by H. E. Trent
She closed the bedroom door with far more force than necessary and tossed her hair tie onto the dresser.
“This is my house. I’m not a fucking interloper.”
She gave her teeth an aggressive brushing and reactivated her wrist com. It beeped, alerting her to missed contact attempts as she turned on the shower.
“Any messages?” she asked the com.
“One from…A. Mee.”
“Natural speaking voice, my ass,” Court muttered. “Programming note, CG15.”
“Go ahead.”
“A-M-Y is pronounced without a break as Amy.”
“Corrected.”
“Play the message.”
“Hi, Court!” came her friend’s chipper salutation. “Seeing if you can meet up with me today. I’ve got something for you. And no, it’s not more pastries. Can you meet me after work?”
Court stepped out of her pajama shorts and instructed CG15 to connect with Amy.
“Well, can you?” Amy said before Court even said hello.
“Possibly. Depends on how long I have to wait for my turn on the firing range.” Having an excuse not to go home right after would be nice. She didn’t know if she could face the men. She’d very nearly thrown herself at Murk, misreading his friendliness as something more.
Typical me.
“I’m available all night,” Amy said, “so don’t worry about that. Oh! My next flight to Earth got indefinitely postponed. Apparently, there’s a bottleneck in the emigration queue and they’ve put a six-month moratorium on travel because they’ve discovered some of the people recently cleared to relocate gamed the system and shouldn’t have been eligible in the first place.”
“Yikes.”
“Indeed. So, I’ll be taking a few shorter trips on other routes in the interim, but I’m free until Sunday.”
“Good to know. You can finish showing me around.” Court nudged off her socks with her big toes. “I’m curious about what’s outside the city limits.”
“I’d love to show you! I’d need to get my vehicle out of storage if you want to go much farther than the administrative boundary, but that’s easy enough. Maybe we can plan on taking a ride on Saturday.”
“Sounds good. I’ll give you call after work tonight and let you know if I can swing meeting up today.”
“Until then.”
Court turned off the com.
Back in Boston, Court had been far more likely to refuse social invitations than to accept them, but she was in a place where she had no allies, no friends. She couldn’t rely on the network her parents and grandparents had forged for her and know that there was always some sympathetic person she could fall back on if necessary. She didn’t have that on Jekh, and if she were going to get a support system, she’d have to build it for herself.
She stepped into the warm shower spray and let the water pelt her thick hair down to the roots while rubbing the good night of sleep from her eyes. Before lying with Murk, she hadn’t slept through the night without waking since the last time she’d slept over at her sister’s.
Although her conscious mind told her that she was safe and that her sleep would be uneventful, her subconscious mind often startled her awake at even the slightest sound. And not just Jerry moving around, but the buzz of streetlights. Vehicles drifting past. The heat cycling on and off.
In Murk’s arms, she hadn’t moved. She’d even dreamed.
“All the good ones like men,” she muttered and reached for the shampoo concentrate.
She lathered up, rinsed, and conditioned—paying extra attention to her dry ends, not really wanting to get on with the day. Not wanting to walk past that bedroom door again to reignite her embarrassment.
She rolled her eyes at herself. “This is my house. They can’t make me feel like an outsider in my own house.”
But she didn’t want them to leave—didn’t know what was out there for them. They were her personal interface to the Jekhan culture and all the history that wasn’t on the books. She wanted to know what had happened from their point of view, because she was uncomfortable with the idea of being willfully ignorant—of conquering through plausible deniability.
McGarrys went into situations with their eyes opened wide, and Court wasn’t going to start covering them just because of a little embarrassment.
She grabbed the soap and lathered up all the skin that needed it.
“Tour guides,” she whispered.
She could use them as her guides to the place. Tap them for everything they knew so she could make better decisions. Perhaps one day, her decision would be to return to Earth.
She rinsed, turned off the water, and reached around the shower door for a towel. Stepping over the tub side, she scrubbed her face dry and patted blindly for a second towel for her hair.
It appeared in her hand as if by magic, and she knew of all the things that existed on Jekh, magic wasn’t one of them.
She uncovered her face to find a shirtless Trigrian leaning against the counter and the bathroom door wide open.
Holding the towels against her front, she blew wet hair out of her face and backed into the corner by the tub. “What are you doing in here?”
“Murk—uh.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and tightened his grip on the counter edge. “I need to explain what you think you saw.”
“I think I’m pretty clear what I saw, and it wasn’t mouth-to-mouth resuscitation procedures.”
Cringing, he opened his eyes. “That…disturbed you?”
They’d disappointed her. She could hardly say that aloud, though. He wouldn’t understand.
She turned her back to him. If he insisted on standing there, he deserved whatever glimpse he got. She needed to get on with her day.
She tossed one towel over the shower door while she wound the other around her hair. The toweling was thick and fast-wicking. Her hair would be dry in a few minutes, albeit a bit frizzy. She’d take care of the frizz with an ounce or so of hair gel, a hard brush, and a strong hair elastic.
