Page 16 of No Strings Attached (Mated Fates #1)

Bahbi was speechless and nearing emotional overload. His mind had begun to explode when Vi had ever-so-casually suggested that they mate, and it had never stopped exploding since. She planned on mating with him again, even as they were still joined in the first mating.

His self-doubt tried to rise and serve as counterweight to his joy, but he pushed it aside. Later, he could ponder and work through it all. Now was just what Vi had said, taking this miraculous gift the universe had offered and giving thanks.

Bahbi allowed one last brief thought: next time and facing him ! And then he wrapped his arms around her. He widened his legs until they were outside hers, gently pushed her legs together, and locked his ankles over hers. He could feel how the new position changed all the points of contact and sensations shooting through his cock and hoped that the same was true for Vi, before her moan of pleasure confirmed it. Then he craned his head out of the water and put his mouth on her ear.

“Violet…would you…?”

“What, Bahbi?” she asked in a whisper.

“Since we talked about your ability to make self-pleasure, I have thought about seeing you touch yourself. Would you…?” And he took her hands and placed them on her breasts.

She laughed and began to caress her own breasts, gently teasing the nipples. Bahbi changed their position to a slight jackknife, then he began to slowly open and close the knife. Vi’s head fell back on his shoulder, and he had an unobstructed view of her hands working her nipples. His rhythm and her hands were bringing them both to the precipice quickly, and he had the briefest twinge of regret about that until he replayed her saying, “next time,” and he reached down into her slickness.

He couldn’t believe how easy it was to drive her pleasure from here, using this little nub. The first time, he had brought her climax so quickly using it that he thought of it as an orgasm button. And while her climax had triggered his, and it had been the most incredible experience of his life to that point, he had also felt a pang of regret that it had been over so soon.

So, the second time, he had sought to draw it out for both of them, carefully stroking alongside her little button and having the warm water kiss her nipples for him. He had not been disappointed with his results, either, triggering an orgasm in her that started before his and went on well after.

But now he had two new thoughts: next time , of course, and internal pleasure center . He would not be distracted by regretful thoughts that his life’s only sexual experience was coming to an end. He could just give to Vi in the hope of repaying her just a fraction of what she had given him: his life, his freedom, his burgeoning sense of belonging.

They were both panting and getting lost in the pleasure, so it was now or never. “Vi.”

“Hmm?”

“How do I find your internal pleasure center?”

“Hmm? Oh, well, I don’t think you can. That space is kinda filled at the moment.”

“Tell me. I’ll try.”

“Um, well,” she thought, then raised her hand, palm down and index finger pointing down toward her belly. “If you could slide a finger in like this,” she crooked her finger and then turned it, so it pointed at their faces, “then stroke like this.” She moved her finger at the first two knuckles. “Oh, and maybe move your thumb against the outside, but try not to hit the clitoris.”

“Clitoris?”

She took his hand and showed him.

“Oh, your orgasm button.”

She burst out laughing and said, “You know what? I like the sound of that a lot better than the word ‘clitoris.’ It shall be henceforth and evermore referred to as my orgasm button.”

Bahbi moved his finger down to her entrance and started trying to snake it inside, making sure to put more pressure against the spongy tissue of his cock than against her opening. He worked his entire finger in but there just wasn’t enough room to make the crooking gesture she had shown him. Perhaps this was something he could do for her when they weren’t locked together in a mating? Maybe it would be a way of giving her pleasure when they weren’t near water? The thoughts were foreign and came unbidden along with an utterly unprecedented image of him holding her legs open and using his tongue on her little button—driving her to a screaming release.

He was awakened from this foreign reverie by the sound of her moaning, loudly. He had continued the jackknife rhythm and guessed that his finger had found the spot. He increased the pressure and stroked the outside of her slick entrance with his thumb, careful to avoid the little button.

Vi started moaning the words “oh god” and his name, over and over again, her body joining his to increase the jackknife rhythm instead of letting his motions carry them both. He pressed and stroked while his left hand went to her breast to tease the nipple, something she had forgotten in her mounting pleasure. Bahbi knew he couldn’t take much more of her sounds, and words, and arching against him. He was almost desperate enough to work her button when she bowed her back, whole body stiffening, pulled in a huge breath of air and held it, then screamed out his name. She partially relaxed against him, but pulses of pleasure continued rippling through her whole body.

