Chapter 14

When I crack my sex-hooded eyelids open, I see that Abraxas is in the doorway with a cloth sack in hand. He drops it on the floor and then snatches me up with his tail, bringing me right up to his face.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I grumble, sleep-choked and disoriented. He licks my face and neck, nuzzling me and waking my body up with a bright, hot burst of arousal. “I’m not a doll.”

He’s not wearing the translator and neither am I.

He doesn’t take it with him either when he turns and stands up in human form, strapping me to his back. I ignore Zero’s glare (however imaginary it might be) as we move past her screen, and then Abraxas is leaping off the ship and into the grass. He lands with a crouch and then rumbles with pleasure at the surprised sound I make.

I’m so fucking embarassed to be naked out here, even if I know that nobody’s going to come up on us. Or … if they do, it’s Bad News Bears for them, isn’t it? My new fuckbuddy is a powerhouse predator. A weird sense of pride fills my chest, but I bat it away. I told myself that I’d use today to really sit and think, try to parse my thoughts and figure out what to do next.

Doesn’t seem to be the case.

We’re going on a field trip.

“Where are we going?” I ask, throwing my arms over his shoulders. He pauses where he is, and the spikes on his spine raise up, poking me in the chest and belly. He scoots me to the side of his back, but I have to say, they didn’t hurt. I actually liked the feel of them. Yep. I have officially lost my fucking mind. This is what I get for mocking Jane’s alien romance novels. This is the universe’s true irony.

I am the last person in the world that should be here. I have a large, loving family. I own a business. I love my life. I have the bestest best friend that ever lived. So what the fuck is all this? I’m sure there are women who would love to be where I am. I just so happen to be somebody that was happy on Earth, and I have a hell of a lot to lose if I never go back there.

I wrap my hands together around Abraxas’ neck, and I can tell that he’s pleased. He keeps trying to get me to touch him more, to explore his body, to cuddle and pet and rub and … I don’t know what to make of it. I am not someone that ever would’ve used the word ‘commitment’ on myself. One word that I would use on myself is TSTL—too stupid to live. That’s what I’m like sometimes. I once jumped off a dam into shallow water for a five dollar bet. Broke my clavicle.

I rub absently at the old wound as we continue walking.

I’m extremely exposed, all sexed up and naked with no less than four of Abraxas’ orgasms between my legs. It’s all over the furs, too, and after he put in so much work for laundry day.

He growls at me, and I know that he’s responding to my question in his own language. Whether or not he’s picking up on my words, I don’t know. But being here with him without the translator makes me remember how foreign and strange he seemed to me during those first few days.

Abraxas strolls the woods like they belong to him. I suppose, all things considered, they do. Who the fuck would mess with this guy? He even killed that aggressive female. He saved me from being eaten. From being kidnapped. Thrice.

Somehow, my rebellious arms squeeze a little tighter around his neck, and he chuffs at me again. My nipples turn to rocks against his back, and I wish that we’d brought the translator so I could, um, explain some of my anatomy to him—and vice versa.

Not that … not that it really matters. Because I cannot fucking stay here. I grit my teeth, and he pauses, like he can sense the sudden shift in my mood. I stroke my fingers down the, for lack of a better word, mane on his head. It looks a bit like hair from afar, but up close like this, it’s easy to see that it’s made up of tiny spikes, like the ones on his back. It falls from his head to his shoulder blades.

Just petting him is enough.

He takes me off his back with his tail and puts me on the ground in front of him. We face each other, and I have to crane my neck up, up, up to his face. He puts both of his massive hands on my head, and my heart leaps. Oh God, no. He’s going to kiss me again.

His tongue sweeps my mouth before prying my lips apart, stroking my own tongue with long, velvety sweeps. Ah, and the way he grips my head, I just … I can’t with this guy. I push back against his chest, but he doesn’t let me get very far. His eyes peer so deeply into mine that I feel like he can see all the lies and the bullshit that I’m carrying around. Guilt swamps me, and I feel like such a stupid asshole that I don’t know what to do.

I mean, I often feel like a stupid asshole—I am sort of an asshole all the time—but this is on a whole new level for me. It’s like I’m stringing this guy along.

“Where are we going?” I repeat, trying to gesture the sentence out with body language that he still doesn’t understand because he’s not a human fucking being. He’s an alien. He doesn’t even share universal things like crying or laughing.

Seems like he has no trouble smirking though. Because I swear to God that’s exactly what he’s doing when he sweeps past me, snatching me up by the tail again and putting me on his back. We walk through the massive trees in silence, snippets of sunshine kissing the forest floor. I see birds in colors I didn’t even know existed, snails that glow as Abraxas steps over them, and even another kiyo that takes off like a deer when we startle it.

