by Hana Starr
He was struggling to hold in a sick shudder when Jade turned back around. Her dark gaze pierced him through like a knife, but there was something odd about it.
She was talking but he was puzzling through it and not really paying any attention at all. There was nothing wrong with the shape of those beautiful dark eyes, rimmed as they were with full lashes which fluttered with each blink. It was something else. Something in the color. Was that a scar on her eyelid when she blinked right then, as well?
Gradually, he realized she had stopped speaking about his position and was addressing him directly now.
“Sorry,” he said, as politely as he could. “I must have missed that.”
She sighed. “I have a ScanEye. Are you happy now? Or were you trying to be romantic?”
“May I see it?”
Jade said nothing, but her right eye closed in on itself like a camera shutter, and then emitted a blue glow that lit up half of her face. She kept it like that for a moment and then blinked it away.
“Did it work?” Sorlo asked curiously.
“You tell me. 112 degrees, male, 30 years of age?”
“It worked,” he confirmed.
“Fabulous,” she said, and rolled her eyes while turning back to the monitor. “Now if you would come over here and show me where you were when you got ambushed, I would appreciate it.”
Thinking that he’d better listen for once, Sorlo obeyed. He examined their current position and then began to scroll the view out until he saw the planetary system where his ship had been. Tapping the proper coordinate, he said, “Right there.”
Jade did some quick calculations on another screen. “So you were in and out for about a week. You must have one seriously hard skull to not have any brain damage. Then again, I’m not so sure that you don’t.”
He scowled, and scrolled the view out very far until he could find his home base. Red Riser 435, right there at the cross-point of Mogle and Darkyrum.
“This is where my base colony is.”
Jade nodded. “That’s going to be a bit of travel but don’t worry. I’ll get you there. I don’t want to but there’s no point in picking up my current mission now that my target knows he’s being followed. A break would be just the thing.”
Sorlo nodded. “I’m really in your debt for this, Jade.”
“Damn right you are,” she replied absently, and then ignored him entirely.
Chapter Three
She was unwilling to tell this to Sorlo, what with him being the cause of all her troubles, but her commander had given her a far worse reprimanding than she’d let on to. Essentially she was walking a very fine line between life and death. Her mission was a failure and she was the first person to ever have another occupant aboard their ship. It was perhaps that part which was the worst, worse even than losing the Hymir when she was just about to eliminate it.
Really, she should have killed Sorlo while she had the chance. He might be a member of the Federation but she didn’t think he would be able to resist the guile and taunting of his higher-ups. He might let something slip, and another traitor in their midst might be able to pick up on it.
But, she didn’t kill those who weren’t scheduled to die. She was just going to have to deal with him being cramped up in her space for upwards of a week.
After ten years of solitude though, “just” doing anything with him was an incredible challenge.
For one, Illurians were rather talkative. And for another, there was only the one chair in the cockpit. This all combined to have him constantly roaming around and chattering away, and then glancing over to her to wait for a reply. Often, she just had no idea what he’d said and could only shrug in response. She didn’t care what he had to say, and the fact that he was filling her silence like this was really pissing her off.
“Can’t you ever sit still?” she snapped at him during their second day together. Much of the first had been spent with him asleep in her cot, forcing her to doze in her cockpit chair. She was quickly becoming convinced that she shouldn’t have used any quick-heal on him, and certainly not the liberal quantity that she had. He was so recovered already that confining him to her cot was useless.
“I am not used to sitting idly by,” Sorlo said with a pompous sort of air. She wanted to smack that look right off his face with her gun. “I am a captain!”
“Well, you’re not the captain here so sit the fuck down,” she snapped. Grumbling reluctantly, Sorlo did as she commanded and she sighed, knowing that he would be back within fifteen minutes.
And he was, striding towards her on those lanky legs of his. “Is there anything I can do to assist you?”
You are equal parts child and needy maid robot, Jade thought with disgust, throwing her hands into the air as she swiveled in her chair to face him. “I’m not quite sure what part of this you aren’t understanding Sorlo, but I am an assassin in a single-person vessel. All things here are meant to be done by only a single person. Just one. And that’s me. You see these consoles?” She dropped her arms and spread her hands, exaggeratedly displaying the screens before her. “Everything that needs to be done can be done from here. Everything. There’s a reason there’s only one damn chair.”
“Perhaps I could tidy something,” he suggested.
In another exaggerated motion, Jade glanced around the cockpit. All her lab equipment was immovable, fixed in place. She had no personal belongings of any kind other than her clothes and the most basic cleansing supplies.
“Go alphabetize the food,” she said.
And away he went.
Jade leaned forward and put her head in her hands. This basically sucked. And it was only the second day.
