The Subtle Taste of Midnight

Apple

"It was just a kiss!" I snap.

A laugh squeezes its way through his throat, as smooth as liquid silk in my ears. "It is never just anything," he says.

I fold my arms across my chest. "What we're doing isn't right!"

"What am I doing other than being honest?" He looks at me in that way I hate so much, and I feel like both punching and kissing him at the same time.

"Don't you dare!" I growl in frustration. "I am–"

"Married," he finishes my sentence before I do. "Yes. I get that. You humans love clinging to your titles so."

"And you Akarseans don't?" I spit back.

A deep sadness washes over his regal features, but he smiles through it. Now there's the Xal I know, with his infamous poker face and his unshakable perfection. Never a strand out of place or a seam misaligned. Perfection at its finest, he is.

Cold. Logical. Emotionless.

Not this cracked and imperfect creature sitting before me, hair disheveled and eyes blood shot, rattled by the confessions his tongue laid bare before me as a sacrifice on the altar of...

Love?

What does he know of such things? His feet only know how to follow the sanctioned dance steps on the chart. His tongue only wags with the right words because it is practiced, as is everything he does. Everything he thinks. Breathes. Lives.

Practice makes perfect, and perfection makes the Akarsean sitting before me right now. So who the hell does he think he is, coming into my house, calling me his nayahi, his Apple? Telling me that he loves me? Whispering to me the things that he knows my heart feels for him? How dare he!

"Get out!" I growl.

He remains where he is, of course. Unshakably rooted to his stubbornness as always, while I stomp around to make my anger unmistakable.

"GET OUT!" I throw a cushion at his face, and perfection becomes a little more disheveled.

He protests because he can't believe that his charms haven't won him favor as they always do. It takes the shaking of fists and screaming at the top of my lungs to get him to move an inch. And when he finally moves, it's so slow and so fucking frustrating to watch. He's always so stoic, even in the face of chaos and anger, while I'm here, just about losing my shit all over the place!

"GET OUT!"

It's only the lights in his skin that tell me there are emotions bubbling beneath his veneer of tranquility. It hums with all shades of red now that he's angry. The glow of his double hearts beat brightly beneath his suit as the atoms within him collide and heat rolls off him in waves. He is an inferno churning, bubbling, but only on the inside. That poker face of his...flawless.

"Fuck you, Xal!"

The light in his eyes dim ever so slightly, and for a minute there, I see a shadow. Doubt. I see his imperfection unintentionally bleed out of him. I smell it as sweet musk perfuming his skin. Such things are toxic to the brain, and dangerous to the heart.

Suddenly that thing inside me, that poison, becomes something more. A longing ignited into a fire no one could ever hope to control. I tremble as I fight against it. I want to win. Honestly, I do. But I know that my heart is just as stubborn as Xal. It wants the impossible.

It wants...

I can't tell you the exact moment when my lips overpower his. I can't say when or how my hands find their way beneath his space-suit. All I know is that they do. That I tear at the alien fabric until it surrenders. That my tongue dances across his, that fingernails claw at flesh until God Himself falls to his knees before me, his head between my legs, his tongue at my command. And in that moment, perfection moves like an animal unleashed, and the inferno inside spills out into the unsuspecting world. It drives itself deep inside me, strangles every nerve with a jolt of electricity. Skin slapping against skin. The taste of sweat salting my tongue. Curses screamed. Tears shed as cries for more chaos. The air glows like stardust, radiant blue and purple, filled with incessant clicks and hovering whistles.