Omega Moon

by Noah Harris

  I wanted it to be perfect. The first of the rest of our days. I’ve imagined it a thousand times, maybe more, since this trip started. I can’t think of anything more wonderful, or more tender, than the gentle care he takes with my body now. Slowing down, eyes never leaving my face, tracking every sensation.

  “Your cock,” I marvel, as he breathes heavy in my ear. “It’s now or never,” I say, barely understanding what I mean. He simply nods.

  His desire and his ecstasy make his body and cock spasm inside me, even as he holds himself still, leaving it up to me. Do I take him all the way inside? Let him mate me, breed me, knot me? Do we start our lives together right now, the life he’s planting? Do I get to have this?

  I always thought I’d know in the moment. The truth is that I absolutely do. There is no question. All the decision-making has already been done.

  “Do you want me?” I ask, and he nods with a smile full of grace.

  “Please. Be mine,” he growls, not quite whimpering and then flips us both over onto the dust. Grinning down at me with a wicked hunger, he nuzzles at my cock, licking its wetness with a satisfied moan. Raising me by the hips again, he puts his hot quick tongue to work along the edges of me, and then deep inside, until I’m moaning, almost in pain with the need to drive him deeper, deeper.

  Alden laughs with surprise and hunger when I turn suddenly around on hands and knees before him, still pushing back against that insistent mouth, my groans ever louder, further out of control.

  “Now,” I hiss, begging, pushing against him with all my might. He gives my penis a few swift strokes to prolong my need before I feel those strong, thick thighs against mine. His warm, hard chest running deliciously across my back, teasing every inch of me with that flame…and then, with no more warning than his thick biceps squeezing at my shoulders, those fine hands working their way between my fingers, and his groan of shock, he plunges into me. Once and then again, grunting with the feeling and the force of it.

  I am filled up to the depths with all of him. I push back until I can feel him at the root, moaning and jerking behind me as I ride it. Fucking myself against the thick solid heat of him. And on the last stroke, I feel the knot itself, locking us together as we move. It’s so big inside me that I feel a stretch with every stroke. And then as we rock together, slower then faster, I can feel how it makes us one man. The perfect symmetry of his cock hitting that brightest place, over and over, drawing out gasps and moans with every stroke. Our perfect alignment and the knot of his alpha cock buried within me, burning with a fire that might never go out.

  His breath, a ragged rhythm, begins to speed up with his strokes, and I realize we’re both coming to the end. I can feel his cock and his knot jerking around inside me, setting off waves of pleasure that bring me to my elbows before him, straining for every inch of him I can get before it ends. And when that breath is coming so hard and hot and fast that it sounds barely human, I can feel my own climax rising just as suddenly.

  “I love you. God, I love you,” Alden says, biting lightly at my neck. The heat of him and the pain, the sweetness of his love, pushes me over the edge.

  “Yes,” I groan and then again: “Yes!”

  I can feel his seed inside me as I clench around him, my own cock shooting so hard I can feel my cum hit the ground. We rise and fall on waves of pleasure, two stars burning brightly outside of time. Wordless moans and giddy gasps as we come and come.

  He pulls himself out of me as I contract around him. Perfectly timed, so I don’t gasp at the sudden surprise when he’s gone. I can feel his thick heaviness against my crack as he continues to come, spurting once, then again, across my back with a great holy shout.

  When we’re finally spent, bodies painted in our passion, I can offer little more than an exhausted chuckle as we collapse together in the dust. He crawls up into my arms, looking up at my face with such pure and unadorned devotion that I feel it might shatter me.

  The moon pulls on the tides, and the tides pull right back.

  “Will it always be just like that?” he asks, thick-tongued, eyes already going soft and sleepy.

  I don’t know what to say, but I certainly hope so.

  “Goodnight, moon. Thanks for the sex,” Alden says happily to the ground, the wall, the cavernous warm dark holding us so tenderly. A minute later, a snore to wake the dead.

  With one breath we push the final button in the sequence that will start the generators spinning, far below us, like awakening deep, old gods. Alden takes my hand, placing it against the back wall where he’s standing, and grins when I feel it through my fingertips. It feels old and powerful. The moon must feel so ready, I think.

  Screens assure us all is well, and we can watch exactly how the power is progressing. First the lights in the outer dome, then section by section, all the way back to us. Alden remembers, as do I before he can even say it, a particular prominence we’d navigated on the way through the dark city, a few miles from here. The swell of a hill rising and then falling, positioned to cast shadows over the neighboring park meant to be full of trees one day.

  Without a word, we pull on shoes and go running out into the night.

