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“Gosh, JayJay, this is a mess,” she said, oblivious to her effect on me. Dark circles still shadowed her hazel eyes, but she seemed more herself after her long rest. The hiti mushroom had worked its magic. Climbing off my thigh, she gathered her first aid kit and returned, standing next to where I sat. She dabbed the cut clean before applying some sticky green gel.
The pleasure of being cared for froze me. Oblivious, she dipped and bobbed, working her way around me, cleaning all the visible cuts and scrapes on my face. She unclenched my hands. Her fingers had tiny hard calluses on the pads. I liked her extrafinger. Next to mine, her hands were tiny but strong, and she wiped every crevice of my hand. Shivers shot down my nerve endings and heated my groin.
“That’s better.” She squeezed my thumb, smiling before grimacing at the state of my shirt. “This needs to go.” Her delicate fingers already wiggled under its hem, her knuckles dangerously close to my swelling coil.
Driven by instinct, my rumba called. A low rumble escaped my chest as her knuckles brushed the hard muscles of my stomach while she pulled up my shirt.
“Help a girl out, would you, King Kong?” She smirked, so close her breath whispered across my lips.
My shirt caught under my arms, still pinned to my side.
“Lift your arms.” The words were slow and deliberate, and the sparkle in her eye led me to believe she’d said them several times already. “Geez, are you always this dozy when you wake up?” She poked my rib cage to get me to move.
Sleepy! Dozy! Why is she caring for me?
“It’s kinda cute.” She flashed a bright smile my way that had me dropping my arms to my lap to cover the evidence of my arousal.
Eventually, I lifted my arms and pulled the shirt over my head, passing her the ruined fabric. “You rejected me, and now you are caring for me… I don’t understand.”
Her pupils had been dilated in the orange glow to begin with, but now that she was so close, I noticed the hazel had shrunk to the thinnest of slivers. “I’m not about to leave you bleeding when I have the means to help. You helped me. My joints are like liquid, and I feel all light and floaty.”
It seemed the hiti mushroom affected humans in interesting ways. With what remained of my shirt in her hands, her teasing abruptly ended, replaced by a ravenous gaze that scoured my torso for much longer than an injury assessment would take.
If I flexed my muscles to entice her further, I would blame it on her undivided attention. On a long inhale, I expanded my chest and contracted. Stop! This isn’t real. But all it took was another hot look to override my rational brain, and I tightened my pectorals.
Finally, it was my turn to smirk. Her nipples had stiffened to hard peaks, and her throat, where her stretched tank top dipped to expose her collarbones, bloomed a delicious pink. She may not have wanted me as a mate, but even as inexperienced as I was, I could tell her body desired me in this moment.
An eternity later, she shook her head and turned away. The back of her rib cage expanded as she clutched my shirt to her nose. My head plunked against the vine-covered wall, and I exhaled, deflating from the strange male posturing that had overtaken me. Though the idea of her liking my scent kept my instincts on edge.
“I’ll just patch this for you then. It should only take a few minutes.” The perkiness in Ginger’s voice mimicked the one she used to sell her designs at the markets. It had the same effect as a cold shower. Ginger threw my spare shirt at me, and I quickly dragged it over my head and tugged it past my softening coil.
“I’m going to get you some water,” I rumbled, so deeply that I barely recognized my own voice.
As I swept the vines to one side and bent to jump down, she called out warily, her back still to me. “JayJay, you think you can show me around a bit today?”
“Yes,” I blurted. I didn’t trust myself to hide my pleasure at how much she desired my company. The blanting idiot in me wanted to shout, ‘I’d devote every moment of every rotation to you if you asked.’
The dorat appeared as soon as the vines closed behind me. Its bushy tail brushed against my legs while I drank from one of the large flowers. I plucked another. Ginger would be thirsty.
Would the hiti mushroom dose last until Sisip arrived tomorrow? An image of Ginger writhing in pain formed in my mind, and a helplessness akin to the moment I’d been banished burned an angry fire low in my belly. Not on my watch.
How many more rotations could I resist my instincts before she returned to Earth?
8
True to his word,JayJay toured me through the volcano less than an hour later. “How do you know so much about this place?”
I couldn’t believe the paradise before me. Lit by the magma’s orange glow, stacks of nested mushrooms folded around volcanic rock columns like pleated skirts draped over ocean-blue moss. Vines dangled and crisscrossed like hand-woven lace, turning the cave into a jungle. Spiky cucumbers, the same ones JayJay had fed me, burst from their intersecting webs.
The hellsna that had trapped us barely registered as a threat, buried beneath a layer of wonder. My exhaustion, swollen handsand leg spasms were still there, but dulled by the miracle mushroom. As crazy as it sounded, those things seemed minor when compared to my newfound attraction to JayJay. Maybe the strange medicine had increased my desire? Or could there be something in the air? Possibly a new symptom? Because never in my life had I been attracted to a man who thought he knew what was best for me.
“It’s like the rocks of Nara on my home planet.” JayJay reached out to steady me as the ground undulated below my feet. “I’ve heard of twin planets, but if I hadn’t witnessed this with my own eyes, I would’ve never believed it possible.”
“No wonder you get sad when you think of home, if it’s like this. At first I thought Tern was all driving wind, rolling pink sand dunes and blue snow.” I tipped a lilac-scented flower to my lips and drank. “But then there were hoverbikes…and that was all it took to sell me.” I laughed.
“There are no deserts on Yagras.” JayJay stared into the distance, looking so alone I wanted to twine our fingers together.
None of that thinking, Ginger. You came to Tern for a holiday and to focus on your health. The sooner I got better, the sooner my clients would come back to me. Doctors were often wrong about how to manage diseases, and I wasn’t going to let my idiopathic blood degeneration rule me.
