Page 71 of Folds
Sadie grinned, tipping her glass so the pale blue liquor threatened to escape. “So if I wanted to be your boss, I’d have to physically pin you to the floor in front of witnesses.”
“It is… more complex. The contest includes a recitation of binding doctrine followed by a test of endurance,” I said, uncertain if this would amuse or appall her.
“Sounds like the dirtiest job interview I’ve ever heard,” she fired back, eyes daring me to keep up.
I grew aware of a magnetic charge between us, every word wedidn’t say thickening the air. She watched me over her glass, and I caught the flick of her eyes to my hands, my mouth, and back again. Perhaps the drink made me reckless.
I set my glass down, steady, and asked, “Are you interested in practical demonstration? Or is this only hypothesis for you?”
She snorted, but her cheeks were warm now, the color rising up her neck. “Depends. Is the demonstration consensual, or do I have to recite the doctrine first?”
“Recitation is for public record. In private, evidence suffices.”
Sadie slid from the booth so quick, the laminate table shivered. Instead of heading for the bar exit, she angled closer, close enough our knees brushed.
“Lead the way, then,” she said, eyes dark and wide.
I paid the tab with a flick of my datacard, left a regulator-grade tip, and pushed into the corridor. The Hangar emptied into the upper ring’s half-lit walk, where sodium lamps rendered light into the blue-marbled pattern of the concourse floor, and Sadie matched my stride as we walked. Not the measured gait of two species keeping diplomatic distance, but the reckless, too-close walk of two bodies caught in the gravitational pull of their own orbit.
The silence was not empty. I could feel her thoughts oscillate between apprehension and anticipation, the way small prey animals freeze before making the leap, and I realized this must be harder for her—the human, the lone outlier—to cross the line between professional and whatever this was. I tracked our route with optics running at half power, paying more attention to the way her arm would occasionally drift into mine. It was not an accident.
I angled us away from crew corridors and toward the guest areas, taking the circular ramp instead of the more public lift. She followed silently, but I felt her watching the set of my shoulders, the tilt of my head. The moment we passed the security checkpoint into the guest suite node, her posture changed. She straightened,just enough to be a second species. I noted it with pleasure. This was the mutual acknowledgement that we were now explicitly off duty.
I keyed us through the entry, a low-lit habitat cube augmented for Bozad physiology—the temperature shift, the abrupt rise in humidity as the door slid shut behind us. I adjusted the environmental controls for human comfort with a flick of my wrist, then closed the distance between us.
In one fluid motion, I had Sadie pinned against the bulkhead, her breath catching audibly as my larger frame pressed against hers. The scent of her skin—that intoxicating human warmth—flooded my Bozad senses, triggering an immediate physiological response. Her laugh vibrated against my chest as her leg rose to hook around mine, her heel dragging a deliberate path up my calf. I braced one blue palm against the wall, caging her smaller form, while my other hand found the curve of her hip, thumb tracing the seam of her dress where it clung to her alien anatomy.
When she yanked me closer, the force nearly unbalanced my seven-foot frame, and she leveraged the momentum to tangle her fingers into my hair—drawing my face down until our mouths met with the violence of an airlock seal. Her human lips were soft, her tongue more textured than I’d imagined. The rush of it, the tang of citrus and salt on her mouth, broke through my Bozad restraint. I pressed her to the wall with my hip, pinning her there, and let the need surge through my hands. I had never experienced such pleasure from the mere contact of mouths—this human ritual was intoxicating beyond any simulation. One palm ghosted up her ribcage, fingers spreading to map every unfamiliar curve, while the other stayed at her jaw, guiding her angle, controlling our collision of species.
She bit my lower lip, then pulled back to gasp. “You’re stronger than you look.” Her voice was ragged and a little awed; I delighted in the sound, the honesty of it.
I swallowed her next words with another kiss—less neat, moredesperate, the kind of kiss that tilted her head back and exposed her throat. Her heartbeat was wild under my hand. I traced the tight line of her collarbone with my teeth, testing how hard she would let me bite before she pulled away.
She didn’t. If anything, her grip redoubled.
chapter three
SADIE
He could have caved the wall panels with how hard he pressed against me, but for all that leverage, there was a cool self-control in the rhythm of his hands—like he was mapping out a schematic of what turned me on, calibrating for optimal overload and only then flipping the switch. My brain looped the same four thoughts: his tongue in my mouth, the pressure on my hip, the soft velvet friction of his suit against my thigh, and the certainty that I was about to be permanently rewired.
