by Olivia Myers
Moona and Jackie exchanged glances. "Uh, Natalie? I'm glad you like it, but are you sure...."
Natalie put down the mug. She glared at Jackie. "You can't order up Kirk."
Her friend's elegant brows rose. "No? Why not? Isn't he available tonight?"
"I have no idea, but—”
"Let's just see, shall we?" Moona whipped up a schedule. Her cheerful smile faded. "Hmm, that's strange."
"What?" Jackie leaned forward.
"He's not on the roster at all. Not a single booking."
Maybe he was fired for refunding a client, Natalie thought hopefully. Then felt horribly guilty. If so, she was the one who'd lost him his job.
Suddenly, Moona gasped and her eyes went big. She glanced at Jackie, her face stunned. "Look at this."
Jackie leaned toward her and they huddled together over the air schedule. Across the table, Natalie tried to see what they were looking at, but she couldn't. Her eyes weren't focusing properly. And her head was feeling distinctly sick.
"Hey, Natalie, are you okay?"
She realized she was swaying in her chair. She put down the Hot Squat Purple Sunset and held her head between her palms. "I think so. Maybe."
"There. It's done." Jackie sounded satisfied. "We did it. Booked him."
Natalie flinched. "Booked Kirk?"
"Your sexy Katarian, yes. Full six hours."
"I thought he was no longer working at the escort agency."
"No, he's still there. Turns out his slot was a conditional. He's only accepting..." Jackie's voice drifted off.
"Certain kinds of clients," Moona finished for her.
"Yessir," Jackie said, sounding annoyingly smug. "One escort booked for tonight. Eight o’clock sharp. Right in the hotel suite."
"But...but...it's almost that time now," Natalie breathed. Just a few minutes. A few minutes more, and Jackie and Kirk would be in their hotel suite together...
"Well, there's no point wasting time, is there? I mean, we're leaving tomorrow morning. The slot's still open. So...." She stood up.
Natalie's heart plunged. She stared bleakly at Jackie. Tears clouded her vision.
Her stomach heaved.
"Natalie?" Moona sounded alarmed.
"I don't feel so good," Natalie managed.
"Come on. Let's get you to a bathroom."
But the restaurant bathroom, though elegant and vast, was occupied, and Natalie knew she couldn't bear strangers to witness what was coming.
"Just get me up to the room," she choked out.
"Right."
By the time they got up there, she was having second thoughts. She should have vomited in the restaurant bathroom, not come up here. Kirk was going to be here any second to provide escort services with Jackie, and she couldn’t bear seeing them together. She'd have to get out of there fast, before...
Just the thought made her stomach cramp. She burst through the door as soon as Moona got it open and rushed to the bathroom.
She walked out again a few minutes later, face washed and teeth brushed. Despite her empty belly, she still felt queasy.
A few steps into the room, she froze.
Kirk was standing by the window. There was no sign of Jackie. Or Moona, for that matter.
He looked the same, but different. Same golden eyes. His features seemed more angular, if anything. He was wearing casual clothes, though—and not just pants, but a black shirt.
And he looked angry.
"What," he said coldly, "am I doing here?"
His question made no sense. She looked around wildly. "Where is Jackie?"
"How should I know?"
"She booked you. She was just here a minute ago. Did you see her?"
"I've seen no one. The door was open. I came in. Eight o'clock. On time. And what the hell do you think you were doing, hiring me? And at the fucking last minute? You were lucky I'm even on site."
"What, me? I didn't hire you. Jackie did. I told you, she booked you. She wanted you." Natalie bit her lip.
His golden eyes pierced her. "You look lousy. You're green."
"Yes, I..." She swallowed. "I had a drink. It was a stupid thing to do. Why did you think I booked you? You know I'd never do that."
"Oh, yeah? I thought I did. But it's your name here. See?"
She tried to focus on the schedule he called up. The lines and numbers swirled around. She winced at the effort.
"Something hurt?"