Bahbi’s right hand was locked in place by their joining, but his left arm closed around her tightly and his legs locked around her as his own climax shot through him, the force of it pushing their bodies straight in the warm water and back into the floating position.

Vi lay draped on top of him, boneless and breathing hard. Bahbi felt his cock begin to deflate, freeing his right hand, and he wrapped both arms tightly around her. His throbbing cock began a very slow retraction, as if it regretted the loss of Vi’s warmth as much as he did.

He loosened his arms and pushed his legs down in the water, away from hers, then gently rolled her over so she was upright and facing him. He wanted to look into her brilliant green eyes and see that what they had shared, all of it—not just the mating—was as meaningful to her as it was to him. She held his gaze, a small smile curving her lips, then came forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, laying her head on his shoulder and breathing into his neck. He pulled her as close as he could. They held each other in silence in the warm water, breathing in and breathing out, for a very long time.

Eventually, Bahbi swam them back to the shore, carrying Vi by the thighs as she held on to his neck. He lay them down in a luxurious patch of purple grass, Vi still clinging to him. After a long while, she lifted herself up onto her arms and looked down into his face, smiling wickedly. Then she lowered herself down again until her skin barely touched his now dry fur and rocked her body back and forth across his, eyes closing in pleasure as his fur slid across her skin.

“What are you doing, Vi?” Bahbi breathed.

“I’m just checking to see if this feels as good as it did in my dream.” She stopped, then slid sideways off of him, one arm and leg still draped across him.

“You…you…dreamed about me? About doing that with me?”

“Yes. In the garden.”

“That’s why you made those sounds and called out my name?”

“Yes.”

Bahbi was dumbfounded. Had Vi actually been attracted to him? Thinking about him in that way before they had been dumped into this cavern? He thought their mating discussion had triggered her causal suggestion that they “try out” some alien sex. But if she had been dreaming about their bodies together…

He pushed the thought away. No, he would not look to take more than she had given; would not look to hope for more than she had promised. He would not tie any strings on her, as she had stated they should not do. She wanted to go home. He wondered about her home. Was it possible that they might accept the presence of a Trallian?

“Vi, tell me about your home and your life,” he said, lightly stroking her hair.

“Earth? Hmm. It’s a lovely planet, third from our star, and mostly oceans. There are seven continents, with humans living on six of them. The seventh is at the pole and currently covered in ice, but that’s rapidly changing as the planet warms up. Humans are the dominant species, but there are lots of different kinds of humans. Different skin colors, different features, different languages and cultures. We have a lot of animal diversity, too, but that’s changing as humans spread across the globe and use up all the natural resources.”

“Do you live in cities?”

“Yes, a lot of us. There are many exceptionally large cities across the continents. But some live in rural areas, farmland, or in the mountains. Some live in jungles or on the beach.”

“Do you welcome other species? Which planets do you have commerce with?”

“Um, you mean aliens? No, we don’t have contact with other planets or species. Well, except the Ulu, I guess, who are apparently the ones stealing us. At least half of the people on my planet do not believe there is life anywhere in the entire universe except for on our little planet. And some people think that our societies would erupt into chaos and war if those people were shown to be wrong.”

So much for going with her , Bahbi thought; he said, “Yes, our galactic alliance groups are very careful about handling first contact with new planets for that very type of reason.”

“Officially, we don’t have contact with anyone outside of the Earth. But I guess the Ulus must have been stealing us for a while, since my language is already loaded in your standard translators. Unlike Mister Beastly’s. Also, the Ulus look just like people have described them on my planet, the people who say that humans are being abducted by aliens.” She thought for a minute. “We don’t travel in space, yet. We’ve only sent people to our planet’s moon. We have only sent unmanned probes to other planets in our system, to take pictures and scientific readings, and we’ve only landed those probes on one other planet in our system, I think. The fourth one from the star.”

“How far away is it?”

