Page 54 of Bred

“I think there’s someone else who might want to remind you of all that,” he says, stroking the hair back from my face.

“Someone else? What do you mean?”

He smiles at my confusion. “I’m not the only man on this ship you had dealings with.”

“By dealings, do you mean sex?”

“I do.”

“Wow. So I was like, a slut. Go me!”

Talon shakes his head at me. “You weren’t a slut. You were just a full-time job for more than one man. Come on. Let’s get cleaned up.”

He pulls me up from the bed to encourage me to do as he says, but I’m far more interested in the others he mentions than in washing myself. What’s a little cum between a whole ship full of dudes I’ve apparently been fucking?

“How many other guys?”

“Two.”

“Oh, well, I mean, that’s not so bad.”

“Not bad at all,” he says, drawing me into a shower.

I am distracted by him all over again, especially by the way his massive bulk hogs so much of the water.

“You’re like a bulky umbrella,” I complain playfully.

“You’re like a brat,” he replies, stepping out of the shower so I can have it to myself. He stays close, guarding me perhaps, or just afraid to take his eyes off me in case I disappear again. I share the feeling. When I woke in the hospital, I knew something was wrong. I knew I had become somehow alien. I didn’t feel right with anyone or anything. The world seemed small, pedestrian, and suffocating.

Now I know why. It is because I have known what it is to have the whole universe at my feet, to be standing on a vessel that must have interstellar capacity. It is because I have been loved by a male so much more than man. It is because I have been ravaged and overcome with lust, because I have been made more human for all of it.

His eyes never leave me as the water courses over me. I should maybe find that invasive or perhaps a little frightening, but I don’t. I want him close to me. I want to be close to him.

“The entity we fought... has it come back?”

“No,” he says.

“Or at least, not that you can remember,” I say with a wry smile.

“We would know if we had been attacked again. It removes everything it encounters.”

“What does that even mean?”

He reaches out and places the blade of his hand against the fogged shower wall. “It means, everything it touches is wiped away,” he says, drawing his hand across the steamy part, making it disappear.

“So what happened to me? Did it touch me?”

“It did. You should not have survived.”

“Why did I then?”

“Best guess? It liked you.”

I think about that for a moment, then shrug. “That makes sense. I like me.”

* * *

Talon

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