I ought to just quit. Leave now. I ought to. Goddamn hormones!
Music and motion, and that white chiseled face. The skin on his upper lip was paler than the rest of his face. Ideal, he shaved his mustache! His hand closing on hers. Final figures now. Zabb brushing light kisses onto her mouth with each pass. The final kiss. This was the acid test. This was where the woman told you if she was interested or not. This was…
He captured her. It was questionable if she’d ever really meant to flee. Arms closing around her in tight embrace. A long, deep kiss to last the final measure. The music stopped. Zabb pulled back. Rivulets of sweat matted his sideburns and beaded his forehead. White blond elf locks hanging about that narrow face. And a look in those pale gray eyes.
No wonder women flee from us. The hungry pressure from those eyes. All the anguished wanting!
Tis began to back away. Zabb thrust a hand at her. Control snapped, and she fled from the dance floor, her shoes making a wild ringing as she ran. The murmur of the crowd rising like a wind storm from behind her. She had done it again. Caused another scene at a family ball.
A stitch in her side finally brought her to a gasping halt. Footsteps coming. Her heart lifted – rescue… from herself. Tall, but not tall enough. Blond, but the wrong blond. Dangerous not safe. Zabb not Mark.
Tis slumped against the wall. Zabb thrust his hands into the pockets of his duster-like coat and offered support to the other wall of the corridor. They eyed each other across a three-foot chasm.
“Don’t you think we ought to do something about… this.” She shook her head, a quick, terrified gesture. Zabb ran a frantic hand through his hair. “Ideal! You are driving me mad!”
“This is insane. You hate me.”
“Not true. You stood between me and ambition. That impediment has now been removed.”
“Impediment to what? Fucking me? You’ve done that very well, thank you, for a very long time.”
Zabb grabbed her shoulders. “You talk too much, Tis. You have always talked too much!”
She watched as her terror slammed into him. His hands leapt from her shoulders as if shocked. He clutched his elbows. Retreated again to the opposite wall.
“I’m sorry. I frightened you. I’m sorry.”
For a long moment they regarded one another. “How can I sleep with you? How? I’m wounded in ways you can’t see, and I don’t fully understand,” Tis said.
“Then let me try to heal you.”
That drew an incredulous laugh. “Heal me? Sex is about trust and vulnerability, and a little like dying. How can I trust you?”
The crooked little smile couldn’t quite cover the desperation huddled in the back of his eyes. “Think of it as sublimation. I’ll get this gnawing need to kill you out of my system.”
Tisianne studied Zabb with growing calculation. A reluctant smile broke. “Think it will work?”
“Ancestors only know.”
“Are you a good lover?”
“The best.”
“All men say that,” Tis said dismissively. “I even said it.”
Planting a foot on the wall behind her, Tis pushed off. Stopped directly in front of him. Almost touching. She caught his chin between her fingers. Pulled his face down. Kissed him. Retreated back to her wall. No pockets. She buried her hands in the folds of her gown. Regarded him. There are many things to be said for telepaths. One is they know when to keep silent.
“All right,” Tis said. “Prove it.”
They had been at it for an hour. Fumblings, groping, awkward kisses from Tis, expert foreplay by Zabb. None of it worked. Each time he attempted to enter her, the terror returned. Tis lay on her back in Zabb’s bed and felt tears tangling wet and hot in the hair over her temples. Zabb wiped them away.
“Tis, do you remember your first toy?”
The question startled her from her internal pain. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at Zabb seated cross-legged on the foot of the bed. “Yes, Roxalana selected her, and father auditioned her.”
“And you had learned to play with her.”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“And what did she teach you?”
“About a thousand positions.”
“No, what’s the first and most important lesson a toy teaches you?”
“That sex is a state of mind,” Tis replied slowly.
“And what happened to you at Blaise’s hands was not sex. It was violence.” He stretched out next to her again. His skin was cold against her. He lifted her hand and laid it on his cock. “Now, you make love to me. Arouse me the way the male Tisianne liked to be aroused. I will not touch or caress you until you tell me to. You’re not powerless now, Tis. In this bed, at this moment, you control me.”
Hesitantly she began to explore his body. Zabb lay supine and helpless beneath her, and she liked the looming sense of power it gave her to look down at him as she knelt between his outflung legs. Under her delicate ministrations she soon had him at rampant attention. His excitement began to communicate with her borrowed body.
With a mouth gone suddenly dry she said, “Now, Zabb, now touch me.”
He laid a long forefinger against his temple, then against hers. “Touch me here first, Tis.”
Emotionally she retreated, though the body didn’t move. Lovemaking between telepaths was a total sharing. For almost fifty years Tachyon had been forcing the joining. With Zabb it would be a merger. She opened her mind to him and found no violence there. She read his arousal and pleasure, and for an instant he had returned to her the sensation of a penis. He gently stroked her labia, nipped at her nipples, and she fed back her pleasure to him.
Terror burned away in the passion of her orgasm. It was only after she had experienced her pleasure that he allowed himself a release. And only after his cries died away did she allow herself to giggle.
“What?” Zabb muttered against her breast.
It feels… so strange. Ideal, I’m leaking.” She wriggled from beneath him and padded to the bathroom, his sperm coating her inner thighs.
When she returned, he was under the covers. He lifted a corner, and she crawled in, curled up next to him.
“What? What do you want? You have that look again,” said Zabb.
“Do it again please.”
Much later she heard him ask. “So how was it?’
Tis stretched her arms back over her head and lightly traced the carving on the headboard with her fingertips. The room was redolent with the scent of cinara wood from the fire and sex. She gave Zabb a mischievous glance.
“Don’t you mean how was I? That’s what men really mean.”
Zabb shoved a pillow behind his back and lit an illusion. He glared down at Tach lying next to him. “You are the most irritating Takisian.”
Tis shrugged, rolled up onto an elbow, and threw back her hair. Scanned the beside table. “When did you order spetza?”
Zabb reached down by the bed and with a rattle of ice pulled out a bottle of sparkling wine. “A long time ago.”
“I must have been sleeping.”
“An admission… I wore you out.” Tis just looked at him as she accepted the glass. “What was it like” You’re the only man to have made this journey.”
“What about lawmerates?”
“It’s a cheat. Surgical alteration, hormonal therapy. You are a woman.”
Tis lifted a breast. “Here.” Then tapped her temple. “Not here. Well, multiple orgasms are definitely an improvement over one. I discover it is much harder to let go as a woman. There is a passivity, a vulnerability that frightens me, but that may just be a result of my early female experiences.” She paused and took a swallow of the sweet, sparkling wine.
“Sex is more significant somehow. Biology talking, I suspect. For men it’s a five-minute commitment. For women, a potential fourteen years until their children leave Rarrana. But much of this you know. It’s an advantage of telepaths.”