by T. J. Land
When they got there and peered through the window on the door, they found that Irene hadn’t been fucking with them. The captain was, indeed, in the gym. And he was…
“What the fuck is he doing?” said Zachery, coming up behind Thomas and tilting his head to one side.
What the captain appeared to be doing was a handstand. On one hand.
Which hadn’t been the first thing Thomas had noticed. No, that would have to be the fact that all the captain was wearing were loose pants, and his ass looked just as nice when it was upside down.
“That is so cool,” Rick said in a hushed voice.
“Stupid old prick’s gonna topple over and hurt himself,” Zachery mumbled.
What struck Thomas was how weird it looked. He’d always pictured acrobats as skinny elf people, like Antoine; the captain was a large, large man.
It’s also kind of hot, said a voice in Thomas’s brain. It sounded like something his dick would say.
Through unspoken agreement, they all kept quiet as mice while the captain slowly lowered himself to the ground and rolled up into a sitting position. He stood, and stretched, giving them all an amazing view of his back, shining with sweat.
Thomas glanced sideways and saw that Rick and Zachery both had on the same glazed, slack expression.
When the captain finished stretching, he went back down again and started doing push-ups, and of course, Thomas counted. Eighty-five in two minutes. By the time he was done, Thomas realised that all three of them were panting openly.
For all that he’d whored around in college, Thomas had had two or three serious relationships with people he really cared about, and in each one, he’d struggled with jealousy. So watching the other two, he sort of expected to feel all fuck off, I saw him first, but he didn’t. He knew the captain wasn’t his. He belonged to all of them.
After standing and stretching again, the captain went over to the bench where a towel and a water bottle were waiting. A soft sigh swept through his audience as he upended the bottle over his head, letting the water splash over his face and down his chest.
“Mary, mother of God,” said Thomas.
“Shouldn’t be fucking legal,” Zachery rasped.
Rick made a whimpering noise.
It took all three of them a while to notice Echo, standing just five feet away, a steaming apple pie in his hands. When they did, Thomas actually jumped back, and Zachery swore.
The captain’s head snapped round to where they stood at the door of the gym. “What are you three doing?”
“Er,” said Rick, seizing up like a deer in headlights.
Thomas looked from the captain to Echo to the pie and back to Echo again. Echo, meanwhile, looked downwards, pointedly, at all three of their erections.
“We were just thinking maybe you’d like some pie, sir,” Thomas said, hearing exactly how stupid it sounded as he spoke.
The captain—still holding the empty water bottle—looked at them with steely eyes.
“Pie,” he repeated.
“Yeah, C’pn,” said Rick, shifting his weight from foot to foot like he always did when he was embarrassed. “We were all just at the party, and we noticed that you were, uh, not there, and so we…thought we’d come and find you.”
“I see,” said the captain.
Putting the water bottle aside, he walked up to Echo, who gave him the same solemn nod with which he greeted him on the bridge and then proffered the pie.
“For me? How kind of you, Echo. I shouldn’t, though. All that pastry…” the captain said, sliding a hand down over his abs.
Echo made a small pout, which was easily the most emotion Thomas had ever seen him display.
“Oh, if you insist.” The captain raised a hand and pressed two fingers against the crust, and goddamn it, all Thomas could think of was the way those same two fingers had split him open just yesterday. When the crust gave way, exposing the pie’s piping hot insides, he saw Zachery surreptitiously slide a hand down over his own dick.
The captain withdrew both fingers, coated in apple filling. He raised them to his lips and licked some of it off, before saying, “Well done, Echo. As ever, you excel yourself.”
“Don’t you think so, gentlemen?” he added, turning to the three of them and holding out his fingers.
For a moment, none of them moved. Then Rick inched forward and gave his fingers a kittenish lick.
“Good?” the captain asked.
His throat clicking, Rick said, “Y-yeah, sir. Real good.”
With a smirk, the captain turned his gaze to Thomas and Zachery. “What about you two? Wouldn’t you like a taste? After all, Echo has put in so much effort. I think we should all show our appreciation.”
Echo sighed and flicked his eyes to heaven.
“Oh, fuck this,” Zachery grunted. Striding forward, he took hold of the captain’s wrist and plunged both fingers deep into his mouth. When they were drawn back, every inch of sauce had been cleaned off. Thomas almost wept with disappointment.
“Greedy,” the captain admonished, running his thumb over Zachery’s lips. “You’ve left none for poor Thomas.”
“Fuck him,” Zachery said and kissed him. Rick, meanwhile, had attached himself to the captain’s side like a limpet and was basically humping his leg.
Like the dumbass he was, Thomas stood there, wanting to join in but unsure of whether it was what the captain wanted of him. After all, he’d just been exercising—maybe he only had enough energy left for two of them.
But then, the captain said, “Thomas—aren’t you hungry?”
No matter how much he flirted, Thomas reflected, the captain hardly ever sounded like he was being a flirt. He kept his face perfectly blank, his tone perfectly even; he’d invite a guy to an orgy with as much sultriness in his voice as he would if he was asking him to pass the salt. It fucked with Thomas’s head.
