11. Tuft

Did I hear Axel right? Did he really ask me to punch his V-card? Who said things like that?

Axel did, that"s who. He was sweet, endearing, and all mine. I couldn"t wait to get him into bed and start working him open, but, "We said we would go slow, so nobody"s punching any cards tonight."

"Right. You didn"t even want to see me tonight."

"I never said that." I sighed. "I"m here now, aren"t I?"

I"d tried to slow things down, but it hadn"t worked. I was already as hard as I had been the night before when we"d made out for hours. Sitting beside him on the couch, the location of our past passionate necking, was not helping.

"How about we start with mutual orgasms and work our way up to sex?" I asked.

"Mutual orgasms? You mean like foreplay?"

"Except it"s the whole enchilada."

His frown was adorable. "Oh. Right. Foreplay leads to something else, and this will … not."

"Not yet anyway." I sighed.

"But soon?" He sounded so hopeful.

I placed a quick kiss on the corner of his lips. "Soon, I promise."

"I feel like a teenager making out on the couch," he said. "Want to get more comfortable on my bed?"

"Sure."

His bed was large for the room, taking up most of the space and both the headboard and one full side butting up against the walls. Instead of taking his clothes off, Axel lay down in the middle and motioned for me to join him. We lay on our sides facing each other, and he caressed my cheek.

"I want to know everything about you," he said. "Want to play a game? We share facts about ourselves as we take off a piece of clothing."

Only my mate would make me more comfortable about getting naked with a game. "That sounds wonderful."

"Why are you so nervous?" he asked. "I can"t wait to see you naked."

"I … It"s ridiculous," I admitted. "I didn"t have the best human body."

"None of us did," Axel said. "The way Merritt explains it, the changeling spell kept us from growing too big and powerful in the human world."

"I know." I sighed. "I had an able body and a pretty face. I wasn"t a good judge of character, let"s put it that way." I"d been a slut in high school and even worse in college. "I always thought one of my hookups would be more, but all the repeats wanted was access to my hole. They didn"t give a single shit about me. I"ve never topped," I whispered. "It will be my first time, too."

"Awesome!" Axel whooped and kissed me. Before it became more, he sat up and pulled his shirt over his head. "I"ll go first. What do you want to know about me?"

"We already talked about your hobbies …" I had to stop myself from staring at his gorgeous chest, or I wouldn"t hear a word he said. "What was your childhood like?"

Axel laughed as he lay beside me again. "You"re going straight for the jugular." He glanced at my neck, and pushed my shirt collar to the side to expose where my mating mark would be one day. It took all my willpower not to crush our lips together again. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

"Well, you already know I was no athlete," he joked. "My adoptive parents were good people. We went on plenty of camping trips. Oh, shit, that reminds me. I"m supposed to babysit for Lark. He"s taking Punky to meet his parents."

"Oh, that"s cool! Can I help?" I asked. I loved baby kobolds, but it felt weird asking Grindl and Punky to babysit, with our history.

"Let me text him and ask." He pulled his phone out of his pocket and fired off a message, and then muted it and tossed it on his nightstand. "Where were we?"

After sharing a few anecdotes of camping with his extended family, including two rambunctious cousins who caught the wrong end of a skunk, it was my turn.

"My parents were young and fun. They found friends in the parenting community, people around their age with kids around my age, and we all met up twice a week and on weekends."

"That sounds like a lot of fun." Axel sounded wistful.

"It wasn"t." There was no sugarcoating it. "Well. It was, at first. I was the life of the party. I was adopted, which made me different. Everyone liked me, until one day in middle school, they didn"t. I wasn"t in sports, I didn"t like girls, and they stopped wanting to hang out with me. The girls started a rumor about me and the drug dealer at our school. They said we hooked up for blowjobs, and …" I laughed. "I made it a reality. He was bi and liked having a mouth on his dick." I took my shirt off. "I think that"s enough for that question."

"I"m so sorry," he said.

"First in a long line of bad decisions."

"I was an impressionable kid, too. My parents weren"t religious, but they both worked, so when our neighbor offered to take me to Bible school during the summer instead of taking me to Grandma"s, they said yes. Worst decision ever. There, I learned I was going to hell if I even looked at another boy."

I bit back a question. I didn"t want to interrupt as Axel explained why he thought he was straight.

"I took it to heart. I didn"t look. I started dating any girl who asked, and then I ended up engaged to one with a baby on the way."

"Are you saying you knew you were bisexual?"

"I don"t think I considered it," he said. "I was so young and impressionable. I removed myself from any situation where I might have thought otherwise."

"Wow." I couldn"t imagine trying to live like that. I"d grown up out and proud. My parents were already in PFLAG for my trans cousin, so it wasn"t a stretch for them to accept me. My classmates were closed-minded in high school, but not in college. I met other queer people and allies everywhere I went because I didn"t hide who I was.

