Page 70 of Shellshock

“If I go to the complex, will you go with me this time?” he asked.

“I’m allowed to leave the ship?”

The question made him laugh, and his laugh made her stomach curl. The different sides of Caligher were difficult to keep up with as they had a way of blending into each other.

“Yes,” he said. “Do whatever you feel you can pull off.”

We’re just gonna ignore that one for a minute.

She barely gave the invitation an ounce of thought before giving her pre-recorded reply. “I don’t think I can.”

Rejecting all invitations was ingrained in her bones.

His tail swooped through the air in noisy, languid movements. He grew catlike in the moments he started calculating. “You couldn’t before. Why not now?”

The water continued as she mulled it over. “You’re okay with people knowing what I am?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? You’re my person.”

She was momentarily shocked.

Had they talked about this? Wasn’t that sort of required? Deep-throating him in the dark hallway hardly equaled a commitment, but it certainly complicated matters.

Maybe it was a mistranslation—but she doubted it. Caligher said it like it was done and decided—just like he had picked her ship up that first time without so much as asking. So… not a mistranslation. Just a difference in opinion on how relationships were formed.

Did shewantit to be true?

Oh, fuck her, she did.

“Ah, you know, I forgot to mention,” he said, “therearehumans living with us.” He sounded so proud of that fact. “Sometimes we keep them as pets.”

“Jesus Christ, Caligher. Am I a pet now?”

“You really sort of are.”

Even through the glass, the heat of his gaze intensified into a physical thing. She should have told him, ‘I’m a person—not a pet.’ But her mouth had an odd way of refusing to cooperate when her brain was melting down. And the air had turned a little blue again. He was forcing her compliance by turning her on and it was… utterly distracting. The place between her thighs ached relentlessly and she had no privacy to ease it.

She shifted her naked body to let the stream of water run over that area, as inconspicuously as possible… but the water pressure wasn’t hard enough. Caligher… Caligher was hard. He was made of rock and her mind got caught up in fantasies of what he would feel like.

“I thought I was your prisoner,” she said in a quiet, strangled voice. She cleared her throat.

“Petsareprisoners,” he said nonchalantly. “The distinction is in the treatment.”

Her brain just went blank. Wishing she could manage some witty reply. She wiped her hand over her mouth, staring at the shower controls.

“This is so deranged, Cal.”

Facing away from the shower head, she rinsed her hair, if only to mask her flustered state. Her skin hummed with the awareness of him watching her through the glass. He was absolutely looking.

She arched her body the tiniest amount, letting him see. He could give her whatever title he liked if it meant him putting his hands on her again. She’d even take the tail around her neck. The memory of that warm, tight appendage hadn’t faded.

Maybe she needed to make him leave so she could deal with her urges.

“Come on, Lucca. You’ve been cooped up in here for too long. Don’t you want to see something else?”

He wasn’t wrong.

But she’d grown so used to watching his world through glass and audio channels that it was difficult to fathom leaving her sound-proof bubble.