Chapter Four—The Kiss

My heart broke open like a dam, and everything I’d started to feel for Kaz came bubbling to the surface, and I was overcome. I gave myself over to the falling and thought, I’ve accepted his proposal. If I’m going to crash, I may as well enjoy the view on my way down. But hopefully the metaphorical parachute would open and I’d land, cradled gently in my new husband’s esteem. Of course, all of that remained to be seen.

For now, I let myself get wrapped up in the whirlwind, and decided that I would have one more conversation with him about my concerns and give him a real opportunity to explain himself and his people and his intentions. Then, in private, I could decide for myself whether or not I’d let the entire thing progress to actual marriage.

I am not embarrassed to say I was swept up in the romance of it. It isn’t every day you wear a dream of a gown and get proposed to, and it isn’t something I ever even let myself wish for. I do not fancy myself a silly girl, nor was I ever the type to prize men and marriage and children above sensibility and a solid career. But I was falling in love, and the promise of sweep-you-off-your-feet romance was more than I could realistically resist.

Kaz took me around the party, introducing me to a band of Important Ivaldans and their Important Human counterparts. I couldn’t tell you their names or their titles or what it was about them that made them important. All I could tell you was that Kaz’s eyes glittered every time he said my name to introduce me; all I could tell you is that his arm was warm where my hand was tucked into the crook of his elbow; all I could tell you is that we were pressed so closely together, a few of the beads popped off the side of my gown.

Shortly after Kaz’s surprise announcement, we were veritably shoved onto the dance floor, whereupon the string quartet began to play a waltz. I could identify it due to my years of piano lessons as a child and could count out the three-four time. But I couldn’t begin to guess how I was supposed to dance to it.

I smiled. “We’d better not, I don’t want to make a fool of myself,” I said, even as Kaz placed one hand on my waist and took my hand with the other.

“I need to impress some people, so if you’re awful, it will make me look even better by comparison.” He flashed a bright smile down at me and lead me, rather clumsily I’ll admit, into a waltz.

It was during the waltz that I bothered to spare a thought for poor Ms. Ingram. I cringed inwardly at my stymied attempt to figure out what had made her so upset, and I realized it must have been me. “You told Blanche right before the party, didn’t you?” I asked over the music, over the sounds of other feet scuffing against the floor as couples spun around us.

“I did,” Kaz affirmed, and I frowned.

“Is that because you only just made up your mind right before the event?”

He parted his lips to speak but closed them again without having uttered a word and spun me toward the edge of the dance floor, whereupon we both let our arms drop. “I want you to understand something,” he said, locking his eyes on mine. “It’s important to me that you understand this, all right?” I nodded. “I have loved you from the first instant I laid eyes on you. Before that, even—I swear, I dreamed you.”

Me, and not the beautiful Ms. Ingram. “And yet, it took you weeks to decide—”

“I thought you did not want me, Jane. I thought I was respecting your wishes,” he said, his fingers finding my fingers, and lacing them all together.

“And tonight?”

He smiled a crooked little smile, arching one broad shoulder in a shrug, “My hail Mary,” he said. “I woke up this morning and I knew I could not marry Ms. Ingram unless you had basically publicly humiliated me.”

“Well,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze, “perhaps I should have.”

“Perhaps.”

We were not the last to leave the party, but we were close. The crowd started to scatter just after midnight, most of them having to make a considerable trek across a considerable stretch of desert, but there were still a few people drinking and laughing—Sarah Reed and Alice Fairfax among them—when Kaz and I climbed the stairs.

I felt a pang as we passed by Blanche’s room, something like guilt that weighed heavy in the pit of my stomach. But Kaz opened the door to my room, and held it for me as I went inside, and in the seclusion and privacy of my little suite, I forgot about her entirely.

“I’d invite you to my room,” he said, lingering awkwardly by the door, “but I’m afraid it was recently on fire.”

We laughed a little and relaxed, and I sat on the edge of the bed, spreading my beaded gown out over my thighs.

“Your dress really is extraordinary,” Kaz remarked, coming to sit beside me.

“Thank you,” I said, “your children designed it for me.” At this, his eyes got wide.

“Did they, really? I’d no idea they were such a talent.”

“And quite the team,” I added. “A force to be reckoned with, to be sure. I expect great things from them.”

“I’ve no doubt that they will live up to your loft expectations, particularly now that they will have you as a more permanent and personal fixture in their lives.” Stepmother, basically. I wondered how I had neglected to make the connection that I was not only gaining a husband, but an entire family. My heart swelled: I wouldn’t be alone anymore. I would have the foundation I had always wanted.

