Power Trio

Kell takes her extraordinarily expensive red dress in two fists; her tattooed biceps bulge as she rips it in half down the middle, in one motion. It flutters from her as she falls upon Evan and Thekla and pins them both to the ground.

She carves Evan’s button-down open with a slicing tusk, from belt to collar, billowing hot breath into his face. He’s hard as a rock against her inner thigh. Thekla’s pulling her own dress up. Too slow. Kell seizes the goblin, lifts her into the air by an ankle, peels her squealing from the black satin. She holds Thekla upside down, buries her face between her mate’s legs and takes a heaving, starving inhale. Her nervous system fizzes and rewires itself. Her hips buck and grind against Evan, still trapped beneath her. She’s soaked through her boyshorts.

Her muscles are painfully tight. Her jaw aches.

Thekla’s legs kick helplessly, hands shaking as she pulls her sheer black panties down (well, up). A delicate strand of liquid stretches from the departing fabric. The smell of arousal and sweat and honeysuckle. Thekla is as turned on as she is.

She grins viciously. Her tangr’ak roars. She hefts her little green morsel up, so that Thekla is riding on her shoulders, pelvis pressed into her face. The goblin locks her legs around the back of Kell’s neck. The night sounds of the forest muffle beneath a pair of squishy sage thighs. Kell buries her fingers in the globes of her girlfriend’s thick, round ass, pulling her even closer, nuzzling her nose ring against her firm clit; then she shoves her tongue as deep into Thekla as she can. She coats her tastebuds in tangy sweetness. Her spine arches in pheromonal ecstasy. She flattens her tongue against the roof of Thekla’s pussy and drags it back out, makes the goblin double over and wail and cling to her hair for purchase, then forces herself back in.

Thekla’s so wound up she comes around Kell’s broad tongue in seconds, with a full-throated scream. Her grip slackens and Kell catches her as she flops backward, hanging off the orc’s carved shoulders like a surrender flag, hips jerking and clenching. Kell lowers her onto Evan, who’s finally wiggled his way out of his pants.

Now he’s struggling with his snug gray boxer briefs. She snarls at their inorganic intrusion. She wants skin. She sticks her fingers into their button fly and shreds them open, roughly caresses Evan’s erection and thrusts her hips along it. A blissful growl escapes her. “Mine.”

Evan’s reaching up to touch her. She seizes his hand and pushes it into the dirt above his head. She closes her fist around the elastic of her boyshorts and rips those away too. She squeezes her breast, feels her own urgent heat.

Her pussy throbs against Evan. She lowers her head to where she’s pinned Thekla on top of him, and marks a long, slow lick across her, from her glistening slit up her soft little belly and between her breasts, to her quivering lips. Her human slender and pale and downy with golden hair. Her goblin hot and slick and trembling. Their scents intermingling. Her flawless lovers. Her eager conquests. Her mates.

She hooks a finger into her mouth, sucks the earth from it, then slides it across her goblin’s tight labia. She swivels her hips and that horrible emptiness replaces itself with the dewy tip of her human’s cock, snug and straining against her feverish cunt. The night air is cool and stinging on her burning skin. She strains, locks herself in place for a moment. They submit. You will not hurt them; they are yours. Yours to keep.

She slams her hips down, engulfing Evan to the base. She pushes her finger forward, spreading Thekla open. The three lovers share one overwhelmed breath. Then Kellax of Pack Falrak howls at the heavens’ winking flames and fucks her mates into the ground.

Thekla whines and twists, bracing herself against Kell’s bicep as her walls suck and pulse against the finger inside her. Kell traps her against Evan, pushes deeper, exploring every bump and contour. She’s gotten much, much better at this over the last few months. She finds that rough, sensitive ridge, her prey’s weakness, and caresses it. “Kellll,” Thekla pleads. “There. Siyafiisa. Right there.” Kell offers her shoulder, and exults as Thekla’s teeth close around it, a crescent row of stinging pressure as her goblin marks her.

