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“Deal? I was not aware we’d made a deal.”

“Well, we did. So, pucker up, buddy.”

Lit by the light of his own eyes, his face took on a bemused expression. But that expression quickly darkened into something much more terrifyingly like hunger as I brought my face to his.

It would just be a chaste little kiss. That’s what I’d planned, anyway.

But what I hadn’t planned for?

The absolute explosion of sensation that rocked me when my lips touched Tenn’s. Every nerve came to painfully bristling life. One brush of my mouth on his, and my nipples were hardening, my skin tingling everywhere.

“Oh!”

Tenn swallowed my gasp, his mouth surging, hot and open, to meet with mine.

“Where do I put my hands?” he panted against my mouth a few seconds later.

“Where… Wherever you want,” I whispered shakily.

“Don’t tell me that,” he groaned. “You might not like the places I’d put them.”

What places?What places?!

The question screamed through my head as Tenn crashed his lips to mine once more. I held back a shameful moan, opening my mouth to the claiming onslaught of his tongue.

Fuck me. How was he already so good at this? He’d never kissed someone before, and here he was, making me shiver and clench my thighs together like he’d been doing this all his damn life. Was this a Zabrian thing, to conquer so completely whatever it was you put your mind – or mouth – to?

Or was this simply something unique to Tenn?

I didn’t have an answer, and I gave up on trying to find one. Instead, I simply submitted completely to the rough, ravenous glide of his mouth. He finally decided where to put his hands, settling the firm heat of them on my waist.

This time, I couldn’t hold back my moan. My tongue slid against Tenn’s, and my back arched towards him without me telling it to. I wanted his hands to slide up. To cup my breasts. Run those calloused palms across the sensitive peaks of my nipples.

This was bad. Really, really bad. Poor Tenn had asked me to try out a kiss to satisfy his alien curiosity, and now my horny human ass was about two seconds away from ripping off the beautiful satin shirt he’d made me and sticking my bare tits in his face.

I couldn’t bear the confusion that would cross his expression if I did that. Cringing, I remembered when he’d measured my chest back at Fallon’s. He’d thought my boobs were mylungs.How the hell would he react if I started dangling the odd, floppy bits of flesh he’d thought were literally internal organs in front of him?

The humiliation of that thought alone was enough for me to break free of the fever of his kiss. I drew away from him and sucked in oxygen like I’d been drowning. Maybe, in a way, I had been.

“Well. Um. There you go!” I said with false cheer. I patted Tenn’s firm chest. It heaved beneath my hand. His eyes were so bright I couldn’t even look him in the face.

“That’s it?”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’”

That was probably the best fucking kiss I’d ever had, and here he was with the nerve to ask a question like that?

Then again, this was Warden Tenn we were talking about, here. The man practically seemed to be made of nerve.

“That’s it,” I said, smiling so hard and so fake that it hurt. “That was a human kiss.”

More like a full-blown human make-out session…

“I… I see. Very illuminating.”

If anything was illuminating, it was those big white lightbulb eyes Tenn was giving me. He pulled one hand from my waist, scrubbing it roughly down his face, blocking out the light for a few seconds.

“What did you think?” I hated myself for asking the question. Hated the insecurity in it. Hated that I wanted him to say something to make me feel better about all this.