Page 78 of Shellshock

It was a hot tub to them.

Imagine how strange it must seem, to see a person come in and be terrified of the public pool.

She could never have what they had and she hadn’t let it get to her before—but now it was staring her in the face at every turn.

This wasn’t turning out to be a nice outing.

She took a thin breath, rubbing her sternum, looking at her company, and forcing another smile. Her cheeks ached from grinning. The context was all wrong. Morwong replaced her drink and she downed it, grinning even harder.

Drinking helped.

Caligher’s tail nudged her and she met his eyes. He must have spotted the flighty panic she’d been trying to hide. A frown marred his face.

“Are you alright?” he asked quietly.

She nodded. Caligher pulled her onto his lap in a perfect embrace. His arms circled her as his nose pressed against her cheek. It was… so nice. She needed it too much to continue arguing the specifics of their relationship. Those things were semantics when it felt like she was drowning. She needed Caligher. That was simple fact.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked.

“Not yet.” She looked around the bar from her new perch, melting into his shapely, hard body. He felt intensely good. “Soon, maybe. This is sort of intense.”

Caligher blocked most of the noise and it helped. His tail slipped around her stomach, bringing her thoughts back to that night. The feel of it coiled around her throat—cutting off her breath.

Jesus.

She angled herself to see his face. His fins flickered at the edges with a subtle contentedness—like the gentle ripple of sunlight through shallow water. Flickingup—gently floating down. Thenup… down.

Seeing him around friends reminded her of the ragers back on the Aerinus—the screaming card games that resulted in the same two naughty magazines changing custody for the week, Alex crashing in on them and showing them the true meaning of blackout drunk. Their greatest accomplishment had been the night they used a robot to hang the disco ball off a corner of the Aerinus.

A small grin spread on her face and she ducked her chin. Caligher’s smile faltered.

“You miss your life,” he said. Not an accusation. Just an observation.

“Well, yeah.”

He leaned back, his lap shifting under her hips and putting her in contact with the hard shell that plated his pelvis. Her face baked with warmth.

She twisted her shoulders to keep eye contact. Caligher was looking around the room in thought.

“I would miss what was normal to me,” he said. “I’ve never reacted well when I was…”

“When you were stuck on their ship? I wouldn’t expect anyone to react well in that situation.”

She didn’t know how she would ever fit into their circle, but she couldn’t ask him to follow her to Earth knowing how it could end. Her family was there. Everything normal to her was there. But it would never work.

The conflict must have been written on her face because he pulled her even closer and rested his head against hers.

She played with his tail idly. The tapered tip was wonderfully fiddly—like an ear—but the width of it was packed with the same musculature of a well-fed boa constrictor. The heaviness was strangely exciting—the coiling muscles underneath that moved and flexed beneath her palm.

He let her explore his tail, starting with the rocky shell that lined the spine. Clear, slick fins rippled with liquid starlight, and the underside of the appendage was smooth on the downward pass of her palm—grippy when she pet him backward. He could make the texture change on reflex. Silky like skin, then rubbery.

Strange. Interesting. She kept touching, and he didn’t stop her. His tail wrapped closer, circling her stomach completely and cinching tight, making her gasp. The dormant power in his body was an undeniable turn-on. At any moment he could turn it all against her.

Underneath the smaller end, she noticed a tight slit and traced one finger over the seam in an attempt to annoy him.

“Is this your anus?” she asked.

“What?” He burst out laughing, vibrating against her. “No.”

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