Kell becomes something primeval. Her hips piston against Evan. Her addled mind imagines her insides shifting and reshaping themselves around him with every thigh-shaking thrust, making of her a perfect home for him, forever. A sheen of sweat shines upon him, catches the moon and turns her human silver, like starlight. His heels dig into the forest floor, trying to push back up into her onslaught. “No,” she purrs. “Mine.” She leers and binds him to the ground beneath her weight, crushing her ass against his thighs and keeping him hilted inside as she switches to a gyrating grind. She finds a spot that makes her shiver and churns her mate’s cock greedily against it.

She slides a second digit into Thekla’s tight passage, zeroes in on that throbbing little g-spot, lays her palm across Thekla’s belly, and fingerfucks the goblin’s soul out of her body. Thekla’s bite detaches as her mouth fills with Kell’s name, her breathless encouragement going from English to Goblin to just sounds without meaning as Kell’s unrelenting fingers reduce her to a gushing, twitching mess.

She rolls Thekla to Evan’s side, still working her fingers through the goblin’s silky core, trying to wring yet another orgasm from her. She pushes their faces together as she descends upon them and kisses them both in turn, leaving one to fill their lungs with night air as she invades the other. She flattens her legs out, wraps them around Evan’s and lays prone against him, immobilizes him completely, does everything possible to fit every inch of him to every inch of her. Closer. More.

She slides and flexes along him, in and out with unyielding force, taking her fill of him. She will drench herself in his scent forever. His sweat coats her thighs. Her saliva mats his beard, his gossamer hair. Thekla’s lips are on Evan now, open-mouthed and frantic, releasing fluting gasps with every thrust of Kell’s sodden fingers. She’s dizzy with lust as her little mates kiss. Her Tangr’ak boils. She huffs their scents like a narcotic.

Her hips ache with need and pleasure. She will wring every drop of her human’s seed into her starving belly. She will make him paint her womb. She will carry their proud, beautiful child into the world, with her strength and his kindness, and she will build fires to keep them warm and make the world safe for them. Thekla too. She’s going to knock Thekla up, too. She’s going to find the ash elf and throttle him until he invents a spell to let her fuck a baby into Thekla. She will never allow her eyes to be deprived of her mates’ beauty, never again. She will keep her pack safe. All of them safe.

(In some corner of her overheated mind, the last ragged scrap of Kell’s sanity is thanking God and science for contraceptive implants.)

In a state of primal hypnosis, in the blue flame at the center of their love, Kell clings to her mates, and the secret words that every orc knows and silently practices, whether they admit it or not, come unbidden, with the air of irreversible truth. She speaks them in a rough whisper into her mates’ ears. Neither of them speak orcish; it doesn’t matter.

“I will tend your hearths as you tend mine.” She lays across her human. His fingers interlace through her hair. She is being rewritten.

“I claim you now and now I give myself to you.” Her goblin mate whimpers and laps at the bite mark she planted on Kell’s shoulder. Kell hopes it scars. She wants to bear it there forever.

“I keep and I am kept. I will raise my axe against your foes and open my palm to your friends.” Her human is close. She returns to her rapid pumping, feels him thicken as her body devours him. He’s unraveling. Her stomach tightens in anticipation. “And you will never be without my strength again, in this life or the next.” She presses her forehead to theirs, holds them both in place. Her cheeks are damp with tears. “Never.” Her voice strains, threatens to break under the mountainous weight of her emotion, her boiling pleasure. “By all the bonfires of heaven I swear it.”

She’s melting into them. Her fire expands and entangles with theirs until they are one blaze, higher and brighter than she’d ever imagined. She will never be whole without them. She can’t go back. She is terrified and jubilant. Something snaps taut in Evan and he chokes out a “Kell!”

