by Jean Roberta
A tiny fae tugged at her earlobe, shishing into her ear, tweaking a sweet spot of sensation just below, next to her head. Another found the pulse point in her neck and rubbed against it. Felt like the rough tongue of a cat, but warm and slick.
God, to feel something like that on her clit.
Laughter trilled in her mind. “Now you’re getting it. We aren’t bad fairies, we just like fucking. Open your eyes.”
Kyra obeyed, and the fairies moved away, offering her a clear view of Lily’s gorgeous pussy. Fat lips trembled with dew, and the hard bulb of her clit jutted through like a seedling, ripe and ready for tasting. “Suck it, Ky.”
She didn’t need prompting. Kyra climbed up onto the dais—what had seemed hard as pearl and gorgeously iridescent, gave under her hands, like skin. Warm, slick, pulsing with the thrum of the music and her own heartbeat, now, all one rhythm. Kyra spread her palms against it and breathed in the musky smell, mocha and lilies and cinnamon and cream. She nuzzled against the inside of Lily’s knee, covering her face with the smell, with the heat. Her teeth raked across hot flesh, nipping, gnawing up inner thigh, roughing the tender, tender skin. The musk grew headier, thicker, hotter, as her face approached Lily’s cunt, and the music’s rhythm shortened, stabbed the air. Rocked her insides.
She felt fairies swarm her body, slipping against sensation points she didn’t even know existed: the small of her back, the arches of her feet, her navel, her ears and breasts and hip bones and ass cheeks and calves and elbows and clit and pussy… God. She writhed against them but they were all over, everywhere, and there was no way to get leverage, to set the rhythm, to increase or decrease the pressure according to her will. She had no will. Her mouth found succor and lapped, drinking in Lily’s dew, suckling that delicious clit. Her chin dripped, slid along Lily’s cleft. Beneath her palms, the dais pulsed. It warmed, hotter and hotter. She hollowed her cheeks, pulling hard on Lily’s clit, digging her chin into the divot of her cunt, smearing her face, blurring their bodies like all the others in this room, in this world.
Orgasm erupted from at least a dozen epicenters, and Kyra’s body and brain and universe shuddered hard, parting into a million pieces and reforming, glued by the strangeness of this place, the fury of emotion and sensation. Two things tethered her through it: the steady pulsing pearl skin beneath her hands and the tensed, shuddering body beneath her mouth.
“Come, my queen,” Kyra thought, but her mouth was way too busy to make words. Still, she felt that Lily heard. Her hands melted into her wrists, bathed in fire. The heat was unbearable, but she heard Lily shouting, calling, singing, pounding out the rhythm of her delight.
Kyra tasted deeper, and Lily came.
“Lean back and look. See me.”
Kyra opened her eyes. It physically hurt to pull her face away from Lily’s still-throbbing cunt. She’d been caffeine-free a whole day before and hadn’t jonesed for a taste like this. But Lily had asked, and Kyra wasn’t about to say no. Not after this.
She rose up on her hands, looked down. The dais, which she’d first thought was white and then later decided was translucent with pangs of blue, now glowed deep crimson, a deeper red than she had ever seen, even on a light box. True red, blood red. Fuck red.
And this wasn’t a weird skin-covering on a hard dais. It had shape. Wing shape. Beneath Lily lay her wings, burning vibrant red, filled with heat and orgasm.
Kyra stroked them reverently, helping her lover down from climax, settling into the slowing music, slushing sensory soup. She brushed a kiss against Lily’s thigh. Lily laughed.
“Now then, art-girl, I think you can draw faerie.”
“Damn right,” said Kyra. “Just let me check that red again.”
•
Repair Mission
Annabeth Leong
“I don’t know what Earth was thinking,” Captain Mechelle Wharton complained. Every few seconds, there was a slapping sound as she caught herself against one of the cramped engine room’s walls and pushed off toward the other. It was a zero-gravity, extreme-power-conservation version of pacing, and it was on my last nerve.