She wrapped the other towel around her body and reached around Trigrian for her toothbrush.
“It did disturb you,” he said.
“It didn’t disturb me,” she said around a mouth full of minty foam. “What you do is none of my business.”
“Really? Your settlement government insists our proclivities are unnatural.”
“I suspect that has more to do with the fact your planet is resource-rich than who you folks prefer sticking your dicks into.”
He gave her a little space to spit.
“Besides, it’s pretty well-known that the settlement founders aren’t the most liberal bunch. Even on Earth, they would have been considered zealots. Most Terrans got with the equal rights thing years ago.”
“But, you followed them here.”
She wagged a finger at him and rinsed her mouth. “No. I didn’t follow anyone.”
“Why did you come?”
She slammed the toothbrush into its holder and turned to face him. “What do you want from me, Trigrian?”
He folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the doorframe. “I told you. I came to explain.”
“And I told you there’s nothing to explain, so let me pass.”
He didn’t move, so she had to squeeze past him, brushing his side as she went.
He followed her, and even sat on the edge of her bed as she rooted through her dresser drawers.
“I wouldn’t imagine you’d enjoy this particular show,” she mumbled.
“You think you know what I’d prefer?”
She stepped forcefully into a pair of very basic white panties and grabbed a sports bra before closing the drawer. “Why don’t you elucidate me?”
She turned for the walk-in closet, which unfortunately happened to be positioned on the bed’s wall to the right of the headboard. He could see her just fine, and her him.
And, stunningly, he was leaned back casually on his forearms with one hand idly stroking his half-m
ast cock.
She froze, dumbfounded as he grazed his thumb over the top and stretched the foreskin.
“You think you know, but you don’t know,” he said.
Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she met his gaze.
His eyes didn’t bear the heat of lust, but a glint of what seemed to be ambition. He didn’t want to be in that room with her. He simply felt that he had to, she was sure that was the case.
She let out a huff and gave her head a hard shake. “I think your preferences are pretty clear, Trigrian.”
He sat up and worked the band of his pants down a little more past his hips.
“Clear as mud, as you Terrans would say. Come here.”
“No. Why should I?”
“Come here.”
“I don’t like being bossed around in my own house.”
“Compared to Murk, I’m sweet as can be, but you still seem to like him.”
“I think you need to get your head examined. Murk is sweet. I’d know his kind when I see it, because it’s so rare.” She hoped Trigrian could intuit from the angle of her chin precisely who shouldn’t be included in that demographic.
Trigrian shook his head. Scoffed. “I’m sure there are a lot of reasons I should seek help, but that isn’t one of them.” He gave his cock a hard tug and hissed, seemingly from the pain of it.
Why would it hurt?
“You don’t have to force yourself to do this,” she said. “I’m not worth that kind of torture.”
“Courtney, come here.” His frustrated snarl and the flash in his eyes made her sigh, then move.
“Prove your point and go back to your lover.” She wrapped the towel a little tighter around her body and walked closer, stopping half a meter from his feet.
He spread his legs farther apart, still stroking. “Closer.”
“You want to tell me the point of this exercise?” She moved in, keeping her gaze locked on his even as the sides of her knees skimmed his.
“I can smell you. Your arousal. Enhanced smell is a Tyneali trait. Helps us with procreation.”
She refused to allow herself to feel one iota of shame about what her body was doing. Being turned only meant only that her hormones were working as they should when in the presence of a well-endowed, attractive male.
“You like the way we look, don’t you?” he asked.
“Why does that sound like an accusation?”
He grabbed the top of her towel and nudged it down. He palmed her breast with a sharp exhalation. “Jekhan women don’t have breasts like yours. They’re flat when they’re not nursing.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
Why am I tolerating this grade school charade? This bit of show me yours and I’ll show you mine? Oh, right. She rolled her eyes.
Because being touched felt nice, and she liked being looked at appreciatively, even if the person doing the looking was someone she’d never reach third base with.
“Not…disappointing.” He swiped his thumb experimentally over her nipple.
She couldn’t suppress the moan or stop her toes from curling.
He leaned forward, eyes still on hers, and lashed his tongue over the erect nub.
Reflexively, she grabbed his shoulders, not certain if she was pushing him away or trying to hold him exactly where he was.
“You like when I do that?” he asked.
“It-it’s hard not to like being touched that way in spite of who’s doing the touching. That’s an erogenous zone.”
“Touch me, too.”
“Why, Trigrian?”
He loosened her hands from his shoulders and slid them down to his chest, gasping at the rake of her nails over his reddish nipples. “Because you don’t understand. You see us, and you assume you know what us being together means.”
“So tell me what it means.”
He pulled her onto the bed onto her back, pushing the towel up to her hips.
He pressed his hands up the insides of her legs, his gaze skimming up one thigh and then the other before his thumbs grazed the edges of her panties. He pressed his palm over her mound, and looked up at her.
