“Let’s take a bath,” he said, “before the rest of the house wakes up.” He reached his hand out to me and I took it, kicking the blankets back and shuddering as the cool morning air hit my naked skin. With his help, I climbed off the bed and walked ahead of him toward the door.
“Stop,” he said, and I froze where I stood. “Turn around.” And I did. “I want to look at you.” His pale grey eyes drank me in as he ran his tongue absently over his lips, eying me like he wanted to devour me whole. I felt a small pulse between my thighs at being looked at like that, a blush rising into my cheeks. Propriety be damned—we wanted one another, why shouldn’t we show it?
After a moment, he joined me by the door, darting in front of me to peer out into the empty hallway before he quickly gave the all clear and ushered me forward. We moved on tiptoe, two naked forms absconding through the house like thieves with the vestiges of their dignity.
We giggled conspiratorially when we slipped into the wet room and closed the door behind us, like we were teenagers who had gotten away with keeping the bedroom door closed while the parents were at home. Danovan went over to the tub and turned the knob so that it began to fill with water. Me, I went over to the mirror to assess the damage.
I was quite a sight. If there had ever been golden flowers painted on me, you couldn’t tell now. Instead, there were streaks of yellow glitter all over my body, and smears of black to accompany it. I was a piece of modern art, like I’d just made love with Rothko or Jackson Pollock. I grinned at myself in the mirror, my hair a wild red halo around my head.
“It’s a little impractical, don’t you think?” I asked Danovan as the room began to warm with steam.
“What?” He dropped a spoonful of lavender bath salts into the water, and I breathed deeply of their sweet aroma.
“The body paint. For a wedding, I mean. I saw that Dinervah and her new husband were also painted—surely everyone expects them to… you know.”
Danovan grinned and bobbed his head as he came to stand beside me so that we could both peer into the mirror. “That’s part of the point,” he said. “Unlike your antiquated tradition of checking the sheets for blood, we use paint.”
I scoffed. “No one checks sheets for blood anymore. That went out with the monarchy.”
“Well, the principle is the same. Or at least, those were its origins. In more puritanical times, everyone was painted, but only the bride and groom were allowed to make love on the wedding night. So that when they emerged from their chambers in the morning, they would be the only two whose colors had mixed.”
I smiled. “How quaint. But I maintain, very impractical.”
“I like it,” he countered. “I like seeing you like this, marked by what we shared.”
“Do you, now?” I turned and snaked my arms around his waist, angling my head back so that I could gaze up at him. He brushed my hair back from my shoulders, grazing his fingertips across the slope of my cheek, and nodded. And I could tell he liked what he saw by how his cock grew firm with his wanting.
“I will have you again.” It wasn’t a request, and something about it sent a shiver down my spine. He slid his hands down my arms, and around to my backside, cupping my bottom in his strong hands and lifting me up and to him. I spread my knees to make room for him, almost involuntarily, and immediately felt the head of his insistent prick at my wet entrance.
He grinned a roguish grin that showed his canines as he rocked his hips back and forth, holding me aloft as he slid himself into me. “You are ready for me.”
“Yes,” I breathed, clinging to his neck and pressing a kiss against the sharp angle of his collarbone.
“I make you wet with your wanting,” he all but growled, and thrust himself home.
“Yes,” I said again, louder, more desperate, panting as he filled me up. He carried me to the counter, his phallus plunged to the hilt into me, and set me on the counter, bending at the knees so that he could stay inside me. I braced myself with my hands behind me, the back of my head against the mirror, and he slid himself in and out, in and out, at a maddening pace.
He pulled away for a moment, and I hopped down from the counter. But before I could move away, he turned me around by the shoulders and bent me over, gripping my hip with one hand as he directed his cock once and plunged deeply into me. I cried out as I felt his fingers digging into my flesh. “Harder,” I begged, and he obliged, pressing me against the countertop so forcefully that I could lift my feet off the ground and remain where I was.