How could someone so attractive manage to be so absolutely frustrating?
Yes, she admitted it. Sorlo was attractive.
Many alien species were ugly in her eyes, though she tried not to let biased perceptions of physical appearance guide her actual opinions. Perhaps it was because a species tended to favor similar species, which meant that many aliens considered humans ugly.
But Illurians were always beautiful.
They were the closet things to the majestic elves of Tolkien’s ancient fantasy works. Very tall and slender, they had spider-like limbs and long-fingered hands. Their skin was so pale that their veins and muscle lines could be glimpsed beneath much of it; in some places, the bone structure beneath was also visible. With long, thin faces and silvery hair, the only bit of color on them was their jewel-toned eyes.
Sorlo’s were red as rubies. He resembled a very attractive albino rabbit, basically.
If only he wasn’t so annoying, she might have spent a lot of this spare time screwing his brains out but she wasn’t sure if he would shut up even for that.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t understand why he was so needy and talkative, because she did. She certainly did. After spending his time with two dozen others, this level of quiet and solitude was bound to be unsettling. He felt a need to try and fill it, but it wasn’t a need that she could exactly comply with. Their requirements were exactly the opposite sort and he was determined not to have anything to do with hers, just as much as she was determined to teach him to be quiet.
He never listened but she was beginning to live for those moments when he stormed away in a huff. Blessed silence.
What he did in the silence was nearly as bad as the talking, though.
On the third day of travel, Jade made a small adjustment to their path to account for a patch of debris her ship’s scanner had picked up on. And then she stood, because it was time for her to check on Sorlo’s wounds.
He was where he always was when he was sulking: sitting in her bed with a childish pout on his face.
Stepping into the darkness, she raised the light level as high as it would go. That was still very dim but it was enough to see by now.
“Strip,” she said, and watched as he obediently took off all his clothes. Insufferable fool that he was, she couldn’t help but to
admire the length of his dick. She hadn’t seen it hard yet but if it was already this long when limp, it had to be impressive. And his thinness didn’t mean that he wasn’t muscular, which he was. The lines of his body were rather well-defined, from his wiry shoulders down to those remarkable calve muscles and the strict arch of his Achilles tendon.
Slowly, she untucked one edge of a bandage and then began to unwind it, freeing first his chest and then his arms, before moving down to his legs. For that, she had to bend over his lap. His cock was right there in front of her face! She had to hold her breath, not wanting this to be any more awkward than it already was. And yet for all its awkwardness, it was also extremely hot. Right now, if he wanted to, Sorlo could grab her head and force her mouth down on him. She would feel his organ shift and engorge beneath her lips and tongue, taste his texture as he held her down there and made her suck on him…
Her hands trembled little, a pleasant sort of burning filling her pussy as she finished unwinding the last of his bandages. Now he was entirely nude, covered with fading yellow patches of bruising and shrapnel marks.
“You’re looking more like you’re alive every day,” she commented drily, reaching for the tub of quick-heal. She wasn’t enough of a scientist to know exactly how the creamy paste worked, only that the chemical mixture in it encouraged the body to hasten recovery, encouraging new cell growth and causing the current ones to stitch together faster. After only a few days of it, Sorlo was already starting to look like he’d only been in a rough fight rather than in an exploding spacecraft. Without this, he would still be a groaning and immobile mess.
He didn’t react to what she was saying, just kept staring down at his hands with a moody expression. His long hair covered his shoulders in a tangled disarray, which ran completely counter to the fastidious nature of his kind.
A little irritated at having made an effort and basically being rejected, Jade went on, “Not that anyone else would be able to tell if you just continue to sit here like a lump of worthless meat.”
“Leave me be,” the alien said blandly.
“Like you’ve been leaving me alone?”
He lifted his head and she saw that she was rewarded with a flash of fire in his eyes. “Pardon me for wanting to make amends. I know how badly I’ve screwed up. I just wanted to put at least one part of it to rights.”
Jade laughed bitterly, no longer being gentle as she smeared quick-heal over his whole body in a thin layer. Well, over most of it anyway. “Sorlo, the only way you could pay me back now is if you went out there and brought that alien back to me so I could strangle him with my bare hands.”
He grunted. “What alien was it?”
“The Hymir.”
“Oh,” he said, very quietly now. Jade let him sit there as he realized even further what a mess he’d made while fetching new bandages to start wrapping his wounds in. “The traitor. You found him?”
“I did,” she said. And then she hesitated. Her own pride and arrogance were fighting her on this one but she went ahead and admitted it. “It was pure luck more than anything.”
“And then I came along and was as bad of luck as you could get.”
Again she said nothing, letting it sink in. Feeling bad for him didn’t quite let him off the hook, now did it?
