It is on the tip of my tongue to answer, but then I discern this is what the hu’mans call a rhetorical question.
“You will take off your cover and touch your breeding slit. Your Kel commands it.”
Ki’Ra laughs and tosses aside the blanket to reveal her tempting form. She opens her legs wide to show me her sweet hot. Several clicks fall from my mouth when I see that her breeding slit is already glistening with her essence.
Yet, she does not touch it as I have commanded. Instead she rubs upon her dark inner thighs in a way that makes her fingers meet in a frame above the triangle between her legs without actually touching her womanhood.
My mouth goes dry. Ki’Ra, for all her seeming innocence the day we made our treaty, has revealed herself to be quite adept in the skill of driving me insane with need while I am too far away to punish her for her naughty defiance.
Quickly, I disrobe, freeing my diijo. “Touch yourself, k’vani. Show me how much you miss your Kel,” I command on a hiss, as I grip my diijo in my fist.
Apparently watching me affects her as watching her affects me.
Instead of teasing me further, Ki’Ra falls back on the sleeping mat and begins to rub herself in up and down motions before concentrating on the sensitive little piece of clit flesh.
I jerk my diijo, hard and fast, my eyes fixated on her holo-image as two of her fingers sink into her birthing tunnel. “Oh, D’Rek…” she moans. Then she wets her lips as if it is my diijo and not her fingers inside of her now.
Her breath quickens as her fingers pump in and out of her breeding slit. Soon they are also glistening and covered in so much of her juices, I can nearly taste them upon my tongue.
In truth, it is pure torture to see so much arousal issue from her breeding slit without being able to lap it up. I want to both command her to stop and watch her forever. I’m somehow both jealous of her hand and stupidly grateful for the sight of her touching herself in such a lewd manner.
In either case, I cannot return home soon enough. I will fuck her until my body gives out on me, I vow to myself as I pump my fist around my diijo.
“I’m going to come, D’Rek!” she cries out.
I too am close to reaching completion. I hiss as I pump my diijo. “Come for me, my beautiful Ki’Ra!”
For once, she does as commanded, without teasing or defiance. With a strangled cry, she finds her arrival, just as my seed explodes over my fist.”
My head fills with white noise, even louder than the ship’s star drive. I had desperately needed that release. Needed her. It takes several moments before I am able to think clearly.
“That was amazing,” she sighs with a laugh. “But not as good as actually having you here.”
No…no it is not.
The thought of having to relinquish Ki’Ra overshadows the joy of my release as I walk over to my nightstand to fetch a small towel to clean myself up.
“You don’t seem pleased,” Ki’Ra says, her hologram image following me to the nightstand, on top of the bed. “Isn’t this what you wanted? For us to watch each other come, like we promised.”
Promised. That word sends a deep wave of guilt through my body.
And I find myself averting my eyes as I say, “I have much work to do in regard to the Kaidorian treaty. My apologies. I cannot talk any further tonight.”
Any Xalthurian would have answered my reply with a deferential bow. But Ki’Ra stares openly at me in a way that would have been declared treasonous if anyone else from my planet were watching us right now.
Another line from the report floats into my head. The New Terrhans are obstinate by nature. Even when they claim to want peace their actions invite conflict. In fact, they spend much of their leisure time upon their broken colony ship, watching actors pretend to be in conflict. It is both lamentable and aggravating, and most likely explains why occasionally their females become defiant when we try to collect our offspring, often ignoring the accord their own elected leaders negotiated with us.
“D’Rek. Seriously, what’s going on? You’ve got to talk to me,” Ki’Ra says now, commanding me as if she is the ruler and I her subject.
“I do not have to do anything, Ki’Ra,” I remind her, my expression becoming harsh. “I am your Kel.”
She slants her head in a way that tells me I will not like the next words out of her mouth. Most likely they will be both audacious and disrespectful.
Hu’mans seem incapable of learning, even from their own mistakes. Their history is riddled with tragic stories, so similar in nature, I can only conclude they suffer from an inferior intellect.
“I will see you on the morrow,” I tell Ki’Ra before she can react to my pronouncement. Then I swipe a hand to end the call, without waiting for her answer.
My ridges set.
I have much to think about during my trip back to my unpolluted, underpopulated planet, which has never turned upon itself in war.
14
Kira
What the moons is going on with D’Rek?
As I make my way down to the palace gardens, I’m still considering that question the day after he pretty much hung up on me.
As usual, the sun is shining brightly overhead. Warm, but not too warm. New Terrhan has brutal hot seasons. At this point, a few of our older settlers have probably passed on from heat stroke. And I can just imagine my own parents moving about their work as slowly as possible, so as not to collapse in the community fields.
No, my planet couldn’t be further from this tropical paradise, I think with a pang of guilt.
The garden alone proves that. Though it technically belongs to the palace, it’s considered a public venue. People like N’Maryah come to walk amongst the stunning blooms, house their fauns in the palace stables, and even picnic on the rolling lawns.
I’ll miss this place when I’m gone, I think, as I look about the beautiful grounds.
“Is that her? Is that the hu’man our Kel has decided to breed?”
