Extraterrestrial

*** This chapter contains material not suitable for younger audiences, reader discretion is advised ***

There was an unrelenting urgency from both of us during the short trip leading up to the bedroom. He couldn't get the door open fast enough.

Once inside, I started to unfasten the braces on my leg, but was finding it to be a difficult task: my hands were shaking. Wolf stepped in and helped slide them off.

My shirt, at least, was easy. He lifted it up over my head with a single gesture and it, too, was left forgotten at our feet. He, of course, was already nude.

Strangely enough, for all my hemming and hawing over covering myself, there was no unease. Not in the same way there would have been had it been another human there, appraising me with traditional standards and expectations.

There were other ways I needed to measure up, and I already had.

Wolf hooked his arm around me and pulled me against him; a few seconds of skin to skin contact before he lifted me by my hips and playfully tossed me in the bed.

He pounced and rolled me over and over in the furs, his weight causing me to sink all the way into the bed.

Apprehension stirred inside me but it wasn't alarm yet. Not until he bent low enough for his breath to be on my skin, for his powerful mandibles to cage me in, and he said, "You cannot escape me now."

I felt it against the inside of my knee, warm and hard but otherwise unlike anything I thought it would be. He coaxed himself out into the open, sliding his fist up and down so his length gradually ventured free of its sheath.

My eyes widened and my face turned red. In the time I'd spent on Earth as an adult, I hadn't looked for anything like intimacy from anyone. My mission had been too dire to even consider it. But I caught myself wondering now—if I had, would I have felt better prepared for this moment?

All that fear about not being good enough to best him in combat . . . all that anxiety was migrating elsewhere now.

Would I be enough to PLEASE him?

Wolf trapped my wrist between two claws and drew me in close.

"I would like for you to touch me," he rumbled. "Do you consent?"

I didn't trust myself not to stutter something unintelligible, so I just nodded. He guided my hand into place on him, showed me the pressure of the strokes he'd done on himself.

"This is—" I said, stammering. "Uh, what is the word? We call it —"

I twisted to try to hide the heat surging into my face, but it was fruitless. The rising tide was just beneath my skin, an inferno of it, and he could see it light up my body like a wildfire visible from space.

"Um, it changes depending on what we mean. |Penis, or dick, or cock, or|—"

There was a trace of laughter in his reply, but it was mostly withheld for my sake. "It is the same as the word for pleasure."

"'H'tern'," I murmured.

Somewhat emboldened, I added a flourish to what I'm doing with my hand. The groan he gave in response was long and lowing, like that of a weary king lion stretching after an afternoon of sunning in the warm dirt.

He pulled away from me to kneel between my knees. His mandibles trapped my waist in close confinement, his asymmetric tusks scratching just enough to lift a thin pink line out of my flesh as he moved down, down.

"And—" My breath caught as the rough, pebbled texture of his skin brushed against my inner thigh. "—and mine?"

He purred. I could feel the heat of his mouth there, setting off a fluttering in my belly, like the birds that take flight when he bursts from cover to pursue his quarry.

"As you say, it changes." His tone was sly as he continued. "For now, it is 'se'pkaith', the word for banquet or feast."

I gasped, my sharp intake of breath immediately making me dizzy. Wet heat spread where his mouth touched the most delicate parts of me.

Like the rest of him, it was not what I expected. He didn't have the tenderness that a human with soft lips and a seeking tongue might. This was pure thrill, pure risk—the same as any hunt, multiplied a thousandfold.

My muscles turned to liquid. I felt myself slipping out of my body, the sensation too much to take in at once. Wolf hooked his arms around my thighs, dragging me closer, lifting my lower half off the bed entirely so he could forge deeper into the join of my legs with his mouth.

I clutched at the furs, dragging them up with me, their soft caress drawing me into a place of boundless, luxurious pleasure.

As he indulged in my flesh like it's a feast for the taking, a kind of windup began inside of me. It was similar to the sensation of perching on a tree limb, prey placid and unassuming below, and the knowledge that soon will come a window in which I have to take action.

This was worse than that, more unsteady and maddening because now I was powerless at the mercy of what Wolf is doing. I was caught between a frantic impatience and delirious satisfaction.