My stomach rumbles and Abraxas pauses. He growls something out that might mean hey, don’t worry about breakfast, I got this. Or maybe that’s just what I want him to say. He starts walking again. After a while, he drops down to all fours, extending his front claws, and continues on like that. His anatomy is honestly incredible—not just his dicks though—and I find myself surprised that he can so easily transition between walking on two legs and four legs, like both things are equally natural.

I try to look over the side of him so that I can study his back legs. Something about the way they bend makes it possible. My eyes drift up to his ass, visible when he thrashes his tail to one side or the other. Shit. This is what Jane would say: “This alien has award-winning man cheeks, my friend.” She’d be right.

“I am capable of walking, you know,” I tell him, but he ignores me. When I lean forward and grab onto his horns, he snarls at me with such ferocity that I almost come. I swear. Right on his back with no stimulation at all. I can’t resist running my palms up and down the curved lengths, collecting that sweet stickiness on my skin. It hits me like a drug, making me wonder in the back of my mind how much of my attraction comes from within, and how much is because of these pheromones.

The next time he takes me off his back with his tail, I’m put flat on my back and mounted. I use the stickiness on my hands to touch my breasts, and he pauses long enough to watch, to observe the way I pull and twist my own nipples. My wrists are grabbed with his wing-hands and slammed into the ground. He uses the other set of hands to cup the heavy weights of my tits, growling things under his breath that I somehow recognize as separate, individual words even if I don’t know what they mean.

I arch my hips against him, shameless. We’re just randomly on the ground in the middle of the woods, but … who’s going to care? There’s nobody here. A rush of wild freedom flickers through me. What must it be like to live here? I could do anything. Be anybody. Abraxas would take care of me, and I wouldn’t want for a goddamn thing.

Except my family. Except stadium concerts (just not Tabbi’s) with a lightstick in hand. Except the croissants that I only bake for people I love because they’re too good to share with snooty rich clients. Except for binge-watching good TV.

Ugh.

I shut those thoughts down for a final time.

I won’t worry about any of that crap until … tomorrow. Tomorrow is when I’ll deal with reality. For now, I’m somehow part of a mated pair with an alien dragon who knows how to fuck and isn’t ashamed to just do it. I take a note from his book, and I go wild. I push and grind against him, and he loves it. Oh, the sounds he makes are so much better without the translator getting in my way. I don’t even need to know what any of it means because I understand this part of him like I’ve known him forever.

When he releases my wrists, I sneak my hand down to my clit and he slows again to watch. Abraxas sits back and then, much to my fucking surprise, he brings his tail in between us. The first thing he does is rub the tip against one of the spirals on his horn—and then he uses the slick of his pheromones to touch me there.

My body explodes. I just shatter. I’m not a person now. I’m his mate. I literally care for nothing else. That’ll scare the shit out of me later, I’m sure, but in the moment, it’s exquisite.

By the time I come down and regather my senses, I realize he’s finished and is poised over me, staring down. I thought at first that he was hard to read with his mouth closed—it really is little more than a faint seam—but that’s not true at all. His brows move. His eyes. He tilts his head. His spines and scales ripple and raise. His tail smooths across the forest floor and then teases the sensitive skin of my hip.

“Do we get stuck together every time?” I ask, because I can feel it again. I felt it all night. The exchange. His heartbeat. A burst of energy that makes me feel like I could climb the skyscraper-sized trees all by myself.

He sweeps his wings under me and lifts me up, still attached at the pelvis, eyes peering into my own.

Based on his claims, he was a virgin before we, err, mated with each other. Staring back at him now, I find that so hard to believe. He has those beautiful shadows dancing around him, the wicked tips of his horns glinting, his body hot and slicked with pheromones and what I think is sweat. It smells amazing, whatever it is. He’s sex incarnate. I’ve never seen anything like him—not even at the K-pop concert my sister dragged me to. We were seeing ATEEZ together, so you know that I’m serious when I say this.

No human male has ever topped this feeling in me. I feel happily small, smugly female, disturbingly content. Normally, I’m a crass, sarcastic dick. So what is this? What am I doing?

Abraxas nuzzles my face, and I close my eyes tight. If he keeps doing that …

He separates our bodies. There’s that sharp pinch. There’s a tiny bit of blood on my thighs.

I turn away from him, intending to walk on my own and … then I trip. My legs are like jelly and my knees are weak. Oh my God, that gets him. He howls. Literally. The sound raises the fine hairs on my neck and arms as I peer over my shoulder at him. Now this is most definitely laughter.

He stalks past me on all fours with a slyly tossed out snarl that I just know means, “you can walk on your own, eh?” And then he keeps walking and acts like he’s going to leave me behind. At the last minute, he snatches me by the waist and returns me to his back.

I ride him like a horse, arms crossed, pouting.

