by H. E. Trent
“My—” She shook her head and started scratching at the tape securing her eye patch. “I can’t see them!”
Owen gently nudged her fingers away. “Hey, keep that on.”
“I can’t see.”
“Look at them tomorrow, okay?”
She growled with frustration.
“I know, I know. But hey, there are others, too,” Luke said. “They aren’t as clear and close as that picture, but that’s something for you to look forward to.”
“What say?” She pointed to the dark smudge that must have been a caption beneath the picture. The album didn’t have audio captioning.
Owen tilted the screen toward him. “Says sisters Maris and Ona Estar welcome guests to village after flood cleanup.”
“Ona,” Ais whispered. Maris belonged to Amy. Ona was Ais’s. Ona was a name that had been given with intent. The sound wasn’t one that creatures made when they were annoyed. Ais didn’t know what Ona meant in the Jekhan tongue, if anything, but even if it meant nothing at all, at least it was a pretty sound.
And Estar. Ais finally had a second name to claim. She’d always just been “Ais,” attached to nothing and no one.
Ais Estar.
She liked the sounds together.
“Amy was right,” Owen said. “They were both beautiful.”
“Can’t see. Happy?”
“You’ll see them tomorrow, but do they look happy? Hmm. Yeah. I guess they do. I guess they look pretty normal, whatever that means for Jekh, pre-invasion. They’re young here. Probably sixteen and seventeen. Children, basically.”
“Sixteen. Seventeen. Don’t remember then. Was…blurred.” Her hand went to the bump beneath her ear, covered with a bandage at Luke’s insistence because she hadn’t been able to stop scratching and he worried she’d scar. She didn’t know what the bump was, or if there was really some sort of tracking technology beneath her skin, but if there was, she wanted it out. She’d be anxious until the doctor scanned her and assured her that she was clean, because more of those creatures could find her and take her.
“Years ran together?” Owen asked.
She nodded. “Don’t remember. Was girl, then woman. No… Uh…”
“No in-between.”
She nodded because he understood what she wasn’t so good at saying.
“I’ll bookmark this album for you to look at tomorrow as soon as your patch comes off,” Luke said. “I swear, I could sit here and flip through these pictures all day. The videos, too. It’s like a PBS documentary without all the droning commentary. I think learning what the place and people looked like is interesting. There are even a few pictures of Little Gitano.”
“What doing? In government?”
Owen leaned back onto his forearms, and then plopped flat on his back when Nestor decided to try to nest on his chest. “Remember how we were telling you that the Jekhan Alliance is suppressing the Terran occupation in Buinet?”
“Yes?”
“Folks are trying to get into the old systems and get things running so the folks outside of Buinet can access information.”
“Esteben help.”
“Yeah. That’s right. He’s been helping us locate more of the Jekhan satellite engineers who live off the grid. Just in the past couple of weeks with the few folks he’d already recruited, they’d been able to make three trips up into orbit to fix some of the grid damage. More and more people are checking in—people long thought to be dead. They’d been hiding out in The Barrens or in the desert, and kept their mobile COM units on just to catch local transmissions. They damn near overloaded the functional part of the grid again when they all started to sign in all at once.”
“These people cooperate like no one I’ve ever seen,” Luke said.
“I guess they’re motivated now. Maybe they weren’t before, but no one’s been spared the agony of the past couple of decades.”
“Is good,” Ais said. Inarticulate, as always, but she’d needed to let that little bit of joy out. She found the idea of a planet where people could come and go as they pleased to be something of a fantasy like she watched in those movies from Earth. People got into cars and airplanes and came and went as they pleased, meeting people, sharing things.
She slumped, remembering.
She couldn’t go anywhere. Jekh wouldn’t be her playground—not when the Tyneali were tracking her.
When will they stop?
She turned to Owen, who was rubbing Nestor’s head. “Tyneali…”
“Oh. Yeah.” He nudged the dog aside and sat up. “There were a few blips in the sensor logs. Big ones.”
