Page 20 of Taken to Nobu
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.Iruttedhim.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 analien, 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 fursthe 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 throughout 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.
“Xhivey. They are here to help you. I will eagerly await your return, Kiki.”
