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Probably not. And it served no one for me to think it did.
My skin felt hot to the touch and I wondered if I was still recovering from the previous night of lovemaking.
I placed my arm to the wall and the coolness of it soothed my skin.
I happened to glance at my arm where, until just a few hours ago, I sported the nasty black bruise. Only now… it was gone.
“Huh?” I said out loud.
I ran a hand over the spot where I knew it should have been but was no longer there.
Maybe I was mistaken and it was on the other arm. It didn’t sound very likely but it was the kind of thing I had done multiple times over the years.
I checked but it didn’t sport the ugly injury either. Even stranger was that the spot where I was certain the bruise should have been was even hotter than the rest of my body.
Had it been a rash? I wondered. Was that the reason for it not being visible?
Then why wasn’t it itchy? I wondered. And why didn’t it hurt?
It didn’t make sense. Why should the nasty bruise be there one day and not there the next?
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. That, at least, was an explanation I could understand.
I filed it away for later and focused on the moment in hand.
I’d never experienced anything like it my entire life. I kept a neat and tidy list of my favorite lovers over the years and no one had ever come close to surpassing Greg Kyle in college. We hadn’t been together long, which made our time together even more memorable.
But now, Greg Kyle was a very distant third. The two times we had sex last night overshadowed Greg’s meager effort by a long way.
Nothing even came close.
I leaned back and looked at the creature that’d brought this on me. His skin was as red as the dust in the inhospitable desert outside. His horns would have been white when he was born but had turned a waxy-yellow hue through the years of battle and war. There were more than a dozen chips to those elongated horns of his.
His body was crisscrossed with endless scars from the tip of his sloped brow to the tips of his toes where etches had been cleaved into his calves.
Most of the creatures in the prison were capable of healing quickly and I wondered what sort of harm he’d endured to have such violent marks on him as this. He couldn’t have gotten them all fighting in the pit as he’d only been here six months.
He was a pirate, I reminded myself. He could’ve easily have come across violent attacks during that time.
Pirates, I thought wryly, shaking my head.
Intergalactic pirates.
History always had a way of repeating itself, running in cycles without end.
The blankets rustled as Egara came awake. He smacked his lips and yawned, stretching with his enormous arms. His bones cracked and he wiggled his toes. He lowered his hand to my ass and patted me.
“Sleep well?” he said, shutting his eyes and letting the fringes of sleep descend once more.
“Great,” I said, surprised I really meant it.
I didn’t usually sleep well in strange rooms. I rarely slept well in my own these days either. Beneath the makeup, I had dark bags under my eyes.
I stretched and flinched at the pain.
“Sore?” he said.
“A little,” I said.
