by Iris Astres
The hijacked alien already had Bill in a temper. Staying out a second night to check out every motel/hotel/shithole between Nordhup and the Jackson City suburbs had taken him into a fury. Now come to find out the limp-dicked weasel’s wife had taken all his money too. Dancer watched Rick stare into the dirt and shift from one foot to the other while he calmed himself enough to speak.
“What do you mean she took your money? How the fuck did she do that?”
Rick raised his head. “We’re married,” he said in that squeaky voice of his. “Both our names are on the account.”
“Well, I guess we both know that was kinda stupid, wasn’t it?”
“She needs to be able to write checks and shit to buy the groceries, Bill.”
Dancer took one small step closer to the man. “She doesn’t need twenty thousand dollars for a couple bags of bullshit and some beer. You ever once think of putting the real money somewhere that fat cunt couldn’t get at it?”
Ricks face contorted, not with anger but with hurt. The real sad kind that said my little wife just left me. Sickening shit. “I never thought she’d go.” And that was so clear it was downright pitiful. The man probably would have sworn the little woman was as happy as a clam. Five years with her and he had no idea what went on in the space between her ears. Bill Dancer turned on him again. How had he not known what Jane had been thinking? A woman was either with you or too cowed to cross you. Everyone around these parts knew better than to leave one free to get ideas. Rick’s head was so far up his ass, he’d let that fat bitch watch them drag a dead man out of his garage. And just thought what? What, Rick? That she wouldn’t mind her husband joining in with murderers. Good fuck, he was one ignorant hick.
Dancer had had doubts about that girl from the beginning. She was too intent on staying out of trouble not to be hatching some shit. All that cooking, washing, mending. Dutiful and useful drudge. If he’d given himself two seconds to think about it, he might have asked a question or two. But it was too late now.
“Guns and explosives cost money. You know that, right?”
“I know,” Rick told the dirt.
“So now that it’s gone and the alien’s gone and we’re all fucked with a good six months of planning shot to hell, what do you suggest we do?”
It was an easy one. A real softball. But Rick was already lifting up those bony shoulders, acting like you’d need a roomful of eggheads and a baby Jesus to come up with any answer to that quandary.
“We need to find your fucking wife and get the money back,” Bill said with all the patience he could muster. “How the hell you stay married to a woman five years and not know she was wet between her legs for alien dick?”
It made him feel a little better to be hateful like that. Otherwise it did no damn good whatsoever. Rick seemed to get stupider the meaner he got. Time to try another tack.
“Come on, boy.” Bill wrapped a hand around Rick’s shoulder, pulled him in for a rousing man’s embrace. “We have got to get that money back, and to do that, we have got to find her. So think now. How do we manage that?”
That chin was swinging back and forth again, his pointy Adam’s apple irritating even when Bill didn’t want to kill him. Dancer squeezed his shoulder harder. “Now I know you can do this,” he urged. “There has got to be some drawer where there’s a receipt of some kind. A scrap of paper with a scribbled-out address. Someone or someplace she mentioned. An old friend from her school days, popping into conversation out of the blue.”
“I’ve been all over that damned kitchen,” Rick complained. “There’s nothing in those drawers that hasn’t been there since we moved in. You’re welcome to go through everything yourself. I’m telling you she didn’t have no plan. I’d have known it if she’d been thinking about running away like that. It was just that alien.” The word made Rick look miserable for all of the wrong reasons. “I should have thought. I shouldn’t have left her alone but…” His hands flew up, and he tilted his bewildered face to the sky in a helpless way that made Bill wonder how he’d make it through the day without cutting the pathetic bastard’s throat.
On the other hand, Bill was sure somewhere in that poor excuse for a mind, Rick had the answer. They were gonna find it.
“Tell me who her friends are,” Bill suggested in his warmest voice.
“She don’t have no damn friends,” said Rick. “She’s shy. A homebody. You know that.”
