Fucking dangerous thought.
I came through the hatch into the violet pre-dawn and found him crouched at the tree line with one broad hand pressed flat to the ground and his head tilted, listening to something I couldn't hear.The storm nodes along his spine were banked to a soft ember-silver in the low light — present and steady, pulsing with a slow rhythm that I recognized because it somehow matched the beat currently living in my own chest.In my core.In every cell.I felt like a tuning fork and his presence kept hitting me, keeping me on edge.Body humming.Too aware of him.This—this place—was too much.He was too much.
He turned to look at me before I'd made a sound.
The sight of him in full daylight, without the disorientation of the crash and the alien dusk doing anything to soften the reality of him — hit me like a physical gut punch.Actually painful, like a fist squeezing my chest.I had to fight for air.For logic.Control.
I was so screwed.This wasnotnormal.I needed medical scans.Something.Something was wrong with me.My reaction, my need for him, was not normal.So not fucking normal.
He stood, the morning light falling across the broad lines of him in a way that made the wordenormousfeel newly, wholly inadequate.Not brutal.Nothing about him was brutish, despite his size, despite the pale branched lightning marks across his shoulders that spoke of energy I didn’t fully understand.He wasmadefor this world in a way that was almost incomprehensible.Every line of him belonged here, in this valley, in this exact color of electric light.He was part of this world the same way the stormglass trees belonged, and the obsidian cliffs, the pulsing ground and the charged air.
He inspected me with those silver eyes that had been living in my sleepless skull all night.
"Your heart rate is elevated," he said.
"I didn't sleep well."
Something moved across his face.Too fast to name."No," he said."Neither did I."
He let that sit between us for exactly one second, and then he turned toward the jungle and said we should move.I told my heartbeat it needed to behave itself, grabbed my pack and followed him into the trees.
The jungle swallowed us whole.
Daylight in the stormglass forest was nothing like night.At dusk it had been eerie and still.In the morning it wasalive— light bending through the fused trunks in fractured prisms of violet and copper, the bioluminescent fungi still glowing soft blue at the root systems despite the dawn.The air hummed with constant electric frequency in a way that pressed against my skin from all sides like a warm current of flowing water.
I was intensely, helplessly aware of Sorik moving through the forest beside me.
His presence was a physical thing.Not invasive — he kept a deliberate two feet of distance that I suspected cost him more than he showed — butsubstantial, the way a storm front is substantial, the way you feel weather before it arrives.The way I imagined it would feel trying to ignore a Bengal tiger pacing in one’s living room.
The heat of him displaced the cool morning air against my side.His scent reached me on every slight shift of the breeze —something dark and rich that had no equivalent in my experience, something that bypassed my professional filters entirely and spoke directly to a part of me that had been inconveniently, recently awoken.A hungry part.Longing.Want.Desire.A thousand names for things I hadn’t felt for a man in years, if ever.
I focused on the scanner in my hands.
The scanner became the most interesting object I had ever encountered in my life.
The crystal formations on the cliff face were growing clearer in the data — extraordinary conductivity readings, electromagnetic profiles unlike anything in the xenomineralogy database.I was building a mental extraction model, running interference calculations, doing the precise and demanding intellectual work that had always been my most reliable armor against things I didn't want to feel.
That armor was damn near useless this morning.He was too… everything.
"Can I ask you something?"I asked, when twenty minutes of walking had done nothing to quiet the low electric hum that seemed to live in my pussy like a live electric wire constantly letting off sparks.Sparks.Everywhere.In my chest.In my core.Pulsing in my veins like blood.Sparks of lust.Desire.Obsession.Need.Him.They were all him.
"Yes."
I kept my eyes on the path."The Skybond.Is it always like this?"
Silence stretched.I felt as if he weighed his words carefully."Yes.The bond is immediate and powerful."
"Always?For everyone?"
"Based on the teachings of the elders, yes.Always."His voice was careful and very even, as if he wase afraid he was going to scare me.Joke was on him.I was already freaking the fuck out."It does not build over time.It does not resemble something else.When it happens, our mating nodes recognize the match and that recognition is—" another pause, and underneath his control I heard something primal.Instinctive."—total.My nodes have been at full resonance since the moment I saw you."
His words had me rubbing my thighs together to try to get some relief.Discharge some of the energy building in my body.I felt like a pressure cooker about to explode.
"I have never in my life carried this much energy," he admitted.
I didn't look at him.I absolutely could not look at him right now."That sounds uncomfortable."I knew, because I was about to crawl out of my own skin.I wondered if the feeling was better or worse for him.More natural?Less… alien?
"It is."Flat.Honest."It is also the most alive I have ever felt."