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He stopped a good distance from the pool.
I didn’t want to let go of him. His arms around me made me feel better, like they were melting away the harm and stress from what just happened.
“I don’t want you to put me down.” I pressed my face against his chest, not looking up at him.
I felt the warm water lap around my thighs, sliding up my body like a loving embrace. I pulled my face away from his chest to see he had gotten into the bathing pool while carrying me, still dressed in all my clothing. The water sloshed over the edge, wetting the stone around the pool before sliding down a small slope to the stream that ran on the side of the room.
I swallowed, feeling a soreness in my throat.
“Choking a partner is a serious threat.” My words were soft with the heaviness of what I was saying. “It is one of the most likely signs that your partner is going to kill you if you’re in a domestic abuse situation…. If they choke you, it means they want to kill you and likely are going to.”
Aeson’s arms tightened around me.
“I didn’t know.” His words had a torn quality about that. “It is not the same for our species at all. Males do not kill females in my culture. They would get torn apart by the female’s other mates if they even tried. I had read that it was frightening for your species but I didn’t realize the extent of that. I will never put any constriction around your neck ever again.”
I let my legs float out in the water as I turned, leaning the back of my head and shoulders against his chest. His arms relaxed and his fingers began tracing gentle patterns up my arm. I pushed my arm into his touch, encouraging him to stroke down the length of my arm.
“What touch is comforting for you?” he asked, his voice low. “I wish to make your body feel relaxed and good. To be clear, I have no intent to initiate mating with you, just touch you in ways that you desire.”
At the word mate my back stiffened, then relaxed with the rest of his sentence.
“What, is me pissing myself from fear of you not sexy to you?” The sharp tone in my voice cut my own ears as a flash of shame washed through me.
“I have never been aroused less than when you were terrified,” he replied. “Though our previous conversation led to thoughts of chasing and catching you that were arousing, the reality of you being genuinely afraid and causing you harm to get there was unsettling for me. I don’t wish to ever experience that again.”
Those words hit me hard.
I pushed away from him, finding the edge of the pool.
I peeled my shirt off, then wiggled out of my jeans and underwear, peeling them off in the water. I dropped all of my clothing in a wet pile on the side of the pool, then floated backwards moving towards the deeper section of the water.
As my feet left the bottom, a small flash of residual fear flashed through me.
I took a deep breath as it passed through me like a feather floating on the wind, carried away by the effervescent breath of the Earth as it moved through the trees. It didn’t grow like it used to, piling on until the whole pile of stones tumbled. Instead, the fear dissipated as my legs slowly kicked through the warm water, keeping me up right as I treaded water in the middle of it. I turned in the water to look back at Aeson.
He was looking at me with a gentle hunger, an intense stare that remained in his eyes as he glanced down at my naked body before fixing his gaze on my eyes. His heated gaze didn’t turn into action as he stayed where he was at the edge of the pool, most of his tail back up on the stones with just a portion of him in the water.
“Are you comfortable like that?” I asked, gesturing at the rest of his tail.
“No,” he rumbled. “But I thought you would feel better with most of me out there rather than circling the pool.”
“Get all the way in,” I ordered.
He slid the rest of his tail down over the edge, pouring into the pool like a waterfall that caused more water to wash outwards as it wrapped around the inner edge like a cinnamon roll.
“You’re really all in on this, aren’t you?” I asked and stated at the same time, a full concept of who this male was coalescing in my mind with the repeated clear expressions of his thoughts and feelings.
“All in is a gambling idiom, correct?” he asked. “I see no gamble in our relationship, only continued work to communicate with each other and work together to build the type of future we are happy with.”
Future… that word was so strange to me. I’d approached dating, and even this marriage, as something I was doing for the time being, something that furthered my desires and enhanced my life in some way or another. I’d married him because it seemed like a better ploy for my crumbling career than backpedaling and rolling over on my belly for the masses.
But here, floating in this hot tub, surrounded fully by the male who had just given me one of the most visceral frights of my entire life just a short while ago, making me believe I was going to die, the word took on a different meaning.
I’d barely even begun to live my life.
I’d spent so long striving for the goal of attention, to make myself into a product that the world would want to look at, would want to see move around as a doll on the screen, telling other people’s fictional stories. Working for the soap opera had been gratifying in the fact that I was supporting myself doing what I always wanted to do, but simultaneously a drudge as I acted out characters and stories I just didn’t care about at all.
I was on the moon, with a husband who was a space billionaire, at least in comparison to what wealth could accomplish on Earth itself.
