Resonant Drives

resonant drives

In the vast and lightless interstellar void, time ceased to hold real meaning for the traveler eons ago.

He does not fear death, because death cannot touch him. He does not fear age, because he is ageless. He does not fear pain, because he’s already survived the worst pain he can imagine.

But he survived. He’s still here. He has eternity to wait. And he fears eternity most of all.

He could wait forever, and what he waits for—craves— requires —might never come again.

He may never find her . Never feel her. Never free himself from this empty, echoing expanse, an endless shrine to everything he lost. He may never fully live again.

He’s alone in the dark, the way his kind was never meant to be alone. Without a pilot, without his mate, he’s lost and will stay lost.

In the deep void, he waits, still, silent, searching. He stretches his senses and his will across vast distances, to every far-off star within his reach, but finds only a hundred, a thousand, a million barren planets.

One in a million times, hope flares, quickly extinguished when he scans rock after rock seeded with simple life, single cells, nothing to sate him. Again and again, the life he finds strives only to fade away. The failures stay with him like they’re his own. Maybe they are. If only he hadn’t let her go, if she had stayed, they could have tended this little corner of the galaxy until it overflowed with life.

Then, against all odds, something changes. How did this small blue jewel bound to a yellow star escape his notice? How did he miss its flowering, closer than he’d ever guessed, almost in his own orbit?

No matter. Because he couldn’t have missed the call that draws him now.

Find me. Take me. Claim me. Fill me.

The tether snaps into place, a sudden, tangible gravity that shivers across his iridescent shell, exposed as always to the relentless, enveloping cold of the void. It cracks him open and unfolds him, lighting up long-dormant pathways in his neural net, echoing in abandoned corridors of the vessel which contains his multitudes.

She’s mortal. Unfamiliar. Human. And yet…

Come for me.

It’s her. He knows her. Needs her. Has to have her.

His by fate, by right, she’s the one he’s been waiting for. She’ll give him everything. Take him everywhere. And in return, she’ll have all the pleasure he can wring from her, forever.

He has his heading, and there’s no power in the universe that can stop him from claiming her.

His core ignites. He shudders. Rumbles. Roars.

I’m coming.

* * *

Kat Hayworth shouldn’t be awake at 2 a.m. But she can’t put her book down now. She’s just getting to the good part.

Her long workdays at the lab don’t leave much room for letting off steam. Not safely, at least. Experimental fusion drives aren’t quite rocket science, but they could be, someday. Kat wants to be around to see that day.

For now, she’s a first-year postdoc fellow in a large cohort, the lowest rung on a mercilessly competitive ladder. The real rocket scientists get paid for genius, not kindness. The other postdocs are no more than frenemies on a good day.

That’s where smutty literature comes in clutch. When the cruelly hot antihero corners the protagonist on the page, she can trust they’ll eventually have their happy ending, or at least a lot of lovingly described orgasms.

Her male colleagues might be able to find exoplanets or split the atom, but the mechanics of the clit still escape them. By contrast, the love interest in her latest book has aphrodisiac venom, a vibrating cock, an inhuman devotion to feminine pleasure, and is wildly, obsessively in love with his ordinary human mate.

And now he has her at his mercy, bound and begging for release.

Kat props her e-book reader against the pillow and lies back. She will have a crick in her neck tomorrow morning. Her free hand wanders down to tweak a nipple tenting the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Biting her lip, she turns the page and slips her fingers under the waistband of her panties. Scanning the page with frenzied eyes, mouth dry, she chases her own release.

Her fingers aren’t enough. She needs more. With a low moan of frustration, she throws back the covers, book forgotten as she yanks her favorite vibrator from the drawer and plugs it in. Finally, she falls back into the bed and switches the wand on at its highest setting.

God, she needs to come so bad. She’ll do anything. She imagines a shadowy form above her, pushing inside her with brutal force, calling her mine. Taking her, claiming her, filling her until her brain whites out and she falls apart around him.

Her back arches, poised at the edge of a sudden, shattering orgasm when all the lights go out and the vibrator stills in her hand.

“ Fuck! ” she screams, the waves of pleasure ebbing as fast as they rolled over her. “Not again. The wiring in this place, I swear to God…”

It’s not the first time she’s thrown a fuse. Once the entire apartment complex had gone dark and didn’t come back on for hours. One neighbor, wondering aloud who’d used enough joules to blow the fuse box, had mentioned they’d heard someone using a power tool, which was…not incorrect.

Flushed, panting, she lies in the dark, her heartbeat thumping in her ears, almost lightheaded. Even cut short, her toy packs a hell of a punch. She can still almost feel its hum in the air, in her body, shaking the windows?—

That’s not the vibrator at all. It comes from outside, a deep rumble that seems to reach all the way to the marrow of her bones.

She tries to roll over, sit up in bed, but her body won’t respond. She can’t even turn her head.

Harsh light flashes over her, bright enough to bring tears to her eyes. It paralyzes her. She can’t speak or scream.

The mind-numbing vibration draws closer, right outside her window now, shaking her apart, squeezing the breath from her lungs. It’s loud enough to wake the dead, let alone her nosy neighbors.

But no one comes to save her, and amid the overwhelming thrum of whatever is outside, she realizes: she’s not in bed anymore.

She’s floating on air, body rigid, drenched in light that pulls her inexorably— elsewhere.

Abruptly, the light fades away. In Kat’s last conscious moments, the darkness comes as a relief, until?—

Hello, sweetling.

Held helpless in the dark, she shudders. The voice caresses her, velvety and deep as night unending.

Now you belong to me.

* * *

Taking her is easy.

Her desire flares across the empty reaches, a beacon drawing him into her orbit. This small blue world and its riotous gravity of life isn’t all her, of course, but his mind balks at the concept.

He exists as a collective, a network of individual neural nodes and bodies with separate functions, but all his , all himself . He is the vessel floating in the void, and its protective shell, and all it contains within. Each experiences its life as linked inextricably with the whole, forming an integral part of a singular entity.

His scans tell him that she is one among billions, like and unlike her, each life autonomous, without the cohesion perfected by his kind. Not just millions of individuals but millions of species , an overwhelming variety, a wild proliferation of biomass. He can hardly picture such a wealth of difference.

It’s everything that he has waited and watched for, this world. But it requires a brand new frame of reference.

How lonely it must be, how strange, how small and separate she must feel, even among billions. That profound difference intoxicates him. It holds an irresistible, terrifying promise. In her truest essence, she’s unknowable, and at the same time, she must be unknowing too: incapable both of fully knowing him or being known by him.

An encounter with such a unique entity could create something entirely new, unpredictable, unstable, dangerous… and powerful.

Similar alchemy once created this world in its dizzying variety. It’s not entirely unfamiliar to him, and what he does know of it revives something new and old within him: a restless dissonance, a loss of wholeness.

He knew what that was like, once. So long ago, now, that he’s forgotten how it works—worked—must work again, if he’s to live as he once did. Worse, he’s forgotten why it didn’t work, in the end, why it left him echoing and hollow.

Did he try to forget, or did he lose that knowledge, one small part of everything that ending took from him?

The question grips him at his core. It spills from the empty places inside him as he drops into synchronous orbit with her position on the landmass. He aches with it, as if the line between him above and her below has pinned him at the balance point.

Already parts of him reach out to her, long arms unfolding from where he hangs suspended at her zenith. Now, hidden in her world’s shadow, he hesitates.

In that pause, the space of one of her short breaths, her pleasure hits its peak. Even at this distance, it electrifies him. A slender thread of exotic energy— her energy—sparks from the ground upwards, racing along his length toward his center.

With that brief pulse of her essence against his, he’s well and truly lost. All sense of caution, all sense of himself as himself, fails in an instant. Only for an instant—but it’s enough.

He won’t have another chance, not like this, locked onto her and shrouded on the dark side of her world, in a night that’s all too short. If he lets go, velocity will slingshot him out of orbit, faster than her gravity can hold him still.

It’s now or never. He reaches for her, curling fingers of force and shadow around her. She trembles, going rigid at his touch.

She fears him . The realization shakes him. Her terror flows out like a black wave. Her call fades into silence.

No. No, no, no. Panic flaring, he folds her closer, his body shielding her from gravity, acceleration, heat as he places her in emergency stasis. It’s too cold for her in his hold, even at his core.

Now that he has her, the singular hunger that drew him temporarily sated, he can spare attention for logistics, long-term plans. A thousand processes launch at once. His sensors back online and working overtime, he samples her home environment, running comparisons.

Even the atmosphere in his hold is wrong. She needs oxygen most, but tempered with nitrogen, argon, trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, and methane, with enough water vapor to keep her body supple and skin hydrated, all at a very specific mercurial pressure.

Void take him for a fool, she’ll need so many things. Air, warmth, water, sustenance. Human biosignatures mark them as omnivores, but what this human prefers will be individual, unique, unknown. Her den yields few clues, but he gleans enough to make a start.

What brought her to the peak of ecstasy that called to him across the light-years? From her small surface den, he collects a handheld data pad and a stimulator tool of some sort, a starting point for study and iteration. But to master her species’ expectations for mating rituals, he must satisfy her in every way, not merely fulfill physical necessities.

He must delight her mind and tantalize her senses. He needs her to feel for him. His nanoprobes range more widely, gathering samples from local food sources, tapping into a million data streams to gather cultural context, physiological diagrams, electronic libraries, human attempts to parse the mystery of their own sexual diversity.

He keeps her in stasis while he prepares to host her. He must get this right. That brief burst of energy she gave him, all unknowing, told him everything he hoped and feared was true.

She’s perfect. She’s everything he craved in those long epochs of waiting, his end and his beginning.

His fate. His fuel. His freedom.

With the power she holds, she can save him…or destroy his last chance to fulfill his purpose. But no matter how his gambit ends, he knows one thing.

He’s not alone anymore. It’s more than he thought possible. And for a moment, with her wrapped safe and sound within his hold, it’s enough to drive him forward.

* * *

He stalks closer with a smirk playing across his beautiful face. His eyes glow red as a predator’s, one native to the shadows gathered close around her. They hold her rooted in place, helpless before his slow advance.

