And then she remembered Meoraq’s ‘anatomy lesson’ the first night they’d made love. This is my masculine member…it will go here…

A smile tugged at her lips. She rubbed his cock in one hand and pointed at it with the other. “I would like to suck this.”

His spines came forward.

“And lick it all over until you cum in my mouth.”

His cock twitched in her grip. He frowned.

“I just want to be sure that’s okay.” …the most profane thing I have ever seen… “Especially if I swallow it.”

She watched his face closely, where ‘Yes, do it now,’ fought a visible war against ‘Sex is for procreation only’ and finally he passed his hand over his eyes and looked at her through his fingers. “Give me a moment.”

“Take all the time you need.”

He did some muttering, but closed his eyes and that was all for a long time.

She found herself watching the way the light played along the wet shine of his oiled cock—red light and black shadow, stark and smooth and beautiful. She wanted to feel it in her hands again. She wanted to kiss it, taste it, not to kill a ghost or prove a point, but just to hear Meoraq’s hiss and feel his hands clench in her hair. She imagined that penultimate spasm, the flood of his heat across her tongue, the roughness of his scales under her hands as she held him close to drink…

Amber shivered. She wasn’t cold.

“Tell me why you want to do this,” Meoraq said without opening his eyes.

“God wants to know?”

“I suspect He already knows.” He sounded very faintly annoyed. “Yet I am compelled to ask anyway. Answer.”

“Because you’re mine and I want to make you happy in every possible way.”

“I have always been happy without this act,” he said, but it was a grudging admission.

“I still want to share it with you.”

“And if I say it is an offense?”

“Then I won’t ask you again.”

His brows knitted heavily over his closed eyes. “So you don’t really want to do it.”

“Right this instant, it’s probably the thing I want most to do in the world, but I’m not going to do it if it offends your god.”

His eyes slid open just to slits. “You don’t believe in God.”

“You do.”

“You have tried often enough to convince me otherwise, but you will not do so now with your human mating rituals?”

“Whether or not I believe in your god is irrelevant. I’m trying to make love with you. It can’t be making love if you think it’s corrupting you.”

Meoraq tipped his head back and gazed, not at the ceiling where human feet were once again loudly tromping, but through it and straight on to heaven. Looking God in the eye, perhaps.

And if so…she found herself wondering if this was the strangest prayer He’d ever been asked to mediate.

“Yes,” said Meoraq.

Amber started. “What?”

He looked at her, gestured at his cock. “The will I receive has not changed. No pleasure we find in one another offends the eye of God. You may do as you wish.”

She stared at him for a while, then up at the ceiling and back at him.

He grimaced at her, an expression which was never going to grace the covers of one of those sultry bodice-rippers her mom had like to read (and which was far more likely, come to think of it, to be found on the splash page of a horror comic), but something in it made that not-cold shiver come right back, even harder than before. Amber rolled onto her knees and arched up to kiss him, to feel his dry tongue prod at hers and his fingers comb carefully through her hair, and it was beautiful, like the heat and pulse of his cock when she gripped it, like the musky sweet taste that coated his sa’ad, like the orgasm that swept through her when she brushed her lips across the head of him and heard his rich, full groan. She did not drink him in with the pleasure she’d imagined, but with joy beyond all imagining, right up until he fell out of the chair.

Footsteps on the ceiling. Meoraq panting on the floor. Amber watched him, giggling now and then when the happiness threatened to split her in half, and finally draped herself across his chest and thighs where she could both snuggle platonically and fondle him at the same time.

“Say something,” she said at last.

“God is in His heaven,” said Meoraq in a distant voice. “And loves me.”

Zhuqa had said something like that once. This time, it was beautiful.

8

They were a frustrating six days that followed. Meoraq’s limited healing lore had always served him well in the past, or at least, that part of the past which did not include his Amber. It was not the alien workings of her body that concerned him now—that, he was content to leave to Sheul and He seemed to have mended it. No, what he did not know how to manage was his woman’s spirit, and in particular, her will to leap from her sickbed and be immediately whole.

Amber’s long lying-in had left her weakened and restless. Six days was not enough to restore her to her fullest, but it was all she would allow.

He had sympathy. Some. No one liked to lie around and be tended, and certainly no one enjoyed being reminded that they were any less than what they had been, what they should be. His Amber’s fierce will chafed at inactivity. It was no less than a punishment to her and Meoraq understood that feeling. He also understood, as his wife apparently did not, that overworking weakened flesh only slowed one’s recovery and that the mistakes made while in that state could cripple his woman for life.

He explained this. She claimed to accept it. And then she refused out of hand his suggestion of meditation and stretches, even for one day, and instead began a regime of climbing the stairs over and over. Before the day was out, she had set the goal of walking all the way to the stream and back, and achieved it despite his warnings. Was he surprised? He was not, not even the next morning, when she wanted to hunt.

Meoraq had only a few moments to think that over without arousing her suspicion, but the facts were simple enough. Point: If he denied her request and left without her, she would likely begin again with her own idea of how best to recover. Point the second: She was equally likely to go hunting without him. Point the third (and most significant): At least one and perhaps all three of the human males in his camp had eyes on her. Meoraq did not believe any of them would dare to attempt conquest and he did not doubt Amber’s ability, however weakened, to put a scar on them if they did, but it was a point and worth the consideration.

So he took her hunting. All that day and all the days that followed, he led his woman on long walks, well away from any game trails or spoor, and let her believe herself hunting. He lost hours to her stubbornness that could have been spent packing his lodge back onto the sled, but then again, even when there were no animals to track, there were plenty of trees to lean up against.

Exercise was exercise.

On the seventh morning following Amber’s emergence from her sickbed, Meoraq woke early with too much to do. He nuzzled his wife all the way awake, since there was no hope of escaping the cupboard without disturbing her anyway, and told her to be ready to leave within the hour.

“Got it,” she mumbled, rolling over to spread herself out over the bed as he left it. “Gonna sleep a little bit, be right up, okay?”

He grunted assent, patting her fluffy head, and shut the door quietly. After a few short stretches and his morning prayer—my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the shelter of this lodge and its civilized cupboard which is half the size of mine at home, and my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the woman who shares it with me and has not failed once in fifty-nine nights by her own reckoning to hup her bony knee into my groin—he went upstairs.

The foreroom of the underlodge was empty at the moment, although someone had moved the sled on which he had half-heartedly packed their provisions. Leaning close to straighten them, Meoraq smelled the unmistakable tang of sex. Damned humans. Now every time he put the walls up, he was going to think about that.