Chapter 2: Waking Her With His Mouth
The song was still there when he opened his eyes.
Not sound, exactly, but something beneath sound. A vibration that rode the edge of hearing, like whales calling from the deep. It came from her skin, from the slow pulse of the bioluminescent patterns that mapped her body like drowned constellations. The jellyfish above cast their light through the membranous ceiling in slow waves, and each wave made her own light answer.
Marcus lay perfectly still.
Her weight was warm against his side. Her breath was warm against his chest. One long leg had tangled with his during the night, and her thigh was pressed hard against his hip, the muscle taut even in sleep. Her hand still rested over his heart, fingers curled loosely, the mother-of-pearl nails catching the drifting light.
He should move. He should slip out from under her and find a corner of the room to occupy until she woke. He should rebuild the wall between them while she wasn't watching, while her eyes weren't pinning him in place with that golden, knowing glow.
He didn't move.
The collar hummed against his throat. It had been quiet since last night. Quiet in a way that felt almost like consent. But now it stirred, and the hum traveled down into his chest, into his gut, into places he'd spent his whole life keeping locked down.
Not an order.
A pull.
The distinction mattered. He clung to it. This wasn't her forcing his hand. This was something else. Something that lived in the space between the collar's magic and his own traitorous blood.
Her hair had draped across his chest while they slept. It drifted now with that impossible underwater current, aqua strands shifting over his skin like they were exploring him. Where the tips brushed his bare chest, a faint tingling spread, cool and electric.
He exhaled slowly. Tried to name what he was feeling.
Hunger was the closest word. But not the hollow ache he knew from long patrols and longer firefights. This was a different kind. This was the hunger of a man who'd been starving for years without knowing it, who'd convinced himself the emptiness was just how things were meant to feel.
His hand moved before he told it to. He laid it flat against her hip, and her skin was so smooth his palm slid without friction, down over the curve of bone, down until his fingers found the crease where her thigh met her body.
Xylara didn't wake.
Her breathing stayed slow and even. Her patterns pulsed at their resting rhythm. But something shifted in the air—a charged quality, like the moment before lightning strikes. The scent of crushed ambrosia and ozone thickened in the room, and it was her, it was coming from her, her body answering his touch even through sleep.
Marcus stared at the ceiling. Watched the jellyfish drift. Listened to the whisper of tendrils brushing the air outside the membrane.
Then he slid down the bed.
He moved slowly, carefully, easing his body out from under her weight without disturbing her. The liquid mattress rippled softly but gave no sound. He positioned himself between her legs, and her thighs, warm and muscled, fell open without resistance.
The light between them was soft and shifting. He could see everything.
Her cunt was slick, already wet, and the bioluminescent patterns that covered her stomach and thighs converged on the space between her legs, where the light was brightest, pulsing in time with her slow heartbeat. The glow illuminated the folds of her flesh, the small, hard nub at the apex, the opening that glistened in the drifting light. She smelled like salt and flowers. She smelled like the sea.
Marcus's mouth watered.
He hated himself for it. Hated himself for wanting this. Hated the fact that he was about to do exactly what the collar wanted, maybe exactly what she wanted, and that he wasn't sure anymore where the compulsion ended and his own desire began.
He leaned in.
The first touch of his tongue was tentative. A single, slow stroke up the seam of her cunt, barely a taste. Her skin was impossibly soft, impossibly warm, and the flavor of her exploded across his senses—salt and sweet and something that crackled like static electricity. Her patterns flared bright, a sharp pulse of light, then settled back into their rhythm.
Her hips shifted.
Marcus froze.
Her breathing had changed. Still slow, but deeper now, and something in her throat moved on a quiet sound that was almost a moan. She was dreaming. Or not dreaming. Either way, she hadn't woken.
He could stop. He could pull back and pretend this never happened. She'd never know. The collar hadn't ordered this. Whatever he chose here and now was his.
He lowered his mouth again.
This time he didn't hold back. He dragged his tongue flat and slow up the length of her, savoring the slick heat of her flesh. Her hands found the sheets and curled into them. Her thighs, which she'd opened in sleep, spread wider and her hips tilted up to meet his mouth, an instinct as old as life itself.
He tasted her again, deeper, pressing his tongue inside her, and she made a sound that was not a moan but a sigh—long, breathy, satisfied.
She tasted like a storm. Like ozone and honey and something bitter underneath that kept him from confusing this with sweetness. He liked the bitter part. It felt honest.