“Hmm, I have no idea. I don’t know where we are. I guess I’ve been assuming that we’re still in the same galaxy, the Milky Way? Are we?”

“I don’t know this name, Milky Way , but all known habited planets are contained in this galaxy. I do not believe that any species has made contact with other galaxies, yet.”

“OK, we’ll just assume that my planet is in this galaxy, then. I know our solar system is on an outer spiral arm of the galaxy and my system has eight or nine planets.”

“You’re not sure?”

“It’s a matter of scientific debate, whether or not the ninth qualifies as a planet or not.”

“That’s all you know?”

“Well…no. Let’s see. I know that the first four planets are pretty small, compared to the next ones. They are made of rock and metal. I’m not sure how the first two appear from space, but Earth is blue and Mars—the fourth—is reddish. Planets five and six from the sun are gas giants and number six has rings. I think they both have a lot of moons. The last two, if we’re going by the current agreement that there are only eight planets, are ice giants. Bigger than the first four, but smaller than the gas giants.”

“I…um…think there might be some difficulty in locating your home planet, Vi, if that’s all you know. Unless we could locate a species who already has that information, like the Ulu.”

She raised her head off his shoulder to look at him, her face going through a painful series of transformations: confusion, disbelief, understanding, sadness. She lowered her head back down in silence.

He hesitated, then asked softly, “You have much in your life you wish to return to? Family and…home?”

She didn’t answer for a long time, then said, contemplatively, “No, actually. My family has been dead for a while. We were very close, and it has been really lonely without them.”

“Tell me about them.”

She thought about it, “Well, um, my parents. My parents—”

“What are parents?”

“My mother and father. They were life partners, like we talked about earlier. You don’t have parents, right? Just a mother.”

“Right. We may look up biographical details on the warrior who contributed to the litter, but we do not meet them.”

Vi rolled over onto her back, head still pillowed on Bahbi’s arm, but he missed the rest of the contact. “My mother and father were life partners for most of their lives. They met and fell in love when they were in college, around the age of 19. They married…um, that’s when two people who love each other make a formal promise to stay together as life partners until they die…”

Bahbi nodded in understanding.

“Anyway, they married after their first four years of college, then had my older brother, Dave. They raised him while they continued on in school getting graduate degrees. My father studied philosophy and my mother studied sociology. They got teaching jobs in the university and then had me, six years after Dave. So, I grew up around university professors—those are master teachers who are very knowledgeable in one subject, like science, math, the arts—and a big brother who adored me. Our home was a wonderful place to be, always full of interesting conversations on every subject and music from my parents’ record collection. I had a happy childhood.” She smiled as she said this last.

“What happened to them?”

“My brother…he rebelled against the lifestyle of my parents as he grew up. Eventually, he joined the Marines—that’s a type of military, he was a soldier, although he would have given me a tongue lashing if he heard me call him that word—,” she chuckled. “He was sent to a warzone on another continent and was killed in the war, 10 years ago. He was only 21. I thought my parents would die of heartbreak.” She added quietly, “I thought I would, too.”

She sat up and hugged her knees, leaving no part of her still in contact. Bahbi wanted to reach for her, but he let her continue.

“I was 15 when he died. After a really bad year for the three of us, I started to focus all of my energy on school and getting into a good college. I wanted to follow in my parents’ footsteps and become an academic, so they would be proud and happy. I think I did it for that reason more than anything else.”

“When I was 18, I left home and started college. A month after I started, my parents were killed in their home during a home invasion. And then I was alone in the world. I threw myself even deeper into school, because it felt like the only thing I had left of them, you know?”

Bahbi nodded. He didn’t truly understand, her life and society bore no resemblance to his, but he understood the emotions she must have been experiencing. Hadn’t he just been taken from the only home he had ever known and sent alone into the galaxy?

“And I’ve been doing that for the last seven years. Without really having any meaningful relationships or connections. My family used to go hiking and camping in the Olympic national forest every summer when I was growing up, so that’s a tradition I’ve maintained since losing all of them. And I’ve gone alone, because I never had anyone in my life that I felt I could share that with.”