“I swear it,” she sobs, and she’s imprinting. Her mates are burning into her heart like a brand. She feels it happen. She never dreamed this is how it would be, that she would know it with such certainty, and the fear is washed away. She welcomes it, she wants it more than she’s ever wanted anything, she loves them both so fucking much, and Evan floods her with a pulse of agonizingly perfect warmth and she comes all the way apart, crushing her beloveds to her, milking more heat and breath from Evan with her roiling insides, crying out into Thekla’s giving flesh. On instinct, she drops her hold on the goblin and shoots her hand out, wraps it round a tree root instead, and grips so hard it cracks and splinters beneath her fingers.

Kell shuts down and reboots in a new configuration.

Her tangr’ak vents from her with every panting exhale. She rolls onto her back, pulls Evan and Thekla with her, covers herself in them and in the dirt of their impromptu betrothal bed.

She floats within a haze of their heat and their scents. She is complete for the first time in her life, like she just recovered a sense she never knew she’d lost; like she just discovered what music is. Her mates. Hers to protect and keep.

Oh, Christ. What did she just do?

She sits bolt-upright, bringing with her Thekla, who was in the middle of laying a hickey on her neck. The goblin lets out an eep and clings to her arm for purchase.

“Are you okay?” Thekla squeezes Kell’s foream. “Did that work? Oh, baby. Your shoulder. I’m so sorry.”

Evan, who would normally second Thekla’s concern, is still too well-fucked to speak, and is instead drooling on Kell’s sixpack. He limply pats her thigh.

“What?” Kell feels her shoulder, the cuts that Thekla’s teeth made. “Oh, that? Girl, it’s fine. I barely feel it. I’m okay.”

“But you’re upset about something.” Thekla narrows her gaze. “And now you’re blushing.”

“The mate thing,” Kell says. “I wasn’t thinking straight when I was trying to explain it. I don’t want either of you to freak out. Please do not freak out, okay?”

“Baby,” Thekla says. “You dragged us into a forest and fucked us like a werewolf. I’m past freaking out.”

“What we just did is permanent.”

Thekla’s forehead knits. “Permanent?”

“It rewires you a bit. Well, me, not you. I kinda sorta may have imprinted on you.”

“Imprinted?” Thekla’s lips hang open. “What does that mean?”

“It’s hard to describe. It’s not a big deal, really, for us.” I’ve just tripped and fallen ass-over-tits into the most sacred bond my people have. She struggles to keep her face from betraying her. “Like I already loved you. Now I… need you, that’s all.”

Thekla’s eyes go wide. Kell can see each golden thread of her iris, every rivulet of sweat running down her neck. She is hyperaware of her mates. The sharpness and vibrancy of Thekla and Evan have been turned up; every movement, every sound reverberates in her like a tuning fork.

“It doesn’t have to be permanent.” She stammers and overcorrects. “There’s meds that can fix it, and therapy and shit. It happens. So if we ever broke up, or if it’s freaking you out…”

Evan’s hauled himself upright. The curve of his hip is the stroke of God’s pen. He has a little freckle on his cheekbone. How did she never notice that freckle before? It’s placed so perfectly. “Do you want to? Fix it?”

“NO.” Her cry echoes off the surrounding trees. A flash of rage and fear makes her vision go blank for a second. “No.” She struggles to slow her galloping heart. She doesn’t want this to go away. Never. She’s discovered a new favorite song and keeps looping it every time it finishes. “No, I don’t. I… it’s amazing. God, I can’t even describe it.” She takes a deep breath and smells them and her head spins. “But it won’t go away on its own. It doesn’t stop. Unless you make it stop.” She bites her lip, feels the tears coming. “We take mates seriously. Really seriously. Like marriage seriously.” She hiccups as the waterworks start back up. “I just accidentally orc-married you.”

