by S. M. Lynch
I looked him in the eye, arms around his shoulders, and begged, “You’ll help me?”
“All the way, Ari. I’m here for you. That’s all I’m here for. You.”
I believed him, utterly and completely, and I clung to him as we kissed, passionately and with no restraint at all.
He was such an amazing kisser; I wondered if this was an old-fashioned thing, or just a Kyle thing. He knew how to make my insides flutter with his tongue, and how to crush all those bad thoughts in my head I’d been beset by all day.
“I want to feel your body,” I asked, pulling at his t-shirt.
He removed it quickly, and when he was bare-chested, I smoothed my hands along his fantastic body, feeling the muscles in his gorgeous back, the defined abdominals, his pecs, his throat. We kissed so savagely, I thought we were going to do it, but I pushed him off slightly, and gave him a warning look.
“A lot rides on us, Kyle. Besides, you’re much older than me… I want to wait until I’m eighteen.”
He gulped and nodded he agreed. “I can still pleasure you without us having sex.”
“You’re a dog, Kyle.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
Under the covers, he removed his underwear and I started panting, wondering what the heck he had planned. I wanted to touch him, see him, know him… but he pinned my arms above my head, lay his chest across mine and kissed my throat.
“Oh, god,” I groaned.
He kissed the skin of my chest, his stubble scratchy, delightful, lovely. I wanted to touch his ass, feel his back muscles move under my fingers, touch his hardness… kiss him, everywhere.
He held me in place and kissed the tops of my breasts above the button opening of my grandad shirt, making me crazy for him. I wriggled and squirmed and cried out, and he groaned loudly and used his mouth to tell me how much he desired to have me. I was so close to pulling all my clothes off, when he rolled on top of me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he kissed me deeply, rocking against my body. I felt the heat of him, the hard, solid shape of him against my thin bed shorts, and I gasped as he moved against and nudged that delicate place between my thighs.
When he touched my breast over my shirt and gasped my name, his lips brushing against mine, I wanted him more than anything… and yet, I couldn’t help myself, climaxing before we’d even done anything. My belly filled with a fire I had never known before and I came, my orgasm coming over me in waves.
He grunted and I felt his intensely hot fluid drench my shorts. He bit my bottom lip, eyes squeezed shut, shaking so hard I was freed from his grip partially as he touched my cheek, letting one hand of mine free to roam his back and his ass and his thighs—all of which were utter perfection.
“You’re so beautiful, Ari. You’re so worth it. All of it,” he said, still with his eyes closed, his body shaking, his face etched with anxiety.
“You’re gorgeous, Kyle. Don’t leave me,” I begged.
“Never.”
Part Two
Being Human
Chapter Sixteen
SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED LIKE THAT, with us becoming closer every day. I taught him how to cook. How to pull vegetables from the garden. We trained in the home gym but also ran around the city streets, mostly early morning or late at night. I leaned on him as much as he on me.
As Christmas rushed towards us, I realized we were experiencing an actual winter for the first time in years—not just some cold blip. Camille’s house benefited from all modern insulation, but sometimes it got so cold overnight, I’d have to put a couple of eco-logs on the fire in our bedroom, just to keep us from shivering. And this was as we slept entwined in flannel pajamas, hats and socks. Camille wouldn’t have liked me to put the heat on overnight, so the eco-logs it was.
It was just a couple of days before Christmas when the front door opened of its own accord and Kyle took to his feet immediately—we hadn’t been expecting guests.
“It is just us,” she said in French, because whenever she crossed the Channel, French it was.
“Camille,” I told Kyle, and he took a deep breath, returning to the sofa where we were knitting a blanket together. He was working on one side, I on the other. We were making extra covers for the bed.
Camille could be heard chattering in French in the hallway. I heard something about the abhorrent weather, and their awful flight over. Camille was a bad flier, like my mother had been.