She finished with the bandages and tucked the ends in neatly before turning away to ignore him. But, she couldn’t. The moment he turned away, even the slightest bit of animation from when he’d been talking to her just seemed to drain away from his soul.
“Would you cut that out?” she said, still facing away from him.
“What?”
“All that damn pouting. Stop it.”
Sorlo sounded incredulous when he spoke again. “Pouting? I’m mourning the loss of my brothers and sisters! How can you be so insensitive?”
“How can you sit there and act like a whiny little punk?” she shot back, knowing that the word “punk” might throw his Chip but the meaning would still get through, hopefully. “You’re a warrior! A soldier! And you’re acting like a baby.”
“My family died,” he repeated. “I can see from the way you’re talking about this that you haven’t ever experienced a very big loss before.”
“I can’t say I have. I’ve always been a loner.”
“Then, you don’t get to tell me what to do, you assassin scum!”
The insult hit her shoulders and slid away again without any impact. “So you might say but what you don’t realize is that since I am not the one in mourning, I have a clearer perception of this than you. Accept that such things happen and move on.”
Jade shrugged, signaling the end of the conversation. She started to head away and heard Sorlo hiss, “Heartless,” behind her.
And it didn’t bother her at all. She didn’t need a heart to know they were good for nothing but pain.
And so it continued. Three more long days and night of this. By this point, they had long since gone back inside the Peace Federation boundary and were able to glimpse bases and planets on the very edge of sight.
The tensions between them had grown to the point where she couldn’t even stand to look at him, while he just continued to withdraw inside himself. Oh, well. She only had to endure the night and the start of the next day, and then she could dump him at the base where he belonged.
Sighing, Jade sat in her chair and leaned back as far as she could. She could hear Sorlo snoring in her cot and allowed herself a moment to imagine what he must look like asleep, his face relaxed in true peace –and without that damnable pout. His lips slightly parted perhaps, one hand curled up by his face.
Despite herself, she found she wondered what he was like before this tragedy of his. He was very argumentative with her and they clashed constantly, so he must have been a headstrong captain. Capable enough perhaps, with a swagger in his long step.
She parted her legs slightly and slid her hand down between them to caress her material-covered inner thighs. Her pussy was sending out soft little signals, begging for a teasing. It wasn’t exactly an urgent demand like it had been when she was bent over Sorlo’s dick, but it was a call for attention all the same. She was massively uncomfortable sleeping in this chair all the time but pride insisted that she take it even when the tall alien offered to switch with her. Maybe something like this would help her relax, so she didn’t arrive at that colony tomorrow absolutely devoid of sleep and more irritable than usual.
Stroking her fingers up and down over her covered folds, she leaned her head back against the awkward, too-short headrest. Sensing that she was still completely alone, that her unwanted companion was still asleep, she closed her eyes and then slid her hand down beneath the material so that her fingers brushed over soft skin.
A sigh left her lips, and she let the soft wave of pleasure guide her thoughts straight to Sorlo. Her fingers began to rub and stroke all over her soft folds, between and beside, getting her lips swollen and tingly. If only she had something more apt for the job but her own finger would just have to be a substitute for what a man could do for her.
To that end, she slid her finger deep inside herself and swirled it all around to hit every inch of her walls that she could reach. Her mouth opened with pleasure and she couldn’t help but to give a little whimpering moan. Tilting her hips up, she pressed her finger even farther inside before pulling it as far back as the constraints of her uniform would allow before shoving it all the way back in again.
She imagined Sorlo position over her, dark skin pressed to light, his long, rigid cock piercing her straight through. Her slow thrusting sped up and she started to grind against the finger inside her, pressing her ass down against the chair to do it; she imagined his thin fingers gripping her skin, holding her tightly in place as he pounded the hell out of her.
Her other hand wandered over now as her body starting to shake and jump with heightening pleasure, taking her clit between two fingers. It was just as rigid as the cock that she could practically feel buried i
nside her, and she started to rub her fingers over it. Slowly, and then gradually faster, until her back was arching and she could hardly breathe.
Death to any sounds she might have been making, it was all she could do to even stay in her chair! Her body was shaking out of control, with her feminine juices flooding from deep within her pussy.
Tendrils of bouncing hair brushed against her neck, and in her wild fantasy she imagined it was a tender kiss, that she could feel his hot breath panting on her neck, coming closer and closer to the edge…
Gritting her teeth to try and strangle the scream rising in her throat, Jade’s entire body went stiff and taut as her orgasm rocketed through her. Pleasure claimed her body and was her master, consuming her thoughts and soul until she finally collapsed back with exhaustion, completely and utterly spent.