The noise made it impossible to forget her presence. Besides that, every time she flew past me, air currents eddied around her and carried the scent of her body. I’d just spent six months hurtling through the vacuum in uncomfortably high gravity due to acceleration, totally alone, fed through an IV, drugged to within an inch of my life. The psych training courses I’d taken to prepare for the experience had mentioned extreme sexual arousal as a potential effect of coming out safely on the other side—something about the survival instinct asserting itself combined with an urge for connection after the extended isolation combined with an adrenalized response to intense situations—but they’d recommended spending time alone while acclimating. They hadn’t said anything about what to do if an attractive woman decided to watch your every move.
From my current position, entangled with the guts of her ship’s engine, I couldn’t see her face. I knew she could see my hands, though, so I continued to pretend I was actually trying to fix the problem that prevented her and her crew from returning to Earth with a cargo hold full of neurotoxin-producing alien bacteria.
I was so tangled up thinking about her that I could hardly focus on either of my missions—not the faux-repair mission she knew about, and certainly not the military mission she didn’t. I couldn’t deal with her speculation on top of that. Giving her my best noncommittal grunt, I tried to come up with more ways to look busy fiddling with the engine in hopes that she would eventually leave me alone.
She, however, apparently enjoyed thinking out loud. “Once you get the drive going again, I’ll have to divert power away from life support to get a strong enough push from the thrusters to put us back on course. That won’t damage our oxygen production permanently, but you know how math works in space. One more person breathing air adds just enough strain to the system that we’ll come up two days short on our oxygen supply. Even if we utilize every auxiliary oxygen tank on the ship, we can’t make it two days. Don’t they have engineers? I can’t understand why they didn’t do a better job planning how to get you back as well.”
The real answer was that Earth expected Captain Mechelle Wharton to be a little less mathematically minded. A little less observant, generally. I was supposed to have been able to show up, say I had the necessary supplies to fix the ship, present appropriate security clearance, and then, with no further questions asked, rewire the engine to blow us all to kingdom come, myself included. The powers that be didn’t expect her to fixate on the resource management required to get me back to Earth safely, probably because they’d never bothered to consider that question themselves. This had been a suicide mission from the outset as far as they were concerned.
I grunted again and unscrewed several attachments, knowing I was just going to reattach them a few minutes from now.
“I’ve had my crew running the numbers nonstop, Stefany,” Captain Wharton said. “I’m angry about this oversight, but I want you to know I’m committed to making this work.”
“Thank you,” I said, blinking rapidly to hold back an unexpected flood of emotion. PsychPrep was beginning to seem like a total failure. I’d been screened with a battery of tests that measured my loyalty, discretion, strength of character, ability to endure isolation and resolve to place the needs of the many above the needs of the few. I’d had no reservations about taking on a suicide mission, and my commanders hadn’t had any about giving me one. I’d been through death-acceptance classes, and I’d even put on a funeral party before embarking.
All that, and somehow the concern and strength in Captain Wharton’s voice made me want to weep. The alluring scent of her made me want to make love to her. The combination of the two made me want to live.
I remembered the cold, hard knot I’d been able to feel in my chest as I’d set out on this mission, but I could no longer summon the same icy purpose. Captain Wharton’s restless movements and constant qu
estioning had irritated me from our first moment together, but they’d also unraveled me. I reached for the comforting efficiency of my former self. I could at least approximate it, even if I could no longer embody it.
“Don’t strain your crew on my account, though, Captain. You won’t have to worry about me breathing your air. I’ll step out of the airlock, won’t feel a thing.” I thought I might be able to shock her into leaving me be. Then I could alter the engine and none of us would have need of oxygen anymore.