“How you tremble for me, little one.” His voice rumbles low and deep, poised between a purr and a growl. It seems to stroke her very skin, raising chills along her spine. “How your heart races. You can’t hide that from me. Not your fear, and not how much you want this.”

“I don’t,” she whispers. Lying. Every word, every step toward her stokes the ache in her core, even as she shrinks from him. Heat throbs between her legs as tendrils of shadow tighten at her calves, her wrists, and gently, inexorably, around her throat.

“Your body betrays you.” He really growls this time, eyes flashing. His shadows twine around her thighs, an inexorable caress that spreads her open. They pull her down to her knees, and she tips her head back, rewarded by the faint curve of his mouth.

The proximity overwhelms her. She could beg him to stop, to leave her alone, and yet. She cannot bear it. “Please…”

He nudges himself against her lips—silky, hot, hard as steel. When she flicks her tongue over his tip, eagerly tasting the precum glistening there, his groan shakes them both. Gripping the back of her head, hands fisted in her hair, he pushes in deeper, fucking her mouth with abandon.

His shadows are more solid now. They slither between her legs, strumming her clit. She cries out around his cock as one thick, heavy tendril pushes into her pussy, while a second presses warm and insistent below it, gently working her open.

Then they pull back, and she moans with a sense of utter loss. She was lost the second she dreamed of belonging to him.

“Please,” she whimpers, lips numb, jaw aching. “I want you everywhere. I want ? —”

Before she can finish, he’s there. Everywhere. Deep in her pussy, spearing her ass, invading her airway, growling in her ear.

“You…are…already…MINE.”

And she comes apart, lost in a sharp and shattering pleasure, a surrender so complete she could fall into it forever.

Kat wakes with a start, her own wordless cry still echoing in her ears.

The dream dissolves, already no more than shreds and flashes of half-remembered depravity, but heat still pulses through her body, and her panties cling damply to her skin. She reaches down to relieve the heavy desire suffusing her limbs?—

She can’t move. Her limbs are bound by something supple, strong, and oddly, warm. She’s lying on her back, the surface below her soft but not yielding. It too carries a strange current of warmth, like she’s held and supported by something living.

It takes a moment of trying to open her eyes before she realizes they already are, wide and staring into darkness so complete, she wonders if she’s gone blind.

“Where on earth am I?” The words rasp from a dry mouth and aching throat. A flash of her dream returns—something thick and hard stretching her lips wide and pushing deep into her esophagus.

Was it only a thirsty dream?

She licks cracked lips. Thirsty indeed. “Hello?”

Her voice cracks. That’s embarrassing, assuming there is anyone here to listen. But someone must have brought her here, bound her here, left her in this lightless place.

The air here smells fresh, faintly sweet, almost heady. It’s not cold—it’s almost perfectly matched to her body temperature—but there’s no draft or movement across her exposed skin. None of that is much comfort, though.

The last hazy dregs of arousal drain away. Fear builds in its wake. Her heart hammers in her ears. She’s in the dark, bound hand and foot, with no idea where she is.

Before her dream of dark and endless pleasure, before the voice that thrilled and threatened her, she’d been at home, alone, with a filthy book and her favorite toy. The lights had all gone out, and then?—

She doesn’t believe in out-of-body experiences. The bright spotlight falling over her, how she floated up into it, limbs frozen and mind awake, the hum in the air—it’s all too much like something from that old show her mom has obsessed over for twenty years. The X-Files , or whatever.

That’s silly. Of course she hasn’t been abducted by aliens .

Maybe that was all part of the dream. Maybe whoever kidnapped her drugged her first. That makes more sense. She would have screamed her head off and fought back, otherwise. But she couldn’t kick anyone in the balls if they shot her full of sedatives and hallucinogens.

More likely, it has to do with the fusion lab. They don’t have a working reactor yet, but they might someday, if Kat’s wildest theories on quantum energy fields prove correct. If she can get her dissertation through the committee. If she can get her faculty mentor on board. She’d pitched the most hinged part of it at office hours the other day, while he stared at her as if she were speaking another language.

Focus, Kaitlyn . Now’s not the time to engage in postgraduate angst. Her universal resonance theorem can wait until she gets out of this fix. Whatever it is.

Who knows? Maybe her unknown kidnappers will accept her untested equations in exchange for getting back to her boring little lab rat life. It’s probably the best chance for her ideas to see the light of day, if she’s honest with herself.

She opens her mouth, then pauses at a soft sound in the dark, a furtive footstep. The faintest breeze brushes her skin. Her heart thumps unevenly.

“Who’s there?” she calls, as loudly as her wrecked vocal cords will allow.

“You’re awake. Good.” The voice that answers her is deep, velvet, resonant, and impossibly familiar. It makes her belly flip, but a chill creeps upward from the base of her spine and settles at the back of her neck.

“Do I know you?”

“Not yet. All in good time, my dear.” A pause, as if thinking better of this. “I’ve waited for you for so long, you see. You must forgive my familiarity.”

“The hell I do,” she spits, struggling against the bonds to no avail. “What is this place? Who are you? What do you want from me? Show yourself!”

“Of course, you have a lot of questions.” A faint light flares in the darkness—no, two lights. Twin stars, glinting red, trained on her with a predator’s intensity. “We should talk, before?—”

Kat shrieks. “I’m not going to talk to you until you let me go, you FREAK!”

The two red lights in the distance switch off abruptly, leaving her in total darkness once more. When she lifts her head, something tugs at her hair and scalp—multiple points of contact with a sticky, tacky sensation that makes her shudder. Blood? Or worse?

“Please.” The voice sounds taken aback.

“What the fuck did you do to me?”

“You must lie still. You’ll injure yourself.”

With that, real light creeps back in around the edges of her vision, a warm yellow glow that comes up slowly as if on a dimmer switch. Kat squints, eyes watering.

The light sources blooming in midair look for all the world like chandeliers. They hang from an unseen ceiling, but the space beyond the small circle of light remains lost in deep shadow. She’s lying on a table—an exam bed, maybe. The black, flexible restraints on her wrists and legs look like thick PVC tubing or rubber cords, but they reflect the soft lamplight with a faint oily sheen that seems to shift and flow when she doesn’t look at it directly.

There’s no sign of whoever had spoken. Maybe she scared him away. That deep voice was certainly a him , whatever else he might prove to be.

She blinks until her eyes adjust, hauling herself up on her elbows as far as the bonds will allow. Whatever had tugged at her scalp releases its hold abruptly, though the sticky sensation still makes her scalp crawl.

A thicker tube hangs from a hook at the side of the table near her head. It looks like the same material as the restraints, with what looks like an oddly shaped oxygen mask at the end. Its small attachments remind her of earbuds in their size and shape. It doesn’t look like any medical device she’s familiar with, but between her sore throat and the location of the tube, she can make an educated guess about its purpose.

Hell. They intubated me. She checks herself over as best as she can, but despite the unseen person’s warning, she doesn’t have any visible injuries. Rather than a hospital gown, she has on the same clothes she wore in her last waking memory, soft sleeping shorts and an old T-shirt several sizes too large. Her feet are bare.

It still doesn’t make sense, yet in the absence of any immediate danger, her heart rate slows. The air smells subtly different now: sweeter, softer, almost… comforting.

“That’s better,” the voice says unexpectedly, from somewhere behind her head. She doesn’t even jump. Her heart keeps up its steady rhythm as she breathes in the strange, sweet air. It reminds her of cookies baking, of cinnamon and vanilla, laundry fresh from the dryer, the warmth of home.

Soft footsteps draw closer, still out of view, but she’s not afraid. She’s not angry anymore. She’s not numb. She simply is, while whoever or whatever captured her draws closer on stealthy feet.

“Don’t come any closer.” She hears herself speak with impossible calm. “I know what you’re doing. Drugging me won’t get you what you want.”

His voice is soft and low, now, unthreatening. “I only want to keep you safe. Your biometrics spiked far past their recommended range.”

He must be monitoring her vitals somehow. Maybe the restraints have more function than simply holding her still. “Yeah, waking up in a strange place bound hand and foot tends to do that to a girl. You could just release me.”

“If I did so while your body was primed to flee, you might fall from the table in your haste to escape, or trip over something when you run into the dark. There are many ways you could come to harm before I could intervene. You’d likely fight me if I tried.”

“If you think I won’t fight back when I’m stone-cold calm, you have another think coming.”

“It seems likely,” he admits with surprising readiness. “If you must fight me, however, I would prefer you do so with a clear head. But I can give you back your fear, if you wish.”

“I can’t help but notice you still haven’t released me. Or shown your face.”

A pause lengthens. Has he just…left her there? Alone in the dark or alone with my captor…which is worse? With the “clear head” he’s granted her, she decides both are objectively terrible options.

Then he says, in an oddly tentative tone, “Would you like to see me, Kaitlyn?”

“I’d like you to stop lurking behind me, yes.”

He knows my name. Under the artificial calm, her panic beats against the bars of its chemical cage, desperate to kick off another round of adrenaline.

The worst part is that he’s right : all other factors remaining equal, she would rather face whatever this is, whoever he turns out to be, with dispassionate logic instead of raw instinct. If he bottled whatever he’s pumping into the air, he could make a killing marketing it to the military industrial complex. Her petty pack of infighting colleagues could use some cooler heads too.

A shadow falls over her, a quiet footfall her only warning as he circles into her field of view.

Even though her pulse holds rock-steady, she draws in a long breath. Words unexpectedly elude her, because the man standing before her is beautiful. Objectively. Aesthetically. Undeniably a physical specimen of a quality only reached by professional athletes or leading men with a team of nutritionists and trainers at their beck and call. Or the subjects of romance novel covers, but that was just a fantasy. This man is flesh and blood, standing close enough to touch if her hands were free.

He’s bare-chested, slender, abs taut and defined, his pants well-fitted enough to leave little to the imagination. Calm or not, heat rises in her cheeks and belly.

When she belatedly catches herself staring at the outline of the bulge between his legs, she tears her gaze up to his face with its strong jaw, high cheekbones, and full lips. Shadowed by a dark wave of hair falling over his forehead, his intense, hooded eyes meet hers. They’re a striking color, a deep hazel that almost looks red-gold in this light.

