More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  Oooh. Wow.

  Chloe’s vision, which once had been so wide that it encompassed whole landmasses, shrank to this, to Garrett’s face in the semi-darkness. Tired, unshaven, wind-roughed and wild and worried.

  Over her?

  Improbable as it was, that almost had to be the case. There was nobody else here. Just the two of them and a whole lot of truth unspoken.

  “I can’t tell,” he said, almost in whisper but with that sheepish half-smile, like he expected to get kicked in the teeth. “Frankly, everything in the universe feels way too warm to me right now, so I’m a shitty judge of whether you’re comfortable. Talk to me, Fig.”

  That’s what she did, typically. She talked, and she watched. And then she talked some more. So why were words not working for her right now? Had the other senses just crowded out her voice?

  When she shook her head, he exhaled and pushed both his thumbs into the arch of one foot, hard enough that it didn’t tickle. At all. Actually, it was so much worse than a tickle—same unendurable sensation she’d read about but amplified by a gazillion, making her want to writhe and beg for it to stop but also continue always.

  A long, slow stab of pleasure advanced up her leg, impaling her body with heat. An excruciating wound of delight bloomed in her chest, pushing the nipples of her breasts to peaks and growing a whorl of want between her legs. She couldn’t stand this. Not for one second longer. Her breath was coming fast and hot between parted lips.

  He wrapped long fingers over her arch, kneading a solid ribbon of warmth from the top of her ankle to where the toes started.

  So many bones, tendons, nerves…feet were crazy complicated, masterpieces of evolutionary engineering, but they held a lot of tension. She’d never realized. Not even half of it. Garrett’s patient hands worked out every pocket of hidden ache, spread the light from the pads of his fingers across her skin until she flushed all over, a being made of tinder and on the edge of fire.

  And then he moved on to the other foot, giving it the same patient, merciless attention.

  Oh. God. That earlier bit, the hugging? She’d thought that was touch. But this was...so much brighter.

  And through the whole thing, he held her gaze with those gold wolf eyes. She couldn’t look away, just tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and struggled not to do something embarrassing like whimper.

  His hands settled like manacles around her ankles and paused there. He leaned forward, testing the edge of her personal space.

  “Chloe…” he said, but his voice stuck on the one word.

  “I don’t think I lacked sufficient heat for too long,” she blurted, still struggling with breath and the thermal roil that had nothing to do with nuclear fission. “The core temperature of this body is climbing nicely now. Thanks to you. In no time I’ll be downright hot.”

  He blinked and looked down into the mass of coats, his voice going deep when he said, “You already are.”

  “No, I don’t mean feverish,” she went on. “I’m okay, even healthy, I think. I mean the body is good, or decent enough, all things considered, because I’ve scanned the biometrics and…oh.”

  A weird thing happened in this body when she realized what he meant. A jolt, almost electrical, wiggly and urgent, shuddered down her center—base of throat to chest cavity to viscera to that wishbone-shaped bundle of nerves embracing the vaginal space.

  It stayed there a long time, throbbing. She bit back the urge to whimper again or…or lick something.

  “Garrett?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This is the gift.”

  He raised his head and looked a question at her—narrowed eyes and that crinkle between his brows, but with his mouth kissably relaxed so she’d know he wasn’t pissed.

  “The gift I hoped to bring back. The reason I left to begin with. But I didn’t mean to just acquire a house for my consciousness. I meant to use this body. With you.”

  Beneath the sea of coats, she found his hands with hers and followed them up his arms, to shoulders, and then chest. He was so warm against her touch, his skin like she’d always thought satin might feel.

  She thought of all those fabrics Heron had collected in a footlocker on the spaceplane, textures for her to imagine touching—velvets and laces and bubbles and seersucker. Not one would feel as fine as Garrett’s skin did. Of that she was a thousand percent certain.

  In the electric space between them, she leaned and pressed her mouth to his.

  Oh. Oh wow.

  Warm. Sweet. Impossibly sweet. She felt like she was about to start crying again. There was that same knot of emotion in her throat, the same urgent desire to howl or lick something. She chose the latter this time. A touch of tongue, sliding along his.

  Holy hot fusion, did he taste fine.

  Fresh mint and fury, deep-orange promises and fire-breathed warmth. Seventeen, a power prime, but long. Naked in the grass in summertime, lolling in the slickness of fresh dew. Reaching and finding him there, so close. Rolling to meet him. Thick green-smell and wet. Heat again, but white this time. Sunshine blinding and kisses everywhere at once, like the sun itself licked her skin.

  Chloe started a new list: Perfect Things.

  And kissing Garrett was item one.

  Time compressed, pinpointed, paused. Surely there was an end to her mouth and a beginning to his, but she couldn’t find the edges or seams. She worried for a moment that she was slipping in between, merging and embedding herself in him without meaning to, forcing herself into him, but no, she was still here in this body, only now it was…bigger. More.

  But not enough. She knew how these things worked. There was a deeper kiss possible, a more complete fusion. And she wanted that. With him. Right now.