Bill took a breath. “There’s someone,” he assured Rick Bard. “A church in Nordhup she goes to every year to mark the day her daddy died. Someone at the coffee shop she’s gotten friendly with. Fuck a duck, Rick, let’s take this one step at a time. Tell me what she does all week.”
“She cooks. She cleans.” He looked at his garage a minute. “You don’t think it was one of them, do you? We’ve all just been assuming it was Jane.”
“One of the boys?” Bill took a moment to consider that. If it was one of them, the man was the best actor in the world with balls of steel besides. “They’re all still here and your wife ain’t.”
“Okay.” Rick folded his arms across his chest. He nodded to himself. Finally ready to come clean. “She goes to Nordhup sometimes. Volunteering.”
“Does she?” Bill said, knowing right away they’d all but found the bitch. “Well there you go, Rick,” he said, patting him hard on the back.
Rick squeezed himself tighter, looking mournfully toward the house. Bill could almost see the wispy sentiment for his gone wife. Once he got the money back, he was going to have to put this man down for his own good. Sloppy feelings like that were enough to take the good right out of good old boy.
Chapter Six
As promised, she’d awoken with a T-shirt full of spattered cum. Jane had to peel the cotton from her lower back, and when she finally got it off, she missed it. Almost enough to slip it back on again. Disgusting, probably, but she’d always been the sentimental type.
Although never before about dried cum.
Jane stared at her reflection in the closet mirror. Did she look different or was that just a trick of her imagination? There was definitely something going on. A day ago she would have sworn she couldn’t care less about sex, but now that it had happened she was happy—puffed up like she’d just accomplished something.
Before her wedding Jane had imagined sex would be a sort of sleepy, love-soaked rapture. Not the right dreams to prepare her for her husband’s lovemaking techniques. Rick had calloused hands, which he used to randomly tinker with her sex parts—grab the tits, finger the pussy, insert cock, and presto. Yuck. Jane screwed her face up like she meant to spit the memory out. She’d tried to get into the spirit of it. And she’d failed.
But last night, it had come close to the dreamy rapture thing. A little cruder maybe, but the crude part had been really good. Heat crawled up Jane’s neck at the memory of her spread legs, her thrusting hips. The blush wasn’t embarrassment. In fact she felt a little proud. Proud to have been nasty. With a man. At last.
The way his hands felt, the way his breath felt, the way his mouth felt on her breasts. That part had been so good. And his voice, low and soft in her ear. “Pull this off so I can lick you.” If she were alone, she’d let the memories flicker through her in an all-day zone out. But she wasn’t alone. And who knew what the day would bring?
She walked out of the bathroom, one hand still buttoning her jeans.
And there he was.
First she noticed he’d made coffee. There was a full pot waiting for her in the kitchen for the first time in a decade. He poured a cup for her while she took in his naked body: all those lovely, dark hues shading his hard angles and his rippling curves. Then she saw that he was mixing something in a bowl. And there was something else…
“Your eye.” Jane took a step toward him for a closer look. The puffy, angry swelling had gone down almost completely. The shadowy remains of a few cuts and bruises lingered, but it was unreal how much improvement there had been.
She skim
med her fingers over the trace of his wound. He grabbed her hand and kissed the palm.
“Do you always heal that quickly?”
“With proper treatment.” His gaze slid languidly over her chest.
“What’s that mean?” Jane could guess, but she was dubious. “I saved you with my orgasm?”
“You did.”
That was ridiculous. And nice.
“What are you doing?” She looked at the familiar batter in the bowl. The yellow box with its tempting picture, the egg shells in the sink. “Are you trying to make pancakes?”
“Trying?” he objected. “I take it you have little faith in my abilities.”
“Au contraire.” There was a smirk on her face before she’d even finished the lame joke. What was she doing? Breakfast repartee? Easy, girlfriend. One orgasm does not a vixen make. “I thought you said you couldn’t read my mind,” she said over her mug.