“Well?” he says in that rich, low voice of his. “You’ve seen me, now.”

“Uh. Wow. Hi.” Smart. I went to MIT, but I can’t talk to a hot guy like a normal person. Classic Kat.

“Hello.” A trace of a smile flits over his gorgeous features. “If I loosen your restraints, will you run from me now?”

“I’m not making any promises. Would you chase me if I did?” The words slip out before she can stop them, and her stomach flips again. For a moment she pictures this gorgeous man pursuing her, catching her, tackling her to the ground?—

What is wrong with me? He kidnapped me! Whatever chemical cocktail she’s breathing in doesn’t seem to have dialed down her libido.

He cocks his head, a long, assessing look. “Do you want me to?”

“ No .” Her denial rings out too loud, too fast. “That’s not what I said. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“I was only asking,” he says mildly. “I would prefer it if you don’t run. Personally.”

“Are you going to let me go, or what?”

She’s hardly finished saying it when the bindings on her ankles loosen and slip away, brushing over her skin with a silky, light touch that brings goosebumps up on her bare arms. She bends her knees, feet flat on the table, sighing with relief.

Her stiff joints and shaky muscles protest the movement. How long did I lie here, unconscious, at his mercy? The restraints on her wrists uncoil as she pushes herself to a seated position.

What are those restraints made of? They move with a sinuous grace that makes them look organic, alive for a split second before they go limp, hanging from the table’s edges like so much rubber tubing. They were warm …She shivers again, rubbing the goosebumps from her arms.

“Are you cold? I can make this space warmer if you like. Or perhaps—” A moment later, he’s at her side, tucking a plush covering around her shoulders. “That’s better. You were not, hm, wearing much when we—when I found you.”

She pulls the exquisitely soft blanket over her bare arms and legs, feeling exposed but unable to find her way back to fear. At least she has her t-shirt on. It’s some small comfort. Besides, his balls are right there . She could easily reach out and?—

Taking refuge in the strange, unrelenting calm, she swings her legs over the edge of the table, deliberately putting her back to him. Her feet dangle a few inches off the floor as she takes stock of her surroundings again now that she has a wider field of view.

Nothing here looks unfamiliar, exactly. The shapes seem right, but she can’t identify any of the materials. The floor, which has the same subtle iridescence as the equipment. It’s not metal, wood, or stone, but a dark, almost springy texture with a rippling quality, as if some current moves beneath its surface. The intricate molding of the chandelier-like lamps branches into lighted tips with a subtle, organic asymmetry. They sway gently, glowing hypnotically, in an otherwise undetectable breeze.

“I think you better tell me what is going on,” she says, with dreamlike serenity.

Her captor—or rescuer—clears his throat. “You’re not running, it seems.”

“Not yet,” she agrees. “So don’t give me a reason. Tell me where we are and how you found me. Tell me why .”

“These are not easy questions to answer.” His tone sounds almost apologetic, but he says nothing further.

Wearing the furry blanket like a cape, she lets her bare soles meet the smooth, unidentifiable surface of the floor. It has the slightest bit of springy give and exudes a gentle warmth.

“I don’t care how hard it is for you.” Her legs hold her, and her knees prove only a little watery as she turns to face him across the table. “You’re the one who’s left me in the dark so far. Try. ”

“And if you don’t like the answers?” His throat jumps. Is he nervous ? Does the air not grant him the same calm it does her?

She folds her arms, brows raised, waiting. “I promise you I won’t like them less than not knowing them.”

“Very well,” he says, and sighs. “This is not—but no matter. You asked where we are, and what I’ve done to you. The simplest explanation is that you… We are very far away from home. We had limited resources and very little time, so I admit we took some—liberties.”

“ Liberties is one way of putting it.” She really should be panicking. Her continued fearlessness doesn’t feel like a gift anymore. Suddenly, she misses the ability to understand in her body, as well as her mind, why all of this should alarm her. No way she’ll fess up to that now, though. “That doesn’t tell me much of anything, except that you’re admitting to kidnapping me. And who’s ‘we’?”

“I didn’t kidnap you.” His brow knits, and he casts a glance toward the invisible, cavernous ceiling, as if seeking help from some unseen observer. “Not exactly. I’m here to help you. Care for you. All you must do is ask, and I can provide it. Anything. ”

Even without fear, a cold determination straightens her spine, slips into her voice. “I’m asking you for answers—real ones. Starting with where on Earth, specifically, you or whoever you’re working for has taken me.”

She’s circling toward him now. He steps hastily the other way, keeping the table between them. “I can’t.”

“You don’t know either. Is that it?”

He laughs, a little huff out of his perfect, Grecian nose. “No. Your request can’t be granted. Not the way you asked it.”

“I don’t see why that’s funny. Stop playing games with me.”

“I promise you, I’m not.” The spark of amusement drains away as he faces her, eyes wide and pleading. “I believe the most culturally appropriate phrase is…Hm. We’re not in Kansas anymore. ”

“I live in California, ” she says. “But fine, I’ll play along. Just how far away from Kansas are we?”

“Approximately five thousand of your astronomical units.” He stands at the edge of the circle of light now, their combined path tracing an elliptical orbit from its center.

Blank, she stares at him. “I’m sorry.” Nothing about this makes sense. I liked the last dream better. “I thought you said…”

He inclines his head, his gaze oddly melancholy. “Would you prefer I provide the conversion in a different unit of distance? It is a very great number of miles, but I could?—”

If her memory served, that would mean somewhere on the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. Past the current reach of any Earth missions, even past the Voyager probes with their half-century head start. Farther than any woman has ever gone before.

“I know what astronomical units are,” she says, numb-lipped and frozen. No kidding. The temperature at that distance would be 50 Kelvin. Negative 360 Fahrenheit. This must be a dream.

“Then you did hear me.”

“That means we’re in space. Interstellar space.”

“True, in a sense, though you could not survive in space.”

She glances around her, disbelieving, recontextualizing, rejecting the conclusions that follow. Impossible. Objectively. “So, this place is?—”

“I believe you would call it a starship.”

Play along. Maybe he’s a spy. Some foreign power wants our rocket science, and this is all a ruse to get the intel. That sounds more believable than a fucking starship. “What do you call it?”

“I call it home,” he says softly. “And I hope that someday, so will you.”

* * *

From all the data he collected while she lay in stasis, he expected fear would feed her passion, but instead she gets angry. She awakens strong, spirited, full of unexpected defiance, forcing him to recalibrate swiftly.

He assigns an aspect more compatible with her chemistry, with promising results. Her pheromone levels tick up. She stops yelling at him and waits to find out more.

But as the small truths she asked for take hold, she staggers where she stands. A flush painted her cheeks when she looked at the form he chose, but the color drains away now, leaving her skin pale. Even her lips lose their color.

She sinks like he’s cut her legs out from under her. On her knees, head bowed, she braces herself against his surface with hands icy as the void outside. He registers a precipitous drop in her electrodermal activity.

The human-bodied individual rushes to her side. Specialized in both form and function, this one performs a particular role in service to the colony’s reproductive imperative: a gonozooid, defined by his adaptive ability to protect his mate, comfort her, provide for her, and please her. Meanwhile, the collective’s core neural network races through the human medical databases acquired in orbit around her world.

Her home, the one by her side murmurs. We took her from her home.

Lowered skin conductivity can indicate an onset of negative mood states, reduced capacity for pleasure, even loss of personality coherence. The data doesn’t offer any certainty— how do humans live with such imprecise understanding of their own biology? —but it doesn’t allay their collective concern, either.

His chosen mate cannot fear him in this moment, but she can still experience despair.

You told her too much, too fast.

She asked. The individual gonozooid’s response has a strangely frantic edge of emotion, as though human feeling somehow follows human form. She left me no room to prevaricate. It would have made her angrier.

The warning throws the colony into an unfamiliar state of conflict. Yet every part of him knows that this moment, this meeting, is essential. It must go well, or they— he will lose his last chance to fulfill his mission.

He could offer her euphoria, but she already accused him of drugging her. He’s studied the language enough to understand the connotations, and he will not steal her autonomy.

All his focus turns to her chambers, to the two individuals at the edge of the small circle of light. The gonozooid kneels before her, reaching out with tentative tentillae— fingers— to move aside the matted tangle of keratinous filaments— her hair— that’s fallen across her face. He needs to see her.

She looks up with dull eyes, uncomprehending, but she doesn’t shy away. She lets him brush her hair back with a gentle hand.

We’ve already broken her.

I’m not so sure . The one at her side offers a surprisingly vehement counter. She’s already proven more resilient than expected.

“You’re an alien,” she whispers.

He sits back, considering this. “I suppose I am, to you.”

“This isn’t a dream. Or a lie. Or a trick.”

“No, Kaitlyn,” he says softly. “You asked me for the truth.”

“I...” She clears her throat, wiping a wrist across her face. “I don’t even know your name.”

He hardly knows how to answer her. I am many. I am one. I am eternal. An exile. Alone and yet legion. But he was not always alone. When he had a pilot, a mate, a companion, she had called him by many different names. Dear. Darling. Love. My everything. But there were others, too, the ones that came later. Parasite. Wretch. Bore. Destroyer. Brute. Life-ruiner. Tyrant.

Monster.

If this is what we’ve become, his love said, leaving him, if you refuse to change your ways, you will always be alone.

I never had a choice, he’d cried out, but she was too far gone by then to hear him. This is what I am. I can’t be anything else.

“You must have a name,” Kaitlyn says now, his tearstained mate, his only hope, his fate, his likely doom. “Even aliens need names.”

Of course, humans love names. They require them, a precursor to any intimacy. He should have thought of that.

He casts his seeking mind through databases, encyclopedias, still tasting her salt-sweet tang in the back of his avatar’s throat like a promise. Finds something that seems fitting, or close enough.