“Why look at her mammary glands and her hips!”
“The color of her skin is extraordinary. I hear the hu’man females are many shades of brown and pink. Do you think they all look like this one? Surely they cannot all have such large mammary glands!”
Well, I won’t miss everything…
I try to ignore the gossip as I walk toward the faun-drinking fountain in the middle of the garden with my head dipped low. I truly didn’t appreciate being able to walk around New Terrhan without people gawking at and talking about me, just for being…well, human.
As much as we’ve come to learn about the Xalthurians over the last couple of decades, they seem to know little to nothing about us. I can tell that many of the Xalthurians are still trying to figure out what to think about me. Sometimes I receive admiring looks from the tall, jewel-toned Xals, visiting the gardens. But sometimes their ridges bristle in a way, I can easily translate as disgust.
A lot of them don’t seem to understand—or maybe plain don’t care that I can hear them talking about me. I’ve heard more about my “mammary glands” in these few days, than I have in my whole, entire life.
It almost makes me wish the planet wasn’t so tropical. The collection of shimmery dresses that magically appeared in the closet the day D’Rek gave his permission for me to walk outside are way more beautiful than the bark work clothes we’ve been patching up for decades. But they’re also more revealing.
Whereas we like loose clothes during our over hot summers, the Xalthurians seem to prefer that everything molds and sucks. And, possibly because their mammary glands are so small, the style here seems to be plunging necklines. So, while my stomach appears flatter than it should in this dress after a month of lazing around and eating however much I want, my breasts have never been more on display.
I almost don’t blame all the Xalthurians who openly stare at me as I walk along the garden path. And I really can’t wait to talk to D’Rek about giving me something with a more modest neckline when he returns.
Our calls up until then had been…I don’t know. Nice, I guess. Not just sex, but conversation, as well. Unable to touch each other, I’d found myself sharing all sorts of things with him.
I relayed the stories my parents used to tell me about what living on the old planet had been like. He’d seem particularly interested about that. I also told him about life on New Terrhan and how we survived without much technology. I described my favorite entertainments to watch on the colony ship. I even shared stories of roaming the red forest with my best friend Zinnia.
It had seemed like he had been opening up as well. While he hadn’t talked much about how the negotiations with the Kaidorians were going, he’d told me a lot about growing up on Xalthuria during a time of war. His childhood had been full of warrior training and he had started shadowing his father, shortly after his mother died of the same virus that had wiped out the Xalthurian females’ ability to get pregnant.
I was beginning to understand how important these peace negotiations were to him. His planet had been at war all his life, and for most of his father’s. So, everyone was looking to him to lead them into a time of peace and prosperity. With an emphasis on prosperity.
As it turns out, Xalthuria used to be a merchant race and this war had basically transformed them from trade aliens to warriors, which was why they didn’t bother much with New Terrhan before our colony ship crashed there.
While our planet was closest to theirs in proximity, there wasn’t much to mine in the way of resources, save a few small deposits of iron—which they didn’t seem to value nearly as much as we did. Probably because they were so stinking rich, it wasn’t worth the effort to mine there.
According to D’Rek, everyone on the planet, no matter their class, lived in abundant prosperity. And though their neighboring systems had several occupants, they got along so well that wars like the ones with the Kaidorians rarely happened.
“Maybe once every hundred generations,” he’d claimed, during one pre-masturbation conversation, when his hologram appeared to stand in front of my sleeping mat. “Though the Kaidorians are savage, they much prefer raiding to warring. And it is a matter of some debate about whether they actually have a planet in the system. It is possible they live mostly in scattered communities of starships.”
I’d been surprised to find out that the Xalthurians did not know where the Kaidorians lived and the Kaidorians did not know where Xalthuria was located. Apparently, most trade and even the war was conducted in space and agreed upon battlefields. Never revealing your home planet’s location was considered a rule of thumb in this part of the universe, and most aliens didn’t even think to ask where the person they were trading with came from.
This had made me look at the old planet in a new light. For there was no such thing as war on Xalthuria, and this was the first inner-system war they’d experienced in hundreds of generations.
But according to my parents, the old planet had been one never-ending war, and I’d become used to the constant inner-colony squabbles. I could only wonder what it would be like to live in so much peace, and I can see why D’Rek had been so eager for these talks if it would guarantee the return of that harmony.
So then, what happened yesterday? Why had D’Rek been so hot one moment then totally cold in the next? Plus, he hung up on me! I mean, what was that all about? He’s keeping something from me. I know he is.
I clamp my lips, feeling both annoyed with him and weirdly guilty.
Yes, he’s keeping something from me, but it isn’t like I haven’t accumulated some secrets of my own, since he left for his six days of meetings with the Kaidorians.
A few huge ones.
I mean, maybe he wouldn’t mind the fact that I’ve been meeting with N’Maryah every day, a staunch advocate of Xalthurian female rights. But he definitely wouldn’t like the story of how we met…or how anti-Kel she is for a Xalthurian…or how she refuses to stop worrying about me. Especially since I told her the secret I still hadn’t told D’Rek.
