Taken to Lemora by Elizabeth Stephens

7

Raingar

Nob. This is a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. What am I thinking, kissing her like that? Pagh! She’s still finding herself and all that nonsense Merquin spouted. I’m supposed to be giving her space, time.

But I can’t. Because she touched my legs and she asked me about other females and I heard jealousy in her tone, maybe real or maybe just imagined, but I heard it and it was enough.

I pull away from her and she sways forward, like she liked me kissing her and as if she wants me to do it again. I can’t think that far ahead. All of this is too much for me right now. Withdrawing roughly, I go to the chair under the window and plop down in it. I rest my head on the chair’s high back and close my eyes. It’s better if I don’t look at her. My cock wants to devour.

The angry pressure in my half-constructed trousers doubles and then doubles again when I catch her scent. “This won’t hurt, I promise, Raingar,” she says and I chuff. She’s lying. She doesn’t know it, but she’s lying through her straight, square teeth. I’m already hurting but it doesn’t matter a bit because I’m going to keep hurting until she’s finished doing whatever she wants to me.

I hear her hands rubbing together, the sound of something slick between them. And then the smell, delightful and invigorating reaches me. It smells like freshly snipped herbs, the rich, spicy bark of a Sadaran tree, and just a hint of citrus. And she pressed it herself. Just in a few solars. She’s incredible.

The oil makes a slick sound as it melts against her red and brown flesh. I picture her hands, the little red curl by her ear. How far does the red go? How hot are her hands? How hot is the wet, dripping slit between her legs? What does it look like? What do her undergarments look like? Would she let me see her bare if I asked? She is a pleasure female, after all, and she said she didn’t mind it if it was just for one male. I could be that male. The sole recipient of the pleasure she wants and was trained to provide.

My thoughts are no longer mine. My cock has made a journey through my body to my brain and is rooting around in it, destroying all escape hatches, ejecting all reason, taking hold of cannons called lust and desire and firing at everything.

“Raingar?”

“Yeffa.”

“Why are your horns molting? I…was taught that Lemoran horns are one of the toughest materials in the universe — strong enough even to pierce Oosa hides — but yours seem to pain you. Does your pain have to do with the changing colors?”

“They are among the strongest materials in the universe. But they change colors…sometimes…” Tell her. Just tell her. End this charade. To the Grey Zone with Merquin and her attempts to dictate to me how to woo my female. Claim her first, then woo her. There will be time for courtship later, but my cock cannot wait. “They change!” I shout.

“Hmm,” she says softly. “You don’t have to tell me why if you don’t want to.”

“Essmira…” I snarl, but whatever I was going to say next is cut down when she touches me.

Her fingers, slick with the oil she created herself, apply a gentle pressure to the skin around my horns. Whatever’s on her hands is cool, but the temperature of her skin acts as a warming balm that comes right after.

“Essmira!” I heave out a breath, can’t catch my breath, stop breathing altogether.

My chest inflates and my eyes roll back in my skull behind closed lids. There’s a pinching in my lower back as her fingers still around my horns and she says, “Am I hurting you?”

“NOB! Don’t stop!” I gasp, dig my bare heels into the stone floor, try to stop the micro pulses of my hips which are seeking to drive my cock into her soft, pliant body. “Don’t…” I’ve never felt more aroused in my entire existence. The damn trousers are about to explode off of me as they squeeze around my hardening erection. I’m hard as an ohring board underneath her gentle ministrations.

She continues speaking as she massages the skin surrounding the base of my horns oh so ohring gently. “Is the pressure good for you?”

“Is this you behaving professionally?” I hiss, furious at the sudden idea that she’d ask another male this question in that seductive tone of voice.

She stills and starts to pull back, but my left hand reaches out before I can stop it and snatches her wrist. I hold her hand against my horn long enough for her to know what I want before I reach for her waist and, finding it, pull her closer.

She doesn’t speak but she obeys. Her fingers work their way up to the middle of my horns before she drags fresh ointment all the way up to the tip. She ohring…she’s handling my horns beautifully — wonderfully! — fisting them tightly. Does she have any idea that some Lemoran would consider this more intimate than the act of coupling itself? Nob, I think if she did, she’d be horrified, but I’m too much of a bastard to tell her to stop.

I grip her waist more forcefully, fingers digging into her skin as I fully submerge myself in the sensation of Essmira fisting both of my horns simultaneously. Her hands glide up and down from base to tip.

The exquisite pain of her hands touching the grey, flaking part of my horns is nothing compared to the pure pleasure I feel when she touches the white part. It confuses me, the contrasting sensations, but in a way I suppose it makes sense. The white part is hers, why should it hurt me when she claims it?

