CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Suvi

When I woke up, I was warm.

A little too warm, actually. I groaned, wondering how the hell I’d fallen asleep against the metal wall of a furnace.

But that furnace apparently had an arm. And when I struggled, it locked hard around my waist, tugging my back tighter against it.

“Too hot,” I moaned, slapping sweat-dampened hair away from my forehead and opening my eyes. Although opening them didn’t allow me to see much. Disoriented, I blinked at a vast, leathery sky of dark green dotted with gold stars. It was such a beautiful sight that I almost didn’t mind the confusion. So I just stared blankly at that weirdly opaque sky until I realized in the hazy way of just waking up that it was Skallagrim’s wing tossed over me.

No wonder it’s so hot. Not only was his wing producing heat, it was trapping it, creating a starry tarp of insulation over top of me.

“Skallagrimmmmm,” I moaned. But the arm at my waist held fast. Scowling, I started poking at the wing, which thankfully withdrew even though the bulky arm didn’t. Sunshine flooded in. I gave another wiggly attempt at escape, then froze when the unmistakable ridge of a bulge behind Skallagrim’s slit nudged at my ass.

“Skallagrim!” I hissed. “Are you...”

I had been about to say, Are you getting hard? but at the last second I faltered. “Are you asleep?”

He gave a smoky-sounding grunt that could have been an answer either way.

“I have to pee!”

He grunted again, this time more awake-sounding and more growly, but ultimately snaked his arm out from around my waist. I scooted forward, worried he’d change his mind, then got clumsily out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. After getting all sweaty in sleep, I decided to fill the tub with some water, washing first my body and then the clothes before hanging them, wet, along the edge of the tub. My robe was in here, clean from last night, and I put it on before heading back out into the main room.

Though I was the one who’d taken the time to get ready in the bathroom, Skallagrim was somehow the one who actually looked more put-together. Last night his hair had come loose, and one look at him as I’d fled the bed this morning had shown me a sleep-tangled dark mane surrounding the body of a half-asleep alien behemoth.

But he was no longer half-asleep, nor was he in the bed at all. He was standing, his hair tied back in a lustrous braid. And he was wearing clothes! He wasn’t naked, or wearing the temple robe. He was wearing honest-to-goodness trousers, something I’d never seen on him before.

I... I kind of liked it.

His chest was bare, his posture excellent, his wings in a relaxed tuck behind him. My eyes scraped down the muscled planes of his torso, tracing the hard V shape that I now knew led down to the place in his scales that split open to let out his two cocks.

But I couldn’t see that area now, because he was wearing trousers. And he looked damn good in them.

They were obviously a Bohnebregg garment, though Skallagrim was bigger than any other Bohnebregg male I’d seen so far. This resulted in the fabric being rather snug across his trunk-like thighs, and the pant-legs looked a couple of centimetres shorter than I would have expected, but on the whole, the look suited him.

“You look nice,” I said, feeling heat tickle at my cheeks.

His posture got even better if that was possible, spine straightening and shoulders pulling back.

“You should know,” he said, “that I intend to woo you.” He said it casually, breezily. Like he’d just announced that he planned to take a walk this morning instead of lobbing some life-altering declaration at me.

“You... What?!”

“Woo you,” he repeated. He cocked his head a little. “Perhaps you have no word for that in your language. I plan to court you.” His eye darkened to deep amber. “Seduce you.”

He was moving, now. Moving on those long, strong, trouser-clad legs towards me.

“Uh, is that really necessary?” I said, stumbling backwards.

“It is,” he purred, advancing.

My back hit a very poorly-placed wall, trapping me.

“But you already... we already...”

We already came all over each other and fell asleep wrapped around one another last night.

Oh God.

“You do not yet want me as I want you.” His tone was light. Too light. Like it was masking something, trying not to fracture under the weight of hidden hurt. “I have decided to change that.”

“You can’t just change it!” I stammered.

“I can if I woo you.”

He said it in such a matter-of-fact way. Never mind the various layers of resentment and awkwardness built up between us. Never mind that he probably had no idea how human courting rituals even worked. Never mind that we were two entirely different species.

He was Skallagrim, stone sky god and Bohnebregg prince, a juggernaut of alien determination, and everything about his stance and words and tone told me that he would figure it the fuck out no matter what it took.

“But... you don’t have to. The starburn...”

“I want you to want me without that,” he said with quiet force. “To set your heart on me without heat forcing the way.”

One of his hands grazed down my throat, gently sliding between the parted flaps of my robe until he palmed the place between my breasts. He wasn’t even touching them, but my nipples hardened anyway. Warmed honey pooled at the base of my spine, oozing towards the place between my legs.

“That heart I’ve set my sights on is beating very quickly now, little star,” Skallagrim murmured, bending to drag his snout along my jaw. His great thigh nudged between mine, exploding sensation through my core. “And your cheeks are red again. Are you embarrassed?”

I could hear the smirk in his next words, damn him. “And if you are, is it because you’re embarrassed by my intentions, or by your own reaction to them?”

I was saved from answering (though not from further embarrassment, lucky me) by a loud, insistent growl from my stomach.

Skallagrim had been with me long enough to know exactly what that sound meant. He chuckled against my throat, the sound like melting chocolate dripping onto my skin, and then withdrew. I’d been annoyed at the wall a few minutes ago, but now I was frantically grateful for it, because I was fairly certain it was the only thing holding me upright now that the delicious hardness of Skallagrim’s thigh wasn’t nestled below my pussy.

“First part of wooing a human,” Skallagrim said, as if he were an expert on the subject already, like he had a fucking PhD, “is to feed her.”

Hungry, horny, and unable to argue with him, I nodded. And when he offered me his hand, I took it.

There wasn’t much left to eat in the apartment, so we ventured outside. As soon as Skallagrim opened the glass door, the pleasant sounds of morning life floated in. Jolakaia and Zev’s home wasn’t in the more crowded heart of Callabarra near the temple. Instead, they lived nearer the edge, allowing a little more space around their home for a garden at the back and a few animals called bikri that were knee-high and generally shaped like crabs but with scales instead of shells. Apparently, they produced eggs, and I could see them from up here on the balcony, scuttling along at the sunny edges of the garden behind the house, like spidery alien chickens.

In front of the house was the street. Nothing fancy – not like the shiny embedded river stone in the temple’s courtyard. Here, it was hard, packed dirt, worn into trails in places by the wheels of the vehicles that the Callabarra people used to traverse the city. They were kind of like bicycles, I supposed. They had two wheels, but required no peddling, and the seat was different. Instead of sitting on a small seat and having your legs hang down towards pedals or footrests, the seat was a wider, lower bench, bringing Bohnebregg knees towards chests almost in a sort of squat, with a steering apparatus propped up between the legs instead of high handlebars at the front. Apart from a small metal cylinder attached to the main frame, I could see no other engine or power source, but the vehicles did indeed seem to move all on their own at the pull of a lever.