Page 18 of Alien Jeopardy

He scratches at the base of his horn again.

I repeat the motion, pointing at the tip of his dripping talon, and then to my scratches, waiting for him to tell me something I know I won’t be able to understand anyway.

This is getting old really fast.

I start to do it again, pointing to his talons and to my legs—mind getting duller by the moment, heat getting, well, hotter, by the moment, too—when his arms scoop me up, and those dripping talons scrape down my back.

My eyes roll back in my head at the pure fucking pleasure of it, another orgasm building from the pressure of his talons on my skin alone.

Heat builds, his mere touch fanning the flames I’d done a pretty okay job of keeping at bay, when it clicks.

If there was any doubt that whatever is dripping from his wings was making me horny, it’s gone now. I’m about five seconds away from sticking my hands down my shorts and finishing myself off.

My breathing’s rapid, and his golden eyes devour me as I stare up at him, open-mouthed, needing him frantically, knowing in my head that it’s not real, that it’s some biological response to what he’s done, when a strange beeping song fills the air around us.

A drone plunges into the clearing, and Ka-Rexsh growls, pulling me into his side and wrapping a wing around me protectively.

My heart skips a beat because I might not ever admit it again, but being treated like a fragile little princess might just do it for me. It’s either that or the maybe-rabies venom melting my neural pathways.

Who’s to say?

I am a connoisseur of all things alien fanfic, and though this would tick a few of my favorite tag boxes in a story, living it is an entirely different kettle of fish.

I peek out from around his wing, trying my very best not to hump his tree-trunk thigh and mostly succeeding, and catch sight of a thick chunk of writing. In bold letters, a logo screams across the drone’s shell in English, and then again in the same font in a language I can’t make heads or tails of.

I force my hips still mid-hump, my jaw going slack, the headache redoubling behind my eyes.

Mated and Afraid.

“Oh,shit.”

It dawns on me at the same time the alien nuzzles the top of my head with his nose, murmuring alien nonsense at my obvious distress.

“Fuck me sideways and call me Clippy.”

We’re not just partners. We’re not mates in the way Australians mean it, either.

Nope.

We’remated-mated, in the way a lot of the alien species mean it. I’ve done minimal actual research on the few alien species we know about on Earth, thanks to the Federation declassifying some of their documents a couple years ago. Binging fanfic about aliens only gets you so far in the oldknowledge bin, but thanks to that, mated is absolutely a term I’m familiar with.

It's the most common alien fanfic trope, after all.

Mated means forever to most of them.

Which means that it isn’t maybe-rabies venom.

I swallow hard, staring at the metal box emblazoned with that colorful logo.

It was mating venom, and if my alien fanfic habit has taught me anything all, it’s that the venom’s started something pretty damned serious.

I’m in deep shit, and—I’m in heat.

CHAPTER

SIX

Ka-Rexsh