“I don’t want you using this cream on anybody else,” I say darkly.

“Raingar, I…” She swallows a shaky breath. Her pitch wavers and is enough for me to open my eyes and raise my head. I look into her gaze, hovering only slightly higher than mine even though I’m seated on this low chair and she’s standing to her full height.

“What?” I snarl, “You were planning on using this on other males? Will you lie to them, too, and tell them that you’ll be professional?”

Her lower lip juts out and her chin puckers. She steps away from me, pulling her hands into her chest and holding them there like injured victims of a crime she didn’t mean to commit. But make no mistake, there has been a crime, one taking place in my head. Thousands of males slaughtered for daring to take a single touch from her that is mine by right. My horns tighten and burn as she reads the warning in my eyes and takes a step back.

“Raingar.” She stiffens. “This isn’t easy for me, but Merquin…Merquin said I needed to stand up for myself and I…I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

She can’t meet my gaze. She doesn’t have to for her words to slam into me like a battering ram. I manage to find the strength to brace through them and stand.

She stumbles back — back toward the bed. “Raingar?”

“Get on the bed.”

She looks over her shoulder at it and crosses her arms over her chest. “Raingar, I don’t understand.” Her voice quivers and her scent intensifies around me, an echo of the fresh rain falling outside of our window. Spring flowers covered in dew. The storm at its peak. I need to taste it. I have no restraint.

“Essmira…” I moan, agonized. “Get. On. The. Bed.”

“Raingar, I thought…”

“I thought you wanted to be a pleasure female.”

She frowns, looking torn, looking hurt. “I don’t…”

“I see. I’m the problem. You don’t want to be mated to me. Is there someone else?” I’ve advanced on her far enough now that her knees hit the edge of the bed. She plops onto it, unable to catch herself.

“Raingar, you’re scaring me. I’ve never seen you like this. I…I didn’t mean to make an aphrodisiac.”

I chuckle, though the sound is dark and threatening. “You didn’t need to. It’s your scent. It’s you.”

Her expression hardens and fire enters her gaze, reminding me of the moment she threw the statue at my face. It only fans my desire. Before she can say anything else, I grab the fabric at my waist and rip the front of my pants free of the back, destroying most of her work in the process. She doesn’t look down at my angry cock, though I know she sees it. She does an admirable job of keeping her gaze — and her anger — trained on me.

“I was trained to be a pleasure female. I’m not trying to seduce you. I’m not trying to seduce anyone!”

“You don’t have to try…”

“You said I didn’t have to be a pleasure female. I thought I was doing a good job here as a member of your clan…”

“I don’t want you to be a member of my clan.” I drop my fists onto the mattress on either side of her knees. She tries to pull away from me, but I grab the front of her dress and hold her in place. “I want you to run my clan.”

She freezes. Her big, beautiful eyes blink. “What?”

“You’re my mate.” The words just come out, blunt and without ceremony. I can’t control them. They rappel from my lips like climbers, free-falling into an unknown abyss. “Merquin’s horns only flaked white when she met Librida. White horns mean we’ve found our mates and my horns started flaking the moment I entered the atmosphere of Quadrant One. You,” I accuse.

“Me?” She whispers.

“You,” I say.

I wait for a rejection…that doesn’t come. Because in the next moment, the frustrated fear that had been clouding her expression, making it murky, is wiped clean. A brilliant, clear smile is what’s left. She beams at me.

“You’re serious, Raingar?”

“Yeffa.”

“Is that why you’ve been so mean…you’re jealous?” She gasps and brings a hand to her mouth and, when I don’t answer, she shakes her head and immediately moves onto her knees. “If I’d known, I’d have understood. I would have let you know clearly that I didn’t touch any males like I touch you. I…” She smiles. “I like you. I was hoping you’d choose me for a mate.”

“There is no choosing. The universe chooses. This is Xiveri.” I bow my head so that my horns rest just beneath her.

What I don’t voice however, is that there is a choice. One that’s hers because she has no horns and no ability to feel Xiveri from her hybrid heritage either — at least none that I can see. She has a choice, but I don’t want her knowing it.

“You’re sure it’s me?” She takes my horns in her hands and my shoulder blades bunch beneath my ears, tense…ready.

“Yeffa. My horns wouldn’t have flaked for anyone else and they’re flaking now. Do you see?”

I reach up and blindly fumble for one of her hands. I yank it off of my right horn and we both look down at her palm between us. There are small black flecks on her skin. I look at them and am reminded of a collision of stars. A collision of ships sailing through space. Then I look up at her face. In all its infinite mass, how incredible is it that these two wrecks can find one another like this?

