Page 33 of Taken to Kor
I nod, remembering…
I lay on my back, my eyes closed, trying to picture it. “I can’t picture it.”
His laughter echoes through the token, just a light grunt. “What part?”
“Maybe, any of it. The stars through your view pane. The ship itself. You in it.” I shrug even though I’m lying down. Makes the motion feel more difficult and awkward because, in my head, I’m standing right there next to him when, in reality, I’m here in the only place I ever am.
“Interesting.” He goes silent, but only for a breath. Long enough for me to try to picture him again and fail. “You have no idea what I look like, do you?”
“Uh-uh. Not a one.”
“And it occurs to me only now that I don’t know what you look like either.”
He doesn’t want to know what I look like. I tense, hoping heneverknows. If Mathilda has her way, he might not. If Mathilda has her way, I’ll die down here an old woman. “You’ve seen humans before. I’m sure you get the idea.”
“Ontte, I know what humans look like, but I want to know whatyoulook like.” He says the wordyouwith such baiting impishness, that I know he’s trying to get a rise out of me. Too bad, he’s conjured another demon entirely, because with that one whispered word and the thought — no, the impossible hallucination — that he might want to know what I look like — me, Deena, colony trash and colony princess all rolled into one — makes my toes curl and my belly ache.
I stifle a moan and Rhork whispers my name again with every intent of bewitching me. I’m already half-bewitched. To save myself, I break the spell by blurting, “That’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
This strange hold you have over me. “I-I don’t know what Niahhorru pirates look like at all.”
“Centare? Being a human, perhaps it will shock you.”
“Try me.”
And then he proceeds to describe himself in lascivious detail, and it’s strange that even the most alien things about him make me sweat. Maybe, especially them. I love that his entire body is shades of silver and that he has four arms and I love that he has these thick bits of exoskeleton, like armor, that cover parts of his chest and thighs and arms and even form two ridges that flank the giant spikes growing out of his head.
I want to ask a thousand questions, but when he gets to the bit about his cock, I forget everything I was going to say. All I want now is see it with my own eyes. This cock that, once stimulated, surges out of its protective sheath, hard and painfully sensitive until it finds its home inside of a female. In my imaginings, I even go so far as to make that femaleme.
“And now you. What do you look like, Deena?” He says, but I’m still recovering, already twisted leg twisting further against the sheets. I accidentally brush the scar that winds all the way up from my shin, over my knee, to my thigh and quickly wince away from it.
“Centare,” I whisper.
“Centare?”
“Centare,” I say again, even more quietly.
He doesn’t answer. Not for a long time. Long enough to make me sweat for entirely different reasons. And then when he does speak, all he says is a word I’ve come to fear and anticipate. A word that I’ve heard before plenty of times, but when he says it, I no longer know what it means.
“Interesting.”
I swallow hard and try to read his expression. Is he repulsed by me now that he has seen me? Now that he knows I’ve got nothing to recommend me? I swallow hard and try squinting at him, like that’ll narrow my focus and help me understand what he means and what he wants from me.
“You said that the males…um…that they…you have hard bits of skin that protect your organs and that you don’t have colors in your faces like Voraxians do…”
“Not what I said about faces, Deena. What I said about my cock.” He lifts an eyebrow. Well, a brow bone? Whatever muscle is where an eyebrow should be, because he doesn’t have hair on his face — or any other part of him — at all.
I lick my lips and zip my thighs so firmly together that they start to shake. “Um.” I’m sweating again. Am I sweating? Shit. That’s not very sexy. Sexy! Ha! If Mathilda heard me now, what horrible thing would she say?Sexy? You? You’re incapable of it. Defective, even Rhorkanterannu thinks so…
“Deena.”
“Um.” He asked a question. Oh shit, what was it again? Males. Males and cocks. My sweat thickens and I speak as fast as I can when I blurt out, “You said that when you get aroused, you pretty much have to come or you’ll be in pain.”
He tilts his head forward and his gaze drops down to my tits and my arm covering them. “That’s correct. And I’m dangerously close to it now, Deena. So move your hand, cover yourself, and…”
Reacting quickly, I try to pull the blanket over me, but his hand latches onto my wrist. I gasp and my other hand pulls free of my vajajay. He grabs that one too and stares between it and my tits like one or both of them has just called his honor into question.
