Cosmic Captain: Chapter 14

“You haven’t given up on that shtec yet?” Talisaar’s surly voice was recognizable anywhere, and I didn’t have to look up from my tablet to know it was him. Half the time the ship flew itself but I knew Tal was specifically taking a break before docking at the Rizal Qua Station. According to him, docking there was a ‘drekking pain in the ass’.

We were barely a week out from Pretia, but we were low on supplies and apparently Rizal Qua Station was a better place to stock up than the planet we were headed to. I was determined to prove myself and fix that damn cargo bay door before we got there and I…well, they were dropping me off there, right?

I didn’t like the little lurch in my gut at that.

So I ignored Tal and kept working. I was standing by the cargo bay door with the tablet plugged in, and I smiled to myself when Lovath snorted at Tal’s surliness. Lovath was working on another one of the machines that littered the engine room—there were many—and sometimes I thought he was down here more than Qwexil, our actual mechanic.

Our.

Except Lovath was dropping me off on Pretia—which was what I wanted, right?—and I wasn’t part of the crew. I’d just been sexually intimate with the captain twice and sometimes he kissed me so passionately my knees gave out. No big deal, right?

“Gray is perfectly capable of fixing the door, Tal.” Lovath’s head poked out from behind the equipment he was working on. I was pretty sure he’d said it was our—their—inertial dampeners? “He’s already better at the code than me.”

I let my eyes flick up to Tal, whose arms were crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed with skepticism, and had the urge to scream at this stupid code that I couldn’t quite get right. Fuck Tal and his condescending, raised brow and his gigantic eyes that should look dumb but just looked disgusted by me.

Tal wasn’t that bad, really, he just—

“You expect me to believe a primitive species has the ability to fully understand how our technology works?”

I typed a few things into the tablet then looked Tal dead in the eye as the cargo bay door lifted open.

“I’ll be damned.” Lovath laughed, bounding over and pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Knew you could do it, ksiva.” Slinging an arm over my shoulder, Lovath gave Tal a purposeful look.

“This is ridiculous.” He snapped, storming off back up to the flight deck.

“Primitive species.” I scoffed at his back, and Lovath just chuckled, his arm still around me.

“You visiting the station with us?” He kissed my temple, and I was realizing the Lovath was a touchy-feely guy. I didn’t mind it. The possessiveness of his hands all over me all the time was addicting. And I’d basically forgiven him for trying to deliver me to Torvan.

The man hadn’t lasted a week before the tiny bit of conscience he had got to him. A smuggler and a pirate, he was. A slaver, he was not. I’d seen the way his lip curled when we were near the flight deck and chatter about the exotic trade came over the comms Talisaar constantly monitored. I’d inspected the cargo they carried with my own eyes and found only weapons, boxes of implants, and many other things I didn’t recognize yet.

No humans.

“Is it safe for me to come?” So far I’d really only seen the inside of what I’d learned was a krexxian research vessel and the inside of Lovath’s ship. I didn’t count the single room on Krida Q-5 Station where I’d been auctioned off to Torvan.

A salacious grin lit up Lovath’s face, accompanied by another press of his lips to my cheek. “It’s always safe for you to come, ksiva.”

I snorted and shoved him away. “That’s not what I meant, you oaf.”

Unfazed, Lovath just shrugged. “You’ve got an illegal chip so not as safe as it could be. Without a Federation one, you’re basically contraband and this is and unregulated station. If we act like you belong to one of us, you’ll get mostly left alone.”

My brows ran for my hairline. “One of you? You’d let someone else ‘own’ me?”

“Probably not.” He hummed, and I started unplugging my tablet from the wall. I didn’t know if my fix for the cargo bay door would be permanent, but it was worth a try to see that look on Talisaar’s face. “How do you feel about leashes?”

I froze. And then cursed the bolt of arousal that rushed through me. “Leashes?” I followed Lovath back up to the communal, then to his room. “You have one?”

He grimaced at that, but popped open his small—but far larger than mine—closet and pulled out a leather-ish leash and what looked like a straight up dog collar. “Came with you. I disabled all the…functions. It would keep us from getting separated and really sell the pet thing.”

I ran my fingers over it, and…I wasn’t repulsed. The arousal lingered, and I was half hard in sweatpants that were woefully inadequate to hide it, but it actually seemed like a good idea. “Okay.” I breathed, a little more lusty than I’d intended.

His eyes sparked, but then Talisaar’s voice broke over the ship comm. “Docking now. ‘S gonna take twenty drekking minutes to line up the airlock. Might be some turbulence.”

And he hadn’t been kidding. Not five minutes later, the ship rocked so hard that I had to brace myself against Lovath for support, and when he took the opportunity to grope my ass I was only mildly annoyed.

I really did like the stupid, horny lizard pirate.

A stone sank in my gut when I thought it. I just needed to keep having fun with him, let him drop me off on Pretia, then focus my efforts on finding Derrick so we could go home. Lovath hadn’t indicated that things between us were any more than fun, and he’d probably scoff in my face if I suggested something more.