He shifted his grip from my jaw to the back of my head, cradling it with a palm broad enough to span half my skull, and kissed me again, slower. This time the wall was a steady anchor while I tried to match his pace—tangling my fingers in the collar of his jacket, yanking him down to me. I had to rise on tiptoe, straining upward against his seven-foot frame, my neck craned back at an almost painful angle. My knees fell apart as his leg slotted between them, but even standing fully stretched, my hips barely reached his mid-thigh. I could feel a growl building in his chest, a tremor that ran through bone to bone, and oh god, so much hotter than any fantasy I’d dared allow about alien anatomy.
I palmed down his front, feeling the definition—that Bozadfitness wasn’t just for show—and found the singular line of his body blooming thick and hard against my wrist, straining at the seam of his pants. He let out a sound between a gasp and a laugh, and his mouth slanted against mine with a hunger that made me dizzy. I wanted to see him lose it. I wanted to get him out of that uniform and figure out how many ways Bozad could break a rule.
I twisted, driving him back toward the bed—a wide, overbuilt thing, probably designed to take more than just human-level stress. He let me maneuver him with surprising willingness, letting go of everything except what his hands did to my waist, my spine, the heat pooling at the small of my back. My dress caught a snag on his belt, but I barely felt the tear; I was laughing, breathless, too turned on to stop for wardrobe malfunctions. Izu was watching me like I was the next mystery to solve, but the look on his face got rawer the longer I grinded against him.
“Is this”—his voice dusted the shell of my ear, warm and thick—“what you want?”
“What gave it away?” My fingers fumbled at his zipper, undid what felt like a triple-braided closure, until my hand slipped inside. The heat of him, the strange difference, the ridges and the faint tack of some inner membrane catching on my palm, heat blooming until I swore I could feel his pulse beating through the skin. Izu’s eyes squeezed shut, mouth a tight line, but his hips twitched forward so fast, I thought we might actually snap the bed frame before ever reaching it.
For half a second, I stopped caring about decorum, or even plausible deniability that this was anything but a full-circuit disaster waiting to happen. I wanted everything: the smell of him, the strength, the wild precision of his hands as they mapped bare skin. I wanted to watch him—no, make him—lose the control he kept wrapped so tight around his core. He powered me back onto the mattress with a single flex, following after and pinning me with a thigh between my legs. His weight pressed deliciously heavy; I had no leverage except the hunger in my hands as they clawed his shirt up and off his shoulders. Theshirt came away in a single, brutal peel, and I had to stop, just to process the awe. The shimmer of his skin, the way every muscle caught the light in shifting blue, was like looking through a slow ocean current at dusk. His chest was broad, ribbed with muscle.
He bent down to me—blue all the way, hair wild now that I’d grabbed and pulled at it—his skin catching station glow and shadows across a landscape I’d only fantasized about. His chest was smooth at first glance, but up close there were subtle patterns beneath. I traced one with my finger, watched it ripple and deepen from indigo to a shade almost black as his heart rate picked up under my touch.
He kissed me hard, yanked my dress up until my thighs were bare. His hands mapped the territory north to south; he didn’t undress me so much as strip away everything between us. When he knelt over me, hands on either side of my ribs, I had a perfect view as he unfastened his own pants and shifted them down. There’s no polite way to put this—it slid out like a third arm, like evolution hadn’t ever set a ceiling for ambition.
At first, I thought it was standard issue scaled up, but as I touched him, I realized the surface flexed—not quite soft, not quite rigid, with a strange double ridge along the underside. Each pulse made the whole thing swell and roll, a gradient of blue-near-purple, but darkening further at the tip where the skin tapered into something finer, almost like a petal folding back. I couldn’t help staring. He saw it and hovered above me, uncertain—no, not uncertain, just braced for the human reaction. I stroked the length, ran my hand up that broad, shifting curve, and the texture changed under my palm, going from velvet-smooth to something more like the inside of a rose, layered and intricate. It flexed, a slow double-pump, the ridges along it swelling, then easing. It was built for rhythm, for sensation, and it was absolutely nothing like any chart I’d swiped in late-night panic about cross-species sex. At least I didn’t have to worry about protection—the evolutionary gap between our species meant pregnancy was as impossible asbreeding with a houseplant, no matter how compatible our parts seemed.
