This one is a little bit spicy kinda sorta but it’s not explicit in any sort of way.
Soft, slow breaths ghosted against the bare chitin of his chest as his lover slept on, her pale skin still flushed with warmth. Small strands of sweat slick hair clung to her face, and he freed them with a careful brush of his claw, sending them twisting in the current of her breath before he swept them safely behind her ear where they would not tickle her and cause her to wake.
She was so beautiful like this, sprawled as she was against the expanse of his body, her expression soft and unguarded and full of… something. Something warm that lit the dark shadows of his mind, something warm that seemed the soft echo of what had once been familiar. A feeling he had known once. A feeling he could hold now, in the shape of a woman, who had given him back so many things he had once thought lost.
She sighed, shifting, and he admired the elegant arch of her body as she stretched and yawned, moving his own arms slightly to adjust to the new shape that she made against him, though it hardly mattered. There was a rightness about holding her. A certain fit to the shapes of their hearts that lined up as perfectly as a broken bowl, the crack almost impossible to find when they were pressed together like this. Two bodies, made one by the bond of that feeling, that warmth…
It wasn’t love, or not entirely. Or if it was love, it was love’s own pair, the other half that he had always been missing, the second part of the set to make things complete. It wasn’t lust either, though there was plenty of heat between them. He had felt heat before, but it had never been anything like this. It had only consumed him, whereas this feeling bound him together filling the cracks life had left behind on his heart. On his body. There was something in her that soothed the aches that were more than physical, though her gentle hands had helped to fill the worst of his physical aches as well.
It was…
It was… a letting down of barriers, without any fear. It was turning around and knowing that she would be beside him. It was… knowing that he would be there for her too. It was… something in the way that she looked at him, in the way that she talked. It was how when something went wrong he could turn to her and she to him, without hesitation, without questioning and–
Trust.
It was trust.
It was the easy way she relaxed against him, the speed with which she fell asleep. It was how she reached for him without hesitation, heard his voice but never flinched, reached for him as if he was a lifeline and a shield but never a weapon, never a monster.
Only a Kajj.
Only a man.
And, in turn, he trusted her. He showed her his weak points, and his hurts. He reached for her when he was uncertain and he knew that her guidance would not lead him astray. Around her, his mind quieted its litany of checks and double checks, its analysis of every turn of phrase, every tone and glance… He didn’t need it, with her. She would not lie to him. And he could put his life in her palm, willingly, easily.
Trust… Love’s pair. How funny, when seeing them together, to think that they had ever been separate within his mind.