And then I hear water.

Abraxas pushes through a thick cluster of ferns, and my breath catches so sharply that I start to choke. So damn elegant. So sexy. What a mate. I rub the happy tears from my eyes with my knuckles, still choking, and find myself open-mouthed and gawping like a dumbstruck fool at the sight before me.

Steam rises from a sapphire hot spring that’s shaded by trees and surrounded by ferns and wildflowers. Multiple waterfalls drain into it, the water hissing as cool meets hot. But that’s not the most amazing part of it: the waterfalls are coming from floating rocks. Yes. Floating rocks. They drift lazily above the falls, the waterfall from one hitting the next, and then the next, until they reach the springs. There are a few groupings like this scattered about. I tilt my head back to see where the water’s coming from and find that it’s draining off the leaves of a tree.

Huh.

I look back down at the otherworldly set up. Did I mention that it was glowing? The entire thing. It sparkles and shines, pulsing gently like the swirls on Abraxas’ body.

“Um. I don’t know how I feel about glowing water. What if it’s radioactive or—”

Abraxas uses his tail to lift me up and chuck me into the springs. I let out a small scream, but it’s just deep enough to be safe for a fall, and just shallow enough for me to hit the black sandy bottom and push off. I break the surface with a gasp, kicking my legs to stay afloat, and swiping hair from my face.

“What if I couldn’t swim, hmm?” I ask as he lazily saunters his way over to a nearby bush. The first thing he does is … lift his leg and piss on it. I narrow my eyes as I tread water, watching as he moves to a different bush, one with budded purple flowers. Abraxas sweeps his tail around the base of it and then pulls gently upward, gathering all the flowers together. He tosses them into the water around me where they unfurl softly, releasing an intoxicating perfume into the air.

Oh. Oh wow.

Abraxas slips into the springs like a snake or something. He’s smooth and sinuous as he glides toward me, circling me in such a way that I’m aroused all over again. Just from that. I try to turn in the water to keep up with him, but he’s too fast and I’m too clumsy. Why something as beautiful as him would ever want to be until-death-do-us-part mates with me, I’m not sure. That, I believe, is the weirdest part of our relationship.

“Never mind,” I respond belatedly, answering my own question. “I know what you’d do. You’d save me like you have so many times before.” I huff as I look down at the water, marveling at the beauty of it. Now that I can see that it isn’t going to melt my skin off, I’m like … devastated by it.

It’s the perfect temperature, heated from underneath by more of those thermal vents. Maybe a hundred-and-six degrees? I tweaked my parents’ hot tub so it could be heated up past the-hundred-and-four mark. That one-o’-six? Perfect. That’s about what this is. It’s literally the color of sapphires, and it glows even when I cup a small amount in the palm of my hand.

“This smells amazing.” I inhale nice and deep, closing my eyes and listening to the gentle splash of the waterfalls. None of them are very big, and I feel the sudden urge to see if I can’t climb onto one of the floating rocks. I open my eyes to see Abraxas in the water, staring at me. No, more like observing, trying to see if I like this, if I’m pleased by it. A smile lights my lips. It might be the very first genuine smile I’ve allowed myself since I got here. Maybe I’ve twisted my lips into a semblance of a smile before, but I didn’t feel it in my chest the way I do now. To be fair, I don’t smile very often anyway. I’m just sort of that way. “Like violets.” I breathe in deeply. “Powdery. Sweet. Romantic.”

I swim over to one of the floating rocks and he follows me. The rock itself is obsidian black, and shiny, threaded with silver veins. The water is much cooler here. When I reach a hand out to touch the falls, I see that it’s very cold indeed.

Abraxas seems to sense what I’m doing, using his tail to lift me from the water and set me on the rock. It tilts slightly as I balance up there, looking down and into the small pool that divots its base. My lips part in surprise as I see that it’s like a tidepool, full of little alien critters that panic at the sight of my shadow looming over them. I put a bit more weight on one foot then the other, and the rock tilts. My arms pinwheel and over the side I go, landing in Abraxas’ arms.

My cheeks fill with heat— swear that I’m not usually a blusher!—and I find myself staring up at him, completely awestruck.

“Hi.” It’s the best I can come up with. He splits his mouth into a toothy grin, grabbing one of the flowers with his wing-hand. He crushes it up, and it foams, like the ones back at the ship that I used to wash my clothes. When he starts to rub it into my skin, I’m dumbstruck all over again. More so than I was when I saw the springs. He’s … washing me? “I stink, don’t I?” I ask, and he growls at me. “That’s partially your fault. You make a lot of seed, my friend.”

He uses his other wing-hand to pull the cord from my hair, tossing it onto the shore. And then he scrubs me down from head to toe—including between my legs. I’m breathless as it’s happening, nearly paralyzed in his arms, but I like it too much to move. When he’s done, he pushes me into the water and leaves me to dunk myself.