"Next question," Axel said, taking off one sock.

"What did you want to be when you grew up?" I asked.

"A construction worker," he said. "My dad worked construction. I wanted to be a supervisor on his crew, but I couldn"t handle the physical labor. Ended up working at a sporting goods store."

"I wanted to be an astronaut." I laughed. "Can you imagine? A kobold in space? I would never have made it through basic training. We had an obstacle training course for gym class my senior year. I couldn"t make it up a rope to save me from drowning."

"I bet you could now." He traced his index finger down my chest. "We should add an obstacle course to our outdoor facility. Some ropes, tires. Barbed wire might be a little too brutal…"

I laughed. "I bet we could run it with our eyes closed. It might be better to stick to group sports. I"d love to see the females and betas join us, too. This will help build community."

"So would card parties and board games," Axel said. "Maybe we"re not thinking big enough."

"Maybe we"re thinking too much." I stripped off both my socks, since I"d forgotten to remove the first one. "What do you want to ask me?"

"Are you a morning person or a night owl? We were up half the night last night, and I still don"t know."

"Morning person." I was a grumbly asshole to the beta who made my coffee that morning. "I didn"t sleep, even after you walked me home."

"What did you do instead?"

"That"s another question," I chided. "Answer this one. Early bird or night owl?"

He took off his remaining sock. "Both? Neither? It all depends on the day. I can stay up late one night and get up early the next, but only if I get enough sleep the rest of the week. As long as I keep my schedule consistent, I can be whatever you want me to be, sugar."

Sugar. My entire body shivered at the nickname. "Sugar?" My voice raised an octave higher than normal on the last syllable.

"If you don"t like it, I can think of something else."

"No, I do. Is it weird that I like it?" I laughed. "I never expected to have someone call me a nickname. Now I have to think of something to call you."

"Now you," he said. "Answer the question. What did you do last night after I left?"

I was running out of clothes. I took off my pants, which left me wearing only the magical compression shorts that held in my slick. The shorts left little to the imagination, and when Axel ran a finger along my waistband, my cock twitched against the fabric.

"Well, first, I finished what you started." Before either of us thought too hard about what I meant, coming in my hand to the thought of more of his delicious kisses, I rushed ahead. "Then, I spent the rest of the night worrying about our future."

As much as I wanted to elaborate, I couldn"t voice my fears aloud. My mind had raced with worst case scenarios. What if Axel changed his mind and went back to Earth? What if Weld changed his mind and demanded a fight to the death for my honor? What if the dragon changed their mind and decided to fry us all?

I shivered.

"Worrying is useless," Axel said. "I usually ask myself what"s the worst thing that could happen, and then I ask myself if I would have any control over it if it did. If not, then it"s not worth worrying about."

"Like the dragon," I said. "If they decided to kill us all, there"s nothing I could do about it."

"Exactly."

That was only one of the three scenarios, but it was one less to stress over.

"Last question." Axel stripped off his boxers. His uncut cock bounced against his abdomen as it caught in the waistband and sprang free.

I"d seen plenty of alpha peen since I"d been here. Kobolds didn"t have the same prudish rules as humans. Was it rude to say Axel had the average alpha cock, if it was true? It looked like every other cock I"d seen, from Coz"s to Weld"s and everyone in between who had been standing naked in the field on Reemergence Day.

The difference was, Axel"s cock lay inches from mine, and it was thick and beautiful and pointed right at me. I couldn"t resist wrapping my fingers around it and giving him a stroke from root to tip. Then, I scooped up his precome with my thumb and smeared it around his foreskin.

"What"s something you have experienced sexually that you"d like to experience again?" I asked. Our firsts were off the table for tonight, and we"d talked about blowjobs, but I wanted to know if there was anything else.

"With you?" He grinned. "I don"t want to sound like a slut, but I"ve done everything I could do with you with my human girlfriend."

"Rimming?" I asked, and he nodded.

"And anal. My girlfriend before Rosanna wanted to be a porn star. She walked me through everything. Strangest two months of my life."

He looked as embarrassed as I felt, so I cut him a break and cupped his cheek to line up for a kiss. It started chaste, only a brush of lips, but then he grabbed my hip. Our cocks bumped against each other through the fabric of my magical shorts, and I opened for him on a gasp. He kissed me long and deep as we rutted together.

"Wait," I gasped between breaths. "I need to take these off and answer the question."

He backed off a few inches to give me room. "I didn"t exactly answer the question," he said as I stripped. "I"d really like to rim you tonight."

How could I turn that down? My hole was already slick enough to drip down my balls. "I"d like that, too," I said. "First, I"d like to introduce myself to your cock."

He drew his finger down my cock from my tip to my balls. He met my gaze and nodded. "I"d" love that."

Somehow, this was still taking it slow enough that my pulse didn"t spike at the thought. I trusted Axel with everything I"d just told him, and with my body. I was ready for this next step.