Even if he didn’t, then what? I admitted that I might want a relationship with an alien? I didn’t know what happened to my grand plans of making it back to Earth then. Or of finding Derrick. I hadn’t even mentioned Derrick to Lovath, and realizing that made me sick.

As I let Lovath fit the collar on my neck, it wasn’t quite so exciting when I thought about Derrick possibly out there suffering while I was fucking around with a hot alien ship captain. But then Lovath pressed the softest kiss to my mouth that only turned dirty when he slipped his tongue through the seam of my lips.

Derrick could wait. Deciding how to get back to Earth could wait.

I lost myself in his mouth, in his kisses, and when one of his hands cupped the side of my neck, thumb petting over the skin that the collar cut into, I moaned. That gave him the opportunity to push his textured tongue deeper into my mouth and earned him another muffled sound of pleasure.

“Drekking comms are still on, assholes.” Tal’s tinny voice was gruff, and the ship jolted so hard that I clung to Lovath.

That one was on purpose, I thought sheepishly. It was just too easy to lose myself in Lovath’s touch. Shockingly so. Without a therapist to talk to, I wasn’t much of an expert on what was going on with my psyche. But I was pretty sure Lovath cut out the clinical aspect of what happened me.

The krexxians had only touched me with gloves, and every way my body had been violated, sexually or not, had been via a machine. My arousal had been medically induced and painful when they’d found the right drug, too. Lovath touched me skin to skin, and he wasn’t cold.

Was I throwing myself at the first person to show me kindness in a foreign environment? Maybe. I also didn’t know that I cared.

“Ready to go?” Lovath had stopped kissing me when Talisaar bitched over the comm, but that hand was still on my neck, thumb caressing my skin tantalizingly.

“Mm.” It was more of a moan, and I flushed when Lovath snickered. We hadn’t been intimate other than kissing since we found all those drugs in my would-be coffin. Once again, he was waiting for me to come to him.

It would be irritating if it weren’t so god damned gentlemanly. I wouldn’t say no if he pushed me, if he just let the kissing lead elsewhere. But I’d told him what I’d been through and he’d seen the instructions I was sent with. He wanted it all to be my decision.

With one more, soft kiss, Lovath stepped away from me to tie his xivpa back. Usually he did that to keep the tendrils—thinking of them as head tentacles was really unsexy—out of his way when he worked, but he’d confessed that he always tied them back when in public in case he got in a fight. Like hair, opponents tended to grab at them.

When we stepped out of Lovath’s room, Qwexil was right there. His eyes flicked instantly to my collar, then to the leash in the captain’s hand. “Damnnn boss, kinky.” His face cracked into an amiable grin. “Honestly, great idea though. No one will try to lift contraband that clearly has an owner.” And the fucker winked.

“He’s teasing, it actually will be safer.” Zenkara smiled sweetly, then ushered Qwexil along down the hall. It made me a little self conscious, but I scooted closer to Lovath and let him rest a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

When we all got to the airlock doors, Talisaar looked at us and rolled his eyes, but at least Kryn didn’t comment. Kryn was a silent type anyway, though he’d been kind to me in all our interactions. I wasn’t scared of him anymore, but the wariness still came back around sometimes.

I didn’t let the memories of the last time I was in an airlock get to me as we waited to board the station, but I couldn’t keep all of the fear away. When airlock doors opened out onto the station, though, it was much different than the last time.

We stepped out onto a metal walkway, suspended in the air, and when I looked all around there were ships everywhere. The network of walkways extended far above and below us, and I got a little sick when I looked over the edge.

What was truly amazing was Lovath’s ship itself. It didn’t feel huge on the inside, but looking at it like this brought the reality down hard that it was, in fact, a spaceship. Like something out of an Earth sci-fi movie, all metal and sleek, with a tapered front where I knew the flight deck to be. Words were written on the side and not for the first time I cursed that my chip only translated sounds and not written language.

It had never occurred to me that our—Lovath’s—ship had a name. Of course it did.

“What’s it called?” I grabbed Lovath’s hand in mine to get his attention.

He looked surprised, maybe at himself for never telling me. “It’s called…” Then he said a few words that didn’t translate and I probably couldn’t pronounce. When I tilted my head in confusion, he tried again. “It’s like…drek, I don’t know the scientific terms. The point of no return near a black hole. I guess I thought it sounded edgy.”

“Oh, like an event horizon?”

“Yes!” Lovath’s eyes lit up. “My translator seems to think that’s right, anyhow. Didn’t know humans had a word for it.”

Didn’t think we were smart enough, maybe. But I bit back that reply because I knew it wasn’t fair. Humans had known precious little about space until extremely recently—and still did. I couldn’t fault him for believing we wouldn’t know much about black holes when we could barely even create telescopes strong enough to see them.

His ship was the Event Horizon then.