“I didn’t read your mind; I read your pantry. Six bags of coffee, four boxes of pancakes, not much of a puzzle really.”
Jane had to give him that one.
He turned back to his bowl. She frowned at the cheap pan over the burner. These weren’t her things. Her things were gone. She’d never see her mother’s ancient skillet with the burn mark on the handle again.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” Jane shook it off. “I’ve never watched a naked man make pancakes before. It doesn’t look completely safe. Hang on a second.” She went into her room, returning with a pair of black sweatpants, the trousers he’d been wearing, and her sewing kit.
“Try these.”
He slid the sweatpants on. They fit over his hips just fine. The legs, however, gathered awkwardly midcalf, which made the look a little less than a success. “Give them back a second.” Jane dug her scissors from the kit and cut the sweatpants just below the knees. Raj stepped back into them, pulled them up, and looked…well… He looked a little like a king caught in a failed attempt to pass himself off as a servant. But for the moment, they would do the trick.
“Do I need clothes?” he idly asked, returning to the bowl.
“It’s a little less distracting.”
“I don’t mind distracting you.”
“Forget sex for a second.”
“Why?” Again that smooth delivery of his.
“So you’ll have something to look forward to.”
“That’s not a bad reason.” He turned toward her with a look that made her squirmy. Did any of his looks not make her squirmy? “Now what are you doing?”
“There are two rips in these trousers I think I can mend. You don’t mind my trying, do you?”
“I’d rather you not have to work.”
“It’s not exactly breaking rocks.” Her gaze rose to the muscles in his stomach, imagining him wielding a great hammer in a dusty quarry. She made herself go back to mending. The pants would look okay once they’d been washed and pressed out with a little steam. Raj turned the flame on underneath the pan, and her attention strayed again.
“Do you cook at the Body House?”
“Not there,” he said. “I did cook on the Diam Da and at the temple.”
“The Diam…what?” She made a few quick stitches over the first tear.
“The Diam Da. That’s what they called the spacetraveler that brought us all to Earth.”
“I see. How long did that take?”
Raj grunted, and she raised her eyes in time to see his head snap quickly to the window. He shifted like a stallion in a pen and cleared his throat. “Two years.”
“Two years,” she repeated, watching him. “That sounds awful.”
“In fact, it was much worse than awful.”
Why’d he do it? Who is he really? “Will you ever go back home?”
“Not if I have any choice.” Another stallion step. Another grunt. “I spent two years in space to get here. Two long years surrounded by gray walls and bad smells. I’m not putting myself through that again.”
Jane thought about two years trapped in the vast, still nothing that was space. How did he handle it? No trees, no sky. A thought struck her. “How’d you manage having sex?”
Raj shrugged and made a gesture in the air. “As well as possible, given the circumstances.”
“Who with?”
“The women.”
Women? Backusian women? No one had ever mentioned they were on the planet.
“Are there women at the Body House?”
He hesitated. Jane got ready to withdraw the question. “There are,” he finally said. “Not in sexual service. And we like to keep their presence quiet.” He gave her a thoughtful glance.
Jane snapped the thread and checked the cross-work patch over the tear before examining the other. “They won’t hear it from me.” She mumbled this around the needle in her mouth.
“We’re quite protective of our women. Perhaps too much so. The thought of their mistreatment is unbearable. And in the given climate, we’re all glad few people know about the presence of Backusian women here on Earth.”
Jane nodded, cast around for something else to talk about. Raj poured a bit of batter in the pan. He watched it sizzle and reached down to lower the heat.
“There were seventy-two of us on the Diam Da. Thirty men, all future Bods although unchristened with the name as yet, and forty-two women. Eight of the women were the craft’s crew. They’ve gone home now, of course. The others came to Earth with us for scholarship. Purely observational scholarship, I hasten to add. No one’s experimenting on anyone.” He paused, monitoring the contents of the skillet. “So while in space and while the Body House was building up its clientele, they were amenable for play. Likewise of course. We all look out for one another still.”
