“Are you certain?”

“I don’t see any other options. Do you?”

He puffed out a wistful breath.

“Being separated from you has not been an option for me since the very moment I found you.”

I supposed that was true, since being with me was apparently the only thing tethering Skallagrim to sanity.

“We only have to do it once, right?” I blurted.

The sudden shift in conversation seemed to catch him off-guard.

“Sleep once in the bed?” he asked. “You mean to stay in Callabarra only one more night?”

“No.” I flushed. “I mean... To cure you, or whatever. We only have to mate once, right?”

He stiffened so instantly, so thoroughly, it was as if someone had replaced every limb and muscle and scale with pure stone.

“I cannot say for certain.” He paused, and the next words he spoke grated harshly, sounding rusty, like they’d been lodged in his throat for years and it was only with great effort that he could remove them at all. “But, yes, I believe that to be the case.”

I nodded.

“Alright. We’ll sleep here together, side-by-side, until this starburn thing happens. We’ll do what we need to do.” Oh God, my cheeks were on fire. “And then after that, we can figure out how to find the other humans again. Maybe your memory will come back and you’ll remember some way you know of to track them down.”

The man could cross the universe with a beat of his wings and a bang of his fist. It seemed insane that he wouldn’t be able to use his skills and experience to find the ship. Or maybe he could go seek help from someone like Aeshyr...

Lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t see the ragged span of hurt ripping its way across Skallagrim’s face. Not at first. But when my eyes settled on him again, he quickly composed himself.

“How very kind of you,” he murmured. His voice was strained, maybe even sarcastic, but I couldn’t quite tell. “How very generous. To offer your body up at my convenience, as my one and only cure. Like I am one of the temple patients who merely needs a bandage and a condescending pat on the head before you send me on my merry way.”

“Well, what else could you possibly want?” I cried, throwing my hands up in defeat and confusion. “What else can I say? Yes, Skallagrim, I’ll fuck you and then I’ll marry you and we’ll live happily ever after, all hunky dory?  That makes no sense! We barely even know each other and if I hadn’t helped you get your mind back, you probably wouldn’t have spared me a second glance before you killed me back on that other planet! I will do what you need. What we will apparently both need, for fuck’s sake. And then? It will be done. So, I’ll ask you again. What else do you want from me?”

“Everything!” He said it with such brutal force that it shook me like he’d bellowed the word, even though he hadn’t. “I want everything you have to give! Everything that I have already lost to you, river help me!”

He advanced on me so quickly that I immediately stepped backwards, only for my legs to collide with the bed. I toppled, landing clumsily on my ass, my hands thrusting out beside and behind my hips to catch myself. Skallagrim towered above me, points of illumination glowing madly between his scales and along his flexing wings, the windows behind him turning him into a silhouetted god of shadow and light.

“I want your words and your vows and your bond in marriage. I want your human mouth smiling against my scales as I hold you. Want your voice screaming my name as I rut you. I want the willing, open greed of your cunt.”

The way I’d fallen left my thighs splayed on the bed. He stepped insistently between them, widening them with the girth of his huge legs. Heat poured through me, squeezing me inside.

“I want your precious heart. Your today and all of your tomorrows. I want everything, Suvi. And I want it forever.”

We were both still wearing our white temple robes. Skallagrim’s belt had come loose, and the robe hung at his sides, open down the middle. My eye went straight to his groin, where there was an unmistakeable swelling behind the scales there.

Oh God. Now? Already?

Dread mingled with a hot stab of horrifying desire.

“Are you...”

“I am not starburning yet,” he hissed out. A throb pulsed between his legs, and the scales split there slightly, like a seam opening. I should have looked away, but I couldn’t. My eyes were fixated there, and I was breathless with the thought that those scales might part further.

“But I cannot imagine how the starburn could possibly make me want you more than I already do,” he rasped.

He spoke through tight fangs, then let out a strangled groan of defeat as the split in those scales suddenly opened fully, without warning.

He really does have two cocks.

That was my first thought, when the stiff, heavy organs bobbed outwards and towards me. Not, Oh my God he needs to put those away, or I should run now.

Nope. It was a simple, dazed admission of his honesty. He did indeed have two cocks. Alrighty, then.

We stared down at them, both of us surprised, but Skallagrim more so. He glared downwards at his own body like it belonged to someone else, someone he didn’t like very much. Someone he couldn’t control.

My mouth went dry as I examined his genitalia. I tried to do it with a clinical mind, to tell myself I just needed to know what I was getting into. But the way my gaze roved over him was not with detached curiosity.

It was with heated fascination. Paska.

The two cocks glistened, slick with some kind of moisture already. They were a deep, beautiful green, much darker than the emerald of his scales. The kind of green that spoke of sunless, silent forests in winter, or seaweed swaying beneath the waves. They appeared to sprout together from some unseen base in Skallagrim’s slit, forming a jutting, up-and-down V shape in the air between us. The lower one was the larger of the two, heavy and huge, ringed at its fat tip with little bulges. Those bulges continued along both shafts, I noticed, almost looking like a pattern of scales but much smoother. Even the smaller, higher cock was massive, larger than most human men could ever hope to come close to. The bottom one was like a club. Like a weapon you’d use to smash in someone’s brains in battle.

For the first time in ages, Skallagrim’s alienness came slamming down on me like a fist. Even with our recent disagreements and arguments, he had still been Skallagrim. Maybe I didn’t feel like I really knew him lately, but it was in the way that I might not know a human man who’d hidden things from me or who’d done things I didn’t like. I’d grown so used to him that I barely noticed the scales, the snout, the fangs or wings anymore. He was just... Skallagrim. The man I’d spent more than a month with. The man who’d taught me to speak, who’d fed me, cared for me.

Who would kill for me.

But here, now, faced with the swelling, weeping monstrosity of his cocks, the reality seared through me.

He isn’t human.

You are going to mate with someone who isn’t human.

Someone who wasn’t human, I’d thought.

Not something.

Even like this, splayed and so terribly alien in his body’s lust, he was a man to me.

A man who, against all sanity and reason, I was precariously close to reaching for.

A man with two big, green dicks.

God help me.

“You said,” I croaked, “Something about a... a knot...”

“Yes,” Skallagrim ground out. His hands were in fists at his sides. “I will develop a knot during the starburn.” And then, as if anticipating where my mind would go next, he added, “I do not know which shaft it will be.”

This wasn’t even his final fucking form? His dicks were going to transform like a goddamn Pokemon and become even more dizzyingly large and intimidating than they already were?