I was beginning to wonder who she’d brought along, when he arrived, filling the doorway. He hitched up his thermal trousers and sort of grimaced when he saw us sitting together.
“Why didn’t you call ahead?” I asked. “I’d have come got you if you’d said.”
Camille swooped in from behind my father, entering the room like a fast-moving moth.
“It was last-minute. The weather, you see,” she said, gesticulating all manner of unspoken complaints about the world. “York is dire. Six foot of snow. Manchester no better. We thought we’d come here, and it’s catching up. I was glad you shoveled the steps out there.”
I pointed at Kyle generally. “You’ve Kyle to thank for that.”
“Oh, hey, Kyle,” Camille said, “enjoying your time in my heart?”
“Your… heart?” he said slowly, not understanding.
“She means the city is her heart,” I explained.
“Tea, Ryken?” asked Camille.
“Would kill for a coffee.”
“Tea it is, then.”
He groaned and took the armchair on the other side of the room, filling all of its available space, some of Camille’s dainty pieces of furniture not quite suited to his bulk. Her stuff was all custom-made, some pieces with very extravagant upholstery, like the chair he was sitting in—some kind of bright, floral patchwork.
“Thought you were taking care of yourself,” I mumbled to Dad.
“Camille just doesn’t want to have to make coffee,” he countered.
“Hmm, that’s why.”
He was supposed to knock off coffee after lunchtime, and it being two in the afternoon, he surely wasn’t supposed to be requesting coffee. His caffeine habit was preventing him getting proper sleep, and encouraging overlong working hours.
“How long are you staying, then?”
“Until after Christmas, at least. Maybe until New Year. Depends on the weather.”
I watched my father taking in the room, drumming his fingertips against the arms of the sofa.
“You didn’t fly commercial?” I scoffed.
He barked with laughter. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ari. I still can’t go anywhere. I had a friend fly us over. It was choppy as shit out there.”
Kyle and I exchanged glances and smiles. He wasn’t used to my father’s British slang.
Camille returned to the room and handed my father a large mug of steaming tea. He grinned at her sarcastically and she at him, snapping her teeth affectionately. If ever there was a couple in the world who should’ve been, it was Camille and Ryken, two peas in a pod. They played old married types with one another continually, but there was no sexual chemistry, or at least that was what they told everyone. When I was growing up, I always used to think it was funny how Camille would kiss my father on the lips and sit across his lap hugging him all the time, but now I just thought it was weird. Stranger yet was that it never, ever bothered Mom.
Camille took a seat on the arm of the sofa next to me, cradling her mug between her hands. My father and she were both dressed for skiing. Only their coats had been removed in the hallway. Their snow boots hadn’t been removed, nor their fleece hats. She inspected the blanket we were working on before she hauled a bag off the floor and took out her own knitting. Leaving her cup of tea temporarily on the side, she started working on hers, her fingers moving much more methodically and dexterously than ours.
“I wonder if you’d be a dear, Kyle and go and grab our luggage from the hallway and take it upstairs. We’ll take the rooms above yours, and if you could turn the heating on in
those rooms? That’d be delightful.”
“Yeah, uh… sure, no problem.”
I gave him a reassuring look and he left the room, his footsteps going up the first flight, then starting on the next.
“We need a family meeting when possible,” Camille said pointedly, and I looked over at Dad, who seemed worried.
Kyle returned for the next lot of luggage and Camille sang, “Kyle, dear, the brown luggage is Ryken’s. Mine’s the gray. I’ll take the larger room, thank you, darling.”
“Oh, okay,” he replied, and I knew that’d make his trip upstairs last longer.
While Kyle was busy, I said, “What’s Arthur done now?”
Dad leaned forward in his chair. “Does Kyle know about him?”
“Nope. I don’t think he’d like it.”
Camille and Dad shared looks, as if they more or less knew I couldn’t have told him about my twin brother yet.