I’d be giving up my life to keep those neurotoxin-producing bacteria out of the hands of the terrorist groups who’d vowed to capture Captain Wharton’s ship. Captain Wharton and the crew would make the same sacrifice unwittingly, but they’d known there was risk when they’d signed on to their mission. PsychPrep had taught me to think of myself in the context of that risk, a physical manifestation of the abstract forces of chance and chaos. I wasn’t a person assassinating the crew of a research ship and destroying their notes and specimens. I was the wing of the butterfly flapping, the resulting storm an inevitable and impersonal effect.
The noises she’d been making stopped. For a moment, I thought she’d left and I could get on with my task and end all this. Then I took another breath and had to bite back the moan summoned by her smell, closer now.
It wasn’t any sort of perfume—no civet or flowers or spices here. Her ship was a utilitarian, scientific mission with no room for such luxuries. Captain Mechelle Wharton smelled of sweat and pheromones, the funk of her sex unavoidably compelling in the cramped space.
She reached into the engine and touched my hand. “Come out of there for a minute, will you?”
The sensation of her skin against mine destroyed me. Before placing me in the slingshot—the ultra-rapid transport device that had sent me into space with nothing more than the barest essentials for immediate survival—the technicians had wrapped me tightly in a reinforced suit. The body needs to be held, they had told me, and perhaps the pressure of the suit against my limbs had kept me that much more sane, hugging me as I hurtled through the anesthesia and the blackness.
But it had been cold where her skin was hot. The suit had been inorganic, but she was life itself.
I had trembled for an hour after her crew had cracked open the bullet that contained me. I had performed the exercises I’d been taught, cautiously reawakening my joints and muscles, rubbing circulation back into my tingling toes. Even my own touch had confused me—like velvet, but also like knives.
Her touch, so casual and so profound, made me want to scream in agony as it overwhelmed my confused and disused nerves. I wanted to grab her fingers and never let go.
I pulled my hand away, my skin still stinging from the heat of her. “Give me a second. I don’t want to lose any of my tools in here.” I banged a few things against each other to stall, even as I discovered there was no way to prepare myself for facing her. Finally, I had no choice but to hope that PsychPrep would somehow kick in and do its job after all—at least enough to prevent me from compromising the mission.
I took a deep breath and crawled out of the engine. My cunt radiated a sharp, aroused smell of its own. My breathing was rapid and my face flushed, and I cringed at the thought of how I must look.
The captain frowned. “Are you all right, Stefany? I’ve read about how hard it is on the body to travel the way you did. I know this is an emergency repair, but we can spare a few hours if you need to rest.” She offered a weak smile. “The ironic thing is that we could float here indefinitely and survive—we’re stable with a surplus of oxygen now. We only have life-support problems if we try to go home.”
The real irony was that I was her biggest life-support problem, and yet she persisted in treating me so decently. I wasn’t used to feeling guilty about following orders.
I shook my head, but the gesture only made me dizzy. The sharp transition from heavy acceleration gravity to zero gravity disoriented me—I didn’t have to pretend about that. I made a gesture as if to fling hair away from my eyes, then remembered I’d burned that away with laser treatments before embarking.
I knew I ought to say something that would get her to leave me alone. Dragging this out was only making me unstable and confused. The captain was still talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I couldn’t take my eyes off her skin, which positively glowed with life and health. It seemed as if it would cure my every ill, not just the loneliness induced by my punishing voyage. I imagined myself with infrared vision, able to see the warmth of her overlaid on that smooth dark skin.
Perhaps it was the extreme sexual arousal talking, but I believed I would have wanted her under any circumstances. She was the hard and gorgeous type, her femininity emphasized by the way it slipped through her businesslike, muscular demeanor. On Earth, she had probably been made up of straight lines, sharp angles, smooth planes, firm, lean muscles and straight-cut athletic attire. Floating in the vacuum had softened her, though. With no gravity to hold her down, there was a buoyancy to her cheeks, a relaxation to muscles that were used to being driven hard.