“You may call me Cassiel,” he says, choosing a name from a human mythos that resonates, a watchful entity of solitude and grief. Archangel. A curious sort of creature, one he can find no biological reference for, other than beings of their wide salt seas: angel fish, angel shark, sea angels, anglerfish…It seems oddly appropriate. Their oceans contain creatures not entirely unlike him. Besides, she wouldn’t find polymorphic colony as comforting.

“Cassiel.” She draws the sounds out on her tongue, hard and sibilant becoming almost musical at the end. Something shifts inside him, settles into place. Her head comes up, her eyes glazed and shining. “You haven’t told me why. If you are…what you say you are—why abduct me?”

“We— I needed you. If I could have done it differently—but I had no choice.”

“You needed me. For what? Am I…a research subject, or a hostage?” Fluid leaks from her glittering eyes, dampening the epidermal membrane beneath her. “Or am I prey ?”

The vessel’s membrane drinks up the droplet of her immediately. It’s a small gift and he’s hungry for whatever she offers him, anything to help him know her better, map a way forward.

For such a tiny sample, the lachrymal secretion offers a complex, distracting wealth of new information: saline, enzymes, limbic hormones, trace minerals, electrolytes, opioid peptides... Tears. The rich flavor races through his distributed awareness with intoxicating intensity, near-erotic in its force. For a moment he loses himself in it, chasing a dream or half-forgotten genetic memory of his species’ ancient prehistory, before they left the oceans of their Mother World and evolved to live among the stars.

She tastes like a home he’s never known, and he wants more of her. He wants to sample all of her, in every mood.

“No! Not like that.” His avatar stammers, off-balance in the tide of his desire. She isn’t prey, but there are more pleasurable ways to taste her, for them both. “I have no wish to harm you. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t understand.”

How can she? It would break her even more.

“Please don’t cry,” he says, still kneeling before her. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? You must remain hydrated, and this—” He waves a hand at her face, glistening from the moisture running from her eyes and now her nose. “It can’t be helping.”

“Yes,” she hiccups. “No! Please just—leave me alone .” With that, her strength resurfaces. Relieved, he stands and backs away.

“I’ll leave you now,” he says, and walks away, faster than is strictly necessary. She makes no move to follow him.

He will always remember the taste of her tears, no matter what happens afterward.

* * *

She cries herself out on that strange warm floor, wrapped in the blanket he gave her. When she finally pulls herself together—scoured, empty, and as he predicted, terribly thirsty—more lights have appeared.

The hanging candelabras come up in a line, like an invitation, still not quite right , organic, alien. They lead to a perfect, ordinary, normal wooden door.

Distrustful, she lays a palm flat against it, then snatches her hand back with a sharp, in-drawn breath as it swings open under her touch. Beyond it waits a lushly furnished suite with a wide canopy bed, an oversized chair, and a standing wardrobe. The blue-black walls curve gently, concave between floor and ceiling, shimmering in the soft light with a faint iridescence.

“You had all this right here,” she mutters, “and you still woke me up on a lab table like some half-baked alien autopsy video? Here I thought E.T. would be smart .”

Shrugging off the inexplicable impression of unseen attention keenly focused on her, she steps cautiously inside. A crystal carafe waits on a bedside table, with a delicate, subtly asymmetrical glass beside it filled to the brim of blessedly cold water. She gulps down a glassful, then pours another from the jug, starting to feel a little more…human. Further exploration reveals another door, and behind it recognizable bathroom facilities with a huge, sunken tub set in the center of its floor, already full and steaming.

“Ok,” she mutters. “I could get used to this.”

She still doesn’t want to think about whatever unidentified gunk is drying stiff and tacky on her scalp. Now she can wash it off and hopefully never think of it again.

When she’s finally clean and pleasurably boneless, she emerges from the tub and wraps herself in a huge, plush towel, then stops short. She heard no one come in, noticed no movement, yet her discarded clothes somehow vanished from the floor.

“What the hell?”

The door opens before she can shove at it. She almost stumbles into the larger room, dripping water onto the floor, ready to scream at whatever beautiful, unearthly man or monster waits for her. But no one’s there, just that same watchful feeling—and an envelope lying on the bedside table.

She snatches it up. The paper has a unique aesthetic, thin, flexible, but crackling with a finely ribbed texture, and single sheet inside bears a message in flowing script.

My dear Kaitlyn,

You’ve come a very long way in a very short time. I fear I’ve proven myself a poor host who has failed to adequately consider the needs of your mind or body.

If you allow me, I’ll endeavor to remedy these failures to your satisfaction. Please join me for a meal when you’re ready.

Cassiel.

A quiet creak startles her as the wardrobe door swings open. It doesn’t look big enough to contain everything inside: silky, slinky gowns, billowing princess skirts, shimmery cocktail dresses, a confection of black lace and chenille with a bodice to match.

Running her hand over the soft fabric, she lands on a flowy, leaf-green satin jumpsuit with long sleeves and a plunged neckline. She’s not about to pick something she can’t run in. Nothing here resembles a bra or panties, so she goes without. The sensation of the satin between her thighs, sliding across her bare nipples, sends a shiver up her spine.

She’s trillions of miles from home, in a starship of unknown origin, captive of a man with unknown intent, and yet every new detail she encounters seem to offer a frisson of pleasure, as though charged with latent eroticism. If she ruins this satin romper because he didn’t leave her any underwear and his mothership is unreasonably sexy, that’s his fault, not hers.

For all the room’s luxury, it lacks a mirror. She settles for finger-combing her hair as it dries, twisting the bulk of it into a knot at her neck. Strands fall around her face in messy tendrils, but it will have to do.

Outside, the lights now curve around and somehow up , an unwinding spiral inviting her to an unseen higher level. When she looks down, only thick shadows lie beneath. She doesn’t look down again.

Where the slope levels out, a bone-pale, intricately carved archway rises high above her head, laced with unintelligible patterns. Beyond it, more shadows await. The sense of unseen watchfulness redoubles. Meanwhile, the lights that led her safely to this threshold wink out, all but the last one.

No going back now. She holds her head high and steps through the archway.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

A breeze from nowhere swirls around her, stirring the loose hair around her face and setting off a flurry of echoes. They build into a storm of far-off whispers, almost musical, then dissonant, like wind in pine boughs or the ghost of an orchestra tuning. The air carries a rich, sweet scent with it, and her mouth waters despite itself.

“ Cassiel? ”

“I’m here.” He must be closer than she would have guessed, yet that mysterious calm settles over her again. A flood of golden light illuminates him all at once, standing above her on a dais. Behind him waits a long table, laden with a feast.

He, too, dressed for this occasion, in a sweeping, dark red coat embroidered with curls of silver, slim black trousers, a scalloped frill of white shirt escaping from his lapels. For a split second, she catches an odd expression on his handsome face, gone before she can interpret it. His lips curve when his gaze meets hers, like her stunned reaction pleases him.

He’s a stranger. An alien kidnapper. A dangerous unknown.

He’s magnificent , and she’s in so much trouble.

* * *

Her sharp gasp cuts through him—has he miscalculated, frightened her further? Then his higher processing kicks in. Data gleaned during his brief orbit of her world and the pheromone spike in her salt-sweet biochemistry provide context for her parted lips, her wide, startled eyes, the slide of her long, graceful throat.

She’s hungry in more ways than one, drinking the sight of him like he’s a wellspring on a dust-dry moon.

He didn’t expect her to choose the garment she did. It suits her, a splash of green in his empty halls. It belongs to the world he stole her from, the color of photosynthesis, life that builds kingdoms out of air and light.

“This is…” she says. “You’re…”

He waits for additional morphemes that will make sense of her speech. With none apparently forthcoming, he chooses an appropriate response at random. “I wasn’t certain you would come.”

This seems to jolt her out of her daze. Her posture closes, brow creasing and mouth pressed into a thin line. “Did I really have a choice?”

“Of course. I would have sent sustenance to your chamber, had you asked it of me.”

“Right,” she says. “Like a prisoner.”

“Like a guest,” he corrects her, as the hope her initial response sparked in him sputters and fades.

“An unwilling guest, yes. So very different from a prisoner.”

It takes him a long interval to parse her tone, a mere fraction of one of her seconds. “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t have sarcasm where you come from, do you?”

Such feints and games of meaning make little sense from the colony’s perspective. He’s almost forgotten what it’s like, interacting as an individual with another discrete organism, her inner processes unknowable to him. “I am, you might say, long out of practice.”

The fluidity in her emotional affect has him straining to adapt. Her expression changes again, and she steps toward him, stopping at the bottom of the wide, shallow steps. She’s hungry, still, but hiding it, examining him as if running her own analysis. “Where do you come from, anyway? Are you alone in this place? Or are there…” She swallows. “Others, here. Like you.”

How to answer such questions? “Come,” he says, instead. “Sit. Eat. And then if you like…perhaps I can show you.”

He can show her where he came from, even if it’s not what she meant. He is alone, but not, and there are others, like him and not. He can embody any preference, give her almost anything she wants, except an explanation that will make sense to a member of a species with binary definitions of alone and together.

There are so many of him. There is only one him.

And now, her. Singular. Alone, with me. Together…

He extends a hand, inviting her to move closer, to join. For another long moment, she stares at his hand, then at him. Some Earthly threat assessment runs in the background of her gaze before she finally seems to come to a decision.

Her movements deliberate, almost challenging, she takes his hand and lets him lead her to the table, but frowns again when she takes in the foodstuffs spread there. “That can’t be—mac and cheese? If we’re so far from Earth, then where…Did you make all this?”

“I wasn’t sure what you liked,” he says. “You seemed partial to a prepackaged form, but I prepared a variety of other dishes popular in your home region.”

She’s already plunked herself down in a chair. For a moment he stands still and closes his eyes, feeling what it’s like to hold her, the warm weight of her thighs pressing into this other part of him. In the cleft between her legs, her heat pulses like a beacon, satin fabric clinging to the slick folds at her core.

With a shudder, he drags his awareness back from the whole to focus on this interaction. Oblivious to his lapse, she heaps food on her plate: the ground-wheat paste, shaped and boiled, that she calls macaroni , hot and dripping with molten, creamy cheese and topped with tidbits of cured meat; starchy tubers cut into straws, fried to a light crisp and salted well; greens and protein in a spiced sauce over soft, steamed whole grains.