“More like the sensors went down completely,” Luke said. “My guess is that they suppressed the system entirely when they were here so not only wouldn’t Owen have gotten a COM ping that anyone had trespassed, but land speculators could have snuck in then on foot and no one would have known.”
“Oh no.” Ais put a hand to her chest over her suddenly pounding heart, but the touch didn’t slow the beating any.
“Don’t worry about that,” Owen said. “Trigrian and Headron are out patrolling now just to be sure no one’s here that isn’t supposed to be. Once they’re done, we can be reasonably sure the sensors will catch anyone new.”
“Unless the Tyneali come back and knock the blasted system offline again,” Luke said.
“They come back,” she said, and she nodded with finality because that was the only sure thing she knew. They weren’t going to leave her alone because she was property—very expensive property—and they wanted her back.
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t do that.” Owen wiped her silly tears away with his thumb and held her face between his hands. “Don’t cry while you have your eye patched. That patch needs to stay on until tomorrow.”
She released a strained-sounding sob, anyway because it had already been on the way out, and then she hung her head.
“You’re fine. Okay?” He looped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
“I just…stay here.”
“I know that’s not ideal. You don’t want to be cooped up.”
“Seriously, I understand,” Luke said. “I was closed into a little ship with my siblings for a little over a week and very nearly lost my shit six or seven times. Here, you not only have to hang out in one of the few rooms on this property that doesn’t have a window, but you have to put up with assholes like us, too.”
“Assholes.” She barely whispered the word. They didn’t understand. Some people were difficult to get along with, probably, but she’d spent so much of her life alone that she was probably less proficient in sorting out which weren’t worth the hassle. She didn’t think Luke and Owen counted as “not worth it.”
Ais turned her gaze toward Owen and, for the umpteenth time in a week, wished she could see all the things his face was doing. He was looking at her—that much she could tell—but she couldn’t read his expression. Since he so rarely spoke about his feelings, she needed to see what his face was doing.
Putting a hand to his cheek, she felt for tension—for too-rigid muscles. She skimmed fingertips along his jaw and up to his lips. Those weren’t clamped together. They were relaxed and full.
Soft.
His brow was furrowed, but that likely seemed to be more due to his curiosity of her hands-on exploration than from anger or annoyance.
She felt back down to his lips again because she liked them.
The Tyneali didn’t have lips like humans did. She’d found her own to be grotesque until she’d been taken away by Eileen and Edgar, and then arrived at the farm. Everyone there had lips that were more like hers than like the Tynealean ones, and they seemed to like using the cushioning to their advantages. They touched them together. Kissing, they called the practice.
Carefully, she shifted her weight onto her left hand and pulled her leg up beneath her. Turning to Owen, she stumbled a bit—accidentally missing the bed’s edge wit
h her right hand—but Luke kept her upright.
“Got you,” he whispered and set her to rights.
She crawled closer to Owen, who didn’t move. Just stared.
That suited her fine at the moment. Him staring was much better than him recoiling. All the same, she said softly, “Want to kiss.”
“Oh?”
“Tell the lady yes, Owen.”
“I wasn’t saying no, Luke.”
“Do better. She’s not a mind reader.”
“She doesn’t need to be. Apparently, you are.”
“Just observant. Part of my job.”
Slowly, she leaned into him, targeting the pink on his lower face and cursing her poor depth perception. Coming in too fast would mean an inelegant bump to their chins and noses. She wanted soft, gentle. She wanted soft, because with tenderness, she could at least pretend that he could keep someone like her.
When he slipped his hand behind her head, she started, thinking he was going to guide her away, but he actually leaned in and righted her aim. His head slanted, lips parted, and mouth took hers in more of a feel than a kiss. She’d opened for him, but he was feeling his way around her mouth with his lips, pulling the fleshy parts of hers between his, and letting them snap back.
