He released her breasts to kiss down her belly. She sighed contently and brushed her fingers over her nipples. His tongue moved against her slit, over her clit, and dipped inside her. She breathed out, warmth spiraling up from her core to spread out across her body.
He explored her folds with gentle fingers and lips before moving back to her clit, achingly slow and her body got wetter, like it begged him to pay it more attention. She moaned as he slowly swirled his tongue around her, explored every ridge and fold.
She growled. “You aren’t going to get me to beg, wolf.”
“Are you sure about that?” His eyes peered up from over her mound, a wicked gleam in them. His finger drew a pattern inside her, and she squirmed, body rewarding him with a rush of dampness.
“I am going to… do… terrible…things to you,” she panted as he brought her a notch higher. He hadn’t let her play with his body in the Biome, but he was going to be panting her name before this was over.
“I hope so.” He shifted his finger to press upwards, touching a sensitive spot she hadn’t known was there, and nearly bringing her off the bed.
She squirmed away from him, body throbbing, and pounced. “Your turn.”
“If you insist. Do your worst.” He settled back, oozing smugness, and gestured grandly to his rigid body.
She descended between his legs, admiring the iron muscle and combination of scarred and smooth skin. She placed her hands on the inside of his thighs and pushed upwards, savoring the way his muscle filled her grip, and kept going to cup his balls in one hand, and grasped his length in the other.
She growled happily to herself, enjoying the weight of his balls in her palm and the thickness of his cock in the other. He tangled a hand in her hair as she bent to lick his tip, then slid her lips down his length. She stroked the base of his cock with her thumb, gently pulling on the tender skin of his sack, and he hissed, his cock throbbing in her mouth.
She pulled up against his grip, catching his eye for a second, then ducked forward She slid her tongue down to the base, then deeper into the soft pocket where his cock disappeared into his sack. He jumped, gasping, and his fingers raked her hair.
She squirmed against the punishing heat between her thighs and worked her tongue along the hidden base of his cock while stroking his length with her hand.
“That’s enough,” he said, voice thick.
“I don’t think so,” she said even as the rumble of his voice rolled pleasure down her spine. She still had a firm grip on him. He wasn’t in a position to negotiate. She squeezed, stroking downward, and he hissed, more fluid beading on his tip.
He tugged more firmly, commanding, and she released him, and let him pull her across his thighs. He delivered a stinging swat to her ass.
She’d always hated to be spanked, but Rainer sent a guilty thrill through her. “Again.”
A harder swat delivered to the other cheek, then he tumbled her into the blankets.
“Wicked she-wolf,” he half-crooned, half-groaned, shifting so he slid along her dampness.
Her body howled for his, the emptiness inside her begging for him. Every nerve pled for him.
She arched and shifted to greet him as he entered her. Her body felt like it shone as every nerve came alive again, like they hadn’t been alive since they’d been in the Biome. She raked her fingernails along his biceps, his back, mewled as he moved within her, drawing her in, pulling her closer and closer.
Pleasure crashed over and through her. She held onto him before it carried her away, distantly aware of his own body shaking in her grip.
She collapsed back into the blankets, breathing hard.
He looked down at her. “Lachesis?”
“I’m fine.” Better than fine. Some parts of her were the happiest they’d ever been. Her nether regions still sparkled and shifted, suspended between pain and more, please. Even her ass cheeks still tingled from the quality spanking.
“I should be more gentle with you.” He kissed her lightly.
If she had to end up back in Medical, this was how to do it. Worth it, but she wasn’t going to feed his ego by telling him that. She hooked a leg around his and pulled herself up to kiss him. “You only made me finish once in the Biome.”
“And?”
“Do I need to let you rest and go into the other bedroom? I would think you would know she-wolves have ravenous appetites.”
The bunk-tales about she-wolves being insatiable were mostly fiction, but she was feeling quite hungry that particular evening, and was sort of curious how far she could push Rainer and her own body.
He grinned, teeth looking a little sharper than normal in the shadowy light of the bedroom. “Oh, she-wolf, having your hair in my lap may have been too novel to resist for long, but now that the edge is off, the fun shall begin.”
She laughed as he started all over again.
Omission
Something tore Lachesis out of her dreams.
Still gasping and clutching his chest, dripping sweat, Rainer fought the blankets off and stumbled out of bed. He reeked of sweat, and something that sickened her.
He stumbled towards the door, choking like a bone was in his throat.
“Rainer,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.
He gestured with his free hand and rasped something that might have been nightmare. In the darkness, his sweat-soaked form shone like a glossy silhouette.
She touched his pillow. Wet.
She listened as he stumbled into the kitchen. Yanked down a glass—which didn’t shatter, but she heard the clatter of it hit the countertop a bit too hard—and the sink run.
She pushed the mangled blankets off her legs.
The large screen in the front room danced with the usual multi-colored patterns. In the dim light, Rainer stood in the kitchen, hands braced on the countertop, breathing hard.
“Rainer,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle him.
“Go back to bed, Lachesis,” he rasped around gulps of breath.
Her implacable husband suddenly chased out of his bed by a nightmare didn’t get to tell her to go back to bed like this was nothing.