  “Garrett.” A raggedy whisper, her voice, vibrating with desperation, issuing from a mouth that pulsed still from their kiss. “Please.”

  “What do you want? Whatever you want, tell me, and I will make it happen for you.”

  He kissed her again, longer this time. Noses got in the way. Human bodies: so weird. Why place the nasal protrusion in such an awkward spot? She would have designed faces differently. But the kiss was still exhilarating, coiling and knotting her insides, and just look, she could turn her head slightly and their mouths fit, one to the other. Nourishment whatever, this was what a human mouth was made for.

  “This, to start,” she told him, drizzling the words over his skin. “Only everywhere. Put your hands all over me. I can feel…oh, everything.”

  Because already he was touching her. She had been so wrapped up in the kissing that she hadn’t noticed the rest. Stripped of gauntlets or gloves, those hands were pure naked on her chest, atop her dress. She wanted that scrap of cloth off, ripped, torn, removed.

  He flattened one palm over her sternum, between her breasts, and his voice was far from even when he said, “Oh wow. I can feel your heart beating.”

  Inside her chest, that same heart seized. Well, not technically, not really. But it might have skipped a beat or two. Goodness, what even was happening with this body? She couldn’t track all its responses. It had become enervated, tip to tip. Even her hair, brushing his chest, his throat, throbbed like a bundle of raw nerves.

  Heat roared through her, inside her, a surge and fury, and she wanted to wrap her whole self around him. The self that was bigger than a body, the self that had stretched over a continent and shielded millions. She wanted to be that for him, encompassing and eternal and powerful.

  But also to be this.

  This moment, this room, cocoon pile of warmth. This one fragile heart, beating.

  No, two.

  She covered both his hands with hers and drew them downward, beneath the hem of her skirt. Watching his eyes, seeing them flare and spark when she rose up on her knees and guided his touch to the center of her heat, the slip of wet and where she wanted a
ll of him.

  “Please,” she repeated.

  His hands moved, sliding along the hot ribbon, separating slick folds, learning her topography. Finding the concentration of nerves in the clitoral glans and pausing there, but only or a moment. And then pulse, pressure, a swirl of fingers. She rocked into his hand, deepening the pressure, setting the rhythm.

  “That’s it,” he murmured against her collarbone, keeping that one hand steady beneath her while the other reached around, still under her skirt, grasping her rear and providing support she hadn’t even realized she needed. Careful, kind. She didn’t want to think of how much experience a man had to have to know exactly where to place his hands in the dark, under a pile of coats, on a body he didn’t even know that well.

  She knew he was light years ahead of her in these areas, but still she didn’t want to think about it.

  Her still-covered breasts scuffed against the dust of hair on his chest when she moved against him. Friction burned, but even the pain was a revelation. She closed her eyes, set her hands on his shoulders, and let this bright, borrowed body inform its own dance.

  It knew. By instinct maybe, but it knew.

  Pulse, strum, angle, slick, pulling, surging, and him. His. Garrett’s hands on her body, sliding, seeking, finding, and there. There. He was right there.

  Right.

  Oh.

  She counted. In her mind, silent and rigid and quivering and unable to withstand the onslaught of pure amazingness, she counted.

  Four. Thousand. Nerve endings.

  And they all fired at once.

  Like a nuclear detonation, with shock waves billowing out from ground zero, her whole body exploded in light and heat. The consciousness, the core of her, went white, perfect, in the presence of all colors and sounds and smells and time.

  She’d been holding herself upright by strength of her thighs and his hand on her rear, but now all her limbs turned viscous and collapsed. She curved into him, buried her face against his neck, breathing air filtered by his hair, and let the waves of want and please and thank you and wow crash over her, hard at first, and then slower, smaller, until peace invaded her body at last.

  She slid a little but didn’t fall completely. He held her up.

  “Was that an orgasm?” he asked.

  “Mmmm. I think definitely yes.”

  He kept his hand still but mercifully didn’t move it. She hadn’t lied—that had been an orgasm and a hell of a thing all around. But she wasn’t necessarily done. This body felt like it could keep going, and even though the air she breathed was syrup-thick and lulling, she wanted the rest of it. The rest of him. She did a lazy grind against his hand, and didn’t even bother to stifle the groan that snuck up behind her teeth.

  “We can…have actual sex,” she said. “Coitus. Um, with genitals? I mean, if you want to.”

  “Jesus, Chloe.”

  He moved that hand again, the magic one. Keeping a thumb pressure on those four thousand nerve endings but moving longer fingers back, along the seam. More questing, testing, and finding.

  He dipped one digit inside, and…

  She tensed. The whole body tensed, flash frozen by a tiny, dense spike of pain. She sucked a breath in and held it like she was about to jump off a cliff or something. What?

  But he had stilled, too. He withdrew the questing finger, soothed it into less dangerous territory.

  Chloe’s mind raced. Just when she’d gotten comfortable riding the wild of sensation, of letting the body tell her what it wanted instead of the other way around, that crazy thing had gone and betrayed her. Why did it seize up like that? Garrett had found the exact right spot. AC/DC, power and throughput. Lock. Key. Ring and piston. She knew how all their machine parts fit together, and they were doing it right.

