“You look better everywhere,” I tell him, because truth this clean demands equal time. “Even in this terrible lighting.”
He glances up at the moon like it just insulted him. “I will fight it,” he says gravely.
“Don’t,” I laugh. “We just made peace with a minister. Let’s not pick a fight with a celestial object.”
He hums—a sound that brushes the inside of my ribs like a cello string. The humor drains off his face, not gone, just shifted, the way light slides along a blade. “Star,” he says, and my name sounds like a country I can finally visit without a guide. “Tell me what you want.”
“Everything,” I say, because this is not a night for small answers. “Slow. Honest. No one knocking. No glass shattering. No guilt trying to get a word in.”
“Copy,” he says, and the old soldier in him makes the word gentle.
We don’t rush the undressing. It isn’t a scramble or a dare. It’s a new language, consonant by consonant. He unloops my scarf and sets it on the telescope’s base like laying down a banner. I slide each button loose at his throat and kiss the skin I uncover, a slow procession of worship down a decidedly secular neck. He peels my linen like fruit, careful not to bruise, hands skimming, pausing when my breath hitches, waiting for the next yes. I tug at his shirt and it obeys; he makes that soft, almost-silent sound when my palms find the warm plane of his chest, all heat and history, the rough crossing of scar under my thumb like a landmark on a map I intend to memorize forever.
“You always run hot,” I murmur.
“You always run true,” he answers, and I flush in places the night can’t see.
The cloak becomes our quilt. The rug becomes meadow grass. The chess table keeps its dignity; we let it. I draw him down and the room shifts to accommodate our prayers, the dome tilting its ear. He brackets me with his hands, his arms caging me without trapping. When he kisses me this time, there’s no famine in it. It’s not a pillage or a plea. It’s a homecoming with the porch light on and the kettle just starting to think about boiling.
I could catalog each touch—the path of his mouth along my collarbone, the patient press of his palm at my ribs, the way he teases a laugh out of my breath when he noses that spot just beneath my ear—but that would make a ledger of something that refuses to be accounted. He moves with the patience of someone who has been starving and decided the first meal should be eaten slowly, one bite at a time, so hunger never learns how to scare us again. I meet him with the greedy tenderness of a woman who is done apologizing for wanting. Our rhythm is unhurried by design, an old song finally played at the right tempo.
“Tell me if—” he starts, and I cover his mouth with my fingers.
“I will,” I say. “You’ll know.”
He does. I say it with a breath, with the curl of my toes against his calf, with the fingers fisted at his shoulder and then spreading, trusting. He says it with a hand easing off and then returning, a mouth choosing to linger and then to travel, a low sound at the back of his throat when I pull him closer and ask for more like I invented yes. The observatory breathes with us. Dust motes learn choreography. The scar at his brow catches a thread of moonlight and throws it into my eyes; I blink tears I don’t have to explain.
We talk, because I’m me, and silence is sweet but words are sugar. “Remember when you refused to teach me that knife trick?” I whisper into his jaw.
“You nearly taught yourself to bleed trying,” he murmurs, smiling, mouth against my cheek.
“I learned patience instead,” I say. “I’m using it now.”
“I can tell,” he says, and his voice goes rougher on the last word when I show him.
I kiss down over the silver striations that interrupt the black sheen of his scales, tasting heat and salt and the clean metaltang that’s just him. He’s enormous—seven feet of Vakutan, 325 pounds of disciplined muscle—and he is gentle like a secret. I flatten my tongue along the thick ridge of his throat and feel his pulse stagger. “Talk to me,” I breathe. “Tell me what it feels like.”
“Like you’re turning a weapon into a person,” he manages, shivering when I scrape my teeth lightly over that brutal scar above his left eye. “Like I’m allowed to be soft without being less.”
I sink lower, nosing along the planes of his abdomen, mapping what battle carved and time healed. His cock is already hard against his stomach, heavy, hot, the dark skin of it slicked with a little of me from the press of us. He isn’t human—there’s a subtle ridge just below the crown, and faint banding down the shaft that my fingers marvel over—but he’s also exactly what I need. I wrap my hand around him and he sucks air like I put a blade through holy cloth.
“Star,” he warns, voice broken, golden eyes gone wide and molten.
“I want to taste what I did to you,” I say, and take him into my mouth.
He hisses between his teeth, a sound I feel in my spine. He’s thick, filling, the weight of his cock on my tongue outrageous in a way that makes me ache. I go slow, deliberate—one hand cupping his base, the other splayed over the slope of his hip where scales soften. He trembles when I drag my lips down to that ridge and back up, when I circle the head and then hollow my cheeks, when I let spit slip from my mouth to my fist so I can stroke what I can’t fit and not break the rhythm. His hand finds my hair; it doesn’t push, it just holds like he’s anchoring himself to a coast he never expected to see again.
“Tell me,” I hum around him.
“It’s heat,” he says, voice frayed, watching me like worship. “It’s home. It’s… gods, Star, your mouth—if you keep that pace I’m going to?—”
“Not yet,” I say, pulling off with a wet pop, stroking him slow so his hips jerk helplessly. “I want you inside when you come.”
“Then climb up,” he rasps, and his hands are on me again, reverent and greedy, lifting, settling me over his chest so he can kiss my breasts until my back arches, until I’m rubbing myself against his scaled abdomen like an animal begging the edge. He slides down, shoulders wedged under my thighs, and looks up at me with those impossible eyes. “May I?”
“Rayek,” I say, laughing on a gasp, “if you don’t, I’m going to file a complaint.”
His mouth opens against me, hot and sure, tongue stroking over my clit with that same careful, ruthless patience he uses to fieldstrip a weapon. My head drops back; my hands grip the iron railing of the telescope mount because the room is trying to tip. He eats me like a promise, like a man who intends to learn every way I can shake. When he slides one thick finger inside, then two, curling them in that exact spot that makes my vision go white at the edges, I swear in three languages and a fourth we invented.