She nodded. Standing so close to him like this made her miserable and elated at once. She peered up at him. He wasn't looking at her. Probably he'd forgotten their night. Everything that had happened between them. After all, she was just one in a long line of...her stomach churned.
"Natalie?"
"I don't know why my name is there. Jackie said she wanted to book you, but she couldn't find you in the roster. Then she said she did find you. She made the reservation just now. A few minutes ago. She said it was our last night here. She said," Natalie’s voice broke, "there's no point wasting time."
"She… ah. Right. Now I understand. You didn't book this. As before, your friends butted in." He looked grim.
"Well, I don't understand."
He hesitated. "After our date, I took myself off the rotation. I needed a break." He shot her a dark look. "But I had to give myself an active status, because all agency employees have to be active if they're paid, even me. So I put myself on conditional."
"What's conditional?" Her head was clearing slowly. Maybe the liquor was moving through her system more rapidly than she'd expected. He'd taken himself off the rotation? Did that mean...?
"It means I only accept clients that meet certain conditions."
"What conditions?"
"It doesn't matter. I just threw in whatever was in my mind at the time."
"Can I see?"
He seemed reluctant, but moved aside to stare out the window. She focused hard. "Clients must be named Natalie?" she read, confused. "But that doesn't make sense."
"No," he agreed, turning to face her. "You were never going to hire me, because I'm never going to be your escort again, as I told you. So it was a nonsense condition."
"How can you just take yourself off the rotation like that?"
"It's not hard, except for the database problems, as I said. I do own the agency."
"You own the agency?"
"You didn't know that?" He frowned. "That explains some things you said. I keep forgetting. Your friends were the ones who orchestrated this whole scheme, weren't they? Even this time."
"This time? No, you have it all backward. Jackie wanted you for herself. She said—excuse me." Natalie dashed into the bathroom. Heaving didn't help this time; there was nothing left to eliminate.
"You don't hold your liquor well."
His voice came from right behind her. She shivered.
"I keep telling people that. But they don't seem to believe me."
"So...how are you, Natalie?"
She turned and found him inches away. She stepped back so she could look up and see his face, and almost fell over the toilet backward.
"You do that a lot, you know." His hands steadied her.
"You startle me a lot."
He cupped her face in his hands. "You're leaving tomorrow? I wondered when you were going."
"Did you? So you do remember me."
He scowled. "You're being an idiot again."
"You keep calling me that. Well, why am I an idiot? What don't I understand?" She could hear her voice rise, but couldn't stop it. "You tell me you're never going to be my escort again. Then you tell me I'm your lover, not a client. Then after the most wonderful night of my life, you leave and I never hear from you again. It's pretty clear. I'm a pain. I belong far away. Somewhere away from this pleasure planet. You like your sex to be separate from your friendships. I understand everything."
She was practically shouting now. He was staring at her as if she were some bellios that just broken loose.
"Right," he sai
d. "Except for one thing."
"What?"
"You need me. You don't seem to get that. Everyone else gets it but you."
"What?"
"Everyone else gets it b—”
"No, no, I heard you. But what do you mean? You think I need you?"
"Need me, love me, whatever you call it." He waved his hand around. "You're not exactly subtle. Your sex drips for me as soon as you smell me. It's pretty obvious."
"You are the most arrogant man I've ever met! I can't believe you!"
He frowned. "Arrogant? What are you talking about? It's not something you can hide from a Katarian. We're attuned to it. No point in being extrasexual if we can't detect like kind, is there?"
"So you just go around detecting all the women that fall in love with you..."
"There are none. Just you. Just like I'm the only man who's fallen in love with you. It's pretty easy. Pretty basic. I'm surprised you're so unaware of it, though."
Her hand flew to cover her mouth, but she had no words.
"I see now you had no idea I owned the agency. Natalie, it takes weeks to sell a business, even a successful one. But anybody with half a brain would have..." He gripped her arms. "Did you honestly think I left you? As in, forever? After I told you how I felt?"