She tries a bite of each, tentative at first with wide eyes, then with a soft sound in her throat that calls his every cell to attention. Her pleasure, his prerogative, a pull as steady as a magnet.

“This is amazing, ” she says, and then opens her eyes to frown at him. “I suppose I should thank you for not eating me instead.”

“I told you,” he says, stung. “That’s not why I brought you here.” Then he swallows, hard, as the still, breathless part of him now cupping the curves of her seated body whispers, not to eat, no. But to taste…

“Right. That’s the part you haven’t explained.” She pops another forkful of food into her mouth, savoring it this time, and he tries not to fixate on the way her lips wrap around the implement and pull it into the hot, wet depths of her mouth. “Why did you bring me here, Cassiel? Seems like a lot of trouble to go through, just to ask a girl to a fancy dinner date.”

He almost laughs because of how not wrong she is, but he knows he must take special care with this. He doesn’t want to make her cry again. The next time he tastes her, he wants to know her joy, not her despair.

“You called out,” he says, cautiously. “We came. And then—perhaps we, or I, acted too quickly. You were so beautiful, you see.”

Her fork pauses halfway to her lips. “What are you talking about?”

“Perhaps you didn’t mean to, but I heard you. All the way across the system, out here in the black—it had been a long time since…We had little choice. I had to follow it. I had to know whose call it was.”

“I don’t know what call you’re talking about.”

There’s no way around it. He must tell her, sooner or later. “It sang to me like a…symphony,” he tells her, soft with the memory of it. “Or perhaps your myths would liken it to a siren’s spell.”

“You’re saying I enchanted you.” She sounds skeptical, suspicious even, but her eyes are locked on his, as if some part of her can already read between the lines. “How?”

“Your pleasure. Your desire. You must understand,” he hastens, at her deepening frown. “I didn’t know, exactly…To our kind, such a call, ecstasy spooled out across the stars, we hear it in a different way?—”

Her fork clatters to the table. “This call. Please tell me it’s not?—”

“I can’t.” He circles toward her around the table in case she tries to run again. “It woke me from a long sleep and pulled me toward you. I didn’t know you, but I knew what you were. My mate. ”

“A mating call.” She leaps to her feet. “ Fuck me. ”

Surprised, he freezes behind her, a little to her right. “Are you sure?”

“ That’s not what I meant. ” She wheels on him. Her skin is flushed, deep pink and deeply becoming. Heat rolls off her in a wave. “While I was innocently, uh, enjoying myself, you were listening in. Getting off on some free earth girl porn.”

“I didn’t intend to! I couldn’t help it. I don’t make a habit of listening in on, hm, earth girls. Just you.”

“Just me,” she repeats, uncertainly.

“The call is a rare thing for my species.”

She folds her arms over her chest, jaw set. “How rare?”

“We…I was locked,” he says, “in distant orbit in this system, quiescent, for five hundred million of your planet’s years.”

A heavy silence falls. They face each other on the dais he made for her, the fate of his world hanging in the balance between them.

“You were out here, alone, all that time.”

“Yes.”

“That means you’re older than humanity. Older than sharks.”

“…Sharks?”

“Never mind.” She waves the question away, impatient now. “It’s not possible. No species can survive that long without…reproducing.”

“No Earth species. We…my people are travelers. Explorers. Builders, when the time is right. But we’re spacefarers first, and space takes a very long time to cross. Longer still, to find what we’re looking for.”

“What does that mean?”

It means I need you. “Your pleasure awakened me. It brought me to you. It made all this—for you.” It made me what I am . While the greater organism he serves is as old as he said, this body made in the image of her desire has only known an ambulatory existence for a few rotations of her world.

“You still haven’t told me why .”

“This vessel’s power source, its light, its warmth…it’s you.”

“Come again?”

“ Union fuels my people’s journeys between stars. If you let me in, let me taste you…” He swallows, his mouth watering. “It would mean everything. It would mean we could go anywhere. We could know home, again.”

He emerged from the greater whole for one purpose. That purpose now stands before him, ready to scream, or run, or maybe hit him, or all three at once. He can’t read the complicated emotions storming across her face without far more data and time to study.

We don’t have all the time in the worlds. Not anymore.

But she doesn’t do any of those things. “ Union, ” she repeats, thoughtfully. “You’re saying you abducted me because you want me for sex. For mating. ”

“That’s not?—”

“And then you’d take me home? Back to Earth?”

She’s brave , his mate. Brave, unexpected, and oh, so beautiful. In the distant stretches of the colony’s awareness, the individual who now calls himself Cassiel feels a sea change, a sensation of something essential, breaking. She’s shaken him. He can feel the utter ebb of grief, the way it will inevitably come crashing down on him. Like the sea after a tremor, echoes of yet another primordial dream.

In this moment, he doesn’t care about that. He's lost sight of the mission. All he can see now is her.

“My heart,” he says, naming the wild beat inside him. His adopted physiology seems to be developing a mind of its own. Wanting inexplicable things. Individuating. “It’s the only way I can. ”

* * *

“You’ll really take me home?” Kat asks the alien. “Promise?”

He reaches for her, as if to stroke her cheek or pull her close. Then he pauses, his hand suspended in mid-air. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

It’s not an easy question when posed by a beautiful man, one who keeps talking about her pleasure like it’s all-powerful, holy, necessary to his very being. He did kidnap her, though. Maybe she shouldn’t be so ready to let that slide. “I’m still not sure I have much of a choice.”

“Of course you have a choice. You could pleasure yourself …it will still power the journey. I collected your stimulator wand when I came for you.”

“You stole my vibrator ?” She suppresses a snicker. “You really are a freak.”

“It seemed important to you. I’ve been studying it,” he added, almost defensive, “and I think I could improve on a few functions, so if you’d like...”

“And that would work for you?”

“You could have anything, anyone you wish. It doesn’t have to be me. I could show you?—”

“ No ,” she says, and he stops, looking both worried and absurdly hopeful. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it. I want it to be you.”

It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, isn’t it? She gets to have it all: fuck a gorgeous self-proclaimed alien in real life and go home again. Her favorite book heroines would kill for a chance like this.

“All right,” he says, without moving toward her.

If it was him, in her dream—he certainly spoke with a voice that sounded the same—she almost misses the claiming, the overwhelming force he’d shown then. Her cheeks flare all over again. He can’t read my mind, can he? But he doesn’t stir, so…probably not.

“How does this work? Should I just kiss you now, or…?”

This seems to penetrate whatever daze he’s fallen under. He laughs softly, and then, all at once, he descends upon her, sweeping her up in his arms to pull her flush against him.

We’re explorers , he told her, and his kiss starts as an exploration—tasting, testing, probing—and then, abruptly, a conquering assault. His tongue feels human when it sweeps across hers, even if the teeth capturing her lip seem sharper than she’s used to.

He feels human elsewhere, too, though the hard ridge growing against her belly does seem, well, larger than life . When she grinds up against it, an experimental investigation of exactly what she’s gotten herself into, he makes a very human sound into her mouth, half growl, half moan. His hands—which, she notes, have five fingers, nails nicely clipped, with smooth, warm, human skin—slip down around her ass to the backs of her thighs. He lifts her off the ground as if to slot her onto him, if only they were both naked.

Pulling back just enough, his lips brush hers as he murmurs, “I hope you’re done eating, my beauty.”

“Why,” she asks, breathless, “were you hungry, too?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He licks into her mouth again. It is a hungry kiss, thirsty even, like a man finding an oasis in the desert. “It’s my turn to have my fill, I think.”

As he turns them around, her legs still wrapped around his middle, she realizes dimly that the table has disappeared entirely. In its place waits a bed much like the one in her chambers—no, identical to it. Hands busy with the back of her jumpsuit as she clings to him, he takes a few strides forward and spreads her on the bed. Kneeling over her with his eyes bright and wild, he tears the green satin from her body easily as ripping tissue paper, laying her bare.

“I knew you were going to eat me,” she gasps. “Just…not like this.”

“I could , you know.” He bares his teeth, suddenly sharper than before. “Eat you, like that. Just a little. If that’s what you want.”

“Um.” Her laugh quavers, high and nervous. “I’ll pass.”

“If you’re sure.” Leaning over her, he presses parted lips to her neck, over her collarbone, across the swell of her breasts. “I aim to please, remember?”

“How did you do that? You sound human. You feel human. But you can change?”

“Some things, I can.” He doesn’t bite down, but his tongue swirls around her nipple in lazy circles, tasting her before fastening on and suckling.

Pleasure ripples outward and she arches, crying his name. “Cassiel!”

“What do you want, little mate?”

Mate. The word settles hot in her belly. She tugs at his pants, looking for a button. “I want to see you, too.”

“Then you shall,” he says. “But there are other things I can show you. I can give you so much more. Heighten your pleasure just as I eased your fear.”

“Yes,” she whispers. “I want more.”

With a sinuous, slithering noise, oil-black restraints whip out from somewhere beneath her—from somewhere, it seems, inside the bed itself. They wrap around her wrists, pulling her hands back from his body and pinning them against the mattress. Tight but not painful, inexorable but with that strange, warm give, almost like living flesh. She’s helpless beneath him, a knowledge that builds the heat at her core. When he presses his hips forward so the ridge of his cock scrapes over her naked sex, she bucks into him and moans.

“You like to fight me, don’t you?” He does it again. “Especially when you can’t win.”

“Those are yours,” she says. “They’re you.” Then she gasps again as another glistening black tendril twines around her leg, coiling upward along her sensitive inner thigh toward her core. A wave of euphoria spills over her, pleasure layering upon pleasure: her helplessness, his eyes on her, his mouth on her other nipple now, drawing another moan from her throat.

“Oh, sweet little love.” He draws back, a wrenching loss of his touch. “Haven’t you noticed? Everything here is.”

Little love… “It was you, in my dream.” The tendril climbs higher. Exploring , delicate as a single finger dancing a slow path between her legs, insinuating itself among her folds, spreading her slick around her opening and making her tremble. “ Ah. Did that…happen?”