His scent stuck in her nostrils like the acrid scent of burning plastics and the deadly scent of ozone. Back on Earth, people had generally liked the scent of ozone. It was the scent of a summer storm. On the ships, there were no thunderstorms. The smell of ozone meant ionizing radiation, and that meant billions of invisible bullets ripping apart your DNA and scorching the flesh-bag called your body.
Rainer, still braced on the counter, said, “I’m fine, Lachesis. I need a few minutes.”
Excellent. That meant she could keep waiting with him.
He let out an explosive breath he’d been holding, straightened, ran a hand through his soaked hair, and walked into the main room, didn’t seem to notice her, and sat down on the couch in his usual place, and leaned forward on his knees, head in his hands. After a minute, he shifted his design tablet to his knees, picked up the stylus, and began to sketch.
The stylus moved quickly, drawing sweeping broad strokes, the bands of color rough-edged and unusual, and he’d tap the screen in rapid, swift movements, going through palettes of colors and brushes.
She tilted her head to the side to try to get a better look without getting too much closer and breaking his concentration. He worked with those big, broad strokes, laying down colors and shapes, tapping, daubing, changing brush shapes. Within fifteen minutes a sunrise had taken shape: a rough, but vibrant, sunrise like the photos of the sun rising over the ocean. There were at least ten thousand photographs like it in the archives on Ark.
As Rainer worked, the ocean waves came into focus, the brilliance of the sun burning the line of the horizon, the violence of the red light stabbing into the sky, the pink-bellied clouds.
“You’re painting,” she breathed in amazement.
Rainer stopped.
“Please don’t stop,” she said softly.
He hesitated, then
resumed working. She sat down, thigh along his, trying not to press her upper body right into his.
Another twenty minutes of work before Rainer stopped, lay his stylus down on the screen, and let out a breath. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you,” she said.
He stared at the tablet, but wasn’t seeing it. “It was just a nightmare.”
“Are you telling me you want to be alone, or telling me to go back to bed?”
“We’ve had a nice evening. Don’t let my nightmare ruin it.”
It took more than a bad dream to ruin the evening for her. She touched the scars on his shoulder. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It was a nightmare, and I am not a pup.”
Whatever it was, his skin still carried that scent. Nightmare. She leaned over and kissed his scars lightly, inhaling the scent so she’d remember.
Anguish rippled across his scent.
She touched his tablet. “Tell me about this.”
“About what?”
“This.”
Another moment of blank silence. “I suppose we’ve never discussed it.”
“We don’t have to discuss it. It’s just beautiful.”
Another strange, blank moment. His scent churned and in the shadows created by the shadowy forms dancing on the large wall-screen, and the brighter light of the tablet, his jaw moved, causing his profile to shift in and out of view. It illuminated the ridges and lines and knots and shiny patches of his plasma scars.
“My Dying Art,” he finally said. “Painting. Oils and watercolors, but I also draw. Ink, pencils.”
All the ranting she’d done about her Art, and she’d never asked Rainer about his. She blushed, mortified. It’d never even occurred to her to ask what his Art was. Wasn’t she just a self-obsessed ninth-circle asshole.
Rainer placed his palm over the tablet, and the shadows of his face bent as he frowned. “I didn’t want to tell you about it.”
“Why not?”
The shadows bent and shifted more while he tried to figure out how to answer. “I’ve never been very… public… with it.”
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said uncertainly.
“No, no, I don’t mind you. I thought I’d mind. I worried I’d mind.” A pause, then, “I like that you like my work. When you told me how much you loved my paintings, but I knew how much you despised me, I didn’t want to ruin them for you by telling you who did them. So… I just let you keep believing they were family heirlooms from Earth.”
She sat up straighter. She looked behind them at the painting of the winter moon and pointed at it. “You painted that?”
“Yes.”
“And those?” She pointed to the bedroom.
“Yes.”
“And they didn’t come from Earth?”
“No, my family didn’t bring any canvases. Are you angry?”
“No, of course not. That’s… they’re so… real. I was sure they had to have come from Earth because they’re so vivid. I’ve seen a ton of drawings and paintings—mostly digital, but some real—and I’ve always been able to spot the ones that came from Earth versus the ones that haven’t. I get told it’s because the paint and colors are different, and the styles are different, but… I swear it’s because the Earth ones are more real.”
“The paint and colors are different here, even if we’re able to exactly follow formulations from Earth. And we do have our own style. I’m sure my style is different from artists on Ark. Perhaps that is what threw your eye.”
“Maybe,” she said, looking at the moon painting. “But you realize you’re amazing, right? Like that should be down on the market level in one of the galleries?”
Rainer grimaced and closed the sunrise. He pulled up a gallery of files.
She brushed through them. There were landscapes, cloudscapes, skyscapes, seascapes, beachscapes, stormscapes, riverscapes. Waterfalls, ponds, tidepools, meadows, hills, mountains, gardens. Plants, trees, animals, insects.
And some were vivid nightmares: twisted auroras, magma-torn landscapes, charred forests, dead meadows, contaminated skies, boiling oceans covered with the floating carcasses of dead creatures, deep cracks torn into the surface of a dying Earth.
