by Rosette Lex
Suddenly he seized her, his eyes wild, and rolled them over to the middle of the bed, pinning her under him. She gasped with surprise and joy, wrapping arms and legs around him and groaning, “Do it. Whatever you want...whatever you need, just take it….”
He lifted her knees and started pounding away at her, rough, hungry, hands sliding over her thighs, his voice rising in little shouts of pleasure. She knew she was digging her nails into his back, didn’t care, his fierce movements stoked up the fire in her again and she could feel another climax building. He couldn’t seem to get enough of the feel of her around and under him: he lifted her hips against him as he thrust into her, the shouts growing longer and more anguished as he drove toward his own pleasure.
His body started radiating energy again, golden sparks dancing in his eyes and along his skin, sliding into her flesh as he had done, teasing at her nerve endings. Every inch of his body suddenly felt even better against her, and she writhed under him, rubbing her body against him as she sought to soak up every bit of it. She whimpered as sensations rippled through her with more and more power, as if his rapture was leaking from his every pore and sinking into her. She came again, while his tremors grew violent and his hands tightened on her hips bruisingly.
He had lost control completely, and reveled in it, his features full of astonished joy and a ferocity to match his blood-lust. She was ramping up toward a third climax when he went rigid, eyes rolling closed, and ground his hips against her hard enough to push her into the mattress. “Aaah...ah, May!”
A jolt of almost painful sensation rocked through her; she gasped and went up on her heels, her aching muscles suddenly vital again as she felt his crisis in her own nerve endings. He held her tight against him as his last thrusts sent a torrent of ecstasy through them both, and their voices rose together in long, hoarse cries.
They collapsed to the mattress, spent, aftershocks shimmering through her body and her lungs struggling for air. He lay over her, limply, face buried in her shoulder, his chest heaving slowly. She reached up to stroke his hair...and he shuddered, letting out what she realized was a sigh of relief.
“Are you alright?” he whispered, as if he couldn’t lift his head to face her yet.
She took stock, stretching under him and drawing a few slow, deep breaths. Her shoulder popped, and she felt a few sore muscles here and there. That was it. “I’m fine,” she cooed in his ear as she stroked his back. “I’m just fine.”
Chapter 8: Bride Race
She had to sleep again after that, but he didn’t let her sleep long. She woke slowly to his lips at her neck, and sighed happily, twining her arms around him. “Mmmm. Hi.”
“Good morning.” He nuzzled her cheek and then kissed her, more relaxed in her arms than she had ever seen him. It was as if he had been pent up so long that it had started to hurt him. Well. She would just have to see that that never happened again.
“Is it morning? Holy crap, I...must have slept a long time.”
“Yes,” he murmured in her ear before kissing her neck again. “We both did.” Then he started to nibble, and she moaned and arched a breast into his hand.
He did not want to let her go. They made love again, more slowly and without the desperation, and afterward she nearly fell asleep again--but her stomach woke her. He stayed close by her while she ate, while she slept--and when she showered, he stripped off and joined her and they ended up curled together in a shivering, thrusting ball in the bottom of the tub.
On the couch, he had to be close to her. When he worked at the communications array or did something in the science lab, he asked her in with him. And every few minutes at least, he had to touch her--at least a hand sliding up her arm, a kiss, a soft nuzzle of her hair. It was almost obsessive, and would have alarmed her were it not for the joy she could see now shining soft in those green eyes.
Days passed like that--well past a wild weekend. It obliterated her previous life, drove her relentlessly into the present and away from her nightmare memories--and God, the sex. Whenever he came, she felt the rush in her own nerve endings, so intensely that she screamed and thrashed and sometimes laid scratches down his back or arms--which he then wore proudly, shirtless, and refused to heal over for a while. She was so intrigued by this psychic “overflow” that she decided to test a theory about it--while giving him a treat most men loved being introduced to. She hoped he would as well.
He didn’t seem to have much idea of what she was doing as she nudged him against the great room wall and started kissing her way down his chest.
“Is this...May, what are you doing?” He looked down at her, crouched at his feet, and she just grinned and started unfastening his uniform trousers.
His eyes widened as she pushed the trousers down and twined her fingers around his length. “Now the purpose of this exercise,” she said silkily, “is to try and stay on your feet...”
He did his best. His hands dug against the hard white wall behind him as he writhed, coming up on his toes as she licked and suckled, all the while gasping and groaning with astonishment. His knees shook, and then he shook, and she felt his loins tighten against her mouth and took him in deep.
His voice rose to a roar as he released, and she whimpered as her own orgasm rippled through her without needing caresses. He trembled, rigid, helpless...and then went limp, knees buckling.
She let him out of her mouth and caught him, gently helping him to the floor. He made a strangled sound and pulled her into his arms, falling into his side and curling around her while he panted for air.