“Yeah, Captain,” he said cautiously. “Guess so.”
Rick was now pressed against the captain’s bare chest, while Zachery had moved to stand behind him, with his arms wrapped around the older man’s waist and his groin against his ass. One of Zachery’s hands had begun to tug down his pants, exposing a generous slice of thigh.
“Take some, then,” the captain ordered, gesturing to the pie.
Feeling like even more of a dumbass, Thomas dipped his index finger into the mangled pastry, trying not to blush under the scrutiny of Echo’s cool, frank gaze. Was he getting off on this too? Was getting off something Echo even did?
Before Thomas could taste it, the captain seized hold of his wrist and took his finger into his mouth. He licked it clean, all the while maintaining eye contact, and that was about all Thomas was willing to put up with. Taking a step forward, he cupped a possessive hand over the captain’s dick, earning a grunt of approval.
“Captain,” he said, “if you don’t want to come to the party, maybe we could have our own party. In your quarters?”
Honestly, right then, Thomas would have had no problem getting down to business in the corridor.
“Hmm,” said the captain, rubbing his chin and eyeing them all. “I suppose my bed is the only one big enough to accommodate all three of you…”
Behind his back, Zachery pumped his fist.
“…or possibly four of you,” the captain continued. “Echo—would you like to join us?”
Rick took a break from the love bite he was busy carving into the captain’s chest to whine, “Him? He’s creepy.”
“Don’t be an asshole, asshole,” Zachery scolded, slapping the back of his head.
But Echo declined with a graceful gesture and went off in the direction of the mess hall, bearing with him what remained of the pie. The captain sighed. “Ah, well. Gentlemen?”
Rick seized hold of his right arm, Zachery his left, and Thomas trailed behind, replaying the captain’s weirdly hot handstand in his mind and wondering if he’d let him try giving him a blowjob upside-down.
✩✩✩
�
�So,” Thomas asked, several very enjoyable hours later. “Does anyone want to talk about this? This…us thing?”
“Nope,” said Zachery sprawled over the captain’s legs.
“We prob’ly should,” sighed Rick, curled at his side. “It’d be…like, the adult thing to do, I guess.”
Rousing himself, Zachery cleared his throat and said, “Okay, here we go: This was fun. If you guys want to, we should do it again sometime.”
“Sounds good to me,” said the captain, from somewhere beneath a mound of pillows and limbs.
Chapter Six
The ship was quiet. The crew slept.
All except two.
First Officer Antoine Mbaye sat alone in his quarters, trying to contend with a cramp in his wrist. The cause of his affliction sat on the desk beside him; notebooks, dozens of them stacked on top of one another. The captain had his calendar, Echo had his schedule, but Antoine had found no better way for dealing with their endless voyage than keeping exhaustive diaries. Every evening, he filled pages upon pages with whatever had occupied his mind that day—an old song he’d remembered, a new grey hair on the captain’s head, findings from his latest research.
He always wrote more when he was homesick or lonely, and today he’d reached twenty-three pages before his wrist had failed him.
As he rubbed it gingerly, his attention wandered to the opposite wall. It was mostly bare; no calendar, no dirty posters. There was only a small framed picture featuring himself and a taller, bearded man standing in front of the entrance to the Tuileries Garden. A bad picture; one side was out of focus and both their eyes were red. Nonetheless, it made Antoine smile involuntarily.
Abandoning his wrist, he stood and stretched.
Enough, he thought. This has gone quite far enough.
✩✩✩
The captain sat alone on the bridge, staring out through the nearest porthole into an endless ocean of stars, as Moxie sat purring in his lap. His jacket hung over the back of his chair, and a glass of brandy waited nearby.
He wasn’t going to drink it, not when he only had five glasses left to last him the rest of his life. But he did like to pour one out now and then, just to have it on hand, so he could look at it if he wanted to. When he was done brooding, he’d pour it straight back into the bottle and put the bottle back in his safe.
So distracted with his thoughts, he didn’t notice Antoine’s approach until his first officer’s scowling face blocked his view.
“What are you doing?” Antoine demanded.
“Thinking,” he replied. “It’s one of my hobbies. It’s quite enjoyable, actually; one does it with one’s brain. Happy anniversary, by the way.”
He watched Antoine’s eyes move down to his brandy glass and quickly drew it out of his reach.
“You’ve done the rounds, then?” his first officer said, stepping forward and perching neatly on the arm of his chair. “Gone from room to room offering your cock to anyone in need of it, like some kind of fucked up Florence Nightingale?”
“As you ask, I just had a very enjoyable liaison with Thomas…”
Antoine sneered.
“…and Rick…”
Antoine winced.
“…and Zachery.”
At that, even the cornea of Antoine’s eyes seemed to wrinkle. “Zachery? God only knows what you’ve picked up.”
“He’s actually very sweet.”
“You really have no standards whatsoever, do you?” Antoine sighed, taking off his glasses and rubbing his temples. “If I went down to G deck and drilled a small hole in our ship’s reactor core, you’d probably spend the last few minutes before we exploded fucking it.”
