Page 32 of Border Control

I can't shut him out if he really wants to see, he's a powerful psychic, but I really, really want to be able to.

‘This is mine,’I try, straining to be wholly present with Law-rah.

‘Come on, Nevare, let's find Shade,’Arik says. I owe him a thousand thank yous.‘Indeed; you'll be on my nightshifts for the next Earth week,’he sends in a tight band to me.

I don't care, I'm deliriously grateful to slide back into my skin with Law-rah. The human is somewhere behind me judging from the soft puff of her breath, and then the click of her weaponized shoes tells me she's walking back in front to inspect me there.

I take deeper breaths, the strain beginning to bed into my chest muscles, adding a deeper layer to the sensations rolling over me.

“May I touch your stomach?” she asks.

“Yes,” I breathe, and her firm, possessive touch alights on my right hip, then moves across my abdominals. They’re stretched out, taut, my scales shimmering in all directions as she brushes me, no doubt rippling in different colors to match the emotions chasing one another through my body.

The pad of her fingers slips down and onto the lip of my canvas pants, and I jerk in surprise.

“I’m curious what you have down here,” she says, her voice throbbing.

My arm muscles tremble not from the work–I could hang here for hours–but from the mere idea of her exploring me.

“Do you want me to see?” she asks.

I do, but from the imaginings Nevare uncovered, I know what I have won't be what she's expecting. “I might not please you.”

“I'll be the judge of that.”

I drop my head. My chest feels tight, but in a good way. “Then yes. Yes, please.”

“Good, I love how honest you’re being,” she says, and no praise from my commander has ever felt so fulfilling.

She tugs at my belt and quickly unlatches the mechanism while my mind buzzes. Her deft fingers find the ties and then my coverings lighten, loosen, slide down my hips a little as they gape open.

I tip my head back at the delicious agony of exposure, hating and loving it, the squirmy feeling in my stomach in counterpoint to the heat dancing over my scales. What will she think of me? Will she be afraid, or eager?

As if she’s read my mental waves, she says, “You can open your eyes if you want.”

I crack my eyes open to watch her, drinking in the flush on her face, her red lips parted and her tiny pink tongue playing over her blunt teeth. Her fingers slide into the opening of my pants, and the heat turns fiery. I let out a low moan as her nails scrape my carapace before I snap my jaw shut tight.

“What's this?”

Fully opening my eyes, I look down. My sleek carapace hangs at her eye level, the darker purple shade nearly black in the half-light of the shed.

My throat has dried to baked plascrete. “It's a protective casing. Parthiastocks might be attacked by lawbreakers, and this keeps my one weakness safe.”

“You sound like Superman. That’s a story we have about a man with superhuman powers who only had a single vulnerability, too. He was an alien as well, come to think of it.” Her words wash over me as her nails click against the hard shell covering my most intimate organs.

I press my hips toward her, acting on some buried instinct that has nothing to do with Parthiastock training.

I want her to hold me. I want her to touch me.

Where’s this desire coming from?

She breathes, “So. What do you look like?”

“Do you want me to show you?” My breathing goes ragged.

“Please.” I can hear the undercurrent of her voice: a slight warble, a wobble. She's excited, too.

I forcibly make my carapace relax, the hard casing easing open with a hiss.