I break the surface with a big breath, combing hair back from my face. Abraxas is washing himself now, starting with his horns. I bite my lip, and then I swim over to him, using his shoulders to haul myself up from the water. He grabs my bare ass in his big hands, his claws just barely protruding from his knuckles to prick my skin. I snag one of the floating flowers and then I bathe him, too.

If I said that he purrs as I do it, would you believe me? That’s what it sounds like, this wild noise caught somewhere between a growl and a purr. It’s such a pleasant surprise that I scrub harder, washing every bit of his body that’s above water before we’re forced to move closer to the shore.

I continue my work as he stares down at me, head tilted slightly to one side.

And then … I get to his … it’s all flat right now, and I think stupidly how I mocked him for being dickless when we first met. As if in response to my sudden pause, he reaches down and strokes himself with two fingers, coaxing his cocks—in the plural—out of his body. There’s that sack, too, big and plump. Dude’s got balls, for sure.

I swallow hard as I study the pair of shafts, one positioned just above the other. There’s only the one sack though, and it hangs heavy and full beneath his second cock, the one I haven’t seen much of. I’m not usually one to be shy, but my fingers are tentative when I reach out to touch it.

Abraxas takes my wrist with his tail and puts my hand where he wants it to go, closing his eyes in bliss as I run my fingers down the length of him. His second cock, the one with the sack, is solid black. I remember that it never had spirals on it to begin with. Now, both of his dicks are solid black with thick veins under the skin and small, fine scales that mimic the ones on the rest of his body. It’s oh so smooth as I rub my palm down the length of it.

“Why don’t you ever use this one on me?” I murmur, looking up and through my wet lashes at his face. He can’t understand, but I hope I get my point across when I lock my fingers around the lower cock and give it a nice, hard tug. Abraxas bares his teeth at me as I cup his heavy balls in my other hand. This does have purple spirals on it that glow and pulse when I rub my skin against them. More of those honeyed pheromones collect on my flesh like nectar, and my heart races in response. I squeeze his balls and work my fist up and down his second cock, lifting up a bit on my haunches so I can put my mouth—

Abraxas’ hand fists in my hair to keep me from touching him.

He releases me right away and then squats down. Even with him squatting, he’s still tall as hell. I look up, breath catching, trying to figure out why he stopped me when he did. When he stretches toward me, I instinctively move back and end up falling on my ass in a tumbled heap. He makes that rumbling sound and splits his sexy mouth. Now that I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve decided that I like it. He’s a blur of angry black shadow with massive wings and a strong tail, spines down his back, long nimble fingers tapping against his knee in thought.

He asks me something in his language. I think. Or he’s just growling at me.

Something splashes in the water and his tail lashes out, lightning quick, snatching the creature and tossing it onto the shore. It flops around like a fish, but … my eyes skim to the side and lock onto it. The fuck is that? It might flop like a fish, but it’s definitely not a fish. It’s a, um, something fuzzy, I guess.

Getting onto my hands and knees is not a smart choice. I can feel Abraxas snarling at me, but I ignore him—not an easy thing to do—crouching low to stare at the creature as it goes still. Dead, I guess. It’s a sea sponge.

Abraxas steps over me—quite literally. He puts his hands, claws extended so they look like paws, on either side of me and then leans down to sniff the creature. I can feel his heat all over me, making it very difficult to remember that I’m supposed to breathe. He growls something in my ear and then withdraws.

I flick a sharp look over my shoulder when his warmth retreats, watching as he wades into the water on all fours, tail swaying as he waits for another splash. He snatches up a second sea sponge and chucks it my way. While the first was purple, this one is a pretty rose pink color.

He catches an entire rainbow of the things before returning to me. I sit back on my calves as he gathers sticks and leaves into a pile and then sits across from me, like a human with one leg stretched out, one knee up, arm thrown across it. He huffs a fire into existence and then drags one of the sponges close.

“I’m not eating that,” I declare, pretty proudly and ignorantly for someone who can’t procure their own food. Can you tell I’ve never had to starve a day in my life? Yeah, I know. I’m a brat. Good thing Abraxas doesn’t have the translator with him. I scratch at the back of my head. “So, um.”

His tail reaches across the fire, snagging me around the waist again and lifting me right over it. I’m plopped down into his lap. No dicks to be seen unfortunately. Fuck, I am thirsty for alien peen. What is wrong with me?

He uses the claws of his wing-hands on my hair, combing out the knots. As he does it, he stares into my eyes and I … I just don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t think about anything either. I relax and I close my eyes, and then I lay my head against his chest.

It’s the best day I’ve ever had.

In my entire fucking life.

Yep, I am royally screwed, aren’t I?