He slowed himself down after a moment, favoring smooth, deep thrusts, and tangled his fingers in my hair. Gripping with assertive intent, he clutched my curls where they met my scalp and forced me to look up into the mirror.
We were silver and white, all smeared with black and gold, a sheen of sweat forming over our bodies even as the steam began to coat the glass of the mirror. We locked our eyes together in the reflection. “You are mine now,” he said. And I was; I was.
I wanted to feel the pulse of his orgasm, and my own, so I reached down between my thighs to rub my clit as he fucked me, clamping down around the intrusion of him with the strong muscles of my inner wall. He groaned, low and throaty, his hands finding purchase again on my breasts. He pinched my nipples, already hard from the force of my desires, and I cried out, overstimulated by the sensation.
“I want to feel it,” he said, his voice breathy from the exertion. “I want to feel your release.” He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my neck before standing up straight again and gripping me by the fleshy part of my upper thighs.
“I’m gonna come,” I moaned, my voice ringing out against the tile of the bathroom. And just as I felt my body tense, and shudder, Danovan clamped a hand over my mouth to keep the sound in. My internal muscles contracted as I orgasmed, and Danovan joined me with one final, deep thrust. He climaxed, sending one pulsing wave of seed after another into my warm, waiting orifice.
We stayed there, joined together, for several long, silent moments, trying to catch our breath as the steam from the bath swirled around us. And it wasn’t until we felt hot water at our feet that Danovan finally pulled himself out of me, and I could feel his hot emissions dripping down my thigh as he rushed over the wet tiles to turn the bathwater off.
I turned around, grinning to see that, in our distraction, we’d nearly flooded the wet room. Fortunately for us, there was a drain in the center of the floor. No harm done. Danovan let some of the water out of the tub as well, before beckoning me over and helping me in.
He got in with me, and I leaned back so that my back was to his chest before starting in with a bar of homemade soap to scrub the paint away. Danovan took the liberty of washing my hair for me, cupping handfuls of water to spill gently over my head. It was an act of such intimate tenderness that I felt a lump rise in my throat. There is truly something so luxurious about having your lover wash your hair.
Then he went about lathering himself up, and I tried to help him get all the paint from his face and arms, his hands and body. All the while, I couldn’t help but think about what he’d said: You are mine now. And how I’d felt when he said it. I felt like his. When he had spoken those words to me, my mind and body had given way, and I could offer no argument.
And yet Christian was still alive. Before I could rightly make any kind of commitment to Danovan, I had to be honest with Christian. I had to find him, and tell him.
And, furthermore, I needed to find out how it was possible that humans and Galateans were procreating naturally. I needed to know how rare it was—and who had been tampering with my data back on Earth. I needed to know if Cat was alive, and the rest of my team. I needed to know who had attacked us, and find out where I could be safe again. Safe with Danovan, to pursue my work. We would return to Earth, he and I, and I could work and maybe we could even start a family, a naturally born family—but I was getting ahead of myself.
“Danovan,” I asked after a time, washed and clean, an
d lounging in the tub with him, “had you ever seen a human-Galatean couple with a child before last night?”
I could feel him give a slow shake of his head. “No,” he said, running his hands absently over my shoulders, down my arms, across my breasts. “I didn’t think it was possible, without someone like you to intervene.”
“And when was the last time you were home?” I asked. “I mean, when was the last time you would’ve seen the people of this village?”
“Oh, years now. At least two years,” he said. “And that’s too long.”
I nodded, lost in thought. “We have to get to the crash site. We need to know who’s been tampering with my data. We—”
“Shh.”
Danovan was listening to the sound around us, suddenly alert; all I could hear was the soothing sound of water as we moved through it. After a moment, Danovan broke into a grin. “My mother is awake. And cooking!”
