by Alana Khan
My stomach clenches in fear. How bad is this going to be? Shame. That’s a harsh word.
“I just got out of prison,” he launches, “a few lunars before we met.” He analyzes my reaction. I give him none.
“How long had you been in prison?” I ask, since it seems he’s waiting for a question. I decide the answer to how long will be easier to tolerate than if I ask why he was there.
“Twenty-five years.”
I pegged him to be in his twenties. Maybe he’s one of those races, like Primians, that live to two hundred.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
My head shakes, almost imperceptibly, like a robot in a vid when something doesn’t compute.
“You’ll have to explain.”
“I was born in prison,” he announces that as if it’s an answer. It just brings up more questions.
“Can you explain? This isn’t making sense.”
“My mother was a prostitute, which is a crime on Simka. It didn’t matter that she was pregnant with me—she was given a twenty-five-year sentence.”
I’m glad he’s talking slowly because my mind is having trouble grasping this. Pictures of a baby Ar’Tok, and Ar’Tok as a lad are flying through my mind so swiftly it’s hard to follow anything other than the internal screen I’m watching. A young male wandering the halls of a women’s prison? It’s so foreign my mind can’t fathom it.
“You had no family who could take you?”
“I was sentenced, too.”
My head whips toward him. I have to examine his face to discover if he’s telling the truth. How could this be?
“What . . . were you sentenced for?” He was in her uterus at the time. What crime could he possibly have committed?
“Simkin scriptures state, ‘the iniquity of the parents is visited upon their children and their children’s children.”
His face is calm and serious; he’s no longer avoiding my gaze.
Heat flares through my body. His words evoke a visceral reaction as my muscles tighten, my eyes widen, and nausea circles the pit of my stomach.
“So you were punished for your mother’s actions?”
“Yes.” He nods. As if he just made a sane remark.
I know this is difficult for him, and I don’t want to make it any harder by showing how distressing this is for me. I school my features and try to react as if what he just told me is rational.
“So you grew up in prison. Tell me what that was like.” Please Ar’Tok, tell me it was a nice facility with playgrounds and schoolyards and friends. Please tell me you had enough to eat and the staff were friendly and loving.
“Mother and I shared a cell. It was ten-by-ten. The outer wall was made of square beige bricks that were crumbling because they were so old. We shared a bunk when I was little, but I slept on the floor since I turned six.”
This explains the pallet on the floor.
Please don’t tell me any more. I can’t bear it. I’m trying so desperately to hold back my tears that my face is quivering, but despite my best efforts, I feel hot liquid spilling down my cheeks and falling to the mattress.
“I knew this would be hard on you,” he says. “I should have told you earlier. I’m too defective, too full of shame to be worthy of your attention much less your acceptance.”
He pulls away, as if he’s going to bound off the bed. Star, if there’s one thing you need to do in this lifetime, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself, pull your shit together, and listen to his story.
“I can’t hide my feelings, Ar’Tok. I also can’t explain them right now. But I will. I’ll tell you every thought and emotion in my head when you’re done talking.”
I dash my tears with my knuckle and order myself to calm down—to make this easier on him.
“I seldom left the cell.”
I fade out for a moment. Seldom. Left. The. Cell. Could I have possibly heard him correctly?
“Mother died when I was nine. After that it was lonely. The guards never spoke to us inmates. So after she died, I seldom spoke with anyone.
“A few lunars after her death, a male came to my cell. He was huge and imposing, wearing fine clothes the likes of which I’d never seen.
“We used to have bugs that flew through the bars in the open window, especially when the weather turned cool. They were big and black and wore a hard shiny coating on their backs. They disgusted me.
“The male looked at me like that. Like I wasn’t just a bug, but I was the most disgusting bug he’d ever seen. His nose scrunched up and his lip curled.”
I want to smooth Ar’Tok’s cirr, or skim my palm down his cheek—to soothe him. But I know he’s too deep in his memory to tolerate it.
“He ordered the guard to open my cell door even though it was forbidden. He was an imposing male who allowed no argument. When the door creaked open, he pulled out his cane and beat me. Everywhere. Everywhere he could reach. Almost every mark I bear came from that day. He didn’t stop when I begged. Or cried. Or even when I was lying on the cold floor in a puddle of blood and piss.
“‘You’re no son of mine,’ he said, his voice dripping with revulsion. ‘Too bad they’d arrest me if I killed you or I’d put you out of both our misery. But I’ll give you this to remind you that you’re worthless and filthy and broken until your end of days.’
“He bent, careful not to kneel his fine clothes in the smelly liquids on the floor, pulled a dagger out of the end of his cane, and cut my throat. I don’t know how he knew how to do it so it wouldn’t kill me, but it didn’t. It left this mark.” He reaches to his throat, as if I needed instruction to know which mark on his roadmap of pain he referred to.