“And I need you. I need relief,” I choke, desperation making my words blunt and clumsy. Embarrassment rushes up my neck, making the heavy muscles in my throat pull. “I just…I’m not a pleasurer. I will need your guidance.”

I tug on the front of her dress too hard, hand curling without my control. The dress is tailored loosely to her shape, but I can still see down the front and catch sight of straps lacing over her breasts. Undergarments. These must be more of them. I groan.

I don’t know why I find them so arousing. Perhaps because I find them so frustrating in the same measure? They act as barriers preventing my gaze from honing in on what it wants. The only thing I’ve sought out these past solars. Every inch of her bare skin. To see how far the red goes.

“Lemoran horns don’t lie. They ache for you. I ache for you everywhere. I can’t stand this, Essmira. Please…tell me you feel…something! Anything.”

And then she kisses me. Her mouth crashes against mine with none of the tenderness I showed her earlier. Instead, her lips part and she bites my bottom lip between her teeth, sucking it into her mouth and sending my mind scattering.

“I can’t believe it. You should have told me sooner,” she says wildly as her arms coil around my neck. She pulls and I follow her down onto the bed, body coming to cover hers. I love the feeling of crushing her into the mattress and I can’t keep any of my weight off of her as I grind my pelvis against her soft stomach.

“The dress,” I snarl.

“Let me…”

But I don’t have patience for her. I grab the collar and tear it down the front seam. Her body comes into view, almost bare, and I’m fairly sure I die in that moment and fall into my greatest dream.

“You…your…the red,” I gasp. My fingers claw at the straps that cross her chest and cup her breasts. I pull and yank at them until they come undone.

A small flicker of pain crosses her face, but she lets me do what I want, so I assume it can’t hurt her that much. I pull and rip until she’s completely naked and sprawled out on the black bedding underneath her. It makes the red in her skin glow vibrantly, like a burning asteroid headed straight for my forehead. I’m undone. I’m going to come.

“I’m going to come,” I gasp, both horrified and elated.

Essmira sits up, as if on command, and grabs my cock with both of her hands. The moment I’m clasped firmly in her oily grip, semen explodes out of the tip of my cock and all over her perfect breasts. Her red breasts.

She’s red from breast to the bare, exposed slit between her legs. Like a suit that covers her entire stomach, the red is flawless across her entire mid-section. The brown and the red clash over her hip bones in perfect lines of symmetry. Her hips and legs are brown all the way down to her feet, except for a single red spiral that covers her right leg and not her left, and ends on top of her right foot.

I grab her by the back of the neck and squeeze as I empty myself all over her body…her face, her chin, her lips. “Open,” I tell her and she hesitates, but only for the first instant. Then her jaw unhinges and she licks my cock clean.

“Your tongue,” I groan. She has a Voraxian tongue. It has ridges riding up its center and they feel ohring fantastic against my cock. “Ohr, Essmira. Your tongue feels fantastic.”

I grab her by the sides of her head and close my eyes as I give myself up to the pleasure that this pleasurer knows how to provide. I pull her forward and she brings her hot mouth around my cock while her nails scrape meaningfully over the sensitive skin of my sack, below it.

My twin spurs are pulsing and sensitive, but there’s nowhere for them to latch — they’re meant for her core — but Essmira has a solution for this too and gently massages them with her other hand. She works me all over, fully, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

I use her mouth to come not once, but four more times before I finally free her. She swallows my seed down every time and when I pull back, my eyes are hazy and glazed. I can barely focus. All I know is that I want to taste.

I push her back onto the bed and kiss a line down her body. I’m fascinated by her breasts and spend an eternity suckling her dark red nipples. I suck hard and bite and grip her waist and hold her still when she squirms.

“Essmira, you feel so ohring perfect,” I whisper and I wish I’d paid more attention to her response as she whispers, “I’m glad, my Lord.”

Instead, I moan loud enough I’m sure they can hear me in the great hall, but I don’t ohring care. I don’t care about anything except for the scent of rain and Walrey honey coming from between her legs. I fall flat onto my stomach and pump my hips into the mattress as I lick every inch of her red mound. It’s swollen and puffy and tastes like the cosmos. A drug made just for me, and I’m devastated by it. An addict from the start.

I shove one finger inside of her, wanting more of her flavor, but her body tenses and I have a hard time sticking a second digit into her tight wetness. “My cock will fit in here, won’t it, Essmira?” I ask, nervous.

I look up her body and her eyes are closed, her jaw and fists are clenched, she isn’t looking at me at all. I frown. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she whispers tightly.