We didn’t get chance to exchange any other words on my troublesome brother, because Kyle was back in the room within seconds, his overprotectiveness having been the catalyst in him rushing up and down stairs.
“So, have you seen the temperatures in Australia?” Camille said, knitting and making small talk.
“We have,” I said, “those poor people.”
Across the other side of the world, temps were pushing sixty degrees Celsius and Australians had taken to living indoors and not coming out. Most of Australia was no longer habitable anyway, being that so much had burnt already in recent decades, and the coastal areas where people still lived were overrun with survivors of the bush. All people could do was try to stay cool in their pools or behind closed doors, all the curtains shut, the aircon struggling under the pressure. Water shortages were disastrous and it was illegal in some areas to flush your loo more than ten times a day, even in family homes.
In the Sahara, it’d been raining for years and nobody knew why. Scientists had a view that eventually it would become like the Garden of Eden, but until it stopped raining, there was no making it habitable for the foreseeable future.
Kyle felt eyes on him and looked up. Camille and my father seemed to expect something from him. Eventually, I said, “They’re predicting the coldest winter here in over two centuries. And even Texas has snow. And Florida.”
No reply from Kyle yet…
“What do you think of it all?” asked Camille, directing her question at him.
She picked up her tea which had cooled and downed it all in one, then resumed her knitting.
“Where do I start?” Kyle said, sighing, his face a picture of sadness. “The sight of the countryside bent out of shape was bad enough. And all those people in sub-Saharan Africa who can’t move northwards because of the rains… and are starving, their lands flooded. And there’s nothing anyone can do.”
The emotion he exhibited was genuine, and when Camille and Ryken looked at one another, I saw that they could see it, too. He had the ability to feel and to empathize.
“We surely have to do something,” said my father, staring at Kyle.
“You would know better than me about that, Dr. Hardy.”
Camille raised one amused eyebrow and gave my father a look like “that told you”.
“Climate pledges were ripped up when Roche took over from me,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s not a diplomat, she’s a general. The only true diplomat we have in this world is Camille, and even she couldn’t persuade Roche.”
“The woman is a bulldozer,” Camille said, eyes rolling, shaking her head.
“They have all these people coming up with new energies, but guess what? There’s always going to be something we have to offset. Whether it’s the carbon footprint of the research itself.” My father had that fire in his eyes I hadn’t seen in so long. “We reached a point decades ago where we should have begun reversing our carbon emissions, but that passed ignored, and instead, we were increasing them. To create offshore windfarms uses energy. To create solar powered devices uses up energy. And yes, taking carbon up into space to dispose of it uses up far greater resources than it saves, negating the process.”
“Not to mention all those solar fields in the Sahara were destroyed in the floods and rendered pointless,” said Camille, sounding regretful. “And the fighting over who owns the wind… still goes on.”
“So, what will happen?” asked Kyle tentatively. “Will the planet, just, I don’t know, become uninhabitable?”
“Yes,” said Camille, sounding tired and also a little resigned. “Humanity is self-destructive by nature. I would like to think that had 2023 not happened, things would be much better now. Officium’s ineffectiveness, not to mention their draining research, would never have happened. Better leadership… better… better chances! And among the dead of 2023 and beyond, there were people who could’ve improved this world, no doubt. But they posed a risk to Officium and were dispensed with.”
Whenever Camille got passionate, she sounded so much more French and it always made me smile.
“I’ve already told Ari, I don’t think I’ve been sent to help any of you,” Kyle told them apologetically. “Only to protect Ari. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be protecting her from, but that’s my overriding feeling since we’ve spent time together. I don’t have anything else for you guys.”
He’d picked up on that, then?
Although I very much suspected there was more to their visit than Kyle would ever know.
“The only thing that could improve life is advanced technology to remove carbon from our atmosphere, but even so, the damage to our world is now irreversible—no going back on the melting of the ice caps—and we are on a collision course with destiny,” my father hammered home. “And nothing can protect any of us, except one thing, perhaps.”