“Ki’Ra…how…are…you…this…day?”
The halting New Terrhan greeting pulls me out of my jumbled head. I look up to see, L’Than—yet another secret I’ve been keeping from D’Rek during our supposed “tell me everything” conversations.
Shoving those thoughts away, I smile up at my new hybrid friend. “I’m good, L’Than. How are you doing?”
I smother a laugh as I watch him struggle to compose an answer in the language he’d never spoken before meeting me. And I find myself once again feeling grateful for N’Maryah.
After I told her the story of how my sister died on the first day we lunched together, she’d insisted I meet “one of her admirers,” a young male who was a hybrid like my nephew and had a great curiosity about his human side.
“He is the friend I mentioned in possession of his own long-distance flyer. He is not a baby, but I believe you two will enjoy speaking with each other, and he can provide you with an escort. I want to show you all the places there are to picnic on the palace grounds, and he knows his way around the gardens well. He can bring you to me every day, while I set up our lunch.”
She’d been right. The red and brown swirled hybrid male who’d met me in the garden on the day after D’Rek left for his trip wasn’t a baby, in any sense of the word.
On the contrary, L’Than was only a couple of solars younger than me and he quizzed me often about his chances of winning N’Maryah’s agreement to marriage. I got the feeling he’d only agreed to escort me to different meadows on the shockingly large palace grounds in order to get in her good graces.
But he was also curious about the humans on New Terrhan. Over the last four days, he’d asked me many questions about the planet where he’d been born and the list of now forty-year-old women who could possibly be his mother.
Knowing that he’d never meet the woman he was so curious about made me sad. Yet L’Than struck me as carefree in a way that his female counterparts weren’t back on my planet.
On New Terrhan, both hybrid and full humans worked in the community fields from dawn to dusk and sometimes beyond with only a short break for lunch. But L’Than seemed to have plenty of leisure time to meet with me in the palace gardens and escort me to wherever N’Maryah had chosen for that day’s picnic.
Crazily enough to my ears, he spoke full-on Xalthurian, complete with clicks, hisses, and scratching sounds. But he regarded me as a teacher, often asking how to say certain words in New Terrhan, then pronouncing them over and over until he got them just right.
I’d often wondered about the fate of the boys who were ripped from their mother’s arms on New Terrhan, but to my surprise, L’Than seemed…happy. Especially now that the war is over. He’d been on the verge of conscription, when they announced the Kaidorians’ request for peace talks.
Now that he wasn’t under any threat of ever having to fight, his life was pretty much perfect. He’d grown up, if not loved in the way of human parents, certainly valued. He’d never wanted for anything. Never even had to do work or undergo schooling he did not wish for himself, thanks to the Xalthurians’ Knowledge Expansion Educational system, a program that could be uploaded directly into Xalthurian brain waves while sleeping and therefore required no classroom time whatsoever.
Since Xalthuria was a planet with very few vices, he’d grown up having what an old planet entertainment might have called good, wholesome fun. From what I could tell, L’Than’s life now consisted exclusively of picnics, faun-riding competitions, and whatever else he considered enjoyable.
He’d liked growing up on Xalthuria, with its perfect people, perfect educational system, and perfect weather. Other than not yet having N’Maryah’s
agreement to marriage, he had assured me many times that he was very happy.
In fact, after several long moments of thought, he answer’s my question about how he’s doing today with, “I am…perfectly…happy…thank you…for…asking.”
Perfectly happy, just like I had mostly been since agreeing to stay here with D’Rek. It made me wonder—no matter how much I tried not to—how perfectly happy I would be if I lived here, too. Like L’Than.
“Ki’Ra? I…say…words…wrong?”
L’Than’s halting question jogs me from my unsettled thoughts. “No, you said them exactly right. I was just…thinking.”
“I…think…too…and…I…think—essh!” He winces in a way that very much reminds me of a human despite his swirled face. “Apologies, Ki’Ra, I must switch to my own language to speak these next thoughts as they are complicated.”
“That’s okay,” I answer, though inside I’m marveling at the fact that he calls Xalthurian his native tongue as opposed to the composite of old planet languages I grew up speaking on New Terrhan. “What’s up?”
“The sky,” he answers sincerely. “Can you not see that?”
I laugh and say, “That’s the New Terrhan way of saying, what would you like to speak about?”
L’Than only sports five ridges, to D’Rek’s several, but they furrow just the same as my big blue alien’s. “Why do you not ask the exact question then? Why do you instead add a direction word to a general question word?”
Again, I have to smother a smile. “More poetry,” I answer, which is the shorthand I came up to explain the heavy usage of idioms, metaphors and filler words in the New Terrhan language. “Also, novelty. We humans consider language a living thing and like to change it up.”
L’Than clicks. “Your strange words and your explanation of their meaning makes me believe my idea might be a good one. I have told you that the Xalthurian form of uploaded education has taught me to speak, read, and even ride a faun. However, though I am only escorting you to honor N’Maryah’s request, I find myself enjoying the small pieces of language and cultural education you have given me, despite your rude and archaic delivery system.”
Kel D'Rek; His To Claim Page 13