“Maybe I should have the doctor take another look at you,” she was saying.
I shook my head quickly. “No. I’m really fine. It’s just disorienting, as you said.”
“Then rest before you work on that thing. I understand locking yourself in your bunk might not seem appealing after what you’ve been through. If you want company, I’d be happy to provide it. We can hang out in my quarters, nothing complicated. I can play you outdated pop music and serve you military rations.”
I rubbed my temples hard. Her quarters would carry the scent of her body even more than the engine room did now. I would see her cherished objects, get more of a sense of her as a person. I would not be able to prevent myself from looking at her bed, from attempting to gauge whether she ever shared it with anyone, from doing my best to wind up in it with her.
I had to say no. PsychPrep had gone over how to handle temptations and desires that undermined the stability and purpose required for the mission. I’d learned about the indecision that sets in as a result of delay.
I met the captain’s eyes. They were warm and brown and reminded me of the rich soil of a garden I’d once tried to cultivate. She summoned the image of earth—literal, earthworm-and-nutrient-rich earth, conjured here where outside the walls of the ship were swirls of nothingness. Saying no to her seemed equivalent to saying no to home, to safety, to humanity. I gave her a brief nod. “I’d like that.”
•
I suppressed my urge to take her in my arms the moment we entered her quarters, and so the captain truly did play me outdated pop music and serve me military rations. She asked questions about sports teams I didn’t follow, but when I shrugged helplessly, she only smiled. She asked me to call her Mechelle.
“How many times have you been to space?” she asked. “Have you traveled by slingshot before?”
I couldn’t give many details or I’d have made it clear that I wasn’t a simple repair technician. I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “Mostly near-Earth stuff, never by slingshot. This is very different.”
“I can’t imagine the slingshot. It’s hard enough when the trip is gradual. I feel like another person out here, as if I drifted away from the person I was on Earth until I became someone else. As I get closer to my supposed home, I guess I’m hoping the person I used to be will somehow grow back. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“What’s different about you?”
“Out here, I care more. You know, you grow up hearing things about the sanctity of human life, of life in general, but people don’t really act as if they believe those things. In deep space, those aren’t academic concerns. I’m safeguarding the lives of my crew. I’m bearing the awesome burden of transporting alien life forms. All that responsibility feels sacred now, but I would never have used that word on Earth.”
My heart stopped in my chest. She couldn’t know what I’d been sent to do, but here she was talki
ng to me about the sanctity of life. And she was right that my memories of Earth seemed to belong to someone else. Back on Earth, political concerns about terrorist groups had seemed to matter. I had understood why one team had been sent to cleanse the neurotoxin-producing bacteria from the planet where Wharton’s crew had discovered it, and why I’d been sent to eradicate Wharton, her crew, their cargo and their data. Out here, those calculations were different, less meaningful than the intense drive to preserve life in contradiction to the emptiness around us.
I could not afford to get caught up in her sphere of influence. “You make your new perspective sound pretty good,” I said. “Why would you want to go back to the way things used to be?”
“I couldn’t bear being like this on Earth. I’d sob every time I watched the news, break down trying to walk past homeless people on the street. I can handle the responsibility I’ve got now. I can live up to it. Maybe life can only be sacred when there isn’t much of it around—when there’s more, we have to become a little less human. On Earth, I’d struggle to be fully human, fully compassionate, fully aware. It’s so painful.”
She made me want to fall to my knees. What I felt for her now wasn’t merely the desire for physical contact or connection. I wanted to become like her, to find a way to open my soul as she had. Spiced with the lust I’d been feeling, it made for a heady mix—something like the beginning of love. “I want to kiss you,” I said. I hoped she knew I’d been listening to her. The words were my most honest response to what she’d been saying.
She laughed, and at first I thought that meant rejection. Then she reached for my hand. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since the moment we cracked open that bullet ship of yours. I know they sent you for the ship, not for me, but there’s something about you that—”