He had seen naked human females in the course of his career, and he knew that Daria’s bared sex would be the same as any Jotan female’s. His hand, slick with the cream she had given him, became her. His mind embraced the illusion, firing new waves of Heat outward from the core of him, until each pass of his hand was a torment. His body, separate from the playacting of his frantic imagination, came slowly to release. His quick-cum coated his fist and belly, never drying fully before new slicks covered him.

‘Friends,’ she had said. ‘I want us to be friends.’ And in his distraction, he had mistaken her meaning. He had thought he’d finally won her. Heat, still dull in the new hours of this miserable day, flared fast outward through his body at the sound of those words, at the meek and hopeful acquiesce on her human face. He had put his hand on her, feeling her skin smooth and cool beneath his hand, already imagining their bodies locked together in frenetic carnal battle. What remaining shreds of his once-thought great strength of will had been spent in keeping his mask of calm as he tried to warn her, to ready her for his possession of her, only to hear her puzzled laughter. ‘I just want to be friends, I’m not going to bed with you.’

He had not been so crushed by disappointment since his first application to the Fleet had been rejected. His heart actually seemed to stop in his chest before slamming back into action with a pang of anguish. And for an instant, just an instant, he had thought of seizing her, throwing her down on his borrowed bed and battering his way inside of her.

When she had first come to his door, he had frozen, certain that she had somehow known what he had done the night before, when cold showers and four tall glasses of iced water had failed to take back the rock-hard swelling of his shaft or the terrible itch of his churning tsesac. He had been pacing the lower reaches of this alien house, gripping and working at himself in useless effort to drain himself of Heat, and he had tried to go to his room and ended somehow in hers.

Her room was dark, the window open to admit the moon and a thin, unhappy breeze, and she lay in her bed in a tangle of naked limbs. Her human breasts were bared, full and rounded and eerily arousing to him, darker at the center where they came to a tip. He had watched his hand move toward her, felt his thumb graze lightly over her smooth, firm flesh, and felt the small, dark circle stiffen at his touch.

He had knelt by her bed, one hand massaging his rigid shaft, the other caressing, careful and soft as moonlight, at the human’s breast. He bent, breathed her in, and turned to watch her when she echoed him with a dreaming purr. Did he breathe? He must have. He could not remember. He remembered only staring at her, wanting her to waken and see him there, gleaming with sweat and burning with mindless lust.

When she did not, he turned back to the study of her alien body, and carefully lifted away her sheets. Her breasts, soft/firm globes arching over her ribs, curving down with lines like a river into her lean stomach, her full hips, the slight swell of her sex, hidden by a thin strip of shimmering red cloth. Her body fascinated him, all those curves and shapes and shadows. She undulated just by breathing.

He touched his hand to her thigh and looked again at her face. She was frowning, but it did not seem to him to be an unhappy frown. Her eyes danced behind their thin lids in sleep. He moved his hand up until he felt the thin folds of her loin-cover, and watched her lips part. He slid his thumb beneath the edging of that delicate fabric and caressed her, just a small, cautious pass of his hand.

Her thighs parted to him, just a little, just enough to admit his hand, and she moaned, a low and shivery sound in the darkness. Tagen moved to fill the place she offered to him, and cupped her sex, feeling it hot in his hand, hot as his shaft, still burning in his grip.

‘Waken,’ he thought at her, stone-faced in the night. ‘See me.’

Tagen had been taking suppressants for more than half his life. He had endured Heat only twice, once because a female colleague had been drafted to produce young and asked Tagen in her stilted, formal way if he would donate the necessary materials, and once because it was his first time, his coming of maturity, and he had let it drive him in prideful, baffled agony to the Flesh-halls, believing in his boy’s way that it would make a grown man of him. In many ways, he supposed it had. At least it had initiated him with brutal thoroughness to uncontrollable, body-wracking pain.

He had sixty-eight years behind him now, and he had no desire ever to experience Heat again. The few recreational partners he had taken were more than enough to satisfy his desire for pleasure, when he had time for it and when the urge took him. Never had he thought to succumb to Heat on this planet, and never had he thought to ever consider a human as outlet for his needs. But at that moment, kneeling beside Daria’s bed and feeling the heat of her sleeping body, smelling the sweat and the musk of her, none of that even mattered. Nothing was as important as the need to drive down on her, into her, ridding himself of his burning seed for just a few blessed hours so that he could sleep.

Tagen cupped her sex, slowly stroking it, combing his thumbclaw through the curls of soft hair he could feel but not see. She was writhing a little, her thighs clenching on his hand, and he obliged her dreaming desires by rubbing harder, slower. His face was close enough to hers now to feel her breath; he opened his mouth to taste it, to give her back his own.

His mind felt trapped, locked into unnatural calm and illogical reasoning. He felt as law the idea that if, and only if, she opened her eyes, could Tagen be free to move over her, slide his legs through hers and join them together in ferocious sex. If she embraced him, clasped him with her long legs and pulled him fast and deep inside her, that would be fine. If she fought him, kicked him, battered him with her fragile claws…well, that would be pretty fine, too.

But she slept on.

He slid one finger down the shape of her sex and back up, parting the familiar but as yet unseen folds, and pressed the pad of his fingertip to the opening he found, hot and damp and rich with her mating musk. She moaned again, arching her head into her pillow and lifting one hand to grasp at air before it dropped back onto the bed beside her. He pushed his finger a little ways inside her and rubbed at her, at her and in her, his eyes burning on her face the whole while.

She made a sound, a shuddering, sobbing sigh, and moved her hips against him in clumsy dreaming rhythm with his own movements. She clenched her hand in the sheets, bared her human teeth, and suddenly he felt her muscles locking and spasming around him, felt the flood of her oils as she came.

The moment seemed to crystallize in his mind. He came to the sudden, almost terrifying realization of just where he was and what he was doing, let alone who he was doing it to, and with it came the fear that if she did wake up now and see him, if she struggled or flinched back or did anything at all, there was no way he could avoid cutting her open on his claws.

That thought, and the despair that rode it, finally broke the stupor of Heat leadening his mind and guiding his actions. He tried to ease his hand back from her, and the slow withdrawal of him caused her to buck once, wildly, impaling herself on his finger for another shuddering climax before she dropped back. He caressed her thigh once more in silent, heartsick apology, and slipped away, back to his room, to finish himself with the oils she had left on his hand.

And that was just the first evening, coming down from his last dose of suppressants. This, this would be his first full day of Heat.