There was also the digital version of the moon behind her, and the triptych of trees.
“You didn’t do the winter tree,” she said, trying to get a particularly vivid painting of a charred-red dead forest destroyed by a nuclear calamity out of her head. The triptych of trees had a fourth, but with two versions. In one, the tree was barren, snow weighing down the branches, and the sky was gray and bleak. In the other, it was an evergreen, weighed down with snow and in a similarly dim day, but trimmed with traditional garlands of dried berries and fruits, and small fluttering tags tied on with colorful ribbon meant to invite good luck for the new year.
“Maybe one day,” he said.
There were a few scenes from inside NightPiercer, like the eerie spectral glow of the Core and the gleaming inside of the computer core lined with its millions of chiplets. Nothing of Jupiter, or the planets, or even the stars. No people or wolves.
“You don’t do people?” she asked. She hadn’t realized how many drawings she’d seen of ship life before she saw there was none of it in Rainer’s portfolio.
“I don’t find people compelling subjects.”
She lingered briefly over a torn magma-scape, and then a painting of a determined (and very fat) bumblebee’s backside and legs hanging out of a vibrant blue flower while it presumably dug around for every bit of pollen it could find.
She set the tablet back on the table. The sweat was dry, his scent had changed somewhat. “I’m going to go find the spare sheets. Help me make the bed, wolf.”
Outsider On The Inside
“Hey,” the human with the fully shaven head and bright amber eyes said to her as she finally arrived. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know my way here,” Lachesis said, hating that she was eight minutes late. Not the best first impression. And she was breathing a bit hard. The stress of Entry and the fun and games with Rainer had set her back, although she’d never really gotten to a point where hiking across the ship had been easy.
“How could you—nevermind, I forgot for a second,” Clint said. “You’re not from here.”
The human with the dark brush of hair on his head and assigned the crew commander position—effectively the “Captain”—gestured for them to head into the mess.
Anxiety thumped in her stomach, and it moved quickly up to her chest, sending her battered heart fluttering. She took a deep breath and put a hand on the wall, willing herself to not faint or do something else stupid in front of her new team.
“You okay?” the she-wolf with the dark eyes and petite features asked. “Because you look like you’ve seen some of those Core-ghosts.”
“I’m good. And the Core isn’t haunted.” Lachesis leaned against the wall, trying to be casual about it while her heart tried to dial back from the stress.
Most of the crew already knew each other, or at least knew each other in passing. The “Captain”, Marcus, was a Lieutenant out of Operations, as were Dietrich and Jeremy. Clint and Belle, the human with the shaven head, were both out of Tech. He was a main system generalist with an understanding of bare metal, and she was an AI specialist. The she-wolf with the dark eyes, Lil, was also out of Tech, but a Life Support Specialist, so she was a Science/Tech blend with a unique but very important set of skills. And the final member was also Operations, but from the Supplies & Resource division, which straddled the gap between Operations and Crew.
Lachesis pulled the crust off her sandwich while weighing what sort of nightmare scenario they’d be compelled to act out.
“So you were Crèche on Ark,” Marcus said to her. “That’s what Tsu said. Livestock. Guess you were trying to go to Civilization Management?”
She nodded.
“Ever do Telemetry?” he asked.
> “No. Went straight to Crèche.”
“That’s going to be a problem.”
She dangled a crust from her fingers. “Didn’t realize you’d logged hours in the big chair and were the voice of experience guiding us.”
Snickers from the table, and Marcus, with a touch of annoyance, replied, “I’m at least somewhat prepared for it.”
Doubtful anyone could be prepared for that first moment sitting in the big chair. Anyone who was confident they were ready probably got disabused of that notion real quick. But sure, let Marcus think he was ready.
It was Clint, the bare-metal Tech generalist, who said, “Tsu’s shoe-horned you into this.”
She focused on chewing.
“Command Aptitudes are always a bit of a shoe-horn,” Lil, the dark-eyed she-wolf said. “You think a Life Support specialist is bridge crew? They’re just throwing us all together to get you guys,” she pointed at the four Operations types, “tested. They just can’t test Operations people without some other sections to boss around.”
Lachesis snickered. Clint and Belle outright high-fived each other.
“Sure, sure,” Dietrich said, “And without us you wouldn’t get fed.”
Belle, the human with the shaven head, told Lachesis, “The mortality rate of Aptitude is worse than the pass rate. Don’t be offended because we’re skeptical of you.”
Lachesis gestured with her crust of bread. “Not offended. I also don’t like the idea of being locked in a box with a bunch of strangers for a position I’m not trained for in a scenario designed to push us all to our limits.”
“As long as you don’t panic, we’ll be fine,” Clint said.
She practically bristled with insult. “I didn’t panic when I got forcibly taken off Ark and locked in an even smaller box with a complete stranger who informed me he didn’t want to be married to me and then said small box proceeded to try to blow itself to pieces with me inside it.”
Awkward silence.
“Um…” Lil said. “Well, don’t know what to say to that.”
Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2) Page 9