“It was still a dream, mostly. Merely a test. I had a lot of material to analyze, and much of it was contradictory. Nonsensical.” A wry grin flashes over his face and he drops his head to kiss his way up along the opposite leg from the tendril now ever-so-slowly coiling around her aching clit. “And alarming, at times. Do human women really prefer a shadow daddy ?”

“Shadow— what material? ” A terrible thought assembles itself from the wreckage of her higher brain functions. He took her vibrator when he picked her up, like an X-rated Barbie accessory, so what if he… “Cassiel! Have you been reading my Kindle library? Those books aren’t educational! They’re fiction. No fucking wonder .”

He raises his head, blinking at her. “It seemed like rather a lot of fucking, to me. And very educational.”

“Oh, so now you’re sassy too? What gives you the right ?”

“I hoped I could persuade you to forgive me.” His tongue flicks over her, then away, making her twitch and whine. “I had an imperative to fulfill, and I didn’t have much left in me. If I couldn’t keep you warm, fed, breathing…space is very cold and very dark, you see.”

“You could have told me! ”

“Would you have believed me?”

“No,” she sighs, as he settles between her thighs. “But it’s not…ah…what I like reading is a fantasy. When it comes to reality, I prefer…”

“What?”

“ Honesty. ”

He looks up at her, eyes darker than she remembers. “Then,” he says, “ honestly , all I want right now is to make you come.”

* * *

She tastes like the rich salt of ancestral seas, like the tang of an alien spring, like rich air he’s never breathed.

She tastes like home.

Her ecstasy washes over him, a rising tide. She keens and moans, music marked by breathy little gasps, variations of the song that called him across the empty darkness to her small, bright world.

He laps hungrily at her, finding his new center of gravity in the small bundle of nerves at the top of her slit, where her pleasure builds, wave upon wave. Her body trembles beneath him, her legs shaking around him. She opens like a flower, frilled lips slick with her arousal.

Exploring her, he runs his tongue lower, drawn to her entrance by her heady, coaxing scent. Here is where he wants to sink himself deep inside her, give her all he has. Instead, he works her gently open with a tendril, the slender, deft appendage finding the most sensitive spot within her. Rhythmic pressure draws a desperate, wanton noise from her throat, and then, in broken syllables, the name he gave her to call him by.

“Cassiel…”

The sound is too sweet. He wants to hear it again. With gently increasing pressure, he plunges deeper inside, redoubles his attention at her clitoral bud, and spreads her open with his fingers, seeking more access, more sensation, more breathless noises as his own intoxication grows. Drunk on her juices, achingly hard, he can barely maintain control over the surging instinct that demands he follow through on his imperative. He could take her, rut her, breed her here and now.

He shudders at the thought of filling her, spilling his seed within her until her belly swells with the promise of new life, new worlds, potential energy .

But he made her a promise.

Instead, he brings her to her peak again and again, thrusting his fingers inside as he explores further. The press of another tendril against her lower hole raises the pitch of her frenzied cries to gratifying new heights. She instantly yields to his invasion there, her muscles fluttering as they clutch and spasm around him. “ God ,” she whimpers, “yes, please fill me. I want you inside me. Everywhere.”

He pushes deeper into her tight warmth, fingers working her cunt in rhythm as he suckles her swollen clit. Her words dissolve into inarticulate screams, her limbs shaking as she comes apart, and he loses himself in her climax. Every part of him shudders now, not just the one atop her. The colony trembles as the power of her pleasure flows through it, moves it, drives it toward its inevitable end.

She pulls him back to himself, fingers clawing at his shoulders in a bid to draw him upward, to cover her further. It takes a few of her seconds for him to process her breathless, panting words.

“I want your cock,” she says. “Let me see you. Feel you.”

In a moment of weakness, he lets her guide his position over her, his member straining against the fabric of the tight-fitting clothing he wore for her. Her heat sears through him as she wraps her legs around him. Belatedly, he realizes he has released the restraints at her ankles.

“Fuck me, Cassiel. I mean it this time.”

It would be so easy to drive himself into her, lock their bodies together, claim her and seal their fates. It takes every ounce of free will to hold himself back.

“What is it?” A strange look crosses her face. The small hands that grasped his shoulders now stroke over his skin, come up to cup his face with a tenderness that almost breaks him. “If your equipment is…you know, different…I don’t care. I swear. I told you, if we’re going to do this, we should do it. I don’t want to go home without knowing what it’s like to fuck…” She stops, biting her lip.

“What?” he grates out, from the edge of his control. “An alien? A monster? Say it. ”

“ You.”

He can’t help it. He drops his head into the curve of her shoulder, breathing in the wild scent of her, his life’s elixir, the overwhelming cocktail of pheromones screaming at him that she’s ready, willing, and wanting. That she literally asked for it.

But she doesn’t know what she’s asking for. She’s not asking for eternity, to be taken away from everything she’s ever known, to become his goddess, his purpose, his world. She only wants to try this body out before she leaves him in the dark forever.

“I can’t,” he whispers. “ We can’t. Please, don’t ask it of me.”

“Why not? You said you wanted to mate.” Her legs tighten around his waist, and the heat at her center scalds him and soaks through to the cock she’s begging for.

“ No .” The effort in that single word almost breaks him. Dimly, he can hear the uproar of the colony mind. The rest of him doesn’t understand what he’s waiting for. “Trust me on this. You don’t want this. You just think you do. Don’t ask me again.”

He’s out of synchrony, at cross-purposes with himself. As an individual, this body was made with a singular purpose: to love her, to protect her with his very life. He knows what this life will hold for her. Even if letting her go means the colony’s end, or another few millennia floating senseless in the dark, he can’t claim her like that.

But he won’t have the will to hold back any longer if she begs him for it.

“I don’t understand.”

He pulls away from her. His chest aches, and the lungs designed to breathe her atmosphere seem determined to malfunction. This body isn’t him, not really. If she saw the rest of him, she wouldn’t look so bereft and so eager all at once.

“There would be no going back,” he says. “You’d be mine, if I entered you like that. Neither of us would have a choice, then.” Not a meaningful one, at least. His lost love had chosen certain death over eternity with him. She’d taken a part of him with her into the void when she went.

“You don’t want me.” Her voice comes out small, and pain tightens in her face.

“Kat. No. Every part of me wants to make you mine. But it would…change you. Change both of us. It would bind us, permanently.”

“Oh.” She goes still, silent, wide eyes searching his. “Then…”

“I will not do this,” he says softly. “I promised to take you home. But I am more than happy to have you in other ways. I’ll give you as many orgasms as your body can take, until we’re back within your planet’s orbit, safe and sound.”

Her expression shifts. She nods, but mischief sparks in her eyes, and her mouth curves slightly as she says, “I said I wanted you everywhere. It seems like you have more than enough ways to be inside me. I didn’t say what had to go where.”

“What…?”

“Come here,” she says, and then when he still doesn’t move, she scoots down lower on the bed. She tugs at his waistband, pulling it down his hips until his cock springs free, hard and throbbing, pre-ejaculate beading at its head. “How much of that dream of mine did you see, Cassiel? What do you remember?”

His voice almost doesn’t come, and when it does, it’s a rough rasp, nearly a growl. “All of it,” he says. “Kaitlyn, I remember everything .”

It wasn’t him , in the dream she means, not exactly. Hormones and electrical stimulation stimulated her brain to create a fantasy that justified her unconscious arousal. But the information he gleaned from it gave him plenty to work with. He never thought that she would remember it, much less like this, her pupils wide and dark with unbridled lust as she drinks in the sight of him bare before her.

“Fuck my mouth like that,” she says. “Let me taste you. Please? That wouldn’t be the same as you…” Her breath catches and her small pink tongue sweeps across her lips. She swallows hard. “ Mating with me, in the way you said before.”

She’s perfect. She’s everything he could want, even if he can’t have her, not like that. But she’s giving him this.

A groan rises in his chest as he looks down at her, spread out on the mattress for him. Eyes heavy-lidded, she opens her mouth and tips her head back, tongue curling up with anticipatory eagerness.

He can’t resist the invitation. When he drives his cock between her lips, her choked moan makes his hips jerk forward further. Carefully, he thrusts further into the wet warmth. His girth stretches her little mouth open farther than he imagined possible, and he pulls back before he pushes her gag reflex too far.

“Please,” she says, when he withdraws, her lips still brushing him. “I can take it. Let me try, at least.”

“I can…make adjustments, if you’d like me to suppress that reflex.” It’s an easy enough biochemical fix, at least temporarily.

Eyes wide, she nods again, and he pushes deep once more, experimenting with minute hormonal changes in the fluids she’s so greedily suckling from him. Returning his tendrils to her pussy, he makes another involuntary, guttural sound when he finds her soaking with even more moisture than before. He works into her everywhere, just like she asked for, strumming her clit, invading her holes, and she cries out around his cock, helpless and impaled on him.

Three ways he can have her, and she surrenders all of them to him.

Her climax cuts through him with a sharp sweetness close to agony. He roars, spending himself in her, coating the back of her throat with his seed. Her throat squeezes him, vise-tight, as she swallows, and he almost comes a second time, his cock over-sensitized and throbbing, buried in her.

He wants more. He wants everything. But this will have to be enough.

He takes her again, rides her mercilessly from peak to gasping peak, and with everything she gives him, he carries her home.

* * *

A dim, pale blue glow seeps into the room, cold and diffuse as dawn. Roused by a new chill in the air, Kat opens her eyes to find herself alone.

She stirs, her muscles sore, but deliciously so, each ache an exquisite memory of the pleasure Cassiel wrung from her. Nothing binds her here anymore. Her green satin jumpsuit lies crumpled beneath her, torn and shed like a skin. She pulls a sheet from the bed and wraps it around her instead.

“Hello?” she calls softly. “Cassiel? Where did you go?”

No answer. Her bare feet meet a chilly, quiescent surface, no longer humming with electric warmth. Shivering, she tilts her head up, trying to gauge the dimensions of the ship’s hull.

A fathomless dark expanse stretches above her, its dizzying depths pierced here and there by a faint point of light. Stars.