His hands slid up her thighs to hold her open. His thumbs pressed into the crease where her legs met her hips, and he felt the drum of her blood beneath the skin, faster than she'd been sleeping, faster than resting. She was waking up, or she was rising toward something, and her patterns flickered between dim and bright like lightning behind clouds.
He found the hard nub at her apex with the tip of his tongue. It wasn't like a human clit. It was rounder, softer, more of a small mound than a pearl, and when he closed his lips around it and sucked, her whole body jerked.
The sound was short and rough and completely involuntary. He looked up along the line of her body and found her eyes open, golden and glowing and unfocused, staring down at him through her tangle of hair.
"Marcus?"
She said his name like a question. Like she wasn't sure if she was dreaming. Her voice was rough with sleep, low in her chest, and she lifted her head from the mattress just enough to see the sight of a human man buried between her thighs.
His tongue was still on her. He didn't pull it away.
"Did I order this?" she asked.
"No."
"I didn't think so."
He watched her understand it. Watched that glow brighten in her eyes, watch the corners of her mouth curl. She let her head fall back onto the mattress and her fingers found his hair instead, tangling there, not pulling him anywhere, just holding him.
"Interesting," she said. "This is the first thing you've chosen since you woke up with my collar on your neck."
Marcus pulled his mouth from her long enough to speak. "I haven't chosen anything yet."
"Your tongue is on my cunt, human. That reads as a choice."
"Maybe the collar made me do it."
"If the collar had made you do it," she said, and he felt her thighs shift against his shoulders, luxuriant and slow, "you would have eaten me right there in the arena while the court watched. The collar forces obedience. It doesn't invent desire."
She had him there, and they both knew it.
Her hand in his hair tightened, a small, demanding pressure. She didn't say the word. She didn't need to. But this time, when he lowered his mouth, it wasn't because the collar pulled him. It was because he was done pretending.
He ate her like he'd been fasting.
Long strokes of his tongue, slow and grinding, dragging through her wet heat from the tight hole at the bottom to the mound at the top, again and again until her breathing cracked into a rhythm of gasps. He lapped at her like she was the first water he'd found in a desert. He pressed his face into her until his nose was buried and his jaw ached, drinking her down, feeling the slickness coat his chin and his mouth.
Above him, Xylara's head thrashed side to side. Her aqua hair spread out across the mattress in a moving halo, rippling outward in waves like she'd thrown a stone into still water. Her patterns had gone nearly white, blinding pulses of light so fast they were almost constant.
"Fuck," she hissed, which he had not expected to hear in her regal voice, and something dark and satisfied twisted low in his gut.
He worked two fingers into her while his tongue stayed on her clit. She was slick enough that they slid in easy, deep, curled up into that spot near the front wall and pressed. Her hips came off the bed. Her thighs clamped around his ears, locking hard enough to ring them, and the whole rhythm of her breath broke apart into something rough and stuttering.
"Don't stop. Don't you fucking stop."
He didn't. He never could have. Even without the collar, he couldn't have. Her body was arched up tight beneath him, every muscle drawn to wire, her heels digging into his back. She made him no more her slave in that moment than gravity made him a slave to falling.
His tongue wouldn't rest. He worked her with his mouth like he had something to prove, curling his fingers and lapping at her clit in a quick, merciless rhythm until her voice climbed and her patterns strobed and her hand in his hair went from guiding to clawing.
She came hard.
A long, shuddering, full-body clench, her cunt squeezing tight around his fingers, her thighs snapping shut around his head. Her light flared so bright the whole chamber turned gold, and outside the membrane, the jellyfish answered—dozens of them, all around the ship, pulsing in the same frantic rhythm, like she'd shouted across the ocean and everything alive in it had heard and agreed.
She rode it out against his mouth for a long time. Then her legs fell open, and she lay panting, spread out across the liquid bed, staring at the ceiling.
Marcus lifted his head. His chin was wet to the jaw. He wiped his mouth on the back of his arm, slowly, watching her.
Xylara was quiet for a while. Long enough for the jellyfish outside to settle back to their slow drift. Long enough for her patterns to ease from white back down to a gentle amber. Her hair settled too, spreading onto the mattress, exhausted along with her.
Then she said, "You're going to need to work on your manners."
"Ma'am?"
"You didn't ask permission."
