And was she flirting with him? Yes, she was. Tagen had sipped at his ul, feigning interest in the chiak game, intensely aware of the female sitting beside him. “I’ve been busy,” he said.
“That’s a shame. Too busy, I wonder?”
“That would depend on what I was wanted for.” He risked a direct stare, and her smile broadened. She was flirting, by the gods, and she wasn’t a bit shy about it.
“Suppose someone were to ask you to catalogue the emissions readers in the load-pan bay.”
“Then I would be busy.” He returned his gaze to the game.
“And suppose someone were to do this.” She leaned forward unexpectedly and bit him on the jaw, right there, in front of half the crew.
“Well, then I might find a little time,” he’d replied, and, emboldened by the ul, nudged her chin up and bit her right back. He could taste her arousal, feel her pulse racing hotter in her veins.
She’d stood up without another word, her hand catching his, and led him back to her quarters.
That was mating, Tagen reflected, listening to the muffled groans and gasps on the tee-vee. Not this supine imitation, but the real thing. Thrashing, fighting, screaming, scratching, kicking, clawing, real sexplay. And every day after her shift was done, she’d come to fetch him and play it out again. She’d even come to see him the day his tour was up, just long enough to throw him a smile and flash a little fang. “When my number comes up, expect me to call on you,” was her parting word.
He looked forward to it, and not just for the private pride that came from knowing one had been selected to breed. She had been a fine, ferocious mate.
Tagen opened his eyes and stared meditatively at the ceiling. He listened, hearing only moans, whimpers, gasps.
The tee-vee could be deceptive, he knew. It was most often fiction, idealized for drama. Tagen had never seen humans mating in reality, but he had seen plenty of rescued breeders, and if the captives there were anything to judge by, this program that captivated his interest now was purest fiction.
But then, there was a great difference between a free human and a slave. Tagen found himself wondering what Daria might look like while she were mating.
Ah, damn this heat.
Tagen’s glass was empty. He took it and the platter of chicken bones into the kitchen and left them in the sink. They would distress Daria there, but then, they would distress her more in the front room. And as long as he was going to distress her anyway, he might as well put them in the place she’d be taking them to clean them anyway. She’d probably spend all day scrubbing those two, measly dishes.
And when she was done, she’d probably mop the floor. On her hands and knees. Her body rocking. Her breasts bobbing. Much like the female on the mating feed.
Oh, what in the hell was wrong with him?!
Nothing’s wrong, he told himself sourly. He was just hot and tired and restless, and the best cure for that was a sound thrash in the sheets. If he were home, he’d have only to take a walk down to Fleet Headquarters and look available. He was Tagen Pahnee, was he not? He would have a female before the hour was up.
Tagen returned to the sofa and the tee-vee. The humans had changed positions, and now the female was bent over the end of the bed, on her knees. The male was caressing her, preparing to enter. Tagen drummed his claws on the side of the sofa, waiting.
The female gasped when the male finally got around to penetrating. Just gasped. Gods. But he was riding earnestly enough, his hips slapping the female’s hocks, making them judder and ripple. Her breasts, Tagen noted, scarcely moved at all. He wondered if it were customary for humans to mate this way, like beasts. Jotan did not. Although their reproductive organs were in very near the same place, it was not quite near enough for a female to be comfortably mounted from behind. But the humans seemed to enjoy it. He wondered, would Daria—?
Why did his mind keep returning to her? How she mated was no concern of his. And the gods knew, she was not about to extend him an offer. Her eyes were on him always, and although she made an effort to converse with him and adjust to him, there was a fear in her, deeply-rooted. It was not the fear of rape, precisely. Tagen had had all too many occasions to see that look in the eyes of recovered slaves. It was the fear of all of him—his size, his power, his eyes, his voice, and yes, his maleness. At the same time, it was a fear that had nothing at all to do with him, one that almost certainly existed before he had ever come into her home and would continue to exist long after he left.
And what of her in his mind? Why not explore that, since she was sleeping soundly in her chamber and he was here watching humans mate. Did he think her attractive?
He didn’t know, having never thought of humans to that purpose. Humans and Jotan were alike in so many ways, and yet, this Daria Cleavon was very different from what he considered an ideal female form. All the same, for all her feminine similarities, he could not quite imagine that body beneath his. She was so small, so slender, so rounded in so many strangely arousing places.
Her face he found fair. Delicate as spun glass, and yes, beautiful in an eerie, human way. The white markings that made half a mask of it threatened every time he saw it to erase the line between the exotic and the erotic. Her eyes, green and blue, floating in a sea of white, were so clear and guileless, open windows to the very heart of her. Her lips, full and pink and gently bowed, were an easy thing to watch as he tried to puzzle out her words.
Humans used their lips on one another when they wooed. They called it a kiss. He had seen it among the recovered slaves he’d known, and he saw it with even more ardor on the tee-vee. It was what they seemed to do instead of biting, but then, a human’s thin skin could never survive the love-bites of a passionate Jotan, a fact made obvious in the flesh of many of those recovered from raided sex-houses.
Tagen raised a hand absentmindedly and touched his own lips. He watched the humans in the tee-vee perform their endless human kiss and wondered how Daria’s mouth would taste. Kissing was an alien and unknowable thing. What did they do with their teeth when they did it? Or their tongues? Where did noses go? It wasn’t just other’s mouths they sought, either, and that raised the question of what was acceptable and what was not. One could kiss a breast, he saw, or a belly or a throat, but what of a knee? An elbow? The hocks, the ears, the toes?
The humans were now suddenly clothed and talking as they navigated a groundcar. Tagen leaned back into the sofa and folded his arms heavily across his chest, concentrating on their words, determined to make this foray into deviancy as educational as possible. His vocabulary was improving, but not rapidly enough. He knew if he could just talk to Daria, she would be a help to him. She was quick, as quick a mind as any officer of the Fleet. Quicker than most of his colleagues aboard his last tour, in fact. Military minds tended toward efficiency rather than intuition and deduction, which was probably why there were so many like E’Var loose in the universe. Predators such as him never lacked for insight.
“Are you an alien?” Daria had asked him, very nearly her first lucid thought. Not, are you a ghost, are you a demon, are you a hallucination, or are you anything at all supernatural. No, she had made that first leap blindly and made it correctly, despite the fact that Earth’s idea of an alien being was nothing like a Jotan. And despite all the awful fear of him that had been clawing free of her, she had never lost her hold on logic. “Where would I go? Who could I possibly tell about you?” It took a formidable mind to remember such things in the grip of terror.