Page 14 of Alien Scars
“Yes,” I said with a nod. “Valeria and Grim just left with Dalk in the shuttle. They’re heading back to the Sea Sands. But Fiona didn’t go with them.”
“Oh,” Tilly said, worry tilting the corners of her lips down. “We should go make sure she’s alright.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said to her.
“Make sure she is alright?” Oxriel repeated, his warm sight stars contracting with concern. “What do you think might be ailing her?”
“Dalk just left,” I said. I didn’t fill in all the details, hoping Oxriel would catch my drift.
Clearly, I hoped for too much. He cocked his head.
“Why should Dalk’s absence ail her?” he asked. “If anything, distance from that taciturn brute would do a female good!”
Clearly wanting to speak up for poor Dalk, who wasn’t here to do it for himself, Tilly interjected with a defensive, “Hey!” But Zoren made a grunt of agreement with Oxriel’s statement.
“Well, we’re not so sure Fiona will see it that way,” I said. “She might be missing him already.”
“I do not see how anyone can miss the male embodiment of an angry thundercloud,” Oxriel huffed. “Though, perhaps she will miss his cock.”
Tilly broke into sudden choking coughs, which had Warrek rounding on her anxiously. She waved his attention away, taking a shaky breath.
“Um. His what?” I asked, wondering if something had gone wrong in translation. Though we were both speaking the Sea Sand language, and confusion only seemed to arise these days when we used a human word of some sort, or ran into a difference in the Deep Sky dialect. I knew Fiona had looked a little mussed when she’d come back with Dalk earlier, but I hadn’t imagined things had gone that far…
“His hard cock,” Oxriel clarified without missing a beat. “She was very interested in stroking it earlier.”
Zoren sent a scathing look of betrayal Oxriel’s way. “You did not tell me this!”
“Of course not,” Oxriel scoffed. “I was sworn to secrecy. I promised Dalk and Fiona both that I saw nothing. And that even if I had seen something, I would never divulge it to the end of my days.”
“Ox, sweetie,” I said, stuck somewhere between cringing and laughing. “You just divulged it to us.”
Oxriel’s jaw went slack with shock, his sight stars trembling.
“No!” he said after a confused hesitation. “No, I did not! I would never break my vow of secrecy, even to one as loathsome as Dalk! And certainly not to Fiona!” His tail swiped across the stone in agitation. “Perhaps you all merely…intuited what happened! You must have. For I have a very subtle and secretive way about me, and there is no way you have learned this knowledge from my tongues.”
“You just told us that she was stroking Dalk’s hard cock,” Zoren said bluntly.
“Certainly not!” Oxriel stammered. “’Twas not I, Zoren! You must be very clever indeed to have figured out what happened on your own! Without a word about it passing from my lips!”
While Zoren and Oxriel argued about it, with Tilly occasionally jumping in and playing referee, I couldn’t help but risk a glance at Gahn Thaleo to see what his reaction would be to this news. To see if he was unhappy with the fact that one of the unmated human women was clearly making choices about who to hook up with, and that her choice was not a male of his tribe. But he didn’t appear to be angry or surprised. Of course, that said nothing about what he might actually feel about this turn of events. His face was flinty, unreadable.
I found myself once again breathless with the need to ask him what he thought, what he felt. What he’d do about this, if anything. I had a twisting urge to poke and prod him. As if to make him admit to all the things I didn’t like about him. To confirm everything I already knew.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I said.
“I do not see how I could be surprised,” Gahn Thaleo replied on a low rumble. “Both of them smelled like spilled seed upon their return to the vaklok.”
My stomach tightened. Something about the cold Gahn Thaleo talking about a concept as deeply sexual as spilled seed was jarring and infuriatingly erotic.
“You did not notice, warrior?” he asked Zoren.
That finally shut Zoren and Oxriel up. Zoren’s tail thwappednoin response to the question. “My nose was injured in the combat rounds,” he said. “All I can smell is my own blood.”
“Did you notice?” Tilly asked, peering up at Warrek. There was a truly massive height difference between them. Tilly was on the short side for a human woman, and Warrek was tall even for a Zaphrinax male.
“I did,” he admitted, his eyes shifting to Gahn Thaleo for a moment, as if seeking confirmation that it was alright to admit such a thing. “I doubt any man with a working nose could have been ignorant of the fact.”
Well. That was awkward. Even if you had some privacy for the main event, these guys could literally smell a hook-up on you afterwards…
