Tamar's mouth dropped open. There he went again, pushing his wants and needs to the side to focus on hers. Well, not this time.
"Can you feel this?" she asked, trailing this very tips of her claws across his chest. She watched as ripples appeared in their wake, like those on a still pond when a stone is throw into it. "I know you can. What does it matter how you feel it?" Tamar took Malachi's right hand and placed it in the middle of her chest. "I can feel that your suit is touching me, but for me I know it's you. I don't want this thing." she grabbed his arm and pitched it, taking a small portion of his suit between her thumb and forefinger. "To get in the way of us."
"I think you need to slow down. We barely know each other." Malachi was taken aback when Tamar lept onto him, warping both legs around his waist.
"I know you enough." She latched on and refused to move.
"What you know is that I'm the first man to ever treat you the way you should have been treated your whole life. I like you too, but we need to take this slow, you don't have to move so fast, I'm not going anywhere." A picture of a tiny child, a girl huddled in a corner of a stark white room flashed into his head. She was naked, covered in a fine covering of hair from head to toe. Sobs shook her tiny frame as she curled into a small ball.
"I'm not going to leave you alone, not again." He had no idea why he said that last part. He was just reacting to what he'd seen in his mind.
Tamar flinched, then held even tighter. "What do you mean, again?" Tears streamed down her face. He had no way of knowing what she'd been through, yet he had just hit on one of the worst experiences of her all too brief life.
"I don't know. I just want you to know that I'm not going to leave you like everyone else has. So we can take it slow and make sure this is real."
"I know it's real, it feels real."
"And what do you know of real? I'm the first man you've ever been interested in. I don't want this to be about me saving your life, a real relationship is more than that, not that I have very much more experience in that realm than you do." Tamar slid down him, making sure to brush every part of herself against him as she did.
"What do you mean? I'm sure I'm not the first woman you've been with," she asked hopefully?
"I've never had much use for women. They always just got in the way." He began to walk further down the tunnel. "You know, you're the first woman I've talked this much to. I always ended up saying what I felt around other girls, and for some reason they always took offense."
"You've never been, with a woman before."
"As in sex, no, not yet. I'm waiting for the one God has for me. When he shows her to me and we're married, then I will, but until then, no. How about you?" He quirked an eyebrow at Tamar.
"Oh no, not me," she waved her hands over herself. "Do you really think any guy has ever wanted to sleep with me?" Before he could answer she continued. "Besides, all the guys who tried ended up regretting their choice."
It took them another fifteen minutes to reach the very back of the tunnel. They were so far back that Tamar could make out Malachi's silhouette only because he was blacker than the surrounding stone. So when he raised his arm she bumped into it at shoulder level.
"Hey," she swatted it away. "Why'd you do that?"
"Because unless you can fly, we're at the end of the line." He grabbed the back of her head with the greatest care and pushed until she was looking down at their feet. Not a foot in front of her toes was a line of blackness. The darkness of fathomless deeps.
"Okay, where do we go from here?" She asked with a death grip on his arm.
"Down."
"How?"
"Do you trust me?"
"Yes." She answered came with only a bit of hesitance. But it came easier than she would have dreamed it would have just a couple days before.
"Do you want to ride on my back, or should I carry you?"
"And how is that going to get us to the bottom of this hole?"
"Simple, gravity."
"You're serious aren't you. You're going to jump into this hole and fall to the bottom?"
"Yep, with you of course. So what's it going to be, ride or carry?" For Tamar there wasn't much of a choice.
In seconds she was snuggling into his chest, his strong arms wrapped around her. Surrounded as she was she didn't care where they went, Tamar knew she was safe, nestled against his chest.
"You ready?" He asked.
"I am now," the feel of his grip tightening assured her, then thrilled her. Tamar knew they were seconds away from free fall.
In the next second she felt her stomach try to switch places with her throat. Free fall was a sensation she'd experienced only a few times, and it tore a screech from her throat, sent tingles up her spine. Within seconds they had reached terminal velocity, the speed at which a person falling will not increase in speed no matter how far they fall. Into inky blackness they fell, the only indication of their progress was the ever present faint blur of the walls as they sped past. In the glow from Malachi's eyes Tamar could just make out the outer walls of the cavernous hole they sped through.
"We just past a mile and a half." Malachi whispered to her, his mouth just beside her ear.
The contact sent chills from the top of Tamar's head to the tips of her toes. Even as she felt like the floor was still being dropped out from under her, she felt the thrill and safety of being close to Malachi like a blanket.
"How far are we now?" She asked what she thought was a minute later, her eyes tightly shut.
"We're almost there." With only a slight jarring Tamar felt their speed begin to lesson. Then with a fluttering on what sounded like feathers their decent was checked to a slow glide.
Tamar felt the instant his feet touched the solid rock of the bottom and waited. For the life of her she did not want to let go and only after he came to a complete stop and he began to let her down did she slip her legs from his grasp.
Malachi stood as still as a statue, Tamar was just turning towards him when a chorus of clicks sounded from the darkness.
"Move and die. You have seven rifles leveled at you heads. We will kill you, we should kill you, but I want to know how you got down here."
"We fell." Tamar's answer elicited chuckles from the darkness.
"Sure you did. We're three miles underground, we'd be cleaning up your remains if you'd dropped from that height."
"Hey, you asked."
Malachi stepped towards the voice, the man speaking having no idea he could see him as if it were day.
"We had no idea anyone was down here. We're just looking for somewhere to lie low for a few days."
"That's gonna be a problem, we don't have enough supplies to take care of the people we have. We can't handle two more."
"All we need is room to sleep. I'll take care of our own food and water until we leave. You won't even know we're here."
From out of the darkness came a sharp curse and Tamar ducked as a round whizzed over her head.
"It's one of those cat people! The one's who took out our base camp, I saw its eyes!" Several foot falls in the dark and from out of the black a rifle butt smacked into Tamar's jaw.
She allowed the impact to throw her to the ground, not wanting to escalate the situation. Someone else had another idea.
Out of the ebony came an explosion of red fire. In the middle of that sea of red Malachi stood, wings extended around him. His eyes shown with a fire Tamar had never seen.
"The lady does not like to be touched." Tamar heard startled cries then the clatter of metal on stone.
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