“One isn’t enough for us,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You smell so good, Courtney. Drives me crazy. Your scent is everywhere in this house. Going to…touch you.” He nudged the crotch of her panties aside and stroked her labia.
She should have voiced some objection, but didn’t want to. She was wound tighter than a yo-yo, and the moment, the slightest touch would set her off.
He parted her and probed tentatively around her clit.
“God.” She clamped his shoulders between her thighs. “What are you doing?”
“Looking.”
“You’re doing a little more than looking.”
“You want me to stop?” He canted his head as his fingertip easily breached her sex and slid inside. He looked as if her body was novel to him—as if Jekhan women didn’t have the same parts. As Court had learned, they were pretty much the same as human women on the outside, breasts the exception. Inside was questionable. They were apparently different enough that they couldn’t breed if mixed. The Tyneali had managed to crossbreed with humans only through assistance of their laboratories. They’d had to manipulate certain chromosomes from their genetic donors before inseminating human ova. The resulting offspring were supposedly more human than Tyneali, but Court couldn’t say for sure how deep their differences went.
“Do you?” Trigrian asked. “You want me to stop?”
She sighed and wantonly parted her legs farther for him. “No. I want to be touched.”
He tugged at her clit and notched his index finger at her opening so gently she wondered if he thought he’d harm her.
She wrapped her hands and around his wrist and increased his press to her. “I’m built a little sturdier than that.”
“Tell me what you like.”
“I can handle a finger or two. Inside.”
He slipped them in and rolled his gaze up to her expectantly.
“That’s a start.” She helped him establish a rhythm she liked, in and out of her—both deep and shallow—and pressed his other hand against her clit.
“I wouldn’t be upset at you… abusing it a little,” she said with a chuckle. “A little pain adds to the pleasure.”
He rubbed her button beneath his thumb and added a third finger to her already stretched pussy.
She must have gasped, because he stopped. “Too much?”
“No.” She hooked her leg around his waist and pulled him down closer—so he could actually see what he was doing. “More of that.”
It’d been so long since anyone had touched her, and she was perhaps a little overeager to feel pleasure for a change. Aroused didn’t necessarily mean ready, but she’d always been the kind of woman who liked to get a jumpstart on the action. By the time her body did bloom for him, she’d be ready to go off like a rocket.
Gaze locked on hers, he stopped rubbing to dart his tongue around her clit, only to pull back with a groan.
“Tease,” she hissed.
He abandoned her clit for his own cock, and she didn’t mind so much. Looking down her body at his hand squeezing tight around his shaft and the bead of pre-ejaculate at the tip made her body ache as if it were her protrusion he stroked at.
She wanted him inside her, to be pressed beneath his phenomenal physique and to have the guarded man fall apart in her embrace. Perhaps if he gave her his body, he’d open his inscrutable mind up to her as well. She yearned to know him and everything about him that had steered him to her basement with another man.
The other man.
“God.”
Trigrian must have taken that as a cue, because he increased the speed of his fingers in and out of her, leaving his cock alone to massage her quivering clit.
He’d said one wasn’t enough. Could he have possibly been implying that he needs more than one lover?
Her
voice caught as his fingers fluttered against her womb and raked clumsily over her G-spot.
She had no words, no air, and no drive to move her muscles in any way, except to come.
She clamped his fingers inside of her and clawed at her comforter as orgasmic tendrils paralyzed her. Panting, she stared at the ceiling.
Trigrian zipped up, groaning.
“What are you doing?” she asked, pushing up onto her elbows. “Way to ruin the post-coital bliss.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and furrowed his brow as he adjusted his cock. “I can do that for you, if you like. I hope that’s enough.”
Enough?
She turned the word over and over again in her mind, trying to shave off the offense he certainly hadn’t meant to imply.
He walked away.
Maybe he did mean her offense.
Enough? As if she’d demand his body as payment for allowing him and his dying lover to remain in the sanctuary of her home? She pounded the bed and got up to change her mangled panties.
If she were going to keep a sex slave on hand, she’d certainly want one who was a little better at disguising his disdain for her.
She dressed, tidied up her hair, and tried to keep her gaze ahead as she stalked by their bedroom door, but she saw them anyway.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Trigrian with his back to his door bending down to whisper into Murk’s ear.
“Probably telling him he’s secured them grace for another day.”
And the truth was she wouldn’t have asked them for anything if they’d wanted to stay.
Their company would have been enough.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Trig crawled onto the bed next to Murk and settled his back against the headboard.
“I tried to make her understand. I don’t know if I did a good job,” he said.
Murk looked away from the projected video and bobbed his eyebrows at him.
“I got…distracted.” He’d been pretty sure he’d been speaking in sensible statements, but he wouldn’t have bet money. For all he knew, very few of the things he’d followed Courtney to tell her had actually come out of his mouth. When she’d stepped out of the shower, all wet and glistening and her russet skin and incredible body on display, all he’d been able to think was of what a sinful sight she’d make straddling Murk. He would know what to do with her. Trig had only been able to guess.