I lick her seam again, finding the folds she has all fascinating. There’s a little nub at the top of her slit as well that feels soft and smooth under my tongue, but when I suck on it, she releases a small yelp.

“What is it now?”

She’s panting. Not like I’m panting, but panting nonetheless. It doesn’t arouse me though, like I feel it should. It’s like she can’t catch her breath. “It’s sensitive, my soft skin. If touched properly, I can feel immense pleasure through it.”

A rumbling comes from deep within me at the thought of bringing pleasure to my mate. My horns start to vibrate, sounding like a gong rung to the tune of the challenge laid out before me. I pull up on the skin surrounding her pleasure center and immediately return to it with my tongue. I lick and kiss and my mind goes ohring wild when she twitches and bucks beneath me. My hips dive into the mattress ruthlessly, rutting it like I plan to rut her body — savagely.

I suckle on her nub and bite it just a little with my teeth. She yelps again and her hips lift from the mattress and against my fingers, still lodged in her body, I feel a rush of liquid. Her inner core starts to tremble, too, spasming around the finger I’ve got inside of her. Is this her pleasure? I caused her pleasure?

I suckle her nub even harder and she shouts and the trembling of her inner walls gets more violent. I shove a second finger inside of her, wanting to taste more. Wanting to taste everything. My teeth nip at her feathery lips and I hold her hips down with my free hand, wanting her still so I can take more from her.

She moans above me in a tight, controlled way, but I want her to unravel like I’m unraveled, so I return to her soft skin and I suck it again and again and again until she comes for me again and again and again, each time spiraling faster than the time she came before. But I want it slow. Longer, more drawn out. Maybe the key to that is inside her body? But she’s so tight!

I manage to get a third finger inside of her, though she squeezes me deliriously as I roughly pump in and out, hoping to prepare her for my cock because there’s no ohring way I’m leaving this bed without having spent in her hot, wet channel.

Her inner walls vibrate around my fingers and, before she’s finished, I move up onto my knees, grab her hand, which is fisted in the sheets, and fit it to my cock. She pumps me and I spend all over her stomach and all over her slit. I rub my fingers through my milky grey seed and plunge them back inside of her.

“I’m going to spend in you again and again,” I whisper, voice hard and gruff. I grab onto her hips and wrench her down the bed, lifting her ass as I position my cock to her weeping wet entrance.

But just before I can shove deep inside of her, my gaze strays to her breasts and I notice something…

“Ohr. Am I coming blood?” My cock feels fine — better than fine, my cock feels magnificent. But there’s a little pink mixed in with the grey on her chest. I reach up and smear my thumb through it and she makes a sound. Not a pleasure sound or a startled one, either. It’s a pained sound.

My gaze flashes to her face and the tower of epic euphoria so quickly constructed within my chest totters and shatters. It hits the ground at the same time that I grab her below the knees and pull her legs together on one side of me. Then I scramble off of the bed away from her. My feet hit the floor and I fall onto my hard ass. Essmira sits up, but she winces as she moves, which only confirms my suspicion.

“I HURT YOU!” I bellow. Outside, the rain which had been gently disrupting the solar’s earlier sunshine releases a terrible wail. Thunder crackles and wind whips into the room, snapping the white cloth hanging from the bed’s four posters. The sky darkens as if it walks hand-in-hand with my mood.

I scrabble on hands and feet away from her until I run into a side table and knock it over. The wood clunks down, unharmed, but sounding like an arrow thudding into a wooden target. Maybe my head, because it must be made of wood for me not to have noticed the entire time I was using her body for my own pleasure that it was at the expense of hers.

“I thought…” I snap my teeth, snarling like an animal while rage makes my voice shake. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Her lower lip is trembling and she’s got water in her eyes that she tries to quickly rub away. “I’m sorry, my Lord. I should have said something. And you didn’t hurt me very badly. It just hurt when your fingers were inside. And I can’t come so rapidly, but that’s okay. It’s not a problem. I want to come for you, my Lord. When you want me to, my Lord. Your touch was wonderful, my Lord. It was just the undergarments that were the problem. I made them from wego fibers. I should have told you, my Lord. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. My Lord.

My Lord, my Lord, my Lord.

My ohring stars.

How far I’ve fallen. What was I thinking?

I lurch up onto my feet and charge at the bed, intending to swaddle her in blankets and race her to Moreth, the village healer, so he could examine the scrape on her right breast and the red abrasions and rapidly darkening bruises scattered haphazardly across her stomach, chest, neck…arms…her…her…

“Did I hurt your…” I start, but by now, I’ve reached the edge of the bed and when I reach for her, hoping to help, she lifts her arm.

She lifts her arm.

