Monsters Under Mistletoe

4. Tasi

Chapter 4

Tasi

I haven’t flown since leaving Chrytevin, and it was probably several years before then. There’s a point in your life as an unmated, childless adult that you lose interest in flying for flying’s sake, and your body grows heavy and your wings grow weak, you don’t have young to train, and really, what is the point of flying when you can either walk or take a cruiser?

And you just don’t fly anymore.

Which isn’t to say I’m not any good at it. I’m very skilled at flying. And I’m not weak, although my flightless human mate puts me at a disadvantage.

My human mate.

Gods, but she is pretty.

Extremely warm. Concerningly warm. But there’s something in her scent that’s bright and cool, reminding me of the red and white candy circles that have been in the commissary in the winter section. On her, it’s sweet and inviting, and I breathe it in as I catch an air current and soar between the buildings, keeping myself on a straight path over 6th Ave until the city blocks fall away and I find myself high above the canopy of the oxygen forest.

With my mate.

Who said she hates me and hasn’t given me her name yet, but she’s holding me tightly enough I’m sure she’s feeling the mating bond as strongly as I do. It’s like it was fate. I never found my mate on Chrytevin, and it made me so despondent that I left the planet and came here to be an accountant—and a sex worker, but mostly an accountant–and ended up finding my mate

my very human mate

at an office party.

I love her so much.

I don’t know her name, but she’s holding me tightly, so it’s okay.

“You’re beautiful,” I say again, shocked at how much those words ring true even though I’ve never found humans to be attractive before.

She mumbles something, I’m thinking something along the lines of I apologize, I’m so in love with you that I got my words confused and said hate when I meant love . But I can’t hear her properly when she’s smushed against me. I need to hear her, so I loosen my hold on her.

She screeches and scrambles to get her arms around my neck so tightly I’d be concerned she’d choke me if it was her hands instead of her soft, hay-colored, lightly curled hair tickling my throat. “Are you trying to kill me?” she yells.

Humans are so funny. They get loud at the strangest times.

“Of course not, mate. I am protecting you.” Not sure what from, but I’m definitely protecting her.

As she adjusts herself in my arms to find a better hold, her body slides around in my mating slick, rubbing me just right that I’m wondering if she would want to seal our bond here in the sky. It is tradition on Chrytevin, but she has no wings.

“You need to put me down,” she says, her voice small but firm.

“You will fall to your death.”

“You need to land and put me down. I don’t want to die.”

It dawns on me that perhaps the grip she holds me in isn’t the bond but fear. She didn’t actually say she wasn’t afraid of heights, just that she was more scared of the woman than heights.

“I would never drop you, I promise. I love you.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

I bank to circle back around the oxygen forest when I see the next batch of buildings ahead. The currents on Verlain are good for gliding high enough that the air is cooler, no longer heated by the inner workings of the technocolony. With a tilt of my wings, I swing my body into an upright position, which slows me down but puts my mate in a position I imagine to be more comfortable for her. She doesn’t have to hold so tightly, instead putting her weight on me.

I like this. Especially when she rests her head on my shoulder and breathes onto my neck. Breathes in the slick from my mating heat which, despite her vitriolic words, I can tell is affecting her. One of her hands slides into my hair. Her torso swivels to draw her core along my primed, swollen shaft. I need to bond to her. My body demands it.

Still, I need to point out the irony of what she’s said.

“You don’t know me, but you claim to hate me, which sounds far more ridiculous.”

“You knocked me out of top rank for both completions and success rate!” she protests.

I grin at that. My heart fills, beating hard, pumping blood everywhere it needs to go except my brain, which isn’t exceptionally valuable in this moment because I do know her name.

I know my mate’s name.

Of course I do. She’s my mate.

“You’re Gwendolyn Richards.”

“Just Gwen,” she protests, and I’m happy to call her whatever she prefers, but I’m just as happy that my squirmy little human mate can’t hide her smile as well as she thinks she does. She’s happy I know her name. She likes it. She loves it, loves me, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. “And don’t think you’ve won any points there. This just means you know exactly whose career you were destroying.”

I want to look in her eyes, her sort of brown but also sort of green but either way beautiful eyes, but it’s hard at this angle. She’s still glued to me. I take a deep breath, test out my piloting feathers at other angles, and then carefully invert myself so she can sit on my chest.

She’s not really on my chest, more like my crotch, and I’m not about to complain about that. Definitely not when she attempts to scoot to another spot and instead lets out a soft, low moan at the sensation of my cock sliding along the soft, thin, stretchy fabric of her leggings, so forgiving that I can feel the crease in the plump folds between her legs.

I take hold of the thighs she flanks me with to keep her in place so she has no choice but to pleasure herself—or drive herself mad with want—along my shaft. “I was never trying to destroy your career,” I promise her. “I only wanted to do a good job, and making sure I am doing better than the highest-ranking human is the only way I can be sure I am.”

She pouts at that.

And she’s so beautiful it makes my chest ache. Her complexion is on the paler end of the spectrum that human flesh occupies, with lips that stretch wide across her face in a vibrant pink and splashes of dark spots across her cheeks and nose. For a moment, I get the impression that her eyelashes are massive, but then I realize she’s painted them with black. Or she’s lined her eyes with black and it’s smudged onto her lashes?

That seems really dangerous. It does make her lashes look nice, but I don’t want her to hurt her eyes to make her lashes look nice when she’s already so beautiful.

She’s nicely rounded, too. Humans are much smaller than Chryton women, but Gwen’s thighs are thick in my hands, her stomach and rear well-padded. Even her cheeks are sweetly rounded, like I could bite right into them.

I won’t. My teeth will break through her soft skin no matter where I bite, but I can nibble on these thighs and that ass. I can be rough with her. I want to be rough with her.

I have heard talk amongst mated Chryton males, surprisingly gruff talk about how hard they want to drive into their females, how they want to reshape them or embed themselves, about how the act of mating isn’t enough, that there is an unending need for more. I understand it now.

I grab the front of Gwen’s red shimmery top, a knitted but light and form-fitting sweater, mangling the fibers as I use it to pull her down to me. I catch a moment of tightness in her body, whether the fear of falling or the fear of falling into me, but she does nothing to stop me from craning up and snagging her bottom lip between my teeth to test it.

Her core rocks as she attempts to support her weight by anchoring the heel of her palm on my chest. It slides in my slick, and she falls right onto me.

She cries out, but my mouth absorbs the sound, and though her hands are all over me, they’re no longer trying to peel off me. They’re just trying to touch me everywhere.

She knows I’m her mate. If not her mind, certainly her body.