CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Aiden

B y the time we walked back through my front door, I was exhausted. The funeral itself had taken a couple of hours, and then the reception afterwards had dragged on into the afternoon. Military events were always hard to judge, but it was generally considered rude to leave before a handful of the senior officers had left. Given that this had been a funeral for not just one, but two soldiers, that had taken longer than usual. Now, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, my dress uniform was making me hot, and I shrugged off the jacket the instant I was through the door.

Kade reverted to his natural blue as soon as the door was closed. I’d finally managed to have a conversation with him about that yesterday, telling him he could be blue at home, or in his room at the base, but when out in public, he should stick to brown. It was a combination of concern that certain people might give him a hard time, if they figured out he was a dimari, and a concession to his apparent preference for not standing out too much.

I wanted to get changed, put on some sweatpants, and watch the sports channel for the rest of the afternoon. The day had been an emotional rollercoaster, not just with the funeral itself, saying goodbye to two colleagues whose deaths I had been partially responsible for, but also with Kade’s surprise revelations about his childhood, and the apparent ease with which Bryce had got him talking. He’d learned more about Kade in five minutes than I had in a whole week. I hadn’t decided whether I wanted to resent Bryce or berate myself for that particular detail.

But despite my desire to shrug off the burdens of the day, the bedroom seemed too far away, and I sank down on the couch, dropping my jacket on the arm, not even bothering to take off my shoes. I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. Based on one afternoon of conversation and our chat over coffee the other day, I’d come to the conclusion that Bryce would have made a far better master for Kade than I ever would. I hadn’t even made Commander yet, and there were rumours of Bryce being promoted to Major sometime in the new year.

I listened to the sounds of Kade moving about the house, removing his shoes, padding down the hall to the bedroom, then returning a few minutes later, the rustle of his clothing distinctly softer now. He paused in the middle of the living room, and I could feel him watching me. God, was I going to have to explain my current mood as well? Was it too much to ask for him to just leave me alone to grieve for thirty seconds?

I was considering how much of an asshole I would be if I just ignored him, but then he moved and I felt a gentle hand on my left calf muscle. I felt a light pressure over the top of my foot – was he undoing my laces? – and then he lifted my foot slightly, sliding my shoe off. What the fuck? He repeated the motion with my other foot, then I felt the hat that was still in my hand being plucked from my fingers. He disappeared down the hall again, and from the sounds, I assumed he’d taken my jacket with him as well.

He was back a minute later. “Sir?” he said, his voice gentle. “Would you like to get changed?”

I cracked my eyes open, seeing him standing there with a t-shirt and sweatpants in his hands, and I couldn’t help but smile. Was he a fucking mind reader now?

“Yeah, but…” I made an effort to sit up. “I’ll come into the bedroom.” There was a good chance I was going to collapse, and the bed would be more comfortable than the sofa.

Kade offered me a hand and pulled me up when I took it. He followed me down the hall, catching my shirt as I tossed it off my shoulders and handing me the t-shirt. The pants followed suit, and then I did collapse, landing hard on the mattress, as he tidied the room and put the clothes away.

He sat down on the bed beside me. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, looking concerned. “Saying goodbye is not easy.”

Holy fuck, when had he developed that calm, soothing tone? What had happened to the frazzled dimari from earlier in the week, who’d panicked when I’d asked him what type of sandwich he wanted? What the fuck was going on here?

I thought about telling him no, but instead, I found myself saying, “Lie down with me? I just… don’t want to be alone right now.”

He nodded and snuggled up beside me, tugging me over so that my head rested on his shoulder. I was developing a habit of curling up against him when I woke up in the morning, and he’d apparently noticed. He ran his fingers lightly through my hair, his other arm curled around my shoulders .

“It could have been me, you know,” I said at length. “It could have been my funeral today. Do you know why it wasn’t?” I didn’t expect a reply from him, so I kept on talking. “I saw a blue fresis flower when we were approaching the cargo module. I’d never seen a blue one before. They’re usually all pink. So I stopped to take a look. Bent down. Poked at it a bit. I’d barely had time to stand up, and then… Boom. The two of them just… dead. And it would have been me, if not for a fucking flower.”

“Do you wish it had been you?” he asked cautiously, and the question surprised me. Not because it was particularly morbid, but rather, it seemed unusually insightful for my baffling dimari.

“If it meant that one of them got to live, then yeah, I’d swap my life for theirs,” I said, without really thinking about it. “I mean, I don’t have a death wish, or anything. I don’t want to die. But they were both so fucking young .”