I don’t ask if he got medical treatment; I know the answer.
My mind feels echoey, as if I’m hiding far inside myself. It’s a good place to be right now, so I don’t show him how upset I am. I don’t think he’s capable of understanding that my distress is caused by what was done to him, and not his ‘shame’ as he calls it.
He’s acting as if his story is over, which is good, I don’t think I can bear much more. But I have more questions, and then we can close the book on this forever.
“Can I ask two questions?” my voice is calm and quiet, I give him the courtesy of no eye contact so he can hide.
“Yes.” When I sneak a peek at him, his eyes are drifting back and forth across my face. He’s scanning me, trying to detect my feelings. I try to project nothing but compassion, although I’m probably failing.
“Why aren’t you the same color as other Simkins?”
“I looked it up shortly after I came aboard the Fool’s Errand. We’re born white. My race needs to absorb enough vitamins from the sun prior to age three. If that doesn’t happen, we can’t transition from white to brown like we’re supposed to. Because mother and I were in an inside cell in the depths of the prison until I was five, I never turned. I think they kept her in an inside cell so I’d be deformed as another punishment for her.”
Punish her? Didn’t they realize what they were doing to an innocent boy? To heighten the suffering, his differences made his father want to kill him.
“You had no schooling?”
“No.”
“How’d you learn to read?”
Something softens in his demeanor. Although his body’s still stiff, his cirr reach out to me, more tentatively than in the past, just two thin tendrils. I snuggle against them, silently giving them permission. As soon as I do, they all migrate toward me—seeking and providing comfort in equal measure.
“Shortly after my fath—that male came to see me, a female began to visit. I never knew who she was, although I assumed it was his sister. She came once a lunar until shortly before my release.
She was a frightened, birdlike female. She didn’t talk much and kept our visits short. Over the years, though, from the little facts she accidentally dropped, I imagined she was afraid of her brother. And after what he did to me, I assume her fear was
for good reason.
I doubt he knew about her visits. From things she said, I think he came to get a look at me, to see if I was worth his time and effort to free me. He certainly looked like he had the money to pay off people to release me. Perhaps he considered putting me to work in one of his factories. Obviously, my appearance would have shamed him. Now that I’m free on the Fool, I’m convinced his abandoning me was a stroke of luck.
“Although she was quiet, her one act of kindness changed my life—she brought books. At first, they were for younglings. They taught me basics, but within a few annums, she brought textbooks and novels and even the scriptures.”
The scripture that said his mother’s sins should be visited upon him. Yeah, that one’s my favorite.
“She even brought me expensive moving-picture books that showed me things beyond the walls of my jail. I saw dancing, the movement of the ocean, the flight of birds. I believe those small gifts saved my sanity.”
“Anything else you want me to know?” I ask, hoping I’ve heard every shitty thing there is to tell.
“Yes. I apologize.” His beautiful, ruined face is so sincere, so earnest, it breaks my heart. “I never thought we’d meet. The comm on our bridge works fine. I’m sure you suspected as much. I thought for once in my life I could taste something sweet—talking to you. I convinced myself there was no harm in getting to know you.
“How could I have guessed I’d need to rescue you? Or that you wouldn’t readily see my shame? Or that you’d welcome my kiss? My touch? I let it go too far. I’m sorry.” He turns to his side, again wanting to slip off the bed, but this time his cirr and I conspire against him—they hold my hair; I hold them. He’s not going anywhere.
I wiggle higher on the bed, grasp his precious cheeks in my palms, and silently demand eye contact. When he finally turns his gaze to me, I say, “My mom used to have a saying. ‘Fish don’t know they swim in water’. I thought I understood it before today, but I didn’t. Not really. I understand it now.
“We don’t question things we’re taught since birth. We accept them as fact, as the way things are.
“So it’s not your fault you never questioned what you were spoon-fed. But in Star’s world, things are different. In my world, you’re only responsible for your own actions.”
I want him to really hear me, so I wait maybe a full minute for him to play that over in his head.
“So, in my world, you’re an innocent. Innocent,” I repeat, my voice so sincere it sounds rough. “An innocent who was punished for nothing. A babe in his mother’s womb who should have been born fresh and clean and spotless to breathe his first breath.
“In my world, there’s no shame on you, Ar’Tok. You’re a blameless male who was punished for a quarter of a century for no reason.”
I’d hoped his face would be hopeful; that it would tell me he absorbed my lecture. But his face is bland. Maybe he’s still digesting my words.
“I’m just one person. I can’t make up for what was taken from you.”
Tears spill freely down my cheeks. Now that I can explain why I’m crying, I don’t have to hold them back anymore.
