His fingers leave my chin and trail down my neck, passing the sensitive skin of my throat to find the space between my breasts. He cups one, and then with his second hand, the other. His skin is rough and hot, but he is careful with me. He drops his hands and runs them over the sides of my belly, down to my hips. From there, he urges me up into a standing position, half-lifting, half-guiding. The blanket falls and I am standing before him naked. I am so much shorter than he is. I knew I was smaller, but I didn’t appreciate how much smaller until this moment. My head comes up to the top of his abdominal plane. His chest and his shoulders, his massive head, dangerous due to sharp teeth and dark thoughts alike, are well above me.
“Oh my god,” I murmur.
It is like looking up at a god, a deity of ice and cruelty, temporarily fascinated by my frailty. His expression is hard to read. I think we are both struggling to understand the little nuances of one another’s behavior. That is why there are so many questions. That is why his exploration is so careful. I know intellectually that I am in more danger than I have ever been in, but I feel very safe. He has me in this lair, but I don’t feel like a prisoner. There’s something magnetic about him. They say he is crazy. Maybe he is. And maybe I am falling into his madness. It must be terribly contagious to have struck me this intensely, altogether and completely at his touch.
I didn’t think he would smell like anything, but now that I am this close to his shirtless body, I scent something rich and masculine. I also suddenly realize that all people, all animals, smell just faintly like food. This creature does not smell like anything edible. He smells like power and revenge and destiny.
His arms slide around me in an embrace. I feel his strength. He is being so, so careful. He could crush me with one motion of his arms, a slight clinch and that would be the air driven from me completely. He doesn’t want that. He wants to stroke me and caress me like a sweet little animal. His palm finds my ass, and again he squeezes lightly, tests my flesh.
“You are so soft,” he murmurs. “I hope I do not break you.”
I hope that too.
His fingers creep lower, finding the cleft of my lower cheeks and exploring what lies between. I shiver against him. He has not found my pussy. He has found the tighter, darker hole that I’ve never let any man toy with before, though almost every man has wanted to. I don’t know why. I think they’re attracted to filth in every sense. I do not get that sense from Manik. I think he just wants to know what I am.
“This is an aperture,” he says. “Is it one of pleasure?”
I am sure he knows human physiology. He is not a stupid alien. He knows more than I do about more things than I do. I’m sure he has killed humans before, or a species close enough that the differences barely matter. He knows he hasn’t found what he is looking for. I can tell he knows because of the half smirk on his lips. He is teasing me. Playing with me. He is making me explain myself to him.
“No,” I tell him. “At least, not as far as I am aware.”
“You are aware of very little,” he says, but not in the insulting way those words would seem if one were to hear them without context, or perhaps in text.
He’s speaking to me with an affectionate fondness that is strangely intimate for two strangers at odds. He saved my life, but he could just as easily have killed me. This is a relationship balanced on the edge of fate’s knife.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is for, then?”
“It is like the rest of you,” Manik growls. “It is for me to use.”
I feel a thrill race through me. Nothing happens the way it should with him. I should fear him and instead I desire him. He should kill me and instead he wants to make love to me. I have no idea how a beast of his size could ever fit inside me, but the way he is touching me makes me think that’s inevitable.
“Are you willing to sleep with a fugitive? Your own bounty?”
I do not know how to answer that, and so I don’t. There is little point pretending that this situation is entirely organic. We have not met in a bar. I am not here of my own free will. I have been taken captive and my choices from this point on are limited.
“Willing?”
I repeat the word, wondering if he will kill me if I say no.
“You have no doubt heard many things about me,” he says, massaging my cheeks slowly. “Many of them are true. Most of them are probably absent context. But either way, I cannot settle your conscience by telling you that I am simply misunderstood. What you do here will be a matter of instinct and your own conscience. I will not force you against your will. I am a monster, but not that kind of monster.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Is it?” He cocks his head. “Or was it slightly more exciting when you thought the choice was not yours? What kind of monster is it you desire?”
“I’m just happy to be alive,” I tell him as he continues to knead and explore my ass. He is getting dangerously close to the right aperture, as he put it. My body is making a hot, wet little trail out that way, making me slick enough to cause his fingers to slide right inside me if I am not careful.
“I can make you even happier,” he promises, just as his fingers curl under my ass completely and the tips of that rough, hot skin rub against the sleek, dark fur surrounding my lips.
“I’ve always admired the way humans retain their wildest characteristics around their genitals,” he muses as he feels the hair there. I used to shave. I don’t anymore, because being a single lady in a spaceship means never having to impress a man again. Or at least, it did until this very moment.
“Do not blush,” he murmurs. “I do not mean it as an insult. This is the hair of your ancestors. These are the remnants of the animals you truly are. This pelt should be celebrated. Evolution made you hairless everywhere except where it truly counts.”
His musings on the value of pubic hair are accompanied by a stroking and a petting that makes my hips arch and grind with the primal need to feel something pushing up inside me.
“You were made to be fucked, weren’t you.”
His words make me flush with heat.