“How old are you?” he asked, and it came as a somewhat jarring realisation that I’d never told him.

“I’m twenty-eight. You’re twenty, right?”

“Or thereabouts,” he said. “The Eumadians don’t bother keeping track of our exact ages.”

“Fucking bastards,” I muttered.

The stroking over my hair paused for a moment, then continued. “You don’t like the Eumadians,” he surmised.

“No, I don’t.”

We both fell silent for a while, and as time went on, I noticed that I’d begun tracing patterns over his t-shirt, toying with the tie at the waistband of his sweatpants. It seemed we’d both been in the mood to put on something comfortable, after a day in stiff clothes. My mind was wandering, tossing up odd thoughts with no particular pattern, and in the patchwork of ideas, it occurred to me that I’d never kissed Kade. It seemed a ridiculous detail, all of a sudden, that I’d had his cock in my mouth, but I hadn’t kissed him.

Did dimari get taught how to kiss? Fuck, I really needed to have a look at his operations manual again. I wasn’t sure how much detail it would contain, but it could at least give me an idea about which aspects of sex he knew about, and which would be a mystery to him.

“Do you know how to kiss someone?” I asked, before I could think better of it. “Do they teach you that?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied, with neither enthusiasm nor apprehension in his tone.

“And you know about anal sex, right?”

“Yes, sir,” he repeated.

I nodded against his shoulder. He was warm, and solid, and…

And now there was a tent punching out the front of his pants, small, but growing .

I lifted myself onto one elbow and looked down at his face. He seemed both expectant and wary. Deliberately silencing my conscience, I leaned up the bed and pressed my mouth over his. He tensed for a moment, but then a little moan of approval rumbled out of his throat, and his hands caught me around the waist. He responded to the kiss, his lips tugging at mine, his mouth opening to receive my tongue. I didn’t really think about what I was doing. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to feel. I just wanted to drown out the world for a while.

I sat up, pulled off my t-shirt, then slid my hands up his torso, taking his t-shirt with me. “Take this off,” I muttered, distracted by sculpted abs and the gorgeous variations of colour over his chest. Down the centre, between his pecs, was a little valley of a lighter blue, and under his arms was paler still, a pastel teal colour that reminded me of the leaves out in the jungle. He allowed me to trace the contours of the colours, wriggling his t-shirt over his head as he tried to stay still for my examination.

Boldly, I ran my hand down his body to cup his growing erection. He jolted as I wrapped my fingers around it. “I want to fuck you,” I murmured against his mouth as I bent to kiss him again. “Are you okay with that?”

“Yes, sir,” he breathed, parting his legs, a faint moan rising from him as I squeezed again.

“Take these off.” I’d barely touched the waistband of his pants when he shoved them down his body, shuffling his legs frantically to get rid of them. The scales on his inner thighs were that same pale teal colour, and I bent down to kiss the area. His scales were smooth beneath my tongue, warm, with a musky scent that was like the jungle after it had rained. I toyed with his balls, then took his cock in my mouth. His hips flexed upwards, then he muttered an apology.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I want you to enjoy this. I want you to feel good.” My fingers slid down past his balls, down to his entrance, as his legs fell open wider.

But then I stopped, a frantic idea dragging all my other thoughts to a stop. Did I have any lube? I sat up. Where had I left it? Surely I had some somewhere.

“Sir?” Kade said, a wary question that was filled with worry.

“We need lube,” I said, not wanting him to think he’d done anything wrong. He was perfect. He was beautiful. He was temptation personified, and I needed to be inside him.

“There’s some in the bathroom cabinet,” he said, then, at my surprised look, added, “I found it when I was cleaning the bathroom the other day. Shall I get it?” He was already moving off the bed, so I nodded. While he was gone, I shimmied out of my sweatpants, tossing them off the bed. So much for Kade’s efforts to tidy the room .

He was back a moment later, handing me the tube, wearing nothing but a smile and a thoroughly eager erection.

“Lie down,” I instructed him. He did, settling on his back with his legs parted. He gave his own cock a few lazy strokes, biting his lip as he looked at me.

It was blatant seduction, and I couldn’t resist it. I leaned up to kiss him again, and as it turned out, that was a thoroughly distracting activity all by itself. I lost myself for a few minutes, letting my thoughts shut off as I weaved my tongue around his, nibbling on his lips, threading my fingers through his hair.

His hand on my cock finally brought me back to where we were supposed to be going with this, and by that point, I was panting and leaking, leaving faint smears of fluid over his thighs.