He laughed—a raw, hoarse sound, half real and half shock at his own mouth. "You just told me the collar doesn't invent desire. Which is it? You want me to choose, or you want me to ask?"
"I want both," she said, turning her head to look at him. Her golden eyes were hazy and content. "That's what being owned is. You choose, and then you ask anyway. It's not a puzzle, human. It's a relationship."
He sat back on his heels, between her open legs, and looked at her. Really looked. The aloof princess who'd collared him in front of an army looked wrung out and warm, dressed in nothing but her own skin and her own light, watching him like he was the most interesting thing to ever walk into her life.
"I'm not yours," he said.
"Of course you are."
"No." He said it slowly, deliberately. "The collar is yours. My body is on a leash, that's true. But this—" he gestured between them, at the shine on her skin and the ache in his jaw, "—this wasn't a leash."
She considered that for a long moment. Her fingers traced an idle line along the inside of her own thigh.
"No," she said at last. "It wasn't."
She reached for him. She hooked one foot behind his knee and pulled, and he came down onto the bed beside her, and her hand found the back of his neck and drew him in.
Her kiss was deep and unceremonious. She tasted herself on his mouth and made no comment about it, and her teeth caught his lower lip in a way that felt like a warning and a promise at once. When she finally let him go, her forehead rested against his.
"Here is the lesson for today," she murmured, close enough that he felt the words on his skin. "This morning, you came to me with no order. That tells me more about you than any duel could. My proud human. My stubborn, defiant human."
Her hand slid down his stomach. Down past the waistband of the loose trousers they'd left him in. He hissed through his teeth as she wrapped her fist around his cock.
"I'm going to enjoy owning you," she said.
Then she released him, rolled over, and stood up out of bed as if she hadn't just done anything at all. She walked to the corner pool, unhurried, her bare feet silent on the warm crystal floor, her hair drifting out around her in its slow, impossible current.
Marcus stayed flat on his back, staring at the jellyfish through the ceiling, breath coming hard.
The collar hummed, warm against his throat, and he could not honestly say whether it purred with satisfaction or whether that was just him.
The water in the corner pool rippled as she stepped in. Steam curled up around her thighs, up past her hips, catching in the drifting strands of her hair like mist caught in a web. Marcus watched her from the bed, still flat on his back, still hard, still trying to decide whether he was furious or grateful.
She didn't look at him. She washed herself with slow, lazy strokes, dragging a cloth of woven kelp across her arms and shoulders and the hollow of her throat. Her patterns had settled to a dim, steady amber, the color of coals at the end of a long fire.
"Are you going to lie there all morning?" she asked.
"I'm weighing my options."
"You have exactly one option," she said, wringing out the cloth. "Come here."
The pull came with the words—gentle, the collar threading just enough compulsion through his limbs to remind him it could. He stood. He walked. His bare feet found the warm crystal floor and carried him to the edge of the pool, where the water steamed with the scent of crushed ambrosia and the bitter herbs she'd scattered across the surface.
She rose out of the water.
Six feet of her, dripping, hair fanning out and dripping and moving in currents that didn't exist. The light from the jellyfish above ran down the planes of her body, oil-slick and gorgeous. Her breasts were small and high and the tips of them were the same amber as her patterns, and the water beaded on her skin like it had been told to.
"Get in," she said.
Marcus got in.
The water was hot enough to sting. The herbs floated around his waist and dissolved against his skin, and something in them made his muscles loosen whether he wanted them to or not. He stood in the pool facing her, six inches shorter and twice as aware of it.
Xylara closed the distance.
Her hand came up flat against his chest. She pushed. Not hard. Just firmly enough that his heels found the smooth ledge under the water and his back found the wall of the pool.
"Here is what I want," she said. "I want to be clear, because when I fuck you, I want you to know exactly what you're agreeing to. Is that understood?"
"Christ," he said. "You really don't do subtle, do you."
"I'm a princess of a warrior race. Subtlety is for people who lose."
She pressed closer. Her breasts flattened against his chest. Her thigh slid between his legs and pressed up against his cock, and the contact was a shock of heat through the water. He sucked in a breath through his teeth.
"You came to me this morning without an order," she said. Her mouth was at his ear, her voice a low murmur that vibrated down the column of his throat. "You put your mouth on my cunt because you wanted to. I've had claimed soldiers, Marcus. I've had men who obeyed me because the collar would choke them if they didn't. I've never had one who chose me first."
"I didn't choose you," he said, which was a lie, and they both knew it.