The texture of his beard, soft yet abrading, sparked a familiar awareness of his maleness and a welcome reminder of where he’d been nights ago. That beard had tickled the insides of her thighs, and skated against places no man had put his mouth before him.
Her sex clenched, as did her fingers over his thigh.
He delved his tongue into her mouth, and she let him seek, explore, suppress. She was happy to just be kissed instead of being the one doing the kissing. She wanted to see what he liked, and decide if she liked it, too.
She liked what Owen was doing enough. He was far more tender than would have been expected of a man with such a taciturn demeanor. He didn’t try to choke her air with his tongue like a man once had in a warning of the other places he’d be abusing, but sipped on her. Tasted her like she was rare and extinguishable.
Then he turned her head and kissed her cheek sensually, and her jaw.
Her neck.
She tugged at her collar, giving him more room to touch. Every swipe of his hot mouth over her collarbone made her nipples tingle and her small breasts feel heavy with blood.
So small, she thought, sliding her hand up to one mournfully. Hybrid women didn’t tend to have much tissue there until after they’d given birth, and though she was more human than not, she was no different in that regard.
“Let me do that,” he whispered.
His hand replaced hers at her bodice, and as he palmed her breast, squeezing and sending tremulous, nervous jolts through her body, Luke slid down her dress zipper.
“Should I lock the door?” he asked.
Owen didn’t stop kissing, but she felt his nod.
The mattress heaved upward as Luke shifted off, and then came the sound of the lock being snicked into place, and then Luke padding back to the bed.
Owen slid her dress down her arms and put his mouth on her shoulder, then slanted down toward her neck.
Her body arched into his, and then bowed the opposite way when Luke skimmed a fingertip down her spine. He stopped at the top of her ass above the slit, and then skimmed in the hollow there.
His touch tickled and aroused, but he wasn’t the one she wanted inside her. He was a friend who made her feel safe…and bold. She was glad he was there, but she needed Owen. Owen didn’t seem to ever understand.
Luke rolled her dress the rest of the way down to her hips, raised her up a bit, and then pulled the dress off.
The cloth hit the floor, and as Owen switched his kisses to her other shoulder, Luke snaked his hands in between Ais and Owen’s bodies. He worked Owen’s buttons free and Owen slid the shirt off when he was done, barely missing a beat.
His mouth was on her chest, leaving a hot, wet trail across the tops of her breasts, but carefully avoiding the most aroused parts.
She arched for him, wondering if he needed a hint, but he ignored it.
“You want her on your lap?” Luke asked. “Like that one time?”
“Yeah. Let’s do that.”
The one time?
Although she understood that Owen and Luke had some sort of arrangement and that they’d shared women before, the idea suddenly grated at her. She didn’t want to think about those women and how eager they’d likely had been to be in the men’s clutches.
Even as Owen stood in front of her, unfastening his pants and freeing his enticing cock, she fumed. Someone else had touched him.
Does he think about them? Did they mean anything?
They couldn’t have him. He was on Jekh, not Earth. On Jekh, he was hers, and she had no intention of letting him go back, because he belonged to her. She’d already claimed him by so freely giving him her body.
She was still fuming when Owen sat nude on the bed’s edge and pulled her onto his lap.
He’d lifted her as though she were weightless, and his hot lips were on the back of her neck, searing and arousing. Chasing away her annoyance as her eye closed and sex clenched.
His cock was at her back, hard and seeping, and his hands beneath her thighs.
What’s he…
He lifted her, and Luke’s hand slid beneath her, and Owen invaded.
“Oh…”
Luke chuckled and settled in front of Owen’s knees. “Breathe, honey.”
She was trying to, but every attempt at inhalation faltered. Her diaphragm didn’t seem to want to do the work.
Owen kept his body still as he lowered her onto his shaft, and then she could take no more. He held her tightly around the waist and waited.
