Page 5 of Vylit: Glowing for Her
Kazmyr cut in, all business again. "Gate’s tasting current still active. Rerouting trajectory before we lose vector. Hold tight, both of you."
The holowall snapped off, leaving behind an ozone tang and a mortifying silence.
I clenched my fists against my knees, willing my glow to dim. Instead, the biolights up my thighs and hips pulsed harder, betraying every humiliating nuance of my emotional state. If I’d been back on Mavtros, my display would have been a public invitation to any interested party. Here, alone with her, it was just desperation.
Maya twisted again, the moss squirming audibly. "Is all your furniture this... enthusiastic?"
"The ship is alive," I said. "It responds to comfort and warmth. The moss is—" Her translation patch buzzed, cutting me off.
She interrupted, "It’s not responding to comfort, it’s responding to pheromones. Yours. Mine. The... whatever this is." She gestured between us, then shook her head, helpless. "God, I can’t believe I’m negotiating with horny sentient moss in a submarine with a glowing giant and a creep-cam."
I misinterpreted her sarcasm, enthralled by the "negotiating with moss" phrase, and said reverently, "You have a gift for poetry."
She gawked at me. Then she broke into a helpless, bright laugh that sent my pulse into a tailspin.
I explained, or tried. "Mavtrosian warming tradition requires sharing a nest. Moss increases thermal retention and—" The translator patch gave up. "Nest rubbing ensures optimal friction for reproduction."
She buried her face in her hands. The moss, emboldened, crept up her side and pressed her closer to my side. I tried to shift away, but the moss offered no escape. My skin ran molten. Every time I moved, her warmth followed, filling the space between our hips and then some.
We sat in charged silence for several beats, nothing but the hum of the ship and the wet smack of the moss reacting to every micro-movement.
She was the first to speak, voice muffled behind her hands. "Okay, I’ll play along. I’ll pretend this is normal, and you pretend not to notice that your moss is basically molesting me."
"It’s considered a compliment," I said, then immediately regretted it. "You can tell it to stop."
She made a dismissive noise as she peered at me through her fingers. "Do you always glow like this when you’re..."
I waited. "When I’m what?"
Her cheeks darkened. "Turned on?"
"Yes," I admitted. My glow flared, traitorously, in punctuation.
She laughed again, shaking her head in defeat, then lay back on the moss, letting it cradle her. She was pretending to relax, but her eyes tracked my every motion.
The ship gave a shudder, then shifted course with a lurch that drove her side against mine. My hands shot out to steady her, and her fingers dug into my forearm with surprising strength.
A low, discordant hum began to vibrate through the hull, off-tempo with the usual reef-song of the ship. It rattled my teeth and set my nerves on edge.
I recognized the sound… a white-light ping, the Gate’s claim. They were tracking us. The pulse would grow sharper and sharper until it locked onto our position or something broke.
The Nest Moss shrank down, compacting into a protective shell around Maya. She looked at me, finally realizing that I was worried.
I had no words for what I felt…dread, desire, the wild hope that maybe, just maybe, the universe hadn’t made a mistake after all. She was my match. But she was also the beacon that would draw every hunter in the Gate’s spiral straight to us.
She reached out, laying a hand on my chest, over the brightest point of my glow. Her thumb rubbed once in a slow, soothing spiral.
"We’ll figure it out," she said, and for the first time I believed it might be true.
I wrapped my hand over hers, feeling the fragile pulse beneath her skin, and let the tidal wave inside me crash.
The hum outside reached a fever pitch, but in the chamber, all I could hear was her heartbeat.
CHAPTER 3
MAYA
I sat up from the moss nest, my skin still tingling from Vylit's ethereal glow and the press of his heat against me. My mind reeled with the intensity of what we'd shared, but the low hum that suddenly rattled through the hull shoved me back into panic as surely as a physical blow. The vibration crawled up my spine, instinctual warning signals firing in my brain before I could even process what I was hearing. Something was wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong.