She stands beneath a translucent dome, a shell of sorts, its curvature visible only in the refraction of light. Seeking the source of that faint illumination, she turns in place, then stops with a soft gasp.

For a moment she doesn’t understand what she’s looking at, as a sliver at the meridian grows to a wide, shallow crescent of white light. Then it expands into a curving slice marbled with blue and speckled white, here and there broken by greenish-brown?—

Earth.

“Holy shit,” she breathes, and the bright half-circle blurs, her eyes wet with sudden tears.

“Your world is beautiful . ”

She jumps at the voice. The transparent dome brightens with the bluish glow of Earthrise, but Cassiel is nowhere in sight. And this voice isn’t quite the same: more resonant, less human. It echoes from everywhere and nowhere, leaving whispers trailing through the air behind it.

“Where are you?” she says. “Where did you go?”

“If you mean the one who brought you here,” the voice says calmly, “he is gone. He served his purpose. Not well, in the end, but he did the best he could.”

The words have an edge to them, and her skin prickles. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Cassiel?”

The hissing response might almost be laughter. “We are Cassiel, just as much as he was. That name is merely a collection of sounds he gave you to call upon.”

“You’re not him. No way. He was…” Kind. “Different.”

“We made him for that, so you would believe as much. The truth is more complicated.” Then, in a contemplative tone, “There is much about us that a human would find difficult to understand.”

Kat huffs. “On second thought, maybe you’re just the same. He didn’t answer my questions either.”

“He answered more than enough,” the voice rumbles. “Now, time grows short. We are bound to do as he agreed. We will send you home.”

“No,” she says, breathless. “I want to see him.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“Why not?” she demands, and then a terrible thought occurs to her. “Did you kill him? You creepy great fuck. You bring me out to the edge of the solar system, have him rail me senseless for reasons , then bring me back here, and for what? What was the point? ”

“That doesn’t matter now.” It seems to grow distant, as if withdrawing from her fury. “You seem…distressed. Perhaps we shouldn’t have woken you.” Then, on a whisper, almost another voice entirely: “We wouldn’t have, but he said you might like to see your world from another perspective.”

She twists around to look at her home planet again, fully risen now like a small blue sun. The other side of the craft must face the true sun, somewhere far beneath her feet. “It is beautiful,” she says. “I’m glad I saw it like this. But I wish…” I wish I could have seen it with him.

“We did not expect you to be angered by it,” the voice says, softly, and for a moment, it sounds familiar.

Her throat catches, a new ache, different from the rest.

She shouldn’t care this much. It was one night. Wasn’t it? How long did she spend in that bed with him, as he found every world-shattering way to make her come, except for one?

You’d be mine…mine forever, he said. No turning back.

I won’t do that to you.

She turns back.

Then she blinks, because the bed has transformed. It’s a shuttle pod of some sort, curving hatch open and waiting, the bedding inside rucked to fit the new shape contained within a gleaming, nacreous carapace. In its cushioned center, neatly folded, she recognizes the t-shirt and shorts she wore when she arrived.

“Um,” she says.

“There is little time. This will take you home.” The command in the voice presupposes her obedience.

“I’m not getting in there.” But she grabs the t-shirt and pulls it over her head. It smells clean and soft, freshly laundered. She lets the sheet drift to the floor.

“You must.” It’s almost gentle, now. “It is the only way.”

Kat stares at the pod. She casts a glance over her shoulder at the pale blue marble hanging in a vast black space. Vertigo seizes her, a disorienting sense that nothing is as it should be, with the Earth above her head, the sky below. The weight of her world presses at the back of her neck, rank and damp as the breath of a great beast, breathing.

She can go home. See her friends, go on with her life. Act like nothing has changed.

But now, in the cold light of morning, it seems that everything has.

He told me he needed me.

If I leave, what happens to him?

“I said no,” she says, and takes off running.

“Kaitlyn, wait!”

She ignores the voice, racing away from the outward curve of the dome toward the center. This space can’t represent the whole vessel. There has to be a way to go further in.

And there is. The dome resolves into the whorled head of a descending spiral. A rounded corridor opens before her, curving gently downward into darkness. Blue-green phosphorescence blooms around her, as if the ship lights the way for her, under some obligation still to ensure she doesn’t tumble down a long slope to her death.

“Go back,” the voice entreats, less booming now that it has a smaller space to amplify it. “This place was not made for you. It’s not safe.”

“Oh, shut up,” she snaps, but when she rounds the next corner, the corridor opens up, and her own voice fails her.

Bodies. They line this long, tiered chamber, tens of them, hundreds of them. Each hangs suspended in a glowing blue-green pod, not so different from the one she ran from. Some are human, or at least humanoid with bestial or monstrous features: curled horns, folded leathery wings, scales or fur, tusks or tentacles…but all naked, and all unmistakably male.

Kat stares, half in horror, half in fascination at the wide array of phallic diversity. Then she shudders. None of these people are awake. It feels wrong to stare at them, hanging there like slabs of meat, no matter how impressive a display of the meat in question.

“We didn’t mean for you to see them. Not like this.” The voice sounds almost worried. Apologetic, even.

She doesn’t know where to look. “Like what? Flaccid ? I’m sure it happens to all the…” Say it. She didn’t want to hurt him, when he said that before. Now... “Monsters. No offense.”

For the first time, amusement tinges the disembodied voice. “Of course it must look alarming. We weren’t certain what you liked, so we may have over-prepared.”

“Wait. You’re saying—these are all you.”

“Yes,” he—it—they say. “You could have had any of these, more than one. All of them. You only had to ask.”

Made to order from her very own why-choose catalogue. Intriguing. Horrifying. Checks out. “And they’re all…alive?”

“In a sense. They are only segments, undifferentiated from the whole.”

“But when they differentiate, they’re still you. They’re all the same.”

“Genetically identical. Our zooids exist in synchrony but act independently. These are specialists.”

She doesn’t have to ask what specialty. “This is where Cassiel came from. Made for one purpose.” She picks up her pace. “You used him. He was just bait. ”

Bait, who had defied his collective’s will to send her home.

“No!” The voice seems shaken, for once. “For a much higher purpose. Some might say the most essential.”

“You mean fucking.”

“ Mating ,” the voice rumbles, and despite herself, her stomach flips.

“And here I thought aliens would be enlightened.” She rolls her eyes, walking faster, deeper into that rogue’s gallery of masculine fantasies. “Apparently male single-mindedness is universal. Why him?”

Her unseen companion takes a moment to answer, as if nonplussed. “What?”

“Out of all these,” she sweeps an arm wide, encompassing a thousand variations on a theme of cock, “he was the chosen one. I want to know why.”

“We didn’t choose him,” the voice says, after another long pause. “He was the one you chose.”

“Oh, fuck off. When did I get to choose? ” She peers into each translucent pod as she passes. Not at their…attributes, now, but at their faces. “I was asleep. And then I was afraid. And he made me feel…not afraid at all. But that was a trick. He didn’t even deny it.”

“Biochemical compatibility. Not a trick. You knew him in your body.” Then, dropping lower, “Didn’t you?”

“Stop it,” she grates out. “Trick or no trick, you don’t get to play me. Whoever and whatever you are. Tell me where he is.”

“Why?” It’s the second time he’s questioned her, instead of the other way around, and she can’t deny how good it feels to throw him off-balance.

She’s tired of asking. “Cassiel must be here somewhere. I want to see him.”

“That’s not possible.”

“You keep saying that.” Her fists clench at her sides. “If you’ve hurt him, punished him because he wouldn’t impregnate me or fulfill whatever weird hellish plan you had for us, I’ll destroy you.”

A heavy silence falls.

“Oh, now you’ve got nothing to say? Come on, you coward! You could at least show me your true face. You owe me that, at least. Look me in the eye when you tell me what you’ve done to my?—”

She snaps her mouth shut around the word, but it seems to hang there anyway in the quiet corridor, at home among the rest of the attractive horrors.

My mate.

“I don’t understand.” It’s a murmur, one she has to strain her ears to hear. “You didn’t want that. Didn’t want to stay.”

“Yeah, well. Humans are complicated. ” She casts a glance around at the gallery of rogues and monsters. For a moment, it’s like she’s trapped in a hall of mirrors, every reflection a facet of… her. Her own lust, in all the shapes it’s taken. “There’s so many of you, but we can hold a whole host of conflicting desires in one individual psyche. I can want ten impossible things before breakfast. Maybe that’s our specialty.”

The voice doesn’t respond.

“Hello?” She strides forward again. The entire vessel can’t be devoted to the production of sex objects. “Are you even listening? I can want to go home, and also want the stars. I can miss the earth, and also miss the guy who made me come until I’m pretty sure I actually passed out, but more importantly, was kind to me. He cared. I can love you for letting me have him, and be willing to wreck you for taking him away.”

She catches a sobbing breath and finds herself at the end of the assembly line, staring at what could be a door. Or a wall to break herself on. “That’s what humans are like. That’s what I’m like. Is that why you won’t let me stay?”

Raising her hand, she places it flat against the smooth, cool shell in front of her. Exhaustion overtakes her, suddenly, and she leans her forehead against it.

When it shifts, irises outward in a spiral motion, she almost falls forward on her face.

“ Asshole. You could have warned me!”

The corridor that’s opened up to her doesn’t light up the way the upper level did. It absorbs light, an absence so intense it hurts her eyes.

“Are you sure you want to know?” The words come low and pained out of the darkness, without echoes, as from a single throat.

“I want to see you.” But she doesn’t have to. She already knows him, even in the dark.

There’s no answer, just a long, ragged hiss like an in-drawn breath.

She takes a step forward into the darkness, lets it swallow her. “I told you I wanted honesty. Give me that, at least.”

In the absence of light, a strange, sweet scent, his scent, suddenly fills her senses. Her trepidation drains away.

With her next step, her foot meets nothing but empty air, and she falls.

This is it, she thinks, still without a trace of fear. It’s clearly a trap. A classic honey pot. Now I’m definitely going to get eaten.

And then, something supple and rippling as corded muscle whips soundlessly out of the dark to wrap around her waist, stopping her fall.