“That’s the only unusual thing,” she admitted in the medlab, perhaps a day later. She was wearing the strange version of a hospital gown--a short robe which could be picked apart at front or back, and then pinched together again seamlessly. He had just taken another blood sample, and the wand he had used sat in a larger housing while analyses ran.
“I can feel you come, and I end up with a lot of your power running through me. Other than that, I don’t feel any different.” A pause, and then she smiled, and he had to fight a smile too. “Well.” Except for the whole “being in love” thing. That felt very different indeed. It made what she had had with Maddy feel trivial and fake.
“If...these analyses prove conclusive, the Commander in Chief and her council will wish to meet with you personally.” He looked her in the eyes, searching apprehensively for her reaction.
The realization felt like a splash of cold water. “You mean go back with you. In your spaceship. To your home….”
“Planetary cluster,” he clarified.
“...Right.” What a bizarre idea. Not just having an alien lover, but...going away with him, maybe for good, to a planet other than Earth. “So you can prove to your leaders that D’nari and humans are compatible.”
“Yes.” He peered at one of the scrolling readouts, his eyebrows rising, and then quickly looked back at her. “They will wish to speak with you. There may be some further tests, no more invasive than these. There may be an inquest. Some of the questions may seem...personal. I hope that you will not be offended.”
She frowned, a little skeptical--but then nodded slowly. “I guess it kind of makes sense. This is all super important to your race, and I’m the first one to actually, well, volunteer to be tested.” She turned soft eyes to him, and his eyelids lowered a fraction. “Of course, I had better reasons than most.”
He smiled faintly...then grew more serious. “Please think about it. I know it is a hard decision to make, leaving Earth.”
It didn’t actually feel like a hard decision. Was something wrong with her, that she couldn’t say she’d miss this place at all? That even the wild woods themselves couldn’t stir her love any more?
She had burned out on humans by witnessing some of their worst in action, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she didn’t want any kind of home that Corin was not a part of.
A week after the battle in the woods, a search team came through the area wi
th dogs. Corin had discarded the Jeep in town, and had not told her what he had done with the dynamite. The dogs snuffled around the front yard, hit on nothing, and the team moved on.
“That deputy’s family must have put in a missing person’s report,” Corin theorized, and checked for it using his communications array, which he could use to tap into human computer networks easily. “Yes. Apparently your stepbrother is under investigation in the disappearance.”
May smirked and sat back in her chair. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
That afternoon,n the last of the intensive analyses was completed, and Corin spent a long time poring over data screens in the medlab. He did his best to translate their contents to her. “This one speaks to your general health versus normal human baseline. You are actually ahead of the curve in several areas. Immune response, healing, blood pressure, metabolism, fertility….”
“Fertility, huh?” She winked and flashed him a grin. “Guess we had better watch out.”
“...watch out for what?” he asked with a blank look, and she just giggled.
But then something occurred to her. “Are they going to want to harvest my eggs or something?”
“Maybe a few for analysis. But there are many human women, and comparatively few D’Nari. We will likely not have to resort to in-vitro methods unless only a few women agree to go with us.”
He hesitated, then asked, “Do you think that is likely? I know that you are unusually...open-minded for a human. I would hope to find others like you for my brothers.”
“Well, we ladies can be a little fickle, but uh…” she walked her fingers up his arm. “As long as we can get you guys to loosen up a little, I think we can find you some girlfriends.”
“It is not ‘girlfriends’ we long for, May,” he spoke matter-of-factly as he traced a few things into one of the touch-screens.
“Our affections are rarely if ever casual. We came here for mates. D’Nari mate for life, you see.”
No wonder he had been so moved by her gestures of devotion. He wanted to get serious. Space soldier from nearly unisex race seeks genetically compatible woman for permanent relationship and babies. How bizarre. Not unappealing, but not exactly what she had ever considered doing either. Well, maybe the marriage part, maybe. But aliens? Alien babies?
...maybe, if they’re his, I could get on board. But right now I’m having too much fun with the whole “honeymoon” period. I think I’d prefer to keep the sex unproductive for at least a few years.
“So...what are D’Nari kids like, anyway?”
He chuckled. “Small, semi-aquatic, and very psychically gifted. Gestation takes longer than with a human and is divided into stages.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Go on.”
“Because we are a psychic race, our neurological systems take longer to develop. The first gestational stage involves the development of the brain and brain case first. Unlike in humans, where the...er...digestive system develops first.” The way he sounded when he said that made her smirk. Some details of human physiology were fairly grotesque. She only knew a little--Maddie had flunked med school--but he had told her one funny tidbit: in humans, the anus developed first. His comment had been that in Tom’s case, he had stopped his development there and simply gotten bigger.