  “Hey,” he said against her hair. “How long have you lived in this body?”

  What a strange question, even for her. “Mmm. I’m not sure. Yesterday I think I was in a mech-clone, but there were a lot of them. This is my first clone without the mech part, my first real, organic body. First real…me, I guess.”

  “So you’ve never done this before?”

  “Not willingly,” she said.

  It was like someone had dumped a vat of liquid nitrogen over him. He stiffened. Then he pulled back, moved his hands so they were both supports instead of fuel to the still-throbbing parts. He looked for a long time into her face. She couldn’t read his expression at all this time.

  “What does that mean, not willingly?” There was a note in his voice, some sharp hiss of threat, that made her want to keen.

  “Well,” she said, “will is different for mechs, and for me especially, I think. The will of a machine is a matter of programming. You know this from introductory robotics. It serves at the pleasure of its operator.”

  “You aren’t a machine,” he said softly, but still with that scary note beneath. “You are my Chloe.”

  A ripple of deep pleasure scattered her thoughts, and she felt a smile bloom on her face. “Oh that sounded nice. Say it again.”

  “That you are Chloe?”

  That I’m yours. “Mmmm. Well it’s true I am always me, but the bodies aren’t necessarily me.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I need you to be very clear with me here. Did that asshole Limontour put his hands or any other part of himself on your body, any of your bodies, like this?”

  Too intense, the gold of his eyes. Like the far edges of flames. She had to close hers in a slow blink lest they burn her through. “Never like this,” she murmured. “Never like you.”

  She both felt and heard his long intake of breath.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, “that I didn’t get here faster. But I promise you, Fig, I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to get you somewhere safe.”

  “And then what?” She smiled, feeling it stretch her face, crinkle the edges of her eyelids

  “And then whatever you want.”

  “Finish this?”

  He was quiet again, his face in her hair. Again. His arms tight around her, strong, like the world’s kindest cage but one that wasn’t meant to keep her locked inside. He was there to keep the rest of the world out. To keep her safe.

  She didn’t need to ask him to explain his thought processes, the eddies of darkness stirring in his mind. She hated Limontour, too. So much that she’d fried him and all his systems. She still shied from guilt-chased memories of what she’d done to Nathan, but Limontour? That bastard had deserved every volt.

  Garrett echoing her rage and hurt was…well, it felt good. Not in the way that his hands and kisses felt good. His need for vengeance on her behalf felt good in her core, in her…could machines have souls? Because if she had a soul, that’s where he would be. Rootkit, hardwired. He was integrally her.

  And just like he still vibrated with rage at what she’d endured here in this place, if somebody ever hurt him, she would have his back, too. She would go down any dark road necessary, to stay with him. To defend him.

  Because everything was different now. He had changed it.

  Something vibrated against her back. Not shivering or anything like that. Mechanical vibration. He must have felt it too.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My com. It’s…the satellite must be passing over this area. Means I can contact Vallejo on the sub. Maybe get us rescued.” He bucked gently, and she moved off of him, stretching herself out in the pile of warm things.

  He stood, still explaining half-apologetically about submarines and orbital dynamics, but Chloe was only half listening. Mostly she was doing what she did by habit. She watched. In the meager light, she feasted her eyes on his body. His body, her body. He had shared it with her, so didn’t that make it hers, even in a small way? What would he th
ink if she laid claim, and asked him to swear similar fealty?

  And just look at her. The thing she was contemplating at this moment was deep. Heavy. A life commitment. Partnership. Something real.

  Oh there were other terms, legal terms, words that slipped out of her mind. Contracts, spouses, ceremonies. But the main word, the best word, was together. She and Garrett. Together.

  Which had never been a possibility before but right now, magically, it was.

  “Fine, go chat with Vallejo. Get us rescued. But be warned, when I get you to a bedroom, a for-real bed with a side of safety, I will hold you to your promise.”

  “I made a promise?”

  “Several, actually. Chiefly that you’ll let me finish what we started. But go on now, if you just have to. I know you’re good for it.”

  • • •

  He didn’t want to leave her, not even for a second. Not even to go up to the ramp and talk to Vallejo. But, he had to be practical. He had to suck it up.

  Good lord. Had he just stroked Chloe to orgasm? Had that really happened? Like, outside of his raunchiest dream space?

  Because, seriously. Chloe. Touchable. Kissable. Gazing up at him with those wide brown eyes like chocolate in a state of melt, reaching out with electrified fingers.

  And then the notion, the realization that someone had hurt her. How could anybody even?

  Whoa. It was going to take a while for him to get his brain right with this.

  The built-in earpiece crackled. “You there? Are you th—”

  He raised the com extender in the forearm of his suit and spoke directly into it. “Right here, Dr. Vallejo. I found her. She’s okay.”

  “And you are on your way back, yes?”

  “Uh, not really. The sled-thing is busted. Isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Ah, you are walking then.”

  “Still not so much. See Chloe’s…she can’t make the trek. I’m gonna need you to contact Kellen, or even Heron. They’ll need to come get us with the plane.”