It takes me the length of three breaths to understand why she’s holding her arm out in that funny way, but when I do, I crumble. “I’m not going to hurt you!” I shout, but that’s a lie, isn’t it? Because I already did, and didn’t care at all as it was happening.

I race out of the room, shamefully erect cock bobbing in the wind as I reenter the main hall. “MORETH!” My voice booms across every stone, ricocheting back to me along with whispers of shame that make bile pitch in my stomach. “MORETH!”

The creatures in the hall all stop what they’re doing and look at me like I’m mad. I feel mad. I feel crazed and delirious.

“Raingar, are you alright?” Gorman comes out of the East hall, his robes billowing around him and making him look like a king. He should be. And I should be shoved into the lowest kintarr mine for the rest of eternity.

“Nob. Where’s Moreth? I need him. Essmira, she’s…hurt.”

“Wegigichi,” Gorman says over his shoulder, and a Rekkaru comes flying towards us. “Go get Moreth from the village. Tell him it’s urgent.” Then he turns to me. “You know I have some medical training. Maybe I can help in the meantime.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him nob, that I don’t want him to see her like this, but a small, clear thought cuts through the morass that tells me Essmira’s hurt and that’s all that matters. My pride is irrelevant. My pride was taken out back and blasted the moment I saw the wounded look in her eyes and she called me Lord.

Essmira’s already covered herself with a sheet by the time I return to the guest room with Gorman. “Oh, please…I’m fine, really. It’s just a few scratches.”

Gorman moves to her side and conducts an inspection that I watch from the doorway, heel tapping on the ground triple time. Any closer and I’d have to tear his stupidly shaped head off of his narrow shoulders. No male should be allowed to look at her, comes the dark voice guided by my cock and feral, base instincts. It’s not a voice I knew I possessed. But here it is, shouting at me from its position between my legs. Here it is, the reason I’m in this mess. Here it is, costing me the one thing it wants most.

My mate.

By the time Gorman is finished, Moreth has arrived. They confer briefly before Moreth approaches Essmira, all kindness and smiles. Gorman, meanwhile, takes me gently by the elbow and escorts me into the hall.

“How bad is it, Gorman? Did I…”

The kindest, most stoic male in all of Lemora turns to me then and, in the center of the hallway, cocks his fist back and up, high over his head. The pose looks preposterous. It robs me of whatever I was going to say next.

“Gorman, are you mad? What are you…”

And then he punches me right in the nose.

I fall back with a wild wail, tripping over nothing and landing on my ass. I grab my nose, which is leaking pink blood all over my upper lip, and sputter reflexively, “What…what was that for?”

He doesn’t answer me. Why would he need to? I already know.

He just glowers down at me as he readjusts his robes — robes Essmira made him because she’s a good creature, good enough for Lemora, and far too good for me. Once finished, he says, “Her injuries are superficial, but I will tell Merquin that Essmira will stay here this lunar while she rests. I’ll have a cart return her to Merquin’s estate the coming solar. I’ll also let Merquin know that you are not to see the female again in private quarters without an escort.”

I wince, hatred for this male making me want to fight back, but self-hatred outweighing it. I nod as I clutch my upper heart and then rub my forehead. My horns have stopped vibrating. Now they’re just itching again.

“I thought she was enjoying it,” I offer and the words sound so trite and lame that I wince as they hit the bitter air. “Why didn’t she ask me to stop?”

“She doesn’t know how,” Gorman says, picking the scab across my heart to reveal the wound anew. “If it had been an Oosa on top of her, I’m sure she’d have pretended to enjoy it then, too.”

He digs a grave, the bloodthirsty bastard, throws my body in the hole and showers dirt over me softly. I’ve never felt so low. I’ve never felt like this before. I don’t know what to do. “I don’t know what to do. I should go back in. I should…apologize?” I’ve never apologized to anyone before for anything. I’m not even sure I know how to go about it.

“You haven’t apologized to her yet?” I meet his gaze. It’s black and burning. “Raingar, Raingar, Raingar…” He shakes his head, straightens and takes a step back. “I’ll be taking the next few solars in my cabin in the countryside while I reconsider my future within this clan. I’m not sure you are the male I thought you were. And if that female ever chooses to forgive you, I want you to be haunted by the knowledge that it is only because she doesn’t know how not to. I, however, do.”

The male who has been my best friend for as long as I can remember turns from me and walks away without another word. Wind billows in through the curtain when he parts it and steps through, and I see faces — dozens of faces — gathered on the other side of it, all watching me and whispering about their naked clan chief sitting on the floor of the hall wishing…just wishing…

And I’m not even sure for what.

Maybe just some way to make it right.