“But I tell you this,” my voice is so full of honest passion it’s harsh, guttural, “I will do everything I can to make it up to you. Here’s my vow.”
I wait. He’s closed his eyes. I swear to myself that I will wait all night until this beautiful male turns his eyes to me. It takes long minutes, his lashes on his cheeks as he tries to hide from me, his chest heaving as if he just ran a marathon. Even if I could read his thoughts, I’d never understand them because they’ve got to be swirling as fast as an engine on hyperdrive.
Finally, he trusts me with his gaze.
“Here’s my vow. I can’t promise you forever—I don’t know you that well—but I will promise that as long as we’re together I will do whatever’s in my power to help you believe what I just told you: that you’re blameless, that you warrant no shame, and that you deserve happiness and a good life.”
I draw a deep, ragged breath and wait.
“It’s a lot,” he says vaguely, but I know exactly what he means—it’s a lot to absorb. “I feel like the foundations of my world are crumbling. I . . . want to believe what you say.”
I may have never walked on a planet before, but I’ve watched a million hours of vids. I’ve seen time-lapse videos of potted flowers. No matter where the researchers place the plants, they always turn toward the sun. That’s Ar’Tok. It may take him a while, but he can hear the truth in my words and wants to turn toward it.
“Now, I imagine you need a nap,” I smile at him.
“Let me order you food,” he says. “Then I’ll sleep. I feel like I just ran a hundred milles.”
“I bet you do.”
Chapter Six
Ar’Tok
‘Wake up, Sunshine. That’s what my Mom always used to say,” Star says in a happy, chirpy voice I’ve never heard her use before.
My eyes pop open to see her face alight with a wide smile. I barely slept last night, tossing and kicking off the covers. Although I’m still not used to a bed, it wasn’t the soft mattress that was the problem. It was our conversation.
I figured I’d never tell anyone my history—my shame. The other males on the ship certainly didn’t need to know, and I foresaw no female in my future.
I never dreamed the story of my disgrace would pass my lips, and certainly didn’t think I’d be telling it to the most beautiful female in the galaxy. I assumed I’d wake this morning to an empty bed, that Star would have asked the management for another room.
But here she is, and I can’t dispute the fact that she looks happy to be here.
“We have a lot to do this morning. Potty if you have to, then your presence is requested back in this bed,” her voice is commanding, but her face is still beaming.
I slide out of bed and hit the bathroom, still wondering what’s going on.
“No other living being has ever looked so good in a pair of sleep pants,” she calls through the closed door.
When I wander out, face washed and teeth brushed, she points to the bed and orders, “Sit against the headboard.”
“Care to fill me in?”
“No. You’ll like it. That’s all I’m going to divulge,” she says haughtily, her chin tilted up as if I violated an unwritten rule.
“I’m going to blindfold you,” she announces, then her voice gets softer, and she adds, “unless you object.”
“I’ll like it?” my voice sounds calm, but alarms are blaring in my head.
“Yes. Possibly love it.”
This is about trust—interesting. Every internal buzzer and siren is screaming at me, but I slide onto the bed, lean against the headboard, and close my lids.
After wrapping a soft cloth around my eyes, she ties it behind me. A door opens and closes, then I hear furniture sliding across the plush carpeting, dishes clattering, and the smell of food wafts under my nose.
“Ready?” her voice is perky.
“No,” mine is grumpy.
“I’ll ask again in ten minutes. In the meantime, say stop if you want me to, otherwise it’s game on.”
Her slight weight dips onto the bed, then she straddles me. Did she suggest I’d love this? I’m already halfway there. If she scooted up half a fierto, her sex would ride mine. Is that what’s on the menu?
Her hands rest on my shoulders, and she leans to brush her lips against mine. Soft kisses. No tongue. My cock strains toward her.
“Oh, look what we have here,” she announces, not at all embarrassed to call attention to the heavy erection bobbing at my hips. A soft hand slips under my pants, envelops me, then strokes from base to tip. Just once.
“Sorry, Ar’Tok. We’re here for a tasting of an entirely different sort. Although I’ve got to admire your instincts.”
I never dreamed I’d have a female to banter with like this, with good-natured teasing. This could be addictive.
She kisses me agai
n, licks the seam of my lips until I open to her, then coaxes my tongue out into the open.
“Yes. Right where I want you. I got up early and arranged an entire day of festivities for us. The first is food tasting. I’ve grown up with hydroponic fruits and veggies along with simulator food. You grew up with . . . I don’t want to picture it. We have a lot of food from all over the galaxy to explore.
“I’ll start first.” I hear her chew. “Hmm. I’ll let you make your own judgments, so I won’t tell you my opinion until you’ve had your taste.”