“Tell me if this hurts,” I told him, as I slicked some lube onto my fingers. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, watching me intently as I moved down the bed and between his thighs. I slid one finger into him gently, rubbing back and forth to spread the lube around. He stroked himself lazily, keeping an eye on the movement of my hand, and I felt a little self-conscious all of a sudden. It had been a long while since I’d done this. But it wasn’t the sort of thing I would forget. Right?

I slid a second finger into him and frowned at how tight he was. He made a disquieted noise and flexed his hips a little. His cock was still hard as a rock, but the hand that had been stroking it was now gripping the sheets. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but he seemed… nervous?

“You’ve been trained in how to do this, right?” I asked. Something here wasn’t quite adding up.

“Yes,” he said breathlessly.

“As in, you’ve actually done this before? Or just been told about it?”

He shook his head in a ‘sort of’ kind of motion. “We’re trained with toys. Dildos. Vibrators. Not with a real person.” Seeming to realise that his answer surprised me, he sat a little way up, and I removed my fingers when his movement made our position awkward. “No one is allowed to have sex with a dimari until they’ve bonded with their master. But we still have to know what we’re doing. So we practice with toys.”

I was still not a fan of slaves being forcibly trained in sexual technique. But the news brought with it a wave of unexpected relief. Somehow, I’d been picturing queues of Eumadians lining up to fuck him. Toys were… well, not good, exactly, but certainly better than forcible sex with a bunch of random strangers.

I tried to come up with a suitable question to ask, that would tell me what I wanted to know next. How had Bryce managed to get Kade to tell him about his past so easily? “How did it feel?” I tried, after a pause. “When you were practicing?”

Kade bit his lip. “Good,” he said, sounding bashful about it. “Really good.” If he’d been human, he would probably have been blushing.

“Uh huh,” I said, feeling my cock throb in response to his obvious enthusiasm. I glanced down at his groin again. “It’s just that you’re really tight. I don’t want to hurt you.” I’d said it before, but it was worth repeating.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he said, sounding distracted. “I’m just trying not to come too soon. I know you said I could, whenever I’m ready, but I want to wait a bit…”

My brain more or less short-circuited with that little announcement. “Oh. Right. Okay,” I said, like he’d said nothing more interesting than ‘I’m going grocery shopping’. I indicated his groin with my slippery fingers. “Do you want me to…?”

He lay back and spread his legs again.

I went slowly, because despite his assurances, I really didn’t want to hurt him. Two fingers became three, and he seemed to find a calm spot in the centre of his own storm, because he relaxed a few minutes later, his breath slowing, the trembling easing out of his body as I continued to probe his passage.

Then I slicked up my cock with the remaining lube on my fingers and guided my erection to his entrance. “Tell me if this hurts,” I repeated, and he nodded.

I pressed inside, and the constriction of his body around mine made me grit my teeth and close my eyes. “God, you’re tight,” I murmured, stilling my body. I breathed through the urge to come immediately… and suddenly, behind my closed eyelids, I saw the flash of the explosion, the sight of Revier’s lifeless body.

Fuck, no. That was exactly what I was trying to get away from. I snapped my eyes open, running a hand over Kade’s abdomen, a little rougher than I meant to be. I tugged his leg up higher, giving me better access, and slid in a fraction more. “Mmm… Master,” he groaned. And that sent me straight back into the jungle. Kade’s crate. The standoff with the Culrads. Fuck.

No. I didn’t want those memories. Not now. I slid in the rest of the way, ever watchful for any sign that I was hurting him, and thrust once-

Hanes’ arm, lying on the edge of the boulder.

Kent’s face as I told the Culrads to take the cargo.

Kade turning black, like a pool of liquid death, before I’d shot the Culrad in the head.

“Aiden.” Kade’s soft, rumbling voice dragged my attention back to the present. I’d stopped moving, and I got the impression it wasn’t the first time he’d said my name. His hand came up to cup the back of my neck, his fingers threading through my hair. “I’m right here,” he murmured into my ear.

I made a whimpering noise that I might have been ashamed of, under any other circumstances. I felt so raw , like gravel rash over my entire body.

“You’re okay,” Kade said, flexing his hips in a way that forced my cock deeper inside his body. I gasped out a moan at the slick, hot sensation. My hips rolled of their own accord, chasing more pleasure. I buried my face in his shoulder, not able to find the strength to face the world, to face him right now. If he would just let me hide for a few moments, just let me pretend that a piece of me hadn’t been ripped out and left back there in the jungle.

But of course, Kade made no demands of me. He held me, and let me move in his body, my tears wetting his shoulder as my moans peppered the warm air between us.