Page 47 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

He understood. He always understood. The resonance made sure of that.

When he settled between my thighs, he paused. Looked at me. The light on his skin was so bright I could see every detail of his face — the sharp cheekbones, the violet eyes gone almost black with dilated pupils, the expression of such focused, reverent want that my heart cracked open.

"I have you," he said.

"I know."

He entered me slowly and we both stopped breathing.

He was big — not comedy-big, not concerning-big, but big enough that slow was the only option, big enough that I felt every fraction of the stretch as my body worked to take him. His arms trembled with the effort of staying still. Through the bond I could feel what the stillness cost him, the leash he had himself on, and knowing that — feeling him hold back a want that size for my sake — undid me more than the stretch did.

Different. Yes. Different. My brain tried to catalog the specifics and then gave up because the specifics were — there was a subtle texture, a ridging that created friction in places human anatomy didn't account for, and a warmth that was more than body temperature, deeper, radiating from inside his biology into mine. And when he was fully inside me, his body did something — a rhythmic pulse, involuntary, muscular, a slow clench-and-release that pressed against nerve endings I didn't know I had — and my entire nervous system went white.

"Oh my GOD."

"Is that⁠—"

"Do not ask me if that's okay. That is so far beyond okay that okay needs to update its definition."

He moved. I moved with him. It was clumsy at first, two bodies learning each other, two rhythms trying to find a shared tempo. But the resonance helped. He could feel what worked for me as it happened, adjust, respond. And I was learning to read the bond from my end, the surge when I rolled my hips a certain way, the spike when I gripped his shoulders, the near-desperate pulse when I said his name.

"Kel."

His rhythm faltered. Light ran hard through every visible marking.

"Kel."

"You cannot keep saying my name like that and expect me to maintain⁠—"

"Kel."

Whatever he'd been maintaining shattered. He drove into me and the pace shifted from careful to urgent, and the feedback loop through the bond spiraled until I couldn't tell where my pleasure ended and his began, until the fire and the moons and the alien jungle disappeared and there was nothing but us — sweat and light and the rhythm of two bodies doing something that was apparently universal across species.

I was tangled with an alien on a wild, glowing planet, and it was the most spectacular impossible thing that had ever happened to me.

The thought was absurd enough to make me laugh. He felt the laughter through the bond and his surprise shifted to delight and he laughed too — a short, startled sound, and through the bond I felt his own astonishment at it, how new laughing during sex was for him, and somehow that was what tipped me over the edge.

I came with his name in my mouth and his light in my eyes and his emotions flooding the bond — a cascade of pleasure-awe-belonging-mine that I felt in every cell. He followed seconds later with a groan that vibrated through his chest into mine and markings that blazed so bright I saw it through my closed eyelids.

Aftermath.

The monitor band on my upper arm remained green and silent. Kel checked it once, because of course he did, then rolled to his side, taking me with him, pulling me against his chest. His body's light dimmed to a soft, steady glow — post-orgasm bioluminescence, which was a phrase I had never expected to use and would now never forget.

I pressed my face into the crook of his neck. His skin was still warm. The marking along his jaw pulsed gently against my forehead.

"So," I said, muffled against his skin. "The biological life-bonding part is settled. What do we call the two people inside it?"

His arm tightened around me. His response reached me before he spoke: warmth and hope and careful vulnerability he was trying not to show.

"Where do you want to be?"

I pressed closer. Let the bond carry what I wasn't ready to say in words — the warmth, the wanting, the terrifying possibility that I had found my person on the wrong side of the galaxy.

"Ask me again when we're not running for our lives," I said. "I chose forever. I just want to name the rest of it when nobody is hunting us."

He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. His markings glowed steady against my skin.

The answer was already there. We both knew it. The bond made sure of that.