"You didn't tell me anything of the kind."
He shook his head. "You and I need to work on our communication. Strenuously. I claimed you, Natalie. Over and over."
Claimed? She snorted. "You've had sex with lots of women over and over—”
"Not with sex. Not half an hour after meeting you, I was telling you that you were mine. I don't think you were listening. I continued to tell you. I've never doubted it. You were the one that wasn't ready to understand. You've been very thick. A complete idiot. And I had to be careful. You were not ready for everything I'm capable of. I don't know if you are even now. I was prepared to wait a long time. At best, weeks. At most, years. But I'm not really that patient. I wish I were."
He was right, she thought dimly. About everything. She was beginning to get it—finally. And comprehension was too much for her. Her knees gave way. He caught her easily. "You really are kind of green. Why don't you try to vomit again?"
"So romantic," she choked out, but complied. Nothing came out this time, either. But after the heaving convulsions, he gathered her back to lean against him. His hands came around her and cupped her breasts.
"So is everything clear now, Natalie? No more wild assumptions?"
She nodded. "I think so. You may be right. I'm not the most self-confident person. I didn't understand why you even wanted me. I missed you awfully when I woke up and you were gone."
His hands squeezed. "If it makes you feel any better, while your heart was breaking, my cock was in constant torment, with no relief anywhere, except from my own hands—and they're not a tenth as delightful as you are."
She stifled a laugh.
"I'd have come to you every day if I thought you could handle it. But you have a very narrow comfort zone, Natalie. And I strain the limits of it constantly. Which in turn drives me absolutely mad. I'm not going to be satisfied until I have you where I want you."
"Where is that?" she asked.
"See? You're uneasy even now. Where I want you is wherever you want to be. I'll follow you, sweetling. Why do you think I'm selling the agency? If your friends hadn't been matchmaking, I'd have tracked you down as soon as I broke free here. But I like this better." He thrust his hips against her buttocks and shuddered.
But Natalie was distracted. "Matchmaking? Matchmaking? You mean—is that why—were they really—why, those—”
"Remind me not to serve liquor at our wedding," he whispered in her ear.
The End
Dreaming of Electric Love
The alarm sang through the comm embedded in Jessa’s inner ear, a skull-buzzing ‘wah-wah-wah’ that made her grit her teeth. She jabbed a finger at the display on her wristlet, instantly calling up the location of the breach and silencing the warning claxon.
Beside her, Unit MCK-397, her partner ‘Mack,’ watched her with impassive gray eyes. His face, square-jawed and sculpted to a level of aesthetic perfection that was designed to be intimidating, betrayed none of the intellect his complex Brain-Computer Interface was capable of.
“Storage compartment on E deck,” she informed him, as if he hadn’t already accessed the station schematics via his neuralnet and pinpointed the exact sensor that had been tripped. “Probably some tube-rat gnawing on wiring.”
The small rodents hitched rides in the ventilation tubes on the supply trawlers that arrived every six months and, unlike every other animal the Protectorate had attempted to acclimate to life on station, managed to not only survive but thrive.
Mack didn’t offer an opinion on whether or not their intruder was animal in nature. Jessa didn’t know if he even had opinions. Despite having been partnered with him since she’d arrived on Lyra Station eight months ago, she still knew relatively little about his programming. He was a quiet one, and he didn’t seem to know any jokes.
During her last tour of duty in the black (only rookies referred to it as being in space and Cantra Corp didn’t hire rooks), her Bio-mech partner (the PC term, though most people referred to them as cyborgs, or cys for short) had been running a sub-program for sarcasm.
She’d had one partner with an entire database of cheesy knock-knock jokes. She didn’t miss him.
If Mack knew jokes, she hadn’t heard one.
“Central, door sensor in storage compartment E8 shows breach.” His voice was a deep rumble. “Officers MCK-397 and JS-824 responding.”
