I worried.

I worried about love at first sight, because I was still skeptical about whether or not a sapien could feel an everlasting love at first sight like a novus could, but I decided that Gideon was worth the risk.

We went to the zoo together and took our time walking around talking about everything – Gideon childhood, my childhood, what kind of lives we wanted to build together and where we wanted to live. Gideon didn’t mind if we lived near my family, or how many kids we had, or even when we had kids – he just wanted a cat, me, and a house with a huge television.

I knew then that’d I’d have to do some prying to find out what ever he really needed, but we had time for that, and I was patient.

And persistent.

Maybe not nearly as persistent as Gideon, but when I wanted to know something, I’d find a way to learn about it, and I wanted to learn everything about Gideon.

When dawn started to approach, we decided to go to the love hotel and spend the day there messing around to keep pushing our bonding along, Gideon insisting he wanted to bond as fast as possible so he could ‘have me locked down’, which I was fine with.

We had been to the love hotel at the heart of the matchmaking district a few times and had stayed in a different room each time. This time, we stayed in a room called the aquarium room, where there was a large fish tank with exotic fish covering the entire wall between the bedroom and the bathroom.

For a while, we just sat in the large bathtub soaking and watching the fish, talking about what would happen after we were fully mated since he wasn’t very informed about the whole process.

He had a good laugh when I told him that I would probably be growing an entire thirteen or fourteen inches, Gideon insisting that he didn’t think that would happen but said the sex would be insane if it did. I pulled up a video on my comm that taught about the final grown period of a novus for him to watch while I washed his hair, and Gideon fully dropped my comm into the bath when he realized I wasn’t joking. There was a moment of panic before I told him comms were waterproof, and then he watched the video again, asking question throughout this time that I was happy to respond to.

Yes, Type A novus had the most dramatic final growth after they mated. Yes, I would be significantly taller, faster and stronger then I was was now.

No, my teeth wouldn’t return to being sharp, but yes, I would be willing to skip my next appointment to filing my claws down so they looked more novus. He got a real kick out of finding out my claws were retractable, learning that I had them retracted this entire time and when they were out, they were more obviously claws. Retracted, they looked more respectable, and most novus in civilized clans kept them ‘away’ so they were less pronounced.

He asked if I could keep them out while he rode my dick, and I told him that I could keep them out, but I didn’t want to touch him with them when they were out. We came to an agreement that he could hold my hands while I fucked him since he agreed he was unpredictable when we fucked, and once we were dried off, we retreated back to the bedroom.

Things moved fast with Gideon where I let him decide the pace for us while I focused mainly on keeping control of myself so I didn’t hurt him.

And with Gideon, that was hard.

I was laid out under the cover while Gideon withered and moaned on my dick, aggressively riding me with our hands joined together, and it was like...the world shrunk down entirely to what he was doing to me with his body and only what he was doing to me.

I had been hunting a few times before with Mabel and her children, and there was a moment when you locked onto a prey where suddenly everything else faded away and all you focused on was the prey, their scent trail, their tracks, and the sound of their heartbeat. There was nothing else in the world that was alive but you and your prey, and all you could think about was what they were doing, and what their next actions might be.

This was just like that.

Only far more intense.

I didn’t think it was possible to become more aware of Gideon until he leaned down and kissed me while he worked his hips, and then I lost it. I pulled my hands free from his and grabbed his arms to roll us, pinning him to the bed. He moaned and wrapped his arms and legs around me tightly, but I had enough sense to pause, remember that using full strength to fuck into him meant he could shatter his pelvis, and then I buried my face in the crook of his neck and fucked him slow and hard.

He made it very difficult to keep my focus though, moaning and arching his back so that we were completely touching, his blunt nails scratching down my back as he grunted like an animal and roughly moved his hips to fuck himself on me.

I think he was doing it on purpose to try and unwind me, but I didn’t want to assume.

I really just wanted to fuck.

I licked along his pulse, sucking on it as I brushed my teeth against his flesh, Gideon moaning louder, making punched out noises with each of my thrusts, demanding I give him everything I got, telling me how good I was, how much more he could take.

I groaned and suck all the way in as I felt my orgasm building, Gideon forcing my head back so he could roughly kiss me as I came in him, Gideon tightening around me as milking my cock with rough movements, wringing a moan out of me.

I collapsed on him when I was done, twitching as jerking as he still milked my cock, Gideon forcing my mouth to move with his own as I panted into his mouth.

It was a gentle struggle to get him into the shower to clean him out afterward, Gideon insisting he wanted to feel me in him all the way back to the hotel. I knew if I told him the reason why I wanted him to shower was because every novus that came across him would be able to smell that I was inside of him – and that’s why I wanted him to wash off – he would flat out refuse, so I kept that to myself.

It wasn’t civilized to want something like that.

And it scared me that I desperately wanted others to know. I wanted them to smell me in him, on him. I wanted them to know I had bought him the jacket he was wearing, that the cross hanging around his neck was one he had taken off of my own to wear.

I wanted everyone to know he was taken.

But you just didn’t do things like that in Victoria. We were civilized, and stuff like that was rude and vulgar.

But God…

I wanted it.

When we got back to his hotel, we went up to his room and we decided after Gideon insisted that he would come and stay with me at his apartment from now on, but I would need to go change my code so Roy and his family didn’t accidentally walk in on us.

So while Gideon packed up his things, I went back to my place to arrange for that.

Roy came down with Joy and sat with me in the building’s manager’s office while we waited for him to change to codes, and we had a good long talk about what my plans with Gideon were. For now, we were going to stay in Liliport while I finished school and saved up enough for us to buy a nice house, and then once we were settled back closer to our parents, we’d start getting ready to adopt so my kids would be around the same age as Roy’s.

It took about four hours before we got the code changed, and though I gave it to Roy, he knew that was only for emergencies. Otherwise, I would have a ‘family code’ that he or the kids could use to access my house, but when it was in ‘locked mode’ the family code wouldn’t work so they knew that Gideon and I didn’t want to be disturbed.

After it was all done, I called Gideon to see if he was ready to go, and when he confirmed he was, I told him to wait in the lobby for me and he agreed to.

But when I got there Gideon wasn’t in the lobby of his hotel, and he wasn’t in his room either.

At first I thought he was playing with me, so I pulled up my comm to find out where he was.

Gideon had told me to put ‘one of those locating app things on our comms I saw them talk about on the television thing’ so we could see where each other were (and I suppose so he could get ready to look like he was flirting with others when he knew I was coming close) and I quickly saw where he and his comm were and left the hotel to find him.

His comm was found in a trashcan two blocks down.

Which I didn’t understand.

I returned to his hotel and asked them to pull up the security video to see if there was any indication of where he went or what would make him throw away his comm.

When they pulled up the video, I saw him going to the lobby like he said he would right after we hung up, and there he was quickly greeted by a young novus in the Trinity Peacekeepers uniform, who led him outside and then down the street.

Gideon went with him willingly, even throwing his arms around the nightwalker’s shoulders to hang off his back like he did with me.

And then they were gone.