Page 26 of Taken (After the End #6)
Chapter Sixteen
Lacchus
We ride out the storm together in her underground bunker.
We pile mattresses across the floor of the room with the strange and wonderful walls.
She can’t take me again in the night, and I’m not sure I can rally for her, either.
The time in the shower about broke my cock in half.
And I’m grateful that we’re both too weak to ravage each other.
If we’d had more energy, then I might not have asked her about the walls and the beautiful images smeared across them.
“I pay-en-ted them.”
I shake my head. “What is that?”
“To paynt?” She smiles. “So glad you asked. Stay still for me. This might take a while.” And then, she spends the next hours doing something extraordinary.
She paints my likeness in a way I’ve never seen.
She studies my body, and then, out over the Barrens landscape she’s already depicted, she paints me exquisitely.
She paints me once, at a distance, and then again just my head and torso. Then she repeats the process all over after asking me to shift into my Mpo form. Her talent is extraordinary.
“You will bring these paints with you when we return to the tribe, yes?” I ask her stormily.
She laughs like there is nothing pressing in this world or any other as she places her paints carefully in her sack and closes it using an unusual contraption she calls zip-per.
She returns to me in the bed and we dim the lights, using a friend she calls PAM that speaks to her through the entire ship now that she’s discarded her bangle.
I assure her she’ll receive many other bangles in my care. She’ll receive whatever she needs.
“I know,” she tells me as she burrows against my chest, and I pull flimsy blankets over our bodies. “But I already have what I need.”
“As do I. All I’ll ever need.”
She sighs, and in the quiet, so quiet I nearly believe I imagine it, she says, “Is this what love feels like?”
I do not answer her aloud, for I know the answer already in my bones.
Instead, I kiss the top of her head, and we sleep coiled around each other like knotted rope.