  And so it is that we’re out of breath, giddy, and full of hope when the lights finally reach us, and we can see it stretching all the way back into infinity.

  Things look so different in the daylight, even artificial daylight, after all this time in our half-darkness. There is a crystalline glare off a lot of the taller buildings that here, at the extreme end of the world, refracts into rainbows. It looks like a waterfall as big as everything, and I can see it’s bringing him to tears as well.

  “Oh Julian,” Alden breathes. “Baby. Look what we did.”

  It does feel monumental. Not least because of how many people will soon be joining us, filling up this world.

  And here, our footsteps. The last astronauts ever to walk her surface. And the first natives, too.

  Every breath, laugh, sigh. Our moments of ecstasy and grief, terror and joy. All of them here, echoing for the first time and for as long as humanity continues here upon the moon. We’re written into her bones now, her song, and her skin. It feels like a great responsibility. We share a fierce protective feeling toward the moon, and we wonder when that happened exactly.

  Maybe we know.

  Out in the Sea of Fertility far from the Marsh of Sleep there is a flag, for now planted in the airless dirt of a scar we made. Philippa Cortez, Apollyon Harbaugh, Margot Hellstrom. They were really the first natives. They just never got to see her. Never got to walk upon the world they helped make. We’ll make sure they’re honored.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to wait before we come back?”

  I try to remember the schedule. “I think the very first wave of colonists don’t arrive for another three months?”

  Alden nods. “That gives us plenty of time.”

  “For what?”

  Alden frowns, a little bit sad. “We’re going to be the ones to tell this story to the world. I want to be there to answer any questions their families have, privately.”

  “Okay. Isn’t Philippa’s family in Ireland?” her lone survivor, Alden remembers now, is her father. A sheep farmer who returned to his ancestral home when her mother passed away.

  “Yes. And Harbaugh’s wife in DC, so that will be easy. I wish I knew more about the sergeant but she did mention having a wife before. So, I guess…”

  I nod. it’s coming back to me. “San Diego. Hey, Alden?”

  He smiles, almost bashful, as he takes my hand under this new sun.

  “I feel pretty certain that we’re going to have a baby. Is that okay with you?”

  His eyes grow wide and his mouth erupts in a mad grin. Without a word he drops to his knees, staring softly at my belly and kissing its flatness. Then up again to wrap me in his arms and kiss me fiercely.

  “I guess you would know, huh? And yeah. That’ll do quite nicely.”

  The tears in his eyes a
nd the width of his smile are enough to set me at ease.

  “Then how about this. After San Diego and DC, a long stay in Ireland. There’s a shifter community where we can stay, while she’s growing, and nobody will notice or think it’s odd…”

  He laughs then. Imagining me in my dress whites with a baby bump, I’m sure, at some dreary Flight School function.

  “My mom’s going to want to be there. Dad is…my dad. But my mom will definitely want to come. Is that okay? Will the shifters…”

  “She’s family, that’s how they will look at it. She’s family now.”

  “Do we get to have a wedding?”

  The truth is we just did. But I know what he means. “Yes? I hate to be unorthodox, but…maybe it can wait until after the baby?”

  He frowns, excitement dying in his eyes to disappointment, replaced with a question.

  “Because I want to get married here. On the moon. So that means we have to wait.”

  Alden hops up and down, thrilled at the prospect. “Oh, that’s good.”

  I’m afraid to ask how Darius fits into all these travel plans, he guesses right away the next item on the agenda. “Darius is not going to take this well, I’m afraid. We’re the only two people he really even likes.”

  “Well,” I muse. “He’s going to do everything he can to make himself miserable with it…”

  Alden laughs, surprised but pleased that I know his friend so well.

  “Which means we have to head that off from the start. He’s a part of our lives, a part of the story and it’s our job to make that safe for him. We have to find a way to bring him in. Preferably without him knowing.”

  He laughs again, relieved. “Good practice for the…did you say ‘she’?”

  I nod, blushing with pride. I love the way his jaw drops every time he learns something new about shifters. It feels like giving him a whole new world. “Yes. The first child born of the moon. The first citizen. I want to name her Philippa Harbaugh…”

  Alden agrees, but raises one finger in protest. “But Pippa would hate that. So officially, we’ll call her Luna,” he purses his lips thinking hard, testing it out. “Luna. ‘This is my daughter Luna.’ ‘My husband and I are so proud of our little Luna…’”

  He nods. It works.

  “Look, Luna,” I say, playing along in a whisper of wonder, and sweep my hand across all we can see. “Look at your world.”