He climbed out of the water, droplets splattering everywhere as he moved, and fetched two towels from one of the far cabinets. One he secured around his waist, and the other he held out to me. I stood, letting the water flow over the curves of my body before letting Danovan enfold me in the soft fabric of the towel.
“Danovan—” I began to protest, and he could read my intention from my tone alone. He pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“We will dress and get back on the road today,” he said, “I promise. But first, we have to eat.”
Chapter 16:
Danovan tel’Darian
She was mine; she was mine. And the world was bright and new. But I knew what had to be done: I had to bring her to Christian so that we could tell him that their engagement was over. Then, we could settle down in Hiropass, or even Pyrathas if she liked the city better, and she could help the new hybrid babies to thrive, and I could be the head of security for the village, or maybe even run for office one day, and we could settle into a quiet Galatean life. Seeing that couple at the wedding last night had cemented it for me: I hadn’t allowed myself to want that with Ara, but now it seemed possible. It seemed like we could stay on Galatea and everything would work out.
“Will you take a look at my thigh?” she asked, lifting the towel so that I could see the venom burns. They were looking irritated by the warm water, but no worse for the wear.
“I need to dissolve that balm,” I said, moving to the cabinet to find the right vial. Locating it, I moved Araceli to the counter and helped her up onto it, spreading her legs so that I could have access to the worst of her burns. I stole a glimpse at the flower of her sex and felt my cock twinge beneath the towel. But there wasn’t time for that now.
I dabbed some of the dissolving ointment onto it and the plastic-like balm was eaten gently away. Ara sucked in a sharp breath of air through her teeth, so I put some soothing cream on the burn as well and watched her walk awkwardly with her legs parted back into my old bedroom, where we’d abandoned our clothes the night before.
We dressed, and Ara gathered her curls into a twist, which she secured with two of my mother’s weaving sticks. My mother had washed the clothes we’d arrived in, and those were what we donned, traveling clothes. I felt the slightest twinge of sadness at the prospect of leaving my home again.
We went downstairs, and saw my mother and father smiling at one another as they went about preparing the morning’s meal.
“Good morning,” I said to them in English, and my father beamed.
“Good morning!” came his enthusiastic reply.
“Sheeay riagosa du mil,” my mother said in Galatean, and I found myself grateful yet again that I could not blush.
“What did she say?” Ara asked.
“Nothing,” I quickly rejoined.
“No, I want to know,” she insisted. “That’s what she whispered to me the other night, and I have no idea what it means.”
“It’s just an old Galatean saying…”
“Meaning?”
My father approached and pushed a cup of tea into Araceli’s hands, which she accepted with gracious thanks.
“Sheeay riagosa du mil,” my father repeated. “It means, ‘she will—’”
“That’s quite enough, thanks, Dad,” I interrupted. He could do naught but chuckle and shrug his shoulders.
My mother gestured that we should sit around the fire pit, and we complied as she scooted fresh warm oats and berries into bowls for us. “The celebration last night,” I remarked, “was very beautiful.”
My father nodded. “It was a pleasure,” he said, testing his English, “seeing Dinervah become wife.”
Araceli grinned, but didn’t correct him as he translated for my mother’s benefit. “If you think I’m going to let this go,” she said, wagging a finger at me, “you’re sorely mistaken. I want to know—”
That was the instant that everything changed.
A screaming shot across the sky like a banshee from the mouth of hell, followed thereafter by a rumbling that shook the very foundation upon which my family home sat. The blast was punctuated by the unmistakable rat-a-tat of gunfire, and I dropped instinctively to the floor.
“Get down!” I shouted, and Ara and my father dropped to the floor, making themselves as flat as they could with their arms winged out to the side and their cheeks pressed against the floorboards.
But my mother had never heard gunfire before, and she didn’t know what the English words get down meant. So when the bullets tore through the glass at the front of the house, shattering the handcrafted bannister to a million splinter shards, one tore through her as well.