I hauled myself up at the waist so I can reach far enough to thread my hands through his thick locks. I pulled him back down onto the bed with me.

"Us humans would say '|don't spoil your appetite|.'" I tried to inject some teasing into my voice, but my head was whirling on my neck and I could barely manage speech to begin with.

"I could indulge for days and never be sated," he replied.

One of his huge hands squeezed down my thigh as the other went to my chest. My back arched to him in offering—his talons on my breast were tantalizing. There was the suggestion of danger playing just behind his gentle ministrations.

"You are still certain?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. YES.

An embarrassing sound left me as his fingers moved back down. There was a trigger of nerves right at the apex of all that heat and longing, and when his thumb moved over it I nearly lost hold of myself entirely.

He slowly pushed one finger into me. I bit back a string of desperate curses. But not because it was too much.

For as long as we had been together, my life had been about pushing further and harder. He had served as a wall, let me beat my fists against him until they bruised and bled just so I would know what I was capable of.

The answer was always the same: more. I would always be capable of MORE, and more is what I would always want.

I pulled myself together enough to give him a hard look. "You said you would not go easy."

Laughter rolled through his chest. The next finger he added threw my head back into the furs and I couldn't hold my moan. With two fingers working at once, he was coaxing from me a breathless stream of nonsense words and soft cries.

It was almost more than I could take, but I knew it was nothing compared to what was still to come.

His withdrawal left me open and frustrated, eliciting a disappointed groan. I was dizzy with desire, desperately clawing for that which edged just out of my reach.

"Are you ready?" Wolf asked me, his hips poised and the barest hint of him brushing against the juncture between my legs.

"Yes!"

With a smooth thrust and the burst of first-time pain, he was inside me. My hips rocked and I clutched at his shoulders, my fingers digging into his tough skin.

He held still, waiting for me to adjust to this new intrusion.

My breathing came quick and shallow against his chest as I clung to him. There was a stinging at my entrance, but it was easily overridden by a sensation of delicious fullness.

My thoughts turned broken and wild—there was only the basest and most primal of needs ruling me now.

The same might have been said for Wolf. He shuddered as my body tightened around him. The two of us huffed and panted in the small cocoon of space we'd wrought for ourselves.

One of his hands cradled my head to the curve of his throat as if the closer we were, the more bearable the waiting would be.

Little by little, he rolled his hips closer to mine and I wailed as he pushed deeper still, until finally he was fully seated inside of me. I could feel the head of him knocking at the absolute limit of what my body would allow, but the strain of down below was nothing like the chords of my heart, which felt as though they could burst at any moment.

I was as taut as a bowstring, my blood singing like it did in the immediacy of battle.

"Try to relax," he purred.

Panting, I let the tension out of my hips and rested my weight against the furs bunched beneath us. I focused on the heat of his breath against my shoulder and deep tones of his husky voice.

Wolf's encouraging purrs made it easy to let go and give in to the glowing embers of desire simmering inside—and when he started moving again, slowly at first, it wasn't gasps of discomfort being drawn from me but of a feral need.

Wolf's mandibles flared as he thrust into me harder and faster until he found a rhythm that left me breathless and elicited the right sounds from me. I stroked his ego when I could find words through the haze of our coupling—how absolutely good he was making me feel.

For once it was gone . . . My apprehensions, my anxieties, my insecurities. It was just me and him, locked together and lost to the moment.

He kept up the steady pace and a knot was forming in the pit of my being; I fell quiet as I focused on it, digging my fingers into his back, his arms, his shoulders. Anything I could reach, whatever I could touch to keep him close.

His growls and purrs grew more insistent and he propped himself up on his elbow to dig in deeper.

I rocked my hips to meet his rhythm, desperately trying to work the knot that was so close to unraveling. Panting, whimpering, waiting—until finally I came undone in a burst of uninhibited shudders and gasping.

Wolf barely slowed, acknowledging me with a few brushes of his face against mine, mandibles raking across my skin.

"My turn," he rumbled, teasing my flesh with his tusks and claws.

He caged me in with his weight and pinned me into the furs, digging in with his hips. It drew a burning and ragged gasp out of me. His mandibles pressed into my throat and adrenaline licked through me.

