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I came here to be his wife, didn’t I? I wasn’t here to half-ass anything. And if I wanted him to keep me around after thirty days were up, surely I’d need to try to get as close to him as possible, right?
“What do Zabrians do?” I hedged, feeling suddenly shy. Sharing a bed with Silar…
“Haven’t been there in cycles,” he said with a toss of his tail that felt like the Zabrian version of a shrug.
“You don’t ever go there to visit?”
He stiffened, his gaze flashing white before he tilted his head down again, casting more of his face in shadow. “No.”
“Well, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” I said. “But I expected… Well, typically human married couples share a bed. Or at least a room. Not always, of course,” I stammered. Good grief. I was well and truly blabbering now. “If there are, I don’t know, sleep issues or something, they might sleep apart. Do you snore?”
“Do I what?”
“Snore. It’s this loud snorty noise people make when they sleep. Sometimes. Not always. Do you snore?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s fine if you do,” I added hastily. “Mama always said I sleep like the dead, so it won’t bother me…” I steeled myself. “I’ll sleep here! If that’s agreeable to you, I mean.”
Silar didn’t look up. His head still bent, he merely muttered one single, growly word directly at my boobs. “Agreeable.”
“OK. Swell. Sleeping arrangements are settled, then,” I said in a breathy rush. For some reason I didn’t feel relieved by this agreement, even though it was what I had been angling for. My belly tightened with nerves as I finally dabbed some of the cream onto the blackened edge of Silar’s ear. He hissed sharply, and I snatched my hand back.
“Sorry! Did that hurt?”
“No,” he said after a tense moment of heavy breathing. He curled his hands into fists on top of his thighs.
This was just like when I’d put my hands on his shoulders and then kissed him earlier. The simplest touches resulted in the most extraordinary, explosive physical responses. It occurred to me as I thoughtfully squeezed more cream from the tube that it might have been months, or maybe even years, since Silar had been touched by another person.
“Here,” I whispered, giving him a bit of a warning before I stroked the edge of his other ear, gently spreading the cream. He didn’t actually hiss this time, at least, but he did breathe in sharply through his nose. Some unseen muscles beneath the hair on his scalp spasmed, making both his ears twitch in unison.
“Are you sure this isn’t painful?” I asked doubtfully, adding a little more cream to the first ear.
“Define painful,” he said raggedly. Thrown by the question, I couldn’t come up with an answer.
Instead, I asked, my heart in my throat, “Should I stop?”
“Probably.”
I raised a brow at him.
“If I stop, will you promise to finish the job and do this yourself?”
“No.”
I smirked and rolled my eyes.
“I didn’t think so. I’ll try to be quick.”
Silar remained dutifully stiff and silent under my ministrations. Soon enough, all the inflamed, black bits of his ears had been coated with the healing antiseptic cream.
When I was finished, I asked him if he had any bandages to wrap everything up so the skin would stay clean, but he just stared at me blankly.
“Did that not translate?” I asked, wiping residue from my fingers onto my pants. Silar’s blue-veined gaze tracked the movements of my hands against my hips. “I want to wrap up your ears so all the cream doesn’t come off and everything stays protected.”
“It translated,” he finally informed me, taking his eyes from my hip-area with what looked like some effort. “I just don’t have anything like that.”
“What the heck do you do when you’re injured?”
