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I wake up feeling feverish, and Viro is in my line of sight with his feet kicked up on the edge of my bed.
“Get your dirty feet off,” I grumble with my first hoarse breath.
“What a nice way to greet a male who’s saved your ass a hundred times over.”
“I had the strangest dream,” I mutter, rubbing between my brows. I don’t recall many of the details after going into the amma’ka state during the mate-bonding ceremony. I have only the vague memories of following Frankie’s teal silhouette through the blurred forest maze. Then there are heated dreams of her tongue licking my cum from her fingers and sweet teasing words from her lips as she watched me jerk my cock. Was I passed out on the forest floor when Viro came to collect me?
“Was it a dream?” Viro asks me with mocking sweetness. “You’ve been asleep for less than a quarter interval, so how much could you have dreamed realistically?”
I blink at him, the grogginess dissipating quickly.
“The rut are you saying?”
“I pulled your ungrateful, idiotic self off the back of the speeder that Frankie drove here, all the while you were slumped over her back groaning in her ear.”
“Did she say that?”
“No, she said—” He assumes a high-pitched voice. “—‘I ruined our plans. It’s all my fault that he’s like this, but he’s exhausted and should lay down for a while.’”
“You mean to tell me… that my memories of being with Frankie in the forest are real?”
“Yes,” he says. “I don’t know the details, and I don’t need to know, but please tell me you didn’t get carried away. Frankie is acting like nothing’s wrong, which as you know means it could be fine or it could be terrible, and she’s pretending it’s fine.”
No wonder the dreams felt so real. Even through the haze, they’re ones I won’t soon forget.
“It could’ve been much worse,” I tell Viro. “No harm done.”
“If you say,” he sighs with relief. “You two give me a headache. In any case, I’m leaving and I’m officially off duty, so next time I see you, it had better be over a shot of hard liquor.”
When Frankie comes to find me, she’s already done a careful job of dragging fingermarks through her powders, swirling them and smudging them to create the illusion that I put my hands on her.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Refreshed. That nap was long enough to make the crowd think I last quite a long time.” The joke feels humorless, but she cracks a smile.
“Then let’s go. I’m starving,” she says, turning around.
Blue and red powders are stamped all over her back, which was once pristinely clean.
“Francesca, wait!” I call, catching up to her and getting a closer look. She couldn’t have done this on her own. “Your back is a mess.”
“I’m lucky you didn’t fall off the speeder. It was hard to drive with your heavy ass weighing me down,” she explains, craning her neck to look at the sweaty swirl of colors.
“I’m sorry for my behavior.”
“Don’t apologize. It was fi—”
“Fine?” I finish for her. “Everything’s fine. Well, I don’t want you to be ‘fine,’ ti kori. I want you to be more than fine.”
“I won’t accept apologies when you’ve done nothing wrong,” she says firmly.
“First it was what we did to share my kali, then the kiss, and now it’s this. I fear I haven’t been a male of my word,” I say. “I made a promise to you, and I keep breaking it.”
“I chose to stay there. I could’ve left, and I didn’t. That was my decision.” She grabs my hand, squeezing down on my bare skin. I love her warmth, every little taste of it I can get. “Look, with you, I can do this much. That’s because of you. There was a time when I thought ‘fine’ might be impossible. To me, ‘fine’ feels amazing. I was afraid to tell you this, but if you feel bad I might as well…”
“What?” I ask, hating that anything related to me could make her afraid.
“It’s exciting enough for me to feel desire,” she says, looking away. There’s that shyness again. It seems like she reserves her bashful moments for me and me alone, so I treasure it. If I’m the only one who makes her feel that way, it must mean something. “For a while now, we’ve been tiptoeing at the edges of something more than partnership. I’m glad that we’ve become friends. When I asked you to make this exchange with me, that was the most I could’ve hoped for.”