"You're choosing me right now."
Her hand slid down between them, under the water. Her fingers closed around the base of his cock, and she held him like she was testing the weight of a weapon. Marcus's hips jerked. He bit down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper.
"Tell me you want this," she said.
"I want this."
"Tell me like you mean it."
"I want this." Louder. Rougher. His own voice startled him.
Xylara smiled against his jaw. Then she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him down onto the submerged ledge, and he sat in the hot water with his knees bent and his cock standing up out of the water like the last mast of a sinking ship.
She straddled him.
One leg at a time, her thighs sliding along the outsides of his, her hands braced on his shoulders, her cunt hovering an inch above the head of his cock. The light from her patterns pulsed down onto the surface of the water, and the whole pool glowed gold.
"You're going to want to hold my hips," she said.
Marcus gripped her hips.
Xylara sank down onto him.
It was slow. She took him an inch at a time, her thighs trembling, her breath coming in short controlled pulls through her nose. She was so tight it hurt—a deep, electric drag of pressure that made his eyes water and his fingers dig bruises into her skin. Water lapped over the edge of the pool and spilled onto the crystal floor.
"Fuck," she breathed, when she was fully seated. "You're bigger than I expected."
"I get that a lot."
"Shut up."
She started to move.
At first it was slow—a long, grinding slide up until only the head of him was inside her, then back down, all the way down until she was pressed flush against his pelvis. Every stroke sent water surging against the walls of the pool. Every stroke made her patterns flash brighter, until the whole chamber was lit in pulses like a lighthouse in reverse.
Marcus held her hips and let her set the pace. He watched her face. Her golden eyes had gone out of focus. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth. She looked like she was doing math in her head.
Then the slow strokes stopped and her hips started to slam.
She rode him hard and fast, water splashing, breath punching out of her chest with every drop of her hips. Her hair whipped around her head in wild, directionless loops. The light from the jellyfish above flickered in time with the light coming off her skin, as if the ocean itself had leaned in to watch.
"Grab my ass," she ordered, and he did, both hands cupping the hard muscle and pulling her harder onto him.
The angle changed. Something in her broke. She cried out—a real cry, not a grunt—her back arching, her nails digging into his shoulders, her cunt clamping down on his cock in waves.
"You like that, don't you," he said. It wasn't a question. His voice was wrecked, low and mean.
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I like it." She was gasping now, hips still working, still slamming, losing rhythm. "I like your cock. I like that you're not fighting it. I like that the first thing you did this morning was eat me out like you'd been paid to."
"Maybe I was. Maybe I've got a thing for alien royalty."
"Maybe I've got a thing for humans who talk too much."
She leaned down and kissed him—sloppy, wet, all teeth—and the kiss did something to him that the collar couldn't. His hips came up off the ledge to meet hers. He took over the rhythm, driving up into her while she braced her hands on the rim of the pool and let him.
Water everywhere. The floor hot under his back. Her thighs locked around him, heel to spine. Harder now, no more games, just the two of them going at each other in the glowing water like they were trying to end something.
Her cunt tightened around him like a fist.
She came first. Her whole body seized, her back bowing, her mouth open on a sound that had no vowels. Bright white light pulsed off her skin in concentric rings, and out in the dark beyond the membrane, the jellyfish flashed in answer, wave after wave of them, all the way out to the horizon.
Marcus held on for four more strokes and then he was gone—hips jerking, teeth gritted, coming inside her with a groan that turned into her name without his permission. She rode him through it, grinding down, mouth against his neck.
The two of them stayed there after, panting, the water settling around them.
Xylara was the one who eventually moved. She lifted herself off him with a wince and slid down against the wall beside him. Her patterns had gone the color of banked coals. Her hair draped across the surface of the pool like an oil slick of aqua light.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"You didn't ask permission," she said at last.
"I know."
"I'm not angry."
"I know."
"Tomorrow," she said, "I'll take you to the cells. You need to see what happens to my people's claims when they go wrong. Not for punishment. For education."
Marcus tilted his head against the wall and looked at her. She looked back. The gold was fading out of her eyes now, back to something almost human.
"You're trying to make me want to stay," he said.
"I'm trying to make you useful." She stood, water sluicing off her body, and held out a hand. "The wanting is your problem."
He took the hand. She pulled him up out of the pool, and the collar hummed against his throat, and this time he was sure—sure as anything—that the hum was just him.