Kaz leaned forward and trailed his fingertips over my cheek even as he pressed a kiss to my neck, but I pushed him away. I needed answers first. “I said yes to your proposal because it’s what my heart was shouting at me to say,” I said. “But my heart isn’t all you must appeal to.”

A grin played mischievously on his fine mouth, and he ran his fingers from my collar bone over my breast, down to my lap, and I scoffed with mock offense and smacked his hand away. “That isn’t what I meant!”

“Oh, forgive me,” He said, placing his hands in his lap, “a misunderstanding.”

“Uh huh,” I replied, dubious. “What I mean is that my head is also a part of the equation, and there are a lot of things I still don’t understand that I will need to understand if I am truly to live my life with you.”

“Of course,” he said. “Anything you wish to know, I shall answer.”

I nodded and peered down at the ring on my finger. I took in a deep breath and began to give voice to these nagging questions.

“What happened to your home planet?”

Kaz sighed through flared nostrils and pushed himself to standing. “The parent star consumed it. Or it began to—the planet was no longer habitable by the time we left it, but it will take several million years for the star to consume it entirely.”

I nodded. “And you knew about Earth, long before you travelled to it?”

“We did,” he confirmed. “Centuries ago, we sent…our version of satellites with cameras here, saw where you were, technologically speaking, and determined that your species was not yet ready for a point of contact. In fact, we wouldn’t have made contact when we did if not for the necessity of our continued survival.”

“What happened to your women?” I asked. “I haven’t seen any—are they all…dead?”

He hesitated a moment and looked down at his feet. “Mostly, yes,” he said. “An illness swept through our settlement when we first arrived. Our numbers were already depleted, so we prioritized the pregnant females, but even most of them died off. Close quarters breed infection, but we aren’t sure why it was the women. The most disturbing part of it was that it started with a sort of psychosis, a madness that spread like wildfire through the camp, and half of our resources were used up just trying to contain these poor, crazed creatures.” He looked out the window then, clasping his hands behind his back. “We put some of them down ourselves.”

“Why?” I asked on bated breath.

“Because they were hurting themselves beyond repair.” He paused, and he didn’t look at me. “There was one woman, elderly, which…Something you should know is that our life span is almost twice that of yours. But she was aging, and she had begun to lose her mind. She was spouting this insanity about how we should have stayed on our own planet, even if that meant our total annihilation. We should have stayed, she said. That was our home, she said. And I thought she was protesting when she doused herself in fuel and lit herself on fire, She sat there calmly, cross-legged, as the fire consumed her until not even her charred bones remained.”

I swallowed hard, trying not to think of the image he described, but not succeeding.

“And this,” he went on, “can lead me to the next question I know you are about to ask: how does the telepathy work.”

“Yes,” I confirmed, nearly breathless.

“As I’ve said, we cannot root around inside people’s heads. But we can learn to pick up on the psychic pulses that people put forth. This woman who self-immolated, she opened up her mind to us all and we could see every thought, feel every feeling, that she felt as she burned to death. We were connected to her when she finally died, and we could feel what that felt like. Not precisely, not exactly, but…it was closer to death than I ever hope to come again before I experience my own.” He let out a breath and turned to look at me then. “And it’s why I fell for you. More than having dreamed of you, you are just so…open. I can pluck your every thought up out of the air, because you put it out there for us all to see.”

“I don’t!” I protested. “Or if I do, I certainly don’t mean to.”

“It’s a good thing, it means that you are probably more like to be able to read other people in return. We aren’t doing something that human beings are incapable of, it’s only that we’ve perfected it over millennia, we’ve got technology that can help us refine it. And I believe that, with some practice, you will be able to do it, too.” He smiled and returned to my side. “Furthermore, I can teach you how to turn it off, if you like. How to protect your secrets.”

“So this whole time…you knew how I felt this whole time?”

“Yes,” he said, taking my hand. “Precisely. All of your doubts and your fears and your desires and your insecurities. You put them out into the air around you for me to look at. And I looked, Jane. And I loved what I saw.”

“But you can’t…influence my thoughts. You can’t make me feel something that isn’t real.”

“No more than you can me,” he said.

“So that connection I felt to you, right away…”

“Was real. Is real.” He inclined his head slightly until we were forehead to forehead. I lifted my hands to run my fingers across his horns: they felt like polished wood, or smooth stone, and I wanted to grip them and hold on.

He lifted his chin slightly and pressed his lips to mine, gathering me into his lap. “One more question,” I said between kisses.

