“Maybe…” She felt as if she were reaching out in the dark, uncertain what lay just beyond her fingertips. Would it bite her? Drag her down? “Maybe for just a little while we don’t need to be so alone. We can feel what it’s like to be here while the rest of the universe spins on its way.”
“Adeline.” Her name was little more than a whisper in the dark.
“Not for forever,” she hastened to reassure him. “Even the universe won’t last forever. Not even for a night. Just for now. Just for this moment.”
She leaned a little closer over him, then paused, half of breath from contact. So, so close, the fractured lights in his eyes were whirling galaxies, but it didn’t make her dizzy. Instead, she felt as though it all moved around her, that at least for this heartbeat she was the center of his universe.
Too much, too much. No wonder he feared such feeling.
“Or you can ignore me,” she whispered.
“I think I’d rather kiss you.” He tilted his face up toward her, his mouth opening under hers.
With a breath, she threaded her arm behind his neck, aligning their mouths perfectly like a long-lost ship coming home.
Maybe it was ridiculous to have come this far to find something so simple as a kiss. But maybe no one was promised happiness, no matter where they were born or hatched, whatever their credit score or galactic credits. Maybe she’d done exactly the right thing, faking a taste for adventure as she pointed toward the stars.
Because the lingering tang of coffee—once one of the few pleasures of her mornings besides seeing Ollie’s smile—had become something else: the taste of Teq.
Their lips finally parted, she sighed in satisfaction—well, satisfaction and a little sexual frustration. “That was…quite a kiss,” she murmured. “You are really crushing it.”
His eyes glinted at her. “I surmise that in this meaning, crushing it does not mean I am too big for you. It means I have mastered the kiss.”
“You are good, very good,” she agreed, and she couldn’t stop herself from stretching out against him, partly alongside, partly over him. His body was hot and maybe a little hard. But she’d read romance novels about hot and hard and, yes, masterful…
“I would kiss you more,” he rasped. “More time, more places.”
Her eyes flared wide. Now she was definitely feeling a little hot. “More…places?”
“I’ve been reading the IDA handbook on Earther females and the handling thereof. Kissing can be more than mouths.”
“Oh,” she said faintly. “Yes, that is true.”
“In the interest of interspecies collaboration, will you show me?”
She hesitated. Did she want to be handled? By so many hands? A little hot and heavy groping here in this alien beanbag was one thing. Adventure was great, but she didn’t want there to be too much discovery. “Oliver is asleep in the other room,” she started to rationalize, then paused again.
She would do anything for her child,haddone impossible things, but just as she’d never wanted to blight his innocence with her fears, so she would not blame him for her apprehension.
And maybe she was finally done with clinging to her own naivety. Her lack of worldly experience had left her a pawn in other people’s plans.
This was her chance to be otherworldly.
“Let’s go to my room.”
In a single, surging movement he stood from the cushions, lifting her with him.
She might’ve gasped in surprise—and maybe a little delight—but he brought his mouth down on hers again, harder this time, his tusks pressing into the skin of her cheeks, and though she closed her eyes, not quite swooning, but not not swooning either, she could almost imagine that those fierce weapons were her own.
It was just pretend. And maybe she was too old now to play pretend, but the thought gave her a boldness she’d never thought to possess. Like for now she could possess him.
Even though he was doing the possessing at the moment, all his arms wrapped around her as if he might never let her go. She wasn’t asking for forever, she reminded herself.
He carried her down the hall while kissing her—no need to watch where he was going when he had echolocation—and didn’t stop until they were behind her closed door. The nightlight she’d added flicked on automatically, sending a sprinkle of pale dots twirling slowly around the walls.
“Let me down,” she commanded.
His arms unpeeled, one at a time, setting her down next to the nest bed. As he took a step back, she felt as if a new her was being revealed. Or maybe not exactly new; just unfamiliar and slightly out of focus, as if she were looking through a telescope at something far away, tumbling and isolated against the stars.