  And that’s when Pippa’s voice comes calling down from the light, scaring the hell out of us both.

  “I’m coming down there! Make sure you’re decent!”

  We laugh, with both surprise and joy. But we’re grateful for the warning.

  When we do arrive, it will be to tears. Tears of joy and relief, and tears of sympathy and the deep pain of loss. We’ll be taken into hospital for several weeks to treat the effects of our long trip and wake up in separate beds because they won’t know any better.

  Darius will be there, with that first-year hanging permanently on his arm, and the first thing he’ll say when he learns we’re together is, “Hot.” But I’ll know it’s destroyed a part of him. And after a few long nights staying up with Alden, talking it out, crying over a glass of wine, he’ll be okay. He’s always okay.

  It’ll be strange to see ourselves in the mirror and remember how we used to look. How thin and pale we got, during those weeks in space.

  I’ll worry for our daughter growing inside me, and the shifter doctor will be so anxious about my stress that she’ll confine me to bed for a week or two. We’ll both be fine in the end, of course. The Irish shifters will garland her with roses and blackthorn when she’s born, burning sage and singing the old ways. Alden will stare, entranced by it all, and grip my hand so tightly I’ll forget the pain of labor for at least a moment or two, before the next contraction.

  I’ll meet his father, a man much less difficult than the one Alden gets to deal with. And his mother, a kind woman, less quiet than I was expecting. A fiery laugh and a voice as lovely as a bell. She’ll teach our daughter to be strong in the ways of humans, and I’ll teach her what it means to be a shifter. And Alden will love her with all the strength in his powerful body. All the inexhaustible devotion I saw ignited on the moon.

  And when she gets her heart broken, he’ll smile sadly and say sweet as anything, “Did I ever tell you the story of how Papa and I met?”

  And she’ll roll her eyes, but she’ll still pretend she hasn’t heard the story before, though of course, she has. Ever since she was little.

  “Papa was very scary when Daddy first met him, you see. They both wanted to go to the moon, because that was where you were. Waiting for us to find you. So, we pushed and shoved, fought, cried and laughed. It was a war to see who could get to you first.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” Luna will say every time. “You could never get there…”

  “Unless we were together. Exactly. It took both of us to find you. We needed to find each other first. And to do that we had to go…”

  And she’ll look out the window onto a moon slowly growing green, as our garden takes root. She’ll watch the children playing, farmers, the musicians in the square. Look back at us with that proud look she inherited from Alden, and the beautiful smile I can’t quite believe they say she got from me, pointing at it all.

  “Home. You had to go home.”

  Waiting back at the dome for our return shuttle to finish its delivery, time seems to get strange again. Pippa’s inside, excitedly gathering all her stuff we were able to save and promising to tell us her story of bravery ‘as soon I can pee and take a shower.’ But it feels like we’ve been waiting forever. It also feels like returning to Earth couldn’t seem more premature. Right now, our love is like the moon, clean, unmarked, ready for anything. But other people will be writing on it now. Our lives are about to change forever, and any hope we ever had of anonymity is gone.

  The shifter in me is terrified by that idea, but the astronaut knows it’s why I came.

  “When we left,” Alden says, looking up at the Earth in the sky. “I was an Earthling.”

  “And a human,” I laugh.

  “Presumably straight,” he says wrinkling his nose. “Single...”

  I close my eyes again, smiling in the brightness. “And now?”

  He howls again, very aware this is the last time we’ll ever have the place to ourselves.

  “Now? I’m King of the Moon. I’m a werewolf, and I’m marrying my soulmate, I’m going to be a father. I’ve felt loss. I’ve been afraid. I thought we might die. I hoped we would survive.”

  “And are we still enemies?”

  He chuckles at my enraptured smile and shakes his head. His voice when he responds is full of wonder, more peaceful and solemn than I’m expecting.

  “I have no enemies. All I have now is love. Thank you for that.”

  I can barely look at him, barely contain the storm he stirs in my heart and body. So, I look past him, down into the sparkling city. The shuttle arriving is louder than anything we’ve heard in weeks. Louder than the crash, even. Louder than the heat.

  I laugh suddenly, almost to myself, and he wraps his strong arms around me, leaning down to hear the joke.

  “I can’t believe I ever wanted to destroy you!”

  Alden laughs, hot against my neck, and rests his head upon my shoulder.

  “Julian, you absolutely did.”

  It makes me laugh. I push back against him, like a wall, safe in those arms forever. Destroyed and put back together. Stronger than I’d ever imagined, and even happier than that.

  “Right back at you, cadet.”

  END

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