“Yes?”

“What happened to the boys’ mother?” He held me tight, and my mind was flooded with images of fire. Fire, and the contorted face of a burning woman. These thoughts were not mine, but I was seeing them against the black backdrop of my squeezed-shut eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, but he shook his head, and kissed me again.

His hands went low, and he lifted my skirt up my calves, up past my thighs, so that I could straddle him with one knee on the mattress on either side of his torso. He pressed me to him, and I could feel the insistent bulge of him beneath the fabric of his dress slacks, and my desire for him overcame all of the horrific images that had flooded my mind.

I leaned back slightly, and he held me up with the flat of his palms against my spine, and I took off my pendant necklace. Pressing my thumb to the back of it sent the nanites into a flurry of movement, until all I was wearing was the comb in my hair and the ring on my finger.

Kaz lifted me as he stood up, and I felt that familiar pang of self-consciousness about how heavy I must be, but there was no labor behind this movement. Of course there wouldn’t be: Kaz was nearly three times my size and could lift me like I weighed nothing at all. He laid me down on the bed and stood over me, admiring my naked body.

I was surprised to find that I didn’t mind, I liked how he was looking at me, like he was ravenous, like he was marveled. He bent over me and pressed a series of kisses to my skin: my mouth, my neck, my collar bone, my shoulder, the slope of my breast, my upper abdomen, the fleshiest part of my belly, and lower, lower.

He wrapped his arms around my legs and tugged me forward so that my bottom was at the edge of the mattress, and he got down on his knees for the second time that night, but this time he let his tongue ask the question. And my body said yes.

He flicked his tongue in rapid succession across the swollen kernel of my clitoris and I arched my back where I lay, letting my eyes come to a close so I might better enjoy his ministrations. My body flushed with warmth as he lapped at the flesh of my entrance, and I did the thing I had been wanting to do all night long: I reached down, and I curled my fingers around his horns, and I held them fast.

I felt myself begin to ascend the mountain of my climax, and that was when he drew away. I let him go with a little pout, but he just smiled down at me and pressed the thumb of his right hand to the pauldron on his left shoulder, until the nanomachines that knit up the fibers of his clothing flickered off like turning down a light in an old house. And my God, was he exquisite.

His skin was pallid and blemish-free, like imported Italian marble. His musculature was visible through the skin, and he looked like he belonged in an art museum. And his cock was rock hard and remarkably sizable, more than proportionate to the size of the rest of him. I gaped openly at it for a moment until I saw his mouth curl into a grin that was part pride, part embarrassment, and I forced myself to look away—and there was so much more to admire. He had what looked like iridescent tattoos in shimmering silver across his hip and over the curve of one prominent bicep. They looked like a series of interconnected hexagons of varying sizes, and I wanted very badly to touch them.

I had the opportunity in short order when he returned to me, and climbed atop me, holding himself aloft with his elbows on either side of my head. He kissed me, and I kissed him back, another question with the same answer, yes, yes, yes.

I spread my thighs for him even as I touched the hexagons to find that they did not feel like flesh: they were almost rough to the touch, like a scab, but beautifully rendered in threadwork silver.

Just when I was about to ask him what they were, I felt the head of his insistent member pressing against me. And I was slick and ready, and there was no real barrier to him pushing himself inside me, which he did, and to the hilt.

I let out a groan as he filled me and wrapped my arms around his neck to draw him into a kiss. He became the entire focus of my world, and the feel of him sliding in and out of me boiled me down to one simple desire: more.

He quickened his pace, and along with it, his breathing, before he reached between our bodies to press his fingertips to my clit as he fucked me. Because that is what it was: though it was clear that he and I were connected, engaged, and—yes—in love, there was a bestial need that we were sating in each other’s arms.

Again, I was in the foothills of my release, and all my greatest longings crested and peaked with the thrust of him, skin against skin, two species, uniting. “Come for me,” he whispered. Or at least, I think he did—he may have just thought it. He may have thought it and opened up the whole of his mind to me, as I opened mine to him.

Thought or spoken command, it didn’t matter, because the force of my orgasm drew a cry out of me the likes of which I knew I had never made before. And Kaz joined me in my release, grunting, and gripping onto me as he came in pulsing waves, deep inside of me. The rhythm of our pulses synched up as we lay there, trying to catch our breath, until finally he rolled over onto the mattress beside me. He reached across himself and tugged me by the arm, indicating that he wanted me closer. So I obliged and rested my head in the crook of his arm, letting our skin stick together in the aftermath of our union.

