No! Stop it, idiot!
I guillotined that thought before it manifested. I could not get caught, no matter how sexy it sounded while lust-dazed. If Farr’vye saw me now, he’d think I was a total freak. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, I didn’t want to lose his company.
So I needed to finish. Fast.
Unfortunately, the fastest way to do that was...
Don’t think about Farr’vye staring at you. Don’t think about how big and strong he is, or how easily he lifted you from those thorns. Don’t think about how warm his chest was, or how he disregarded his own safety to help you, or how safe it felt to lay down next to him…
And definitely don’t think about how he said he was sterile, and how he could come inside you over and over with no consequences…
A strangled cry tore itself from my throat. I fell forward, one hand bracing my body and the other hand pumping faster until I shot thick jets inside my suit. The aftershocks never seemed to end. When they finally waned, I stopped bucking my hips, exhausted and spent. My trembling limbs gave out, and I collapsed on the grass.
It felt fucking incredible.
But as the orgasm ebbed away, familiar anxiety began crawling in from the dark edges of my mind. It was the embrace of a hard-won sleep that tore me away from them and into unconsciousness.
I woke to a gorgeous violet sky. Although most of my sight was tinted by the face shield, a single patch was vivid and beautiful in the daylight, and the lavender color glimmered like jewels.
Blinking, I struggled to make sense of it. The sky on Eukaria was never purple, except at dawn and sunset, and it was clearly the middle of the day. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I was staring at Farr’vye’s back.
His firm, muscular back.
The memory of last night flooded back, and heat surged to my cheeks. I sat upright abruptly, biting back a whine of embarrassment.
But as I sat up, I noticed a new thing to stress over.
The bright patch in my vision was not caused by the sunlight.
There was a huge hole in my shield that exposed my bare visage to the world.
Gasping, my hands flew up to cover my face.
“Oh no, no, no,” I mumbled in despair.
Farr’vye’s shoulders straightened. “Are you awake?”
Out of habit, I almost yelled for him not to look, but he wasn’t. His back was deliberately turned to me. He knew that I didn't want him to see.
This was bad, but not catastrophic. Not yet.
I tried to calm down. “Yes, I’m awake.”
“I am sorry about your face shield,” Farr’vye said somberly. “When I found you unconscious on the hill, I tried to pick you up carefully, but the damage was done. A piece of the shield chipped and fell away.”
An onslaught of information hit me at once.
Farr’vye found me asleep on the hill.
He’d carried me back down.
And my face shield was totally and utterly fucked beyond repair.
Slowly, as if defusing a live bomb, I lowered my hands from my face. Raw, unfiltered daylight touched my face. It was warm. Despite my rising panic, it was soothing.
But it didn’t fully calm me down. Preparing myself for the worst, I assessed the shield’s damage. Hairline cracks had spread across the rest of the material; a warning of what was to come. The single chip wasn’t a one-off. Soon the entire thing would crumble, and my face would be exposed forever.
“Farr’vye,” I croaked. “Did you see?”