I knew it had torn through her because I saw the blood spatter, but I hadn’t actually seen it hit her, hadn’t seen her hit the floor. I scrambled over to her, gathering her to me and dragging her behind the kitchen island as the bullets rained down on my childhood home.
The barrage ended just as abruptly as it had started, and I could tell that they had merely focused their attention on another nearby domicile. Who were they? Why were they attacking a peaceful civilian town?
“Mother,” I began in Galatean, holding her head in lap. “Can you hear me?”
She nodded, her eyes focused desperately on my face. My father and Ara joined us behind the island, and I tried to ascertain the extent of her injury. She lifted her blood-smeared hand to grip my uncertain fist, and in my periphery I saw Ara grab a dish towel to press against my mother’s abdomen in an impotent attempt to stem the flow of the bleeding. It was a stomach wound; the stern set of Ara’s jaw told me all I needed to know about my mother’s prognosis.
“Listen to me, son,” my mother was whispering, even as my father came around to take her other hand. “They came for the hybrid.”
“What do you mean—who came?”
But my mother would only speak a few more words in this life. She turned a hazy gaze to my father, whose eyes glimmered yet with the last, dying hope between us.
“Loving you has been my greatest joy,” she wheezed, “and the greatest privilege of my life.” Those final words deflated my father into wracking sobs over Jaelle’s body, the great healer of Hiropass. My mother.
I moved out from beneath the weight of my mother’s body and rose to my feet. I don’t know what it was that made me do it, but I didn’t feel any fear as I headed to the wreckage of what was our front door and strode into the morning light, without a weapon to turn against my enemies, without a shield to defend myself.
I saw their shuttles, hovering low in the sky over my hometown. I saw the bodies of the slain in the street. And I saw them hauling a woman bodily from her home. Ayla vel’Myracalf, the bronze-skinned Galatean who was swollen with her human lover’s hybrid progeny. She was shrieking his name as they pulled her from her home, and I headed toward her, picking up speed as I went. I would stop them from taking her. I would stop them if it was the last thing I did in this life.
I ran, I ran, I ran until my legs ached and my thighs burned, but I was not fast enough. They
put the pregnant Galatean on the shuttle and they lifted off into the air, and I was left to block the heat from their engines with my hands in front of my face as they disappeared above the cloud cover.
Looking around, I could see Robert Welsh, the human tourist who had loved the Galatean woman, dead in his doorway. One bullet, straight through his skull.
All around me was chaos, people moaning in their agony, trembling in their confusion, and spilling out of their ravaged houses to check on their friends, family, and neighbors. They came for the hybrid. Was it really possible that these people had ravaged a village just to get at one pregnant Galatean woman? Why? To what end?
“Danovan!” I heard my name break through the cloud of my confusion and focused my eyes as my sister came running toward me, her celebration paint smeared in streaks across her skin. “Danovan! Are you all right, brother?”
She threw herself into my arms and I squeezed her tight. “I’m all right,” I said in broken Galatean, “I’m all right. But, Mother…” I couldn’t find the words to tell her what had happened to our mother, so I took her by the hand and led her home.
***
The square at the center of town, where just the evening previous there had been dancing and celebration, was a smoldering black crater where a missile had hit. It had pushed up the cobblestone around the edges, the way that tree roots do when they’re desperate to grow. But it was the lip of a hole, instead, like the event horizon of a singularity, and I knew if I climbed down into it that I would never come out again. When Dinervah and I passed it, I didn’t even look directly inside.
The trip back to the house was considerably slower than the run I’d taken toward the shuttle, and I absorbed the madness around me. People were dead, or tending to the dead, or wounded, or tending to the wounded. And when we reached the house, hand in hand, there was Ara with her sleeves rolled up, bandaging up a Galatean child who looked as though she’d been sliced up by exploded glass. The kid’s lip was trembling, but she wasn’t crying; she was just staring wide-eyed at the strange human woman who was trying to help her.
Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 14