“So you guys start out as floating brains.”
“Essentially, yes. The first stage embryo bears some resemblance to a large tadpole. In the second stage, the organs and limbs develop along with most bodily bulk, and in the third, the child is born and spends a year swimming in the nursery tanks.”
“Nursery...tanks?” Whoa, wait a second, my weirdness alarm just went off. I thought it was broken after all of this, but nope….
“Yes. We were formerly an aquatic race, you see, and when we reached land we still had to return to raise our young. Eventually, nursery tanks were developed, so that the children may develop muscle tone and bone density properly before venturing onto land. This prevents the mothers from having to follow them around in the oceans for a year.”
“Uh, good.” Because what would I do, live in scuba gear? Come on. “Anything else, um, nonhuman...about the whole pregnancy-birth thing?”
It felt so weird talking about this. No, it felt so weird that it felt perfectly normal talking about this. They had gone from strangers in a desperate situation, to allies, to lovers, and now suddenly, it seemed normal to talk life plans and offspring. The little critic that lived in the back of her head wondered why.
Why was it suddenly normal?
It wasn’t just being in love. Something seemed to be shifting in her, and had since they had first made love. It was as if her instincts were somehow aligning with his. Not so much a forcing of her will as something in her that was responding to his desire for a mate who would stay with him.
He was staring at her softly, a heat in the backs of his eyes and the faintest smile on his face. Then he snapped out of it and blinked. “I am sorry, what was the question?”
“I just wanted to know what would happen if…” If I ended up carrying your children. That’s what you want, isn’t it? There’s a little bit of an animal to you, Corin, and he is thinking of a mate and cubs. And when you look at me like that...I wonder if it would be that bad of a deal.
...Wait, what am I thinking? “Look, never mind, it’s OK, we’re both distracted. I’ll ask you later.”
She had a nightmare that night--Corin had died in the explosion, and she couldn’t find a thing to defend herself with as Tom chased her around the complex. Then Corin was shaking her, and she woke, and her tears dried in the warm dark as he held her.
“I think I’ve decided,” she murmured against his throat. “There’s really nothing here for me to stay for. I’ll go with you. No matter how strange it gets, I think I can handle it if I’m with you.”
He shivered in the dark, and his arms tightened around her, and when he let out his breath, she realized he had been holding it while she spoke. Then his mouth found hers, and he rolled them over so that he pinned her down...and neither of them said much of anything for a good while.
He slept hard that dawn, exhausted from another night of attentions that left her strangely energized, if a bit achy. As it turned out, the General had a great deal of tensions to work out--and helping him do it was even more fun than she had expected.
She didn’t realize how much becoming Corin’s mate was changing her until she stepped out of the shower and caught her reflection in the full-length mirror. There, below her navel and just above her mound, she spied something shining softly.
She approached the mirror, eyes wide, fingers brushing against the spot, which tingled slightly. She came up close...and saw a delicate tendril of iridescence coiling under her skin, a tiny match to the marks on Corin’s body that she had thought were tattoos. It looked a little like an infinity symbol. The skin around it was smooth and faintly luminous, as if the mark was gradually spreading.
She dressed quickly and quietly, suddenly needing some time alone to think. Her body was changing. She had a glowing...thing...under her skin now. She had no idea what it was. Beautiful, yes, from him, yes, obviously something he displayed with pride, but--what was it? Could it hurt her? How much of her could it grow to cover?
She walked out the front door and into the woods, just looking for a quiet spot to sit and think. Corin would know what was going on, if she told him. Which she would have to do eventually, because he was going to notice. How could he not? He barely left her alone when he was awake. And though that was lovely, right now, with his strange mark on her, she needed a little...space.
She sat at the base of a tree maybe a quarter mile out and wrapped her arms around her knees. The whole thing had just become real on a level it hadn’t for her before. It overwhelmed her. That was the feeling. Too many huge changes had happened too fast.
It hit her as she was mulling Corin’s behavior since their first lovemaking, and the way her own viewpoint seemed to be subtly
...shifting. They were both caught in something, she realized. Not just love. Something more primal, and less voluntary. But what was the cause? Pheromones? Something psychic? Something having to do with these strange marks that both of them had now?
He will worry if he wakes and I am gone, she thought almost reflexively, and stood up. But then stopped herself. When had she let herself get so enmeshed so quickly? Was this healthy? Maybe it was completely normal for D’Nari. But why would she feel the impulse to go along? She wasn’t one of them. All she had done was have a lot of unprotected sex with a member of an alien race, which had caused several unexpected side effects when they attempted to mate with various other races….
“...Oh crap.”
She didn’t have time to think on it further. A twig snapped to her left, and she turned just in time to duck Tom’s oncoming fist.