24. Ohara

She tasted sweet — sweeter than any fruit I had ever had.

She was receptive and rose to my every stroke. She arched her back and looked up at me, hunger painting her features, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as if I were taking her to some far and exotic land…

And an idea struck me. I leaned forward, her sweat mingling with mine, as I whispered in her ear:

"Relax. Let me take you on a journey."

"You already have," she said with a fuzzy grin.

I kissed her on the cheek. "Further," I said. "Much, much further…"

I drilled my eyes into her and found her mind just as soft and supple as her body.

She blinked once, twice, and then on the third time, she opened them in wonder as we were no longer in my prison cell in Ikmal. We were half the galaxy away in a wide-open field near my parents' farm.

Lily gasped and she instinctively clutched her arms over her breasts.

"It's all right, my mate," I said. "Nothing will harm you here."

"Where are we?" she said.

"We're where I used to come as a young Nor and read our holy texts, studying to pass the adulthood test," I said.

"The grass…" she said, wriggling on the spot. "I can feel it. On my back. It's real?"

"No, but your mind makes it real. You can feel every movement, every sensation that I share with you."

She locked her eyes on me. "Every sensation?" she said, wriggling her hips and driving me deeper inside her. "Oh yes. I can feel that all right."

She got up, turned around, and slid me back inside her. "Ride me," she said. "Take me on a journey."

I couldn't help the growl that shivered across my entire body. "As you wish," I said, and I began stroking her once more in my constant, unrelenting pace.

Lily groaned as she bounced on me, taking me deeper and harder inside her, and I went up onto one knee and thrust inside her.

She hissed through her teeth. I focused on the horizon, and we began to float up from the ground.

Lily wobbled a little, unsteady, but I hammered her hard with an extra couple of thrusts, and it brought her right back to the moment.

Then we began to move forward, back toward the homestead on the hill, and as I hammered Lily hard, she gasped, and I felt her juices flowing around my cock.

I kicked my pace up a notch and gripped her shoulders, driving her hard onto me as we zipped up into the atmosphere and across the seemingly endless fields of space to a neighboring planet of ice and water.

I cast a bubble of warmth around us as we sailed across the oceans, the native rhudecca species hurling themselves above the surface and twirling in midair.

Then I arched us up toward the famous icy tundra of Corsa Frim where the Ice Jacillal hunted for their dinner.

Around the solar system and the universe we flew, caught in our delicious bubble of ecstasy.

Lily took my hand and placed it on her bouncing breast and I squeezed her nipple and she groaned joyfully, almost painfully.

Her juices were really flowing now and painted my cock white.

I leaned over her, grinding hard from the steeper angle, and caught the gasp on her lips as she arched back to meet me.

Then she pulled back and I saw the look of total calm, of peaceful surrender, on her face, and felt it right alongside her, and her warm breath dappled my cheeks.

I took her lips once more, driving into her, making her gasp.

I stiffened and knew my end was coming.

Lily eased me back and climbed on top of me, commanding, in control, and rode me.

I reached inside her mind and extracted a small piece of her, expanded it, twisted it, and wrapped it around us.

We were on her native planet, in a grassy green enclosure not dissimilar from where I used to go to read as a boy, only this was not the true countryside as building spires rose around us in intimidating screens of concrete and modern life.

Lily hadn't seen it yet as her eyes were shut and she focused on bouncing on me.

Watching her there, so focused, so in control…

I felt myself losing control, losing focus. And I let it wash over me. I let her wash over me.

I opened up all my senses, let myself smell her wicked scent, let the feel of her wrapped tightly around me consume me, and the sound of her groaning deeply in the back of her throat…

And I was lost.

I released myself, spurting inside her. She didn't stop, and coaxed every last drop from me, the glistening pearls of sweat on her body rolling down her perfect skin.

Then, finally, she opened her eyes and focused on me. She still hadn't seen where we were. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips and wrapped her arms around me.

We were both in the moment, serene and perfectly happy.

She made it all worth it.

All the fighting, all the pain, all the anger. All for this moment of bliss with her.

She sighed and looked up at me, her chin balanced on my chest. "That was amazing. Who would have thought sex with an alien could be so good?"

"Same here."

She blinked in surprise. It was a little strange to consider yourself an alien, after all. To her, I was exotic, and to me, she was just as exotic.

She sniffed, recognizing something about the place I had brought us to from her own store of memories. She sat up and peered at our surroundings. "This… This is…"

"Your home," I said. "Or, a part of it anyway."