She didn’t know what for, but caught motion in her periphery.
Luke lifted one of her legs over Owen’s thighs and then the other, hooking her feet behind his calves. He pushed Owen’s knees apart more and more and until there was enough room for a man to fit in between them.
She couldn’t be a hundred percent certain, but she was reasonably sure Luke was smirking on his knees.
She blinked.
He leaned in, and suddenly there was a talented tongue on that little bundle of nerves at the top of her mound.
“Oh!” She grabbed his hair, because nothing else made sense to do, and as he sucked, and Owen curled his hips upward, she tried to push Luke away. Not because she didn’t like the combination, but because it felt too good. Owen’s thickness filling her, and thrusting shallowly. Luke’s wet mouth and his evil teeth.
“You… You do this?” she ground out and her hands sought some new texture for purchase. She needed leverage, and quickly, or she’d come apart.
She settled for the tops of Owen’s thighs, and pushed herself up, and that was worse, because the position gave him a better angle to thrust his cock into her and gave Luke easier access to more of her slit.
As Owen stirred her within, Luke stirred her without. His tongue slid up and down her slit, dipping occasionally into the hole Owen was invading, and she was stunned. She didn’t know that men did those sorts of things.
Maybe they don’t.
Maybe they were just special, and maybe they were abominations, but she didn’t care if they were. What she cared about was that they’d obviously done something similar before, and that they were so good at it.
“Who?” she demanded, even as her thighs began to convulse and fingers cramped against Owen’s thighs.
“Hmm?” he hummed against the crook of her neck. He was still rolling his hips, stirring his dick inside her and making her exposed eye water, and she was seething, and about to come.
No!
She whimpered. She wanted to yell at them, but Luke’s whole mouth was against her pussy, the flat of his tongue demanding she pay tribute, and Owen was so big.
She threw her head back against his shoulder and sighed. Sighing turned into panting, and then, as Luke reached up and plant
ed a hand over her mouth, she screamed.
He muffled the noise, and Owen kept thrusting.
Luke kept sucking, and she sobbed because her body was spasming so hard, and one orgasm rolled into another. Her brain couldn’t quite keep up.
Finally, Owen shouted, “Damn!” and he quickly raised her off of him.
She was on the bed on her back and her thighs were sticky, and he was holding his cock.
“I keep doing that,” he hissed.
“It’ll be all right,” Luke said. He crawled onto the bed between Ais’s legs and, hand in his pants, licked her thighs.
Ais didn’t understand the nature of Owen’s disquietude, and was going to ask, until she realized what Luke was doing.
As he stroked himself, he cleaned her, and she went absolutely boneless.
“I figured you were being nice and not making me dig for treasure for once,” Luke said. He licked the creases between Ais’s upper thighs and her sex, lapping like a cat at a bowl of cream.
“You are a sick puppy, Luke.” Owen appeared to be wiping off his erection with someone’s discarded sock.
“Mm-hmm,” Luke purred, and sat back onto his heels, still stroking. “What does it say about you that you enable me?”
“Says that I’m a good friend. I never say anything when your tongue strays, do I?”
“Because you like my tongue.” The only indication that Luke had his release was his gasp and the slight hunching of his shoulders. “Damn,” he whispered.
Owen tossed him what must have been another sock. “I don’t think there are many men who are so straight that they wouldn’t like being licked no matter who’s doing the licking. Or if they say they don’t like it, what they really mean is they don’t like the idea. I don’t have a problem with the idea. My problem is with you being my best friend.”
“So if I’d been anyone else…”
Owen shrugged.
“Dude!” Luke flicked the soiled sock at him, and Owen easily swatted it away.
Leaning against the nightstand, Owen canted his head. “Let’s be clear. I’m not saying I’m inviting a guy home anytime soon. I have no particular drive to do that. I’m only saying that if one thing led to another, I probably wouldn’t freak out if my dick ended up in someone’s mouth.”