Blade savored the moment of entry. He always had, from the first time he'd ever had a woman. There were lots of other pleasures in sex, of course, but this was certainly one of the biggest and best. From the way Crystal closed her eyes and let her mouth sag open, Blade suspected she felt the same.
In fact, this was the best Blade had ever felt. He couldn't put his finger on exactly why. So he put all his fingers on Crystal's breasts. They were skilled fingers, as quite a few women had told him. So did Crystal, although she didn't use words. She kept her eyes closed and moaned quietly, then not so quietly.
Blade tried to keep quiet for a while. He was just about to lose the fight when he realized what was happening to make this sex different from all the other times.
He and Crystal were in telepathic contact. Only slightly, less than he'd ever had with Cheeky, but now that he knew what to look for, he recognized the odd feeling in his mind. Odder than usual, because he had the sense of both entering and being entered, of being both himself and Crystal.
He gasped, partly in triumph, partly because he couldn't stay quiet any more. Then he realized something else. Crystal was close to her climax. Either she hadn't had a man in a long time or the telepathic link was increasing her pleasure.
It wasn't doing so badly for Blade, either. He knew that his own control was slipping-slipping, the devil! It was just about gone, he was on the edge, he was going over-
He stopped. Or rather, he was stopped. Crystal was not only in his mind, but she was passing through his mind into his body. Into one particular part of his body.
She was holding back his climax until she reached her own.
It made sense. Blade knew that, with the small part of his mind that still held the power of reason. A very small part, by now. When it came to analytical thought, being on the verge of climax was almost as distracting as being in the middle of it.
He also wasn't sure he liked the sensation. Physically, it was marvelous. It was agony, but it was also delicious, and he wouldn't have minded it's going on for hours.
But this amount of control by the woman? For all Blade knew, the women were supposed to crack the whip in sex among the Uchendi. He had just enough old-fashioned male vanity to resent her control. He also had the sense to suppress his resentment because Crystal was reading his thoughts. She would detect any hostility.
Then she might retaliate. Blade doubted that his manhood was the only part of his body she could control while they were linked telepathically. Her father could certainly do more, and only sheer luck had saved Blade from harming the Guardian in their meeting. He wouldn't have the kind of control he needed to do that again, not this time, not with Crystal all around him, warm and tight and sliding furiously up and down, her pubic hair tickling him, swaying forward until her breasts brushed his chest, farther forward until she could bite his shoulder, her arms tightening around him until she was plastered against him. His control was going but so was hers…
Blade didn't groan. He howled like a madman as his hips bucked and thrashed and pounded himself into Crystal. The woman clung frantically to him as her pelvis took on a life of its own, as if he was a log she had to ride through foaming rapids.
At last she screamed, a scream muffled in Blade's chest and her own hair. She screamed again, then the scream turned into happy sobbing.
At last Crystal was silent and Blade caught his breath. She lay on top of him, still snugly fitted to him, and giggled.
«I caught you by surprise, with the Voice. Didn't I, Blade?»
«You did.»
«You say the Voice is not unknown among the English, just not lawful or much taught?»
«Yes. All the English women I knew who had the Voice were unlawful for me to bed. So I never had the Voice with a woman at the same time I was in her.» He grinned. «Next time I'll know what I'm doing.»
She laughed out loud. «You mean, this was your first time with a woman. You-ouch!» He pinched her admirably firm and rounded buttocks.
«No, it was not my first time bedding a woman. Nor will it be my last time bedding you.»
«I certainly hope not!»
It wasn't.
Blade and Eye of Crystal took to each other with enthusiasm, tenderness, and laughter. Blade would have enjoyed her company even without the sex, or the sex without the telepathy. Having everything made it just that much better.
Crystal taught Blade a few things about telepathy in sex. He discovered that he could arouse her by simply projecting the image of her writhing in climax. She promptly returned the favor. They found that if she brought him to climax by fellatio while they were in contact, she would also climax, nine times out of ten.
They discovered a lot of other things, which Blade knew he would have to report to Lord Leighton when he got back home. They would make interesting reading, and not entirely because of their value for the study of telepathy. For the first time Blade didn't like the idea of talking about his sex life in Dimension X as frankly as the Project required. He'd be revealing things he'd never thought were there to be revealed!
However, that didn't alter the fact that he was learning a lot about telepathy while he was having fun! If having Crystal's every little response written down in Lord Leighton's files helped give the Project controlled telepathy-well, they'd just have to be written down. This was all the more important, now that Cheeky was almost certainly gone for good.
Once he and Crystal became lovers, Blade found that he didn't think about Cheeky for days at a time, and when he did he didn't miss him as much as before. He wondered how much Crystal knew about Cheeky, and whether she was doing anything to affect his memory. Whether or not it was deliberate, he was grateful for the healing she was giving him.
Because he was so grateful, and for other reasons as well, Blade could never quite bring himself to explain to Crystal how soon he might have to leave her. She seemed to sense it anyway, and was remarkably cheerful about the prospect.
«We are good as we are, Blade. If we tried to be different, we might not be as good. My father says you are a man who has traveled far, and my Voice tells me the same. You would not wish to stop traveling, and if I asked you to you would be angry. Nor would I care to have as husband a man who might spend so much time away from my bed-Blade, have I hurt you?»
«No.» How to explain about Zoe, who'd left him for just about that reason, with the Official Secrets Act buggering up things even worse? He'd thought that memory and its pain were dead and buried, until the Guardian's probe of his memories showed him otherwise.
Eye of Crystal wasn't worried about being loved and left, but her father worried for her. Or at least Kyarta told Blade that, as nearly as he could understand. The Guardian's wife was handsome and charming and by no means stupid. But she kept changing the subject on a whim, and she never used two words when five would do half as well.
«He thinks you ought to be named Distant Eagle,» Kyarta said. «But that would be using an old name too soon after the man who brought it honor died."' She spent the next ten minutes telling him about the dead warrior Distant Eagle, before remembering that his name had really been Gray Eagle.
«He fears I will travel on and leave Crystal grieving?» Blade finally asked.
«Oh, yes,» she said. Another twenty minutes went by as Kyarta related tales of all the young women among the Uchendi who'd been loved and left during the last ten years, talking as if she'd known each one personally.