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He took my questions in stride though. “It takes as long as it takes. It lasts until I sever it. As for what it feels like for me—I would rather not say.”
“Oh,” I thought softly. “Am I . . . hurting you?”
He paused, as though assessing himself for damage. “Not currently,” he answered, then began unlooping his tentacles from me. “The bonding is through,” he announced, and I sagged against the chair.
chapter 11
CEPHARIUS
Feeling like I was going to suffocate in air was awful, but at least I knew it was coming.
No one seemed to have warned her about the bonding process. I was worried about the bound state they’d left her in on her side—I would’ve rather had her avid consent, but there was no way for me to judge her mind until we were through. I would have to trust in the fact that she’d sat down on her own, and made the journey to the deep to join me to begin with.
I hesitated before putting my first tentacle on her. I had gone three years and thirty days without feeling another’s touch, and I would’ve readily gone the rest of my life.
I didn’t want to mar Cayoni’s memory, or have anyone else erase my sorrow—but to ensure that might occur, the only way out was through.
So I reached across the magical line and wrapped her wrist.
Because we weren’t bonded yet, our contact was merely physical, although my suckers began reporting in all of her minutia. Her wrist was small. Her bones, delicate. I could feel the thrum of her pulse, and the slight heat radiating from her body. And her taste...a lick of salt, the last chemicals in which she’d bathed, and something beneath both of those, something inexorably hers—I wanted more of it, and I wound her ankles readily, without thinking. My suckers pulsed against her skin, trying to take more of her in, as if they realized this might be the last contact with another sentient entity they would ever truly have.
I held back my final tentacle, waiting, wondering if her heartbeat would slow down, if she was terrified of me or excited, knowing full well the answer to any of my further questions lay just inside her mind.
I reached out, bound her other wrist, and enveloped her in my ’qa.
My mind’s horizon breached, pulling away from the space I thought of as mine and invited her in to share in it.
I felt her panic as she imagined herself doused in the deep water I was swimming in, and swallowed my own at feeling my “lungs” breathe her “air.”
I knew what was happening, however—she did not. Her terror was a living thing as the same mind I’d admired the prior night thrashed wildly, looking to escape. I envisioned myself reaching for it, trying to send my thoughts to settle hers, wrapping not only her limbs but herself, trying to give her a concept of safety, wrestling her fear for her own wellbeing and?—
My colors shifted from gray to black, and a surprising low heat stoked inside of me.
Then I shifted from black, to green, to gray again, each color raking through me, the decisions of my body becoming written on my skin.
It’d been so long, I almost didn’t recognize the signs. “No,” I whispered.
She was thrashing, because she thought herself drowning—but what was happening to me was real because I felt my pumping arm swell and descend. I only barely kept my panic from matching hers as my colors began changing more quickly.
“No!” I shouted internally at what was happening, helpless to stop it because—because—I didn’t want to.
My suckers pulled at her skin like I was trying to drag her into the sea—a thing I could’ve done accidentally if I were not careful—and my mind soared, bathed in the release of mating endorphins. I shook my head from side to side, trying to clear it, attempting to use internal musculature to pull my pumping arm back up.
I didn’t want this—I didn’t want her—I wanted what I had—but it was too late.
I felt her thoughts like I felt my own, far deeper than any obligatory bonding I’d had to perform with humans in the past, and her bright mind didn’t just meet mine—it possessed me.
It sank into all the cracks where I was broken and for a moment, I was whole.
My ’qa had fully taken her in—and we were mated.
I was suffused with her, and she was closer to me than the water I breathed.
I knew her name was Elle. She was thirty-five years old. I knew she was very smart, very sad, and I was to be with her for the rest of my life—while at the same time, I ached with the knowledge that that was literally impossible.
She was of the air and I was of the sea.
This would be the only time we would ever touch, and my heart, that had felt so healed a second ago, was already falling back apart.