“What’s that?” Kyle asked, sounding eager.
“The way you came to this planet couldn’t have been via human hands.”
“But I am human,” said Kyle. “And actually, the idea of teleportation has been around since before Victorian times.”
“Officium depleted the planet’s rare earth minerals to make the xGen, but also to build their cloning labs, the pods, etcetera. I don’t think they used what they took for building a teleportation machine; that wasn’t one of their priorities. I am very much of the belief it’s not something we have on earth. We’d know if it had been achieved down here. Surely.”
“So… you’re saying we need some technology of this ilk?” Kyle presumed.
“We’d need to reverse the damage pretty quickly. Or build an ark. It’s as simple as that.”
Kyle sighed loudly. “Like I said, I’m here for Ari. I don’t know anything else. Perhaps they’re saving the best people and I’m here to pick her up. She certainly seems to be one of the chosen few. I can hardly find fault with her. Other humans, however…”
My father was amazed to have been bitch slapped so swiftly, while all Camille could do was sit there with a great big smirk on her face, loving how smart Kyle was—and quick to see through Ryken Hardy.
“Anyway, aren’t you going to feed your old dad, Ari? I’d murder a sandwich.” My dad threw daggers my way.
“Yeah, I suppose I can manage that.”
“Great, I’ll help you,” said Camille, leaping from her chair.
We two headed to the kitchen and I whispered to Camille, “How long before my father ends up with a bloody nose?”
She shook her head, laughing. “That was the most emotion your dad has exhibited in years. I think he feels threatened because he knows you guys are getting along well.”
“Erm, well… maybe I buy that. Maybe I think he’s just being himself.”
She chuckled and brought out everything from the fridge that she thought Dad would like. I grabbed the protein bread and spread mayo on the insides of two slices. Then we stacked it with meat-free pastrami and lettuce, tomato, gherkins and slices of gouda cheese.
“Hmm, where’s his?” Camille said, resting her chin on my sho
ulder and staring at the sandwich in an objectifying way as I cut it in half. She winked and wriggled her shoulders. Camille wasn’t a big eater these days, though she wished she still were—like my father, who even in his late fifties, could still pack it away.
“Thank you, my treasure,” he said, as I handed over his sandwich in the living room.
Kyle had greedy eyes even though we’d already eaten lunch. When his belly gurgled, my father made some exaggerated noises as he tore into his snack. I warned Kyle with my eyes not to rise to it.
Camille arrived in the room with a smaller snack—just toast with jam.
“We’ll head out tomorrow, see what we can get for Christmas dinner,” she said, eating her toast in tiny bite-sized amounts, unlike my father, who was chomping through that sandwich so quick, despite the bread on the outside being nearly rock hard.
“Oh, we already did that,” said Kyle, who’d wanted to find chicken or turkey or something for the festive feast yesterday—but we’d been unsuccessful.
I put my hand on his arm. “Camille knows everyone in this city. Fingers crossed, eh?”
“A bit of beef, if possible,” said Camille. “I know the nuns and monks still sneak a bit into the city now and again. We could make a really delicious stew. Ryken could make his mother’s dumplings too, couldn’t you?”
“If you like,” he said, speaking around his sandwich.
“What about Granny Connie?” I asked, out of interest. “Isn’t she joining us? Seeing as though it’s turning into a family occasion.”
Dad shook his head. “She’s in Canada or somewhere. Trapped in a snowdrift, like us, most probably.”
I sighed. Granny Connie and Camille were the best when they got together. Connie was probably the only being on earth Camille would defer to. Once upon a time, my grandmother, Eve was the only other she would’ve deferred to. It must have been a relief for Camille to have had my grandmother, because they were equal, best friends… and in one another had someone who understood them completely and didn’t need to wear a mask for. I looked up and found Camille staring at me, as if she were thinking the very same thing.