We were a little shy, suddenly, and I smiled, not sure what to say. But Kaz didn’t seem to have that problem. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, Jane.”

~ * ~

We slept in late the next day, and I was pleased to find that my shyness had dissipated overnight. I awoke to the sunlight streaming in, still resting in Kazimir’s arms, and I stretched my back until the bones popped pleasantly, reaching my arms over my head and wriggling free of my newfound lover’s embrace. I got up, bleary, and ran the bath, the sounds of which roused the master of the house, and he gave a garumph of protestation.

“It’s nearly noon, Master Kain,” I shouted from the bathroom, where I stood in front of the mirror. My hair was a total fiasco. I’d slept with the comb still in, but now it was sort of hanging in a rat’s nest of curls and I was working diligently to try to untangle it without ripping out a chunk of hair. “When you wallow with the pigs,” I continued to shout, “you have to soar with the eagles!”

“What in the seven hells does that mean?” He demanded, shambling into the bathroom, his eyes half-closed with sleep.

“I have no idea,” I replied, “it’s something my grandmother used to say.” Even in his sleepy state, he cut a fine figure, and I allowed my eyes to sweep appreciatively over him from head to toe. His pale white skin was almost blue, like he was cold. And I realized that he probably was: we’d slept with the air conditioning on. I hadn’t even thought about it.

“I’m so sorry, you must be frozen solid.” I turned and stood on tiptoe to examine his lips: yep, tinged purple like hypothermia was about to set in. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

“Please, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s more important to me that you are comfortable. And trust me, you would not be at my preferred temperatures.”

He offered half a smile and came over to press a kiss to the side of my face. I finally disentangled the comb from my hair, and the sight of it stopped him in his tracks. Suddenly, he was wide awake.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, pointing a stern finger at the peacock comb in my hand.

“The boys left it for me,” I explained, “when I was getting ready last night, I found it on the counter.” He plucked the item gingerly from my hand and examined it. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, after a brief silence, “it is.” He handed it back to me then and went back into the bedroom. I followed him out and found him searching the floor for our abandoned datapads. He found his, and quickly dressed—a casual ensemble made of light linen material. The materials must have had some sort of insulation provided by the nanites, because his color quickly began to return to normal.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “Stay. We’ll have a bath.” He smiled as he walked over to me, hugging me tight as he leaned forward to catch my lips in a kiss.

“There’s much to do, and the hour already grows late,” he said. “But I will see you this evening at dinner. There’s much to plan.”

And with that, he left me alone to bathe, and to consider how abrupt his exit was. I went back into the bathroom and examined the peacock hair comb, turning it over in my hand. It had clearly stirred something in him—but what?

I bathed and dressed and got myself to the nursery as quickly as I could, and the boys greeted me with a hug and some light cheering. They looked genuinely pleased, and it warmed my heart to see it.

“I’m so glad it will be you,” Tox said.

“So am I,” said Pim.

“Ms. Ingram was nice, but not as nice as you,” Said Tox.

“Not as nice at all,” Pim said.

“Well, thank you, boys,” I said, and hugged them back. “Your design of my gown was a huge help. And the hair comb was a nice touch.”

“Hair comb?” they both questioned in unison.

“Yes, the peacock?” I glanced between them, but their faces were blank. “You didn’t leave it for me?”

Pim looked at Tox and Tox looked at Pim and they were silently conferring with one another, but their expressions belied the fact that neither of them had left the comb for me.

“It wasn’t us, Ms. Lockewood,” they both said. “But we’re glad you liked the dress.”

Strange. If it hadn’t been the boys, who had it been? Ms. Fairfax, perhaps, noting that I was missing something. Or Ms. Reed, she was a stylish lady. Blanche, even? Though that seemed unlikely.

“The comb had a peacock on it,” I said, pressing the matter somewhat to see if it stirred anything in the boys the way it had in their father. “Crystal encrusted—perhaps you saw it in my hair. Do you remember?”

But both boys shook their head, before rising to their feet to fetch their previously abandoned datapads. These were serious boys, and I’d wasted just about enough of their precious time with congratulations, and warmth, and questions about frivolous hair combs. Now it was time to get to work.

“Sorry, Ms. Lockewood,” Tox said.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Pim. “We don’t know where it came from.”

“But good thing it did, yeah?” Tox went on. “You looked perfect last night.”

“Yeah, Ms. Lockewood,” Pim echoed. “Really, perfect.”

I decided to let the topic drop and get to the lessons of the day. But before I did, there was just one thing on which I decided I must insist: “Please,” I said, “you have to call me Jane.”

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”

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