unblinking as I heeled off my boots. “See what happens.”
Tinsley backed up one step, her tights sliding against the tile. I paced forward, untying one side of my tabard just above the hip. She did it again, transfixed by my hands as they slowly pulled the red ribbons apart on the other side, running the lengths through my fingers all the way to the ends in a slow, dangerous display.
My breath was loud now, air filling my lungs at a progressively deeper and slower pace. My muscles primed themselves as if I were flexing, even though I wasn’t, preparing for the dives of old, stimulating my metabolism and running a fever to keep me warm at extreme depths. My heart was slowing to half its usual pulse, each beat so forceful and over-extended that my chest visibly thumped.
Tinsley stared. Assessing. Choosing. I waited, frozen in place. My stripes were already glowing, but the bioluminescence that accompanied them pulsed once like a lure, the only thing I couldn’t help myself from doing.
With a sharp breath and blood pooling in her cheeks, Tinsley turned her back to me and walked down her cluttered hallway. I didn’t wait a beat or give her space. I followed so close that her heat caressed my tendrils. She was nervous, intimidated, excited… I stared at the back of her neck like a hungry shark, frothing for the muscles on either side of her spine that were separated by the gentle divot along the vertebrae.
The bedroom door hushed open and mysentisnapped forward, wrapping around that delicate, exposed column. Mypriyagasped, her thin fingers clutching my tendril as I gripped her dress and pulled her against my aching groin. I only squeezed hard enough to feel her pulse and esophagus as she panted,sentidraped across her collarbones like a queen’s wesekh. Pleased, my mane vibrated and hummed as I walked her to the bed.
“Down,priya,”I demanded. My vision vibrated. Desperate, thirsty, so thirsty...
Tinsley shuddered, palms out to catch her weight on the mattress. The silicone bands that held her curiously cut tights around her thighs peeked out from the hem of her dress, just tight enough to make her flesh bulge above them.
A primitive shiver raced down my spine and I ripped my tabard off, unwilling to remove mysentifrom her neck. The ruined top hit the wall and slipped to the floor as I pushed her dress up to expose the well that fed me, healed me,ownedme.
Sequins scraped Tinsley’s hot skin as the delicious fat of her ass and thighs shivered. They left pleasing red marks along her dusty pale flesh that I massaged away with my lower palms. I needed to remember, because soon I’d be mindless. The frenzy was rumbling in my veins and stealing my mind.
Arching her back so the cleft of her mantle spread open, she strained to look back.
“Hunar…” she breathed, pushing her hips back in invitation.
I fell off the cliff.
I snarled as the need to thrust my pearls into her womb addled my instincts. I rose above Tinsley’s hips and knelt on the bed behind her, pressing down on her shoulder blades with one upper hand while the other gripped her hip in a frenzied vice. Her cheek and chest pressed into the bedding, and mysentiloosened, slithering between her mammalian mounds to soak up the taste of skin I’d never dared touch before.
Groaning, I fit my lips around the nape of her neck, right where she’d have pheromonal glands if she were a shilpakaar. Her neck surrendered as I sucked the salt and soap from the thin silk that disappeared into a fuzz beneath my mouth. She bent her head forward, a small sound breaking from her throat. And breakingme.My sanity, my patience…
I unlatched my dhoti with rough lower hands and pushed them down my hips until my cock rested along the length of her scorching mantle. She moaned, gripping the sheets in her hard-working hands, and rocked her hips as best she could, pinned beneath the greater weight of my wide shoulders. Hot, thick waters slipped along my reservoir, filled to the brim with pearls that strained my channel and caused a delicious tingle up and down my spine as she swayed that tiny bit beneath me.
Cock gripped in one lower hand, I dragged the harpoon head through those waters, searching for her entrance. I was blind with need, going on instinct, and as soon as I found the dip and change in texture, sheathed myself to the hilt.
“Chudthi,”I snarled, baring my canines against her neck. I licked her vertebrae as I withdrew and dove back in again.
Tinsley was a furnace inside. Andwet.Slippery with all the syrup she’d given me in her gifts. Unlike the others, I’dnever looked at human pornography or anatomical charts. I’d thought I’d always be stuck in Corsa’s horrible, loveless limbo before Tinsley shoved her way into my heart. Whatever she had was different,sodifferent from a shilpakaari woman, and a fog of concern obscured my frenzy.
“Hunar, fuck me,” Tinsley hiccuped, pushing back on me in desperation. My cock jolted against something inside her, the end of her channel, and she mewled, her spine straining to press her seat bones against my hips with force. “Like… like a piston.”
That, at least, was the same.
I dug my upper fists into the mattress on either side of her shoulders, lower hands gripping her ass, and did as she asked, rolling my spine and clenching my abdominal wall with each stroke. I crashed into her like the tide and bowed my head over her silk, letting my tendrils grip her curls and test the corners of her mouth.
And Tinsley fell apart beneath me, nodding and pleading, her knuckles white from holding on. Mysenti’stip twisted around one of the tight, brown buttons on her chest, the modest mound quivering with each hammering stroke. Saltwater forced its way from the corners of her eyes, weighing down her lashes and staining her cheeks.