He turned sharply on his black-booted heel and marched off, his back straight. The lines of the dark green body armor framed wide, muscular shoulders, narrow hips, and long, thick legs.
Jessa followed after him, trying hard not to notice how the uniform pants clung to the high, tight globes of his ass.
Unlike her last cy partner, who’d been around her own 5’10 height and wide as a tank, Mack was six and a half feet of sculpted steel-synth muscle fiber and dermaplas enhanced skin over a tungsten carbide skeleton.
With thick, wavy black hair, pale gray eyes, and a face that could grace an ad campaign back on Earth, she was finding it harder than usual to remember he wasn’t a man.
Despite how nearly human they looked and the vast capabilities of their BCI, cys weren’t human. Not that they couldn’t feel. That was a myth that was easily debunked the first time she’d partnered with one.
They were capable of feeling the same range of emotions as purely organic humans. But that didn’t mean they thought the same way. Mack hadn’t been born, hadn’t grown up. He hadn’t had a first kiss, or gone through an awkward phase in high school before his fantastic physique filled out.
He’d been manufactured from a mix of biological and mechanical parts in a Cantra Corp lab somewhere. He’d stepped off an assembly line as perfect as he was today and he would remain so, unless he took damage.
It was a fact she needed to remember when an errant lusty thought caught her unawares.
“Take the west stairwell,” she said.
She didn’t bother raising her voice to be heard over the constant low hum of the stations gravity generator. Mack’s ears would easily pick up her words.
“Copy.” He didn’t look back, but he obeyed her directive and took a left at the next intersection. One thing Jessa had learned to appreciate about having a cy partner, apart from their efficacy in veritably every situation, was their general lack of ego.
She’d had enough experiences with human men who couldn’t reconcile themselves to taking orders from a woman. It was one of the reasons she hadn’t dated or had any other kind of romantic relationship in nearly two years. She hadn’t had any sex apart from the kind that involved a toy in even longer than that.
Lips twisting, she wondered if that’s where the errant attraction to Mack was coming from. Her only sexual partner recently had
been battery operated. Not much different from the walking, talking machine that was her partner.
As they tromped down the west staircase to E deck, Jessa chewed her lower lip. She had to stop thinking that way.
Though she’d never seen any of her cy partners naked, she knew they weren’t exactly equipped. It was one of the reasons there were no issues with partners of opposite genders sharing quarters. They cooked and ate, but they didn’t eliminate the way humans did. They didn’t procreate.
And, as one tech had told her, “It’s not like they do things for pleasure, is it?”
Jessa shunted the thought of pleasure and sex and, especially, Mack, to the back of her brain as they turned down yet another narrow, dim corridor. E deck was almost all storage except for a few machine repair labs in the south section. Because of the lack of personnel on that level, lighting was minimal.
She slid closer to Mack and lowered her voice.
“Let’s go quietly, just in case.”
Mack gave a curt jerk of his chin to indicate he’d heard her. Instantly, the heavy thud of his steps was silenced. They crept along the corridor, Mack slightly ahead of her as was protocol.
Cantra Corp Directive Ninety Seven stated that bio-mech agents were to always provide cover for their organic counterparts. It was why the Aspis Initiative had been instituted originally. Years ago, when she’d first hired on with Cantra Corp, it had bothered her. It had been a struggle to not feel like she was hiding behind her cy partner during fire fights. But she’d seen enough of them repaired from what would have been mortal wounds to a human to have gotten over it.
At the very end of the corridor, Jessa could see the black rectangle of the doorway to the open compartment.
“Hsst.”
Mack stretched an arm across her chest, blocking her forward motion still eight feet from the storage area. Jessa ignored the brush of his forearm against her breasts and suddenly stiff nipples and strained her eyes and ears, but she couldn’t see or hear anything that would make him pause.
Of course, he had senses she didn’t. She’d learned to trust them.
He bent, putting his mouth close to her ear. Warm breath puffed against her cheek.