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It’s -at first- a peculiar thing. A press of her lips against his own. Another difference between them: his lips are far smaller than hers, much more narrow. The first kiss is fleeting, and strange in the way every new thing is. A second attempt. Her fingers ghost along the edge of his jaw as though she does not quite know where to put her hands. This time she tilts a bit in the same way she does when she is considering something or forming a question in her mind she is about to ask. And perhaps this kiss is a question. It evokes an answer in the form of a third attempt.
This time, he leans to meet her halfway. Her breath hitches a moment before their lips meet. Perhaps it is that quiet hitch that makes him chase her, chase this. He is curious more than anything else. Perhaps hopeful; that this could be something. It is not unpleasant, even if it is clumsy and strange. But it is not new like the first two kisses were. This is a question. One asked with lips that press against his and really, who is he to not seek the answer alongside her? Who is he to deny those soft lips their shared curiosities. He tilts his own head to mirror hers as they part for only a second before he is chasing her for a fourth attempt.
Somewhere in the chase, in the meeting of their lips, in the way she shifts in his lap, some kind of sense begins to be made.
Something in the way they share the same gasps of air. Something in her every breath exhaled through her nose or against his mouth and feeling the warmth of it across his skin. Something of the way that their lips are moving now against one another. It is not something he would have ever chased before; so foreign still for him to experience and yet, and yet.
Her arm falls across his shoulders. His fingertips find her jaw. He does not know how to count their kisses any more. Is it every time their lips break from one another? Is it when she pulls back for half a second before he follows her? Is it when he breaks their kiss to attempt to ask -or even to attempt to look at her- only for her to pull him back into her? How does he even attempt to consider counting when he can all but taste her every breath? How he could swear that he can almost taste the faintest bit of red spice tea on her lips from earlier and some filthy deranged part of him wishes to somehow have more of it and chase its taste. His tongue is no stranger to her body, to her taste, and yet this is different. This feels somehow so much more illicit than the other ways he’s tasted her skin. This is warm and soft and new and yet no longer quite so strange and her lips are a blessing upon his skin in any form and when she pulls back this time she must have licked her lips to wet them because when they meet again her lips are wet and oh that is new that is borderline illicit how can he stop himself from chasing the way their lips slide against each other how could he resist the temptation to lick them himself and taste the red spice for himself-?
An age passes against her lips, wrapped in her arms, clinging to her waist. An empire could rise and fall before he could begin to explain what this is, how this feels. An endless pursuit of an answer that feels as though it is slowly taking form with every meeting of their lips. An answer that begins to shape itself into something that has the plushness of T’Rina’s lips and the taste of whatever it is that makes them so soft.
They part on a shared gasp for no reason at all, and yet it is synched as though it were planned. He is close enough to hear her swallow. Close enough that their panting breath mingles in the scant few inches between them. Even now, their breath finds synchrony. A harmony of the electric buzz in his veins that he can only hope is mirrored in her.
When he opens his eyes, his lungs very nearly give up their breath entirely.
Her flushed cheeks, the blush along the tips of her ears. The flutter of her lashes. Her lips parted with her panting breath, flushed green and plump from their experiments. Her eyes flicker open.
There. In the blown out darkness of her pupils; the very way they get when she is particularly engaged in something, or particularly excited. The way they flicker down to his lips and dart over his face before meeting his eyes once more. The way her arms move off his shoulders just enough for her hands to slide up his neck and find his jaw. The way her hands rest upon his face and she looks at him as though she is seeing something entirely new. No longer the question they began with. No longer a question at all.
This is the answer.
“More.”
It drips from her lips as though she is hardly aware she even spoke. Not a question, a plea, or even a command. A statement. Like it is an eventuality. A fixed point.
“More.”
An affirmation from his lips. A formality, if anything. It is an eventuality. She is never something he can deny. Least of all her lips: flushed and kiss-swollen and so enticing that not even the Makers themselves could cleanse him of the urge to take her lower lip between his teeth.
She dives against him as though she heard the very thought. As though somewhere in between her warm lips and her hands that cannot seem to stop touching him anywhere they could reach, she could somehow use it all to string together a plea for more.
As though he would ever deny them this. Now that he has tasted her, now that they have claimed this for themselves. As though he is not just as desperate for the curious brush of her tongue against his lower lip, and then the brush of their tongues together, and then for the little shocked noise she makes as her tongue meets his between their tantric explorations.
Oh, if he had only known that the exploration of the stars would one day lead to her. If he only knew the barest hint of this; her plush lips and the soft moan that falls from them when she shifts in his lap to press the length of her body against his. If he could have even dreamed of such a thing as this -as her- he would have walked into the unknown darkness of the stars with eagerness to be lost within them.