Thekla crawls onto Kell’s lap, sending electricity coursing through her where their skin touches. It feels so fucking good Kell wants to scream. “That’s okay,” the goblin whispers. She lays a hand on Kell’s cheek and sets her nerve endings on fire. Kell leans desperately into her touch. “I’m ready.” Thekla’s crying too, tears cutting channels through the dirt on her face. She’s covered in dirt and leaves and sweat and tearstains and saliva and she’s more beautiful than anything Kell has ever seen. They invented music to sing about Thekla. Just talking about her wouldn’t be enough. “I said take me and I meant it. I want to be your mate.” She lets out a quaking laugh. “I really, really want it.”

Evan’s turned away from them and gotten to his dirt stained feet. He’s rummaging around the pile of their discarded and ruined clothes. “Shit,” he mutters. “Where…?”

“Evan?” Kell blinks the mist from her eyes.

“You guys see my jacket?”

Thekla points. “The tree.”

“How the hell…?” Evan reaches up and pulls his jacket off the branch where it ended up. Kell doesn’t even know when that happened. “Okay. I thought I’d be doing this tomorrow at the Falls. And we’d be wearing pants. And I had this whole speech to convince you I wasn’t being too premature, even though it’s only been four months. Or at least that prematurity was very punk rock.” He rummages around in his inner pocket. “But Kell stole my thunder, so fuck it.”

He turns back to them. His runner’s muscles tremor, still unsteady; he braces himself on one knee. There’s a small velvet-lined box in his hand. Kell’s breath stops. Thekla’s frozen.

“Kellax Falrak. Thekla Kamiyon. I love you. I want to get old and out-of-touch with you.” His eyes are full and watery and bluer than the late summer sky. “Will you marry me?”

Kell tackles him all over again. Her body sings where it connects with his.

“Yes.” A racking sob breaks behind her words. “Yes yes yes yes.”

Thekla shoves her way inside the embrace and kisses Evan with un-Thekla authority. Kell laughs giddily through the tears.

Thekla lets up and wipes the weepy snot from her nose. “What the orc said.”

Evan wiggles his forearm, which Kell’s laying on. “If you give me my arm back, I got rings.”

Two sleek platinum bands, their differing sizes leaving no doubt whose is whose. “This is really cheesy,” Evan says, “but the inside has notation on it. It’s Fossil Fuel. Our first song.”

“It’s not cheesy.” Thekla covers half her face with the hand Evan’s not sliding the ring onto, dampens it with tears. “It’s fucking beautiful, Evan.”

“Maybe it would be a little cheesy on the outside.” Kell holds her ring up to the full moon, watches it shine. “But like this, it’s perfect. It’s so perfect.”

The fiancés lie together in the deep forest, caked with dirt and naked as they day they were born. “I think Thekla’s the only one whose outfit you didn’t rip apart,” Evan says.

“We’ll get up soon so I can chew that fucking Vi’roak guy out and make him give us some pants. Just… one second.” Kell cuddles them closer, feels their warmth against the chilly air. Every square inch of her in contact with them tingles and hums like a live amp. It will always be this way, she thinks, and the thought fills her with such an overpowering wave of joy that it’s hard to breathe.

She nudges Thekla. “Me and Evan went. Is there any goblin thing you want to do?”

“Goblins don’t really do marriage,” Thekla says. “We’re a lot more, um, freeform. But there’s something kinda like it. Just an oath you swear.” She giggles. “Actually, I did it once already.”

She rolls over, so she’s laying halfway on top of Kell. She kisses Kell’s ear. “Ssairavika ansaia, Kellax.” She snuggles back into place. “And that’s it.”

Evan’s gone rigid with revelation in the crook of Kell’s other arm. She strokes Thekla’s lower back, right over her tattooed sun. “What does it mean?” she asks.

“Well,” Thekla says. “The translation isn’t one-to-one, exactly. And you gotta understand it’s a lot more romantic and poetic in Goblin.”

“Spit it out, baby.”

Thekla clears her throat. “Something like ‘May you die of old age inside me.’”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Evan reaches across Kell and rests his hand on Thekla. “That’s romantic as hell.”