She reached out a hand and ran it over the tuft of grass. "It looks… feels… smells exactly the same…"

"Do you like it?"

She beamed at me and her eyes shimmered with tears. "I thought… I thought I would never see it again."

She got up and — after a little awkwardness at moving on legs that now felt like jelly — pointed to a park bench. "There, that's where I used to have my lunch every day. I used to eat my sandwiches and then feed the crusts to the ducks. And there. That's where the kids used to play football. Sometimes, after I'd had a good morning at work, I would play with them. How did you do this?"

I ran my fingers through her hair. "I glanced into your mind — just a glance, nothing more — and this was somewhere near the top of your consciousness. I thought you might like to visit it and so, I brought us here."

"But we're not really here, right?" she said. "It's just a projection?"

"That's right. I didn't populate it with people. I thought as we were doing what we were doing… well, you might prefer a little privacy."

Lily threw back her head and laughed boisterously. "Yes," she said. "I suppose that was a good decision." She ran her hand over my arm and felt the hard, flat scales. "Thank you. It was nice of you to bring me here."

Her smile was warm… and yet, I sensed it was distracted.

"Do you wish to go elsewhere on your home planet?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No."

"Why not? I would like to see where you lived your life before coming to Ikmal."

She hugged herself and rubbed her arms. "It…" She sighed. "It would only make me sad."

That's when I realized my mistake. After all, she was a Prize now, and to see her home planet like this, with everything the way it'd been when she'd been taken…

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought it would make you happy. I'll remove it."

I raised a hand to wipe it clear but Lily placed her hand on my shoulder before I could.

"No," she said. "This is nice. It's enough. It's just tough knowing I'll never see it again. Not for real, in person, I mean."

I felt like a fool. I'd wanted to make her happy and instead, I had only done the opposite. But for now, at least, she seemed at peace.

We walked the park and Lily pointed out various shops that ran along the perimeter. Then, she asked me:

"Do you think you can conjure us up some clothes? I'm feeling a little exposed here."

I chuckled and did as she asked, summoning the clothes we wore back in Ikmal.

"So, is this how you defeated Druin? By controlling his mind? That's how you made him do those things?"

"I don't control others' minds," I said.

"Sure you do. I saw you do it with Druin."

I shook my head. "What you saw was me putting Druin into a situation where he believed he was a zilaz."

"Believed?" Lily said. "How do you do that?"

"By putting him in a situation where that is the only possible explanation. What the mind believes is what is real. It doesn't matter what anyone says or does, it is real to that person."

"And you can do that? Make people believe whatever you want?"

"Not everything. And not everybody. Druin is very concerned about what the other inmates think of him. His greatest fear is others thinking he's weak. By playing on that fear, I can make him believe he's the weakest thing in the galaxy. A zilaz."

Lily shook her head in wonder. "Well, I think it's pretty amazing. Everyone who saw what you did does."

I shrugged. "It's something all Nor can do — with practice. Each day, for just five minutes, we close our eyes and imagine a new setting, a new place, a new behavior, and then send it out, like radio waves, toward whoever we want to see those things."

"Five minutes?" Lily said, curling her face into an expression of disbelief. "It takes a lot more than five minutes a day to do what you did."

"I swear to the Creator, just five minutes," I said, raising my hands. "The thing most creatures don't realize is that with five minutes a day, every day, you can achieve pretty much anything."

"Huh. I suppose that's true. It's how anyone gets good at anything, I guess. Lots of practice. Well, you're never going to need to use your ability with me."

I cocked my head to one side. "Why's that?"

"Because I will do anything you want me to. You just need to tell me."

I lifted her chin with a finger. "Lily," I said softly, "you've got it exactly the wrong way around. You will do anything you want to do, and that will make me happier than anything else you could ever say or do."

Lily beamed at me and went up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around my neck and kiss me.

I felt the warmth and softness of her beneath me and couldn't remember a time in all the past ten years when I'd felt anywhere near as good as I did with her.

It all seemed like a haze, as if it hadn't really happened at all. There was precious little I wanted to remember about this place, and less still that I actually could remember.

It was the one place that I would never relive, never conjure from my memories. Never… except this moment.

"Let's go home," Lily said, smiling at me happily.

The Earth faded into the background as we reemerged in my Ikmal cell.

Small, cramped, with no fresh air or open spaces… and yet I didn't want to be anywhere else.

Because she was here.