His rhythm changed from the long, careful strokes from before into quick, deep thrusts that had me jerking beneath him.

I didn't have time to come down from my soaring high before a new bout of sensations battered my lit nerves. I was pressed deeper into the bed, his claws dug harder into my arms; his mandibles scored down the thin skin of my neck, leaving raised marks.

And I was lost to it, whispering and groaning his name over and over.

I couldn't keep up. We decoupled long enough for him to flip me over, and he was inside again, holding my hips and grinding with reckless abandon.

Even with the cooler temperature of the room, I was working up a sweat. The slickness of my thighs egged him on, deeper and harder.

He grew uncharacteristically quiet after a brief lapse of time, and just as an ache was beginning to form between my legs and in my muscles, he buried himself as far as my body allowed, reaching his own climax with a low, rolling snarl.

The force of it pressed me into the furs and I let out a muffled wail. We stayed together as he finished twitching, both breathless and spent.

He collapsed atop me and I squirmed.

"|You're going to squish me|," I protested once I had caught my breath long enough to form words.

Wolf retracted and rolled off me onto his back. I shifted around until I was the same, panting and trembling.

The furs felt especially lush against my skin and I writhed around like a lazy cat, just enjoying the way it felt. We lapsed into a comfortable silence and neither one of us felt a particular desire to fill it.

I fully expected that to be the end of it, but Wolf took me by surprise and pulled me against him. I automatically moved onto my side and made myself comfortable in the crook of his arm, his heat making my skin flush.

He must have sensed my unspoken confusion, because he said, "Humans require physical affection, correct?"

It was the first time I ever even remotely considered anything he did as "cute".

"I mean, yes, but how did you figure that out?" I asked, feeling free to snuggle into him.

I had been feeling fairly touch-starved, so as long as he was offering I was going to make up for all the deficit I'd accumulated over my years of social isolation.

Wolf made an annoyed face and I thought maybe my question was the cause, but he explained, "I met an . . . obnoxious female when I took you for your procedure."

"Oh?"

Though he seemed reticent, he told me the story. "She is, what we consider, undesirable. Small, generally sickly. Physically incapable of many things. Apparently, she has spent most of her abundant free time studying the various trophy prey, specializing in humans."

"|You guys are mean|." I was still listening, but my eyes were closed.

He snorted. "Had she been born male, she would have been culled. She was instead given room to do as she wished so long as she stayed out of everyone's way."

"|Still mean|," I muttered.

Wolf ignored me and continued. "When she learned of our arrival, she was quick to come and speak with me about you. What I planned to do with you, what sort of procedure I was seeking, if I was equipped with everything you would need. She was . . . Persistent and quite excitable."

"|She sounds adorable, if a little annoying|," I murmured in English.

Exhaustion was starting to set in and I was feeling sore, but content. I pressed closer against him and bent one leg over his.

"She would have liked to meet you but you were in poor shape, so I merely let her talk. Despite herself, she had good information and I was grateful to her," he said.

I hummed in acknowledgment.

His mandibles clicked together in a thoughtful manner. "I am well versed in hunting, but I suppose I did not know much about how to deal with your recovery."

Smiling, I nuzzled against his shoulder and he held me tighter. "I think you are doing a good job."

Wolf grumbled in what I took as embarrassment. His claws traced lazy patterns across my skin.

"Will I get to meet this female when we visit? I would like to," I announced.

Sure, some of it was because I wanted to sate my own curiosity, but I also felt like she would probably appreciate it. Especially since she didn't get to before.

I would let her know that I was grateful for her indirect help.

"If you wish," Wolf said with some derision. "We should both sleep. When I wake, I will take us to their ship. It is orbiting an uninhabitable planet for now, waiting for us."

"|Excellent|," I said.

"It is 'excellent'," he replied, providing me with the Yaut'ja equivalent.

"Excellent," I repeated, already starting to doze off.

I hadn't been feeling particularly sleepy before, but after everything we'd just done, I was spent and ready for a nap.

Wolf slept much less often than I did, so I figured it was about time for him to rest, too.

The low hum of the ship's machinations droned on in the background and Wolf's purring lulled me. I pulled the furs over my legs and hips—not because I was cold, but rather because it gave me an extra sense of security as I drifted off in Wolf's arms.