Free Shalia's Diary by Tracy St. John Page A

of his kiss swept through my skull, traveled down my spine, and burst into flame down below.  I wasn’t just melting.  My insides boiled.  I have never felt anything like it, and if I’d had any sense of what I was doing before, it was absolutely gone in that instant.
     
    I touched him as the kiss went on and on.  One arm was trapped against him, but the free one more than made up for being on its own.  It was as if my sense of touch had been starving, and I was determined to devour Dusa through feeling him.  I traced his strong jawline.  My hand swept down his corded throat.  I felt the width of one shoulder and gasped at the hard iron of his bicep.  His chest was the width of a football field, and I explored that for what felt like ages.  His abdomen was granite.  There was nothing soft about Dusa.  He was all rock and steel and strength.  It should have made me afraid.  Even at my healthiest, I would have no defense against such a man.  But instead I felt sheltered.  Safe.
     
    More than that, I’d become desperately aroused.  While I touched Dusa, he touched me.  His tongue twined around mine, sometimes drawing it into his mouth, sometimes pushing it back so he could invade my mouth with passion.  He held me tight with one arm in an uncompromising grip.  His free hand stroked my hair.  He cupped my cheek to tilt my head just so, allowing him to deepen our kiss.  His fingers stroked down my throat, traced over my collarbone, and trailed down my arm.  Then they returned to the hollow of my throat.  Slowly, slowly, that whispering touch drifted down to my breastbone.
     
    A hundred moths took flight in my belly.  Would he go further?  Would he dare?
     
    He did.  His hand covered one breast, heating it.  I arched with a cry, as if I could fill his hand even more with it.  I had lost all control.
     
    His thumb found my nipple and stroked over it, bringing it to stiff attention.  The sensation was pure fire, adding to the conflagration already burning an inferno in my belly.  I was like a volcano, lava roiling within, eager to get out.
     
    Who knows how far I would have let Dusa take me?  If not for the sound of laughter breaking into our senses, I might have let him do whatever he wanted.  I’d become no more than an animal in heat, ready to rut as any thoughtless beast might.  Since this morning, I have decided that we are little more than primitive creatures, obeying nothing more than the instincts we are born with.  Why else would I have responded so eagerly to the sexual urgings of a man I hardly know?
     
    It was the sound of others in the distance that woke us from our would-be mating frenzy.  We simultaneously broke the kiss, gasping in shock.  I suddenly realized how we were outside and anyone might have stumbled upon our wild display.  A vision of the Pageant Trio with their disapproving faces appeared before my mind’s eye.  I thought of the two women I’d seen hanged outside the Academy. 
     
    I have lost my mind.
     
    The moment broken and our senses restored, Dusa helped me back to Medical.  He wanted to stay, to talk with me, but I couldn’t take his presence for even one second more.  Begging exhaustion, I sent him away.  Now I’m dealing with the fallout of what just happened.
     
    I carried on carnally with a man where anyone might see me.  And not just a man, an alien man.  A Kalquorian, Earth’s avowed enemy.  I can’t believe I let such a thing happen.
     
    More disturbing, I can’t get over how good it felt.  I ache for more.  I’m not saying ‘ache’ as a metaphor.  I want to kiss that man again so bad it hurts.  The thought of what might have happened if we hadn’t come to our senses in time scares me, but it excites me too. 
     
    Have they been putting something in my food?  Something that will make me want to join one of their clans so they can breed?  Something that puts my hormones into overdrive so that the slightest clandestine