The captain glared at him and then returned his gaze to the porthole. For a few minutes, they sat in silence disturbed only by the ubiquitous hum of the ship’s engines. Moxie woke up and nudged at Antoine’s hand until he stroked behind her ears.
Ever since the quarrel on the bridge, the captain and his first officer hadn’t been on speaking terms. It wasn’t a state of affairs the captain was at all comfortable with. While shouting matches had always been a core component of their relationship, they usually forgot whatever it was they’d been angry about within a few hours. This drawn-out bitterness was new, and he hated it. Even so, he’d stubbornly resisted apologising. In all the years they’d known one another, they’d only exchanged apologies once, and the captain had no desire to conjure up memories of that awful afternoon in Paris and the engagement ring that still lurked in the back of his desk drawer.
“There she is,” said Antoine, pointing. As was usual on those occasions when they were alone together, he’d switched to French, the only language they’d had in common when they’d first met. “The host star. Seventy-three percent hydrogen, four billion years old, eight hundred and seventy-two thousand miles across…uncannily like the Sun. You know, we should give it a proper name. Actually, we should start giving all of them names. You see that constellation there? I’ve named it ‘the Goldfish.’”
The captain squinted. “It looks more like a crab.”
“Yes, I know, but there’s already a constellation called ‘the Crab’ back at home. We should try to be original.”
“There’s a Chinese constellation called ‘the Goldfish.’”
Antoine cursed. “Really? Damn. I’ll have to think of something else, then.”
Then, tentatively, he continued, “So, have you read…”
“Yes, yes, I’ve read through your reports. Exhaustively.”
“The largest one is our best bet. I thought we could call her ‘Leia.’”
The captain rubbed his beard, frowning. “After the nymph? The one with the swan…?”
“No, that was Leda. Leia, Princess Leia, you idiot. From Star Wars?”
Of course. While they had both studied Ovid in college, Antoine had been the one to cultivate a fetish for obscure speculative fiction. “And your reasoning?”
Grinning now, as though he’d been building up to it, Antoine declared, “Because she offers us a new hope.”
The captain stared at him blankly, until Antoine added, “It was the name of the first movie?”
“I thought the movie was called Star Wars.”
“No, no—God, you’re ignorant—that’s the franchise. The first movie is called A New Hope. It’s my favourite. I saw it when I was ten, and it was the first time I realised I wanted to live on a spaceship.”
“I wanted to be Captain Nemo when I was ten,” the captain imparted, bracing himself for a “long, hard, and full of seamen” quip.
Antoine smirked. “Oh, so you could abduct handsome Frenchmen, or so you could wage an aquatic war on an evil empire?”
“I think I was drawn to the prospect of spending my life exploring the ocean.”
Waving a hand at the window, Antoine said, “Well, there it is! Three whole worlds full of ocean, all for you.”
Gracefully, he slid from the arm of the chair into the captain’s lap, dislodging Moxie with a yowl of complaint. “Because that’s why we really went into this business, isn’t it? We wanted to explore the universe. That’s the only reason anyone really does what we do; it’s dangerous, and the pay is shit. All your men, they’re here because they wanted to go ‘where no man has gone before.’ They deserve better than to live out their days in this miserable coffin, with nothing to hope for. And so do I. And so do you, Khurshed.”
The captain couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called him by his first name. He didn’t even think the rest of the crew knew what it was.
He took a deep breath. “These men—my men—they trust me with their lives. Trust me to get them home—”
“Which you cannot do. No matter how determined or clever or brave you are, you can’t get them home. But you might be able to give them a new home. Isn’t it worth trying, at least?”
After a lengthy pause, the captain muttered, “Get off. I’m getting an erection, and I don’t want to have to wake anyone up.”
For what felt like the thousandth time, he wondered whether sex would have made their relationship simpler or even more complicated. But of course, the question was a fatuous one. Antoine was what he was, and the captain wouldn’t have had him otherwise. And his asexuality had been far less a factor in their eventual disintegration underneath the Arc de Triomphe than the captain’s natural tendency toward polyamory.
“You fall in love with half the people you meet, Khurshed,” Antoine had told him after he’d put the ring back in his pocket. “And I’ve never been any good at sharing. Eventually, you’ll meet someone else, you’ll be smitten, and you’ll ask me if they can join us. I’ll say yes to make you happy, but I’ll secretly hate them, and you’ll spend all your time playing peacemaker. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.”
Angry and hurt, he’d said a handful of despicable things in response, which Antoine had returned in short order. Although they’d never exactly broken up, their relationship had entered a sort of limbo, from which it hadn’t yet emerged. When the captain had purchased The Prayer, Antoine had been his first recruit, and they’d agreed not to disclose their history to the crew so as to avoid accusations of favouritism. In that, at least, they’d succeeded; Thomas and the others seemed convinced they despised one another.
Rubbing his eyes, he tried to organise his thoughts. His half-hard cock didn’t make the task any easier.