Page 18 of Crave
The click and rasp of the exo-suit fasteners distracted him from musing on the way she’d emphasized “want”.
“What are you doing?”
“If we’re hiding in the bunk while we wait to see if we survived, might as well get comfortable.”
To his orc eyes, the low light couldn’t conceal her stripping, and as she peeled down the sleeves to just the skimpy Earther underlayer called a camisole, the reveal of her skin was…a revelation. All his fingers twitched with the sudden, tingling desire to hold her, to feel that expanse of yielding softness, so unlike his own hide. Everything about her was so unlike him: she wasn’t beholden to anyone and had no desperation to prove herself. What would it be like to be so…free?
He could take control of the shuttle, claim the rock, and go anywhere.
“What are you waiting for?” she murmured.
For a moment, he froze, even though the dropping temperature shouldn’t have affected him yet.
“What…am I waiting? For what?”
“It’s getting cold. I can almost see my breath. And there’s only one bunk.”
He tilted his antennae in confusion. “What? No, there are two bunks. I was just sleeping in one when the alarms—oh.” He gulped when she wiggled her lower half, and the exo-suit slipped past her hips to puddle on the floor.
Suddenly, he wasn’t frozen; he was on fire. Just like the emptiness of space was too cold when beyond the reach of a sun and also too hot when exposed to that solar light, he was overwhelmed by her, vulnerable to a force that might destroy him.
But he might still revel in the discovery.
He took a step toward her, bracing one arm on the edge of the bunk support over her head and leaning closer. “Probably best if we huddle together for warmth.”
She smiled at him, eyes half closed, in a strange Earther expression that made his pulse race with something like terror. “It’s our only chance.”
She was teasing—but she wasn’t wrong. They would find where Roxy had been, and they would return to theDeepWander, and then she would be leaving. Thiswashis only chance.
Canting his body another few degrees, he paused, staring down at her. “Maybe another kiss would warm you.”
“Just one? It’s too cold and there’s too much of me bare for just one kiss. Unless it was a very good kiss, I suppose.”
He lowered his head to capture her smirking lips with his. And since he was using only one arm to lean, he had three other arms to wrap around her and reel her up against him. Her body—most of it bare, yes—pressed full-length against his, also mostly bare, her soft curves yielding to his hard planes. She let out a sound, a moan that rushed through him, threatening to decimate his control. It was like watching the silent explosions of a mining mission ripping through the crevasses of a deep-space asteroid, through he’d never actually been this close to those dangerous expeditions.
Now he wanted to be even closer.
He was small for an orc and she was bigger than the other Earther females, but that only seemed to bring them more closely into alignment. Her arm around his torso held him fast, and her mouth under his…ah, she could probably shift entire orbits with the power of her tongue.
Certainly his body swayed helplessly to her touch.
She tilted backward, guiding him with her into the enclosing shelter of the bunk. Reaching behind him, he pulled the privacy screen into place, sealing them together in the dark. Although it wasn’t completely black.
“Your eyes are glowing,” she whispered.
“Not truly glowing. My eyes have specialized cells that capture and magnify light. It’s a throwback adaptation in orcs, but there are enough diodes in here to amplify the effect.”
“Capturing light,” she purred, arching up beneath him. “Like you’ve captured me?”
“Have I? Maybe it was due to the momentary loss of gravity, but seems to me that you’ve all but thrown yourself at me.”
“Mmm. You like that idea?” With a sinuous twist of her hips, she somehow brushed almost every part of her against almost every part of him, some impossible mobius of intimate entanglement, not quantum but even more elemental. “Being seduced?”
He cupped a hand under her jaw, levering her face up so that the reflection of his eyes bounced back from her widened black pupils. “In space, no one is on top or bottom. At least not all the time.”
The rest of her eyes widened even more as he rolled deftly in the narrow space, holding her close with one arm and framing the confines with his other hands so she didn’t strike the boundaries.
From her new place above him, she smiled again. “Isn’t there some sort of rule about relativity? I seem to be on top at the moment.”