It lowers her gently until her feet touch down on something solid. As it releases her, the darkness ebbs, and she can see him.

Cassiel’s eyes meet hers, wide and wild, his pupils blown. His beautiful face twists with something close to agony. He’s seated on a chair of sorts— a throne? Thick cords bind his wrists and ankles, holding him in place, the same kind that bound her when she first awakened on this ship.

He’s also naked, fully erect, his cock jutting between his parted legs and swelling further under her gaze. “You shouldn’t have come,” he grates out, teeth bared. “It’s not safe.”

The chamber doesn’t look safe. More of the iridescent dark cords line the walls and snake across the floor. They move in waves and coils, with a strange, sinuous synchrony.

“I’m not afraid.”

His chin falls forward onto his bare chest, as if he can’t hold it high any longer. “You should be.”

“I can’t be. Not around you.” She steps carefully forward. The tentacle-like cords seem to make way for her, clearing themselves courteously to the sides. “What did they do to you?”

The chair he’s bound to has a curving, organic shape, but it’s part of something larger. The bindings pulse where they touch his skin, and bruise-purple veins stand out rigid and dark on his forearms.

There’s technology here, of a sort, and a tangible crackle of energy, an ultraviolet phosphorescence. She can see it if she doesn’t try to look right at it, like an alien magic eye puzzle.

“I told myself you couldn’t destroy me.” He doesn’t raise his head, his voice quiet enough she strains to hear him over the deep electric hum in the air, at the very edge of audible frequencies.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says, flushing. “I didn’t mean you .”

“It doesn’t matter. You already have.”

“What? Why? ”

“Your pleasure,” he says, voice tight. “Our power. We’re almost finished now.”

“Power…” She stares around her. “This is an engine room, isn’t it?” A half-formed idea teases her mind. Unity. Resonance. Fusion.

Connection lies at the core of this alien technology, potential energy released by the merging of wildly different elements. It answers a question she didn’t know to ask until she came here, saw this, knew him . It blows her pet theorems out of the water, upends them in an instant. It changes everything.

Experimental physics comes with inherent risks. A good scientist must cultivate the will to understand the incomprehensible, to unmake the knowns of the universe to account for new data.

“I said I’d bring you home.” Cassiel writhes in the chair— a pilot’s chair? —as if he’s trying to escape his bonds, and he bites his lip like he’s in pain. “I made you a promise. Why won’t you let me keep it?”

You already did. “They plugged you in like a battery. They’re using you, Cassiel.”

“This is what I am,” he grates between bared teeth. “I told you. You should…leave. She did.”

That gives her pause. “ She who?”

“It doesn’t matter.” The tentacles whip out from the throne, from the walls. They push her backward. “It was…a long time ago.”

Apparently even aliens have ex-girlfriend trauma. “I’m not her , ok?” Digging in, she slaps the whipping tendrils back. “I’m not going anywhere. My choice.”

“We’re out of time, love.” He pants, his body flexing against the restraints. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

“Hold on how?” Why is he holding back? He seems to have some sway over the cord-like tentacles in this room, but if so, that means he could have made them release him.

“I’m weak, Kaitlyn. Don’t you understand?” His back arches, his cock rigid and swelling larger still, dark, ropy veins standing out along his length. “I’m weak for you. I could lose control, and then…”

“Then you’d take me,” she says calmly. “You’d make me your mate.”

“ Don’t. Tempt me.”

“Try and stop me,” she counters, pushing at the resistance of the tendrils. All at once, they make way for her. She strides unimpeded toward his throne.

Finally, he raises his head as she stands looking down on him. “Kaitlyn. Please. I warned you not to?—”

“Shh.” She reaches out, places a finger over his mouth. “I don’t care.”

His lips part under her touch, his expression dazed. She poises herself over him, bare under her t-shirt, and a feral sound rises in his throat as the tip of his cock nudges against her entrance. The contact jolts through her, electric pleasure with the force of a live wire. It heats her from the inside out, and she’s instantly slick with overwhelming need that coats him and trickles agonizingly down the insides of her thighs.

“You can’t…” His voice breaks, torment and desire mingling in his eyes. “This will change everything. You won’t be able to go home.”

He thinks he’s saving me. But she doesn’t want to be saved. Somewhere between the promise he made her and all the ways they found to have each other, in the long dark journey back from the edge of the solar system, the change he threatened must have taken hold. She can’t imagine leaving him, not like this, not now.

He warned her of an unbreakable, permanent bond. He didn’t mention it would come with an all-consuming need to have him in her, over her, around her, as close and in as many ways as possible. She would crawl inside his skin, as if it weren’t enough that the ship that carries her is just another part of him.

Is it really my choice?

The answer resonates in every cell of her being. She can’t go back to her life before this, not without having him, not after he laid the universe at her feet.

“Cassiel.” She leans her forehead against his. “I am home.”

She lowers herself onto him, inch by inch, her body straining to contain him. His head drops back against the coiling shell of the seat, and he bucks his hips up, pushing deep inside her. Driving himself home. Stretching her as the base of his cock swells to fill her even more. When she tries to rise again, she can’t go far.

His eyes meet hers, fathomless, dark, and heated with an infrared glow more felt than seen, a relentless, inexorable gravity drawing her into him, molten at her core. “I warned you. No…going back.”

“Bound together. I want that. God, I can feel it.” A fractional lift of her hips, and then she slides back down, the curve of him hitting every secret place inside her with exquisite friction. “Fuck, Cassiel…It’s so good, it’s too much, I can’t …”

His hands close around her hips, gripping them hard enough to bruise, but she’s beyond caring. He moves her on him, slamming deeper inside her with each thrust. Then, with a growl and a fluid movement, he surges forward, bearing her down to the floor. She moans at the pressure and sensation as the knot at his base takes more of her weight, dragging her along with him. He’s locked inside her, and she couldn’t stop this if she wanted to, not anymore. Maybe she never could.

She doesn’t want to, doesn’t want anything but this pleasure, forever and always.

The thought almost frightens her before it dissolves in a dizzying, abrupt peak, her cries echoing wildly in her ears. He bears down on her with slow, agonizingly short thrusts. “You take me so well, little mate,” he groans into her neck. “Want to breed you. Make you mine.”

“ God, yes.” She wants him spilling inside her, wants to take his seed over and over until her body overflows with him. “I need it. Need you. Please?—”

Her plea dissolves into a helpless scream of pleasure as he rises to his knees and spins her away from him, still sheathed as deep as he can go, her hands scrabbling for purchase as he pounds into her. His rhythm turns ragged, and suddenly he’s not holding back anymore. Each thrust shakes her body, rattling her bones and sending sparks of ecstasy up her spine. He grips her thighs for purchase, pulling her half off the ground as he ruts into her with ragged panting gasps that roll hot and sweet over her neck.

Then, with a roar, he closes his teeth over her nape. With one last shuddering thrust, his release floods into her. Exquisitely sensitized, she cries out with every pump of his seed, each pulling another white-hot wave of orgasmic pleasure from her.

“Cassiel?” Dimly, she realizes he’s fucking her through her climax, picking up speed again.

“Yes, love?”

She can hardly manage words, but this seems important. “Whatever…happens. You need…to know. I… aaahhh . I chose this. I chose you. My mate.”

“ Mine, ” he says, driving hard and deep inside her, and she has no more words to give him. Keening, incoherent, she’s barely human anymore, an entity of pure energy, pure sensation, and utterly, entirely his .

This time, when he spends himself inside her and they come together, she sees stars.

* * *

“Cassiel,” his mate says, a long time later. “What comes next?”

They’re lying together on the floor of the ship’s core, still joined. The frantic force of the first mating frenzy has loosened its hold, at least enough that they have breath to speak with.

Breath. It fascinates him, how quickly he’s acclimated to this shape, her shape, this body that fits her so well. And with it, how his will has strengthened, until he holds sway over the colony. It doesn’t rule him anymore. He rules it.

Some functions have accepted that easily. The ship-form responds to his every thought now without resistance, but other parts need more time to adjust. He has much to learn about what it means to choose for himself in this new form.

“You come next.” He rolls his hips lazily, drawing a gratifying noise from the human woman beneath him. He’s still buried deep within her, her body fluttering with orgasmic contractions around him. Her inner muscles grip him like she doesn’t want to let him go. “And then, maybe me again.”

“I’m serious,” she gasps, when they can speak once more. “I want to know what happens now.”

“That depends on you.” He says it into the soft skin at her neck, just to feel her shiver. “I meant every word, when I said we could go anywhere.”

“We can go anywhere, but I can never leave. Is that right?”

He stretches his awareness toward his greater whole, receiving a grudging answer. The colony doesn’t want her setting foot outside its reach, not after what happened last time. It wants control. But that belongs to him, now.

“I cannot be apart from you.” He says it with some uncertainty at first, but in speaking it, he can feel the truth in it. “But I won’t keep you here against your will.” He doesn’t like that much either, but she chose him once. Maybe she will again.

“I don’t want to leave you .” She strokes his back, his hair, with gentle fingers as if sensing his distress. “What if…would you come with me? Could you survive outside the ship?”

He rolls onto his back, pulling her with him and over him. The mating tendrils released their hold hours ago, satisfied by how well he’d filled her, as his seed spilled down her thighs in softly phosphorescent rivulets. He had gone on rutting her on this floor because she begged him to, because he wanted to, because it felt so good. Not biological imperative, but his choice and hers, together.

How far does his new freedom extend?

“I don’t know. We could try.” The colony likes this even less, flooding his mind with warnings about contamination, hostile environments, and violent planet-dwellers, but he ignores them. “It has never been done before, but we never mated with a human, either.”

“All right.” She grins up at him, a challenge and an invitation. “My place or yours?”

“If you want to visit Earth, we’re already in orbit.”

“We can start there.” Then she laughs. “At the very least, I should take you home to meet my mother.”

“Your…mother?” Honestly, that sounds terrifying. An alien planet, with alien customs, in an environment wholly out of his influence, on the home turf of his mate’s progenitor, and yet…

She’s been so brave for him. It seems right that he should do the same for her.

“I’d like that,” he says, and his courage begins with her kiss.