She turned to look at him and said, “I’ve never told anyone any of this. Not even the few lovers I’ve had.”

Bahbi sat up and held her gaze, “I’m honored that you would choose to share this with me.”

She continued regarding him, seeming to wonder at the fact that she had shared with him. Then she visibly shook something off and said, “Anyway, that’s where I was when the fucking Ulus took me. All by myself in the middle of a fucking forest. Stereotypical alien abduction bait—I might as well have been wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘Probe Me’.” She shook her head, then smiled and looked off in the distance, “At least it wasn’t the goddamned bigfoot.”

Bahbi had let the companionable silence between them stretch out as long as he could stand while trying, and failing miserably, to keep his gaze from sliding up and down her naked body, continuously returning to those small, rosy-tipped breasts. He knew it would be a while before he was ready for NEXT TIME , but he longed to simply touch her and enjoy the feel of her wonderful body beneath his hands. And maybe his tongue. He also wanted to clear her mind of the sad subject matter they had been speaking of. He could tell that the double realization that Earth might be impossible to locate and that there wasn’t really anything pulling her back there if they did, weighed very heavily on her.

He reached an arm around her back, then slid the other under her knees and pulled her across his lap before she even realized what had happened. She squeaked out an “Oh!” and then smiled up at him in amused shock. He pulled her close and smiled, then gave in and nuzzled into the side of her neck, running his tongue up and behind her ear. She repeated, “Oh” in a much different tone, drawing it out into a sound of understanding and pleasure.

“Vi,” he whispered, while running a short claw gently around the rosy, pink tip of one breast and watching it pucker into a hard point, “I feel an uncontrollable urge to lick you here. Is this allowed?”

She had become a little breathless and smiled when she said, “Not just allowed. Encouraged.”

Before she had even finished speaking, he had lifted her off his lap to bring the peak to his mouth, rolling it around with his tongue before pulling it in to rub against the row of short incisors between his long canine teeth. She moaned and squeezed her thighs together. He shifted the angle he was holding her to get at the other one, which was just as responsive, and Vi became even more breathy while her head dropped back in pleasure.

“And the rest of you?” he asked, a little more urgently. “Licking?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “Bon Appetit.”

He lay her gently back on the grass and spread her legs to place his knees between them.

She was panting and flushed. He bent down to the small, furry patch at the apex of her thighs, but she said, “Wait,” and reached for him. He crawled up and held himself above her, looking into her eyes.

She smiled and said, “Now rub your fur against my skin. This is exactly how our bodies were in my dream.”

Bahbi felt a sensation jolt through him, but he couldn’t identify what it was. He thought it might be…pride. He still couldn’t believe this incredible female had dreamt about him touching her. Him! He lowered his body until only his fur made contact with her skin, then slid it up and down her several times, feeling hot trails created where her stiff nipples grazed him in lines. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she moaned with pleasure.

She said, “I don’t know why that feels so… oh …good to me, but damn, it…really does.”

It felt insanely good to him, too, but he had somewhere he desperately wanted to be. Bahbi slid slowly back down her body, stopping to lick and kiss each nipple before moving back down to her sweet sex, already glistening with her arousal. He ran his tongue once through her folds and she cried out, hips bucking toward him in response. Then he was lost to the taste of her and the sounds of her pleasure as she moaned and softly said his name. He hungrily slid his tongue between button and entrance, then dragging it around the insides of her folds, then back, occasionally flicking it lightly across her little button or probing inside her entrance. As the sounds of her pleasure were escalating, he moved to circle her little button with his tongue until she tensed and screamed out so loudly that it was a few seconds before the sounds stopped bouncing from the rock walls.

Her body melted back into the grass and the only sound was her rapid breathing. Bahbi let his body relax where it was, turning sideways to lay his head on her lower belly and running his hand along the inside of her right thigh.

After her breathing settled into a slow rhythm he recognized as sleep, he closed his eyes to rest while sending mental commands to his body to be ready for NEXT TIME when she awoke.

He had started to drift towards sleep himself when he heard Acken’s voice boom through the space from the far side, “VI! BAHBI! ARE YOU IN HERE?”