“So for those two years in space, did you have sex with one of them, or all of them?”
The look he gave her said she’d asked a startlingly stupid question. “All of them, of course.”
“Of course.” Jane went back to her mending. “How many women have you had sex with?”
“Thousands.” Raj flipped the pancakes. She sensed that they’d be brown and fluffy and delicious. She also recognized she wasn’t very hungry, which was weird given how little she’d been eating.
“A thousand women.”
“Thousands,” he corrected. “I’ve been in service nearly thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” Now that was shocking. Jane fit the needle in its sheath and stared at him. “Did you start when you were still a kid?”
“Sixteen,” he said. “Or thereabouts. Time is very hard to calculate outside the galaxy. I’ve tried to factor in for differences, but it’s so irritating, I’d rather believe it isn’t worth the trouble. In any case, I was full grown before I started, and I’ve been in service quite some time.”
“How many thousands?” Four more pancakes were stacked on the platter. He poured out more batter and stepped back to give that one some thought. Jane smoothed her hands over the stitched-up pants and set them down. “Five hundred a year would be a conservative estimate,” he said. “Times thirty would be…” He looked at her.
“Fifteen thousand.” Even she could do that math.
“Is that too many?”
“No.” Jane shrugged. If a man was going to stick his cock into lots of strangers, why not fifteen thousand of them? She glanced up at his body one more time. He had the muscled chest of an outdoorsman, but those muscles weren’t from splitting logs. Instead, his body had been hewn by all the countless repetitions needed to fuck women into screaming climaxes. One after the other, boom boom boom, day after day. No ranch-hand stuff, just opening women’s thighs and fucking them until they came. What could that be like? She wondered if he made it all as pleasurable as what he’d done to her.
The fire under the skillet went off. Another four pancakes were lifted out onto the platter.
“Have you ever hurt anyone?”
He set the platter down and took the chair beside her.
“H
urt anyone?”
Jane served herself and him. She poured a little syrup on the side. He waited for clarification.
“Have you ever hurt anyone during sex?” She took a bite. Pancakes were a perfect food. Jane chewed contentedly, despite the way his eyebrows lowered and his hands came to his thighs.
“Tell me what you mean,” he said.
“Hurt as in cause pain.”
“As part of sex play? Clamps and crops and flogging? Or in some kind of nonconsensual, sadistic fit of cruelty?”
“Neither,” said Jane. She took another bite. While she was chewing, she looked down at the outline of his cock. Even sleepy, it was big. And she’d seen it much bigger. The slight impatience in his eyes was fun. When was the last time she’d had fun? “What I mean is”—she took a sip of coffee, nodded toward his prick—“does that thing always fit?”
“Ah.” He took his own bite of food, chewing slowly in retaliation. He swallowed. Drank a bit of coffee too. “Yes,” he said. “It always fits. And no, I’ve never hurt anyone, beyond the wanted sting of play. Accidents are caused by inattention, and temple lovers like myself are trained to keep their focus.”
They went on eating. Suddenly, Jane realized she was waiting. Waiting for an offered demonstration. No such luck. One orgasm later, she was still a lousy flirt. She stared down at the two remaining pancakes, the edge completely off her appetite. “That was good.” About to reclaim territory at the kitchen sink, Jane pushed back in her chair.
“Leave it.” His hand landed on her forearm. She looked into his eyes, and there it was: her invitation. The one she couldn’t deny wanting. “Come back to bed.”
Jane knew her head was moving back and forth in its old self-denial habit. She also knew it was inevitable they’d be having lots of sex that day. And she was glad.
“Come back to bed. I want to show you how well I can fit my cock between your legs.”
“I believe you.” Jane rose, smiling as she set her plate down by the sink. “I can take your word for things, you know. I don’t always need proof.”