I wrapped my body around hers and held her as the lightning outside moved with the sky.Through the ground.The rocks.The stormglass trees.Energy pulsed through the cave entrance in steady, gentle waves that didn't retreat until the storm finished its work and moved on.I was content to hold her.The cave was warm and quiet and smelled of us.
She lay against my chest and breathed with the careful, deliberate evenness of a person who rebuilt herself from the inside out.Everything had changed for her.For us.There was no denying our bond now.Or her desire.She had given herself to me.
If she chose to leave me behind, to deny me now, she would take my soul with her.She was my storm.My perfect storm.
I held her and gave her all the time she needed to feel me around her.
I didn't speak.I understood her well enough to know she needed the silence — needed it the way she needed her scanner and her data, as a structure to stand inside while she processed what had just happened between us.What was happening to her body.I would wait.Her extraordinary, relentless, analytical mind would adapt.Accept.
My nodes were quiet for the first time since she had arrived on my planet.Not dormant.But different.They would never be what they had been before she fell from the sky.But the blazing desperate pressure I had been carrying since the moment I felt her presence had resolved into something deep and warm and permanent.Something totally, completely her.The weight of her against me.Her heartbeat.Her scent filled every breath I took with a totality that felt less like sensation and more like direction.Like north.Like the direction all my compasses would point for the rest of my life.
She spoke before I expected it.
"How much energy do you think just went through us?Have your people ever measured it?How do you survive so much power moving through your bodies?"
I breathed against the crown of her head and held back laughter.Of course she took scientific notes about the explosive orgasms we'd just shared."The Skybond is a gift.We do not measure it."
"How is this possible?How is your planet doing this to me?"She looked at her own hand — at the faint luminescence that still traced her veins.At what the Storm did to a nervous system on this planet."I could feel your nodes through my palms.I could feel—" the pause had a rawer edge now, something she wasn't sure she had permission to say "—your body.I could feel what you felt."
"I know.I felt the same.You are part of me as well."Part of me.Such an inadequate way to describe what now existed between us.
Outside, the storm's lightning came in single, separated flickers.Retreating.The cave air smelled of ozone and rain and the warm combined scent of sex.Of her skin.Just her.A scent I would spend the next fifty hours trying to memorize before she decided to leave me.My world.This new life.
I knew this world was strange to her.My physical appearance, alien.Still, I would do whatever I could to try to convince her to stay.I would do anything if it meant touching her never became just a memory.
As if she read my thoughts, her next words confirmed my darkest fear."This doesn't change anything," she insisted.
"Does it not?"I pressed a kiss to the top of her head and searched for patience.For the words to reach her stubborn human heart.“I told you this would change everything.I meant my words.We are mated now.The Skybond is complete.We are one.”
"I don’t mean with you.I mean my people will still send a salvage crew.They'll want everything here, once they realize…" Her silence made me ache to force the truth from her.A truth I knew she wasn't ready to trust me with."I have to get our ship off this planet.We still have time.I need those crystals so I can fix the reactor.I can't let them?—"
"Can't let them what?"
"Never mind.It doesn't matter."She sat up.Found her clothes.Her jacket.She dressed with quick, efficient movements."This was a mistake."I watched her pull the cuffs of her jacket straight with trembling fingers and deliberate precision.She refused to look at me as she donned her physical armor.Shut me out.
"This was a physiological response to an external stimulus," she said."That's all this was.They'll destroy everything.The corporation will destroy this planet.We can't do this.I can't do this."
I looked at the back of her head.At the dark hair that still held the static charge of the cave, the fine ends lifted slightly in the residual electrical field.At the line of her shoulders, set now with familiar rejection, military precision.At the person who had held a dying ship in the air over my people and walked out of the wreckage alone.I could no longer see the female who kissed me like I was the only solid thing in the storm.She was, once more, alien.Foreign.Separate from me.Her heart and her storm hidden from me again.
"Perhaps you are right.We should go."I agreed not because I believed her, but because we needed to return to her ship and save the village.I knew what would happen if her ship's engine exploded in my people's valley.More importantly, I needed to get this situation under control so I could return to the most important mission of my life — seducing my mate.Making her fall in love with me.Convincing her to stay.
She rose and moved to the cave entrance.Fully dressed, she stood and watched the last of the lightning retreat across the valley, her scanner in her hands, her back straight, the wall around her heart rebuilt brick by brick with a thoroughness and efficiency that made my entire body ache.
Not impatience.Not frustration.No.What I felt for her now was quieter.More certain and very, very patient.
I had touched what lived behind that wall.I had felt her nervous system run through mine.I had experienced her hands tightening desperately, possessively in my clothing.Heard the sounds she made when there was no wall left to hide behind.
None of that — not a single moment of it — was abiological response to an external stimulus.
It had felt like the planet exhaling.Like the Skybond locked into its final configuration.Like the thing the elders spent their lives trying to describe to warriors who hadn't found it yet.A mate.A pure bond.A gift from the storm itself.A merging of souls.We were stormbound.
"The storm is letting up.Ten minutes," she said.Steady.Professional.Her internal wall fully reconstructed."Then we move."
"There is no rush."I sat against the obsidian wall and felt the warmth that lingered in the nerve clusters of my palms.I breathed the air of the cave that still smelled of both of us.I watched the last of the storm's lightning flicker out across the valley.
Fifty hours remained on her precious clock.Fifty hours to help her save her ship and her crew.To touch her.Kiss her.
To make her want to stay.To choose me.To trust me to face whatever outside threat she feared.