Hope

by Tia Wylder

  That girl, the one whose party he had crashed—that Tia Swift. Now feeling human again after hours of doubt and confusion and no memory, what came pouring into his mind and his feelings was the memory of the one thing that he loved even better than being a member of the Force and serving his home planet and it all now coalesced around Tia. Even more than service and duty, Jay Goodwill loved sex: the feeling of his body commingling in the deepest, most profound and powerful ways with the body of a warm and willing girl. He had bedded plenty of girls in his twenty-one years. His looks and his uniform had brought him the attention of all the young women he wanted. He had known many a girl’s bed and many a long and exuberant night of joining loins with girls eager to have him inside them. Now, returning fully to himself, Jay wanted nothing more than to return to what made him feel most alive. His head was filled with the lovely face and the limber and leotard-clad form of Tia Swift. And it was not just the way she looked. It was the fire she exhibited when she came up to him in the gym and confronted him about what he did to her party. It was the way that fire simmered down into a warmth of compassion when she learned he had lost his memory and himself. It was the way she looked at him with such concern even after he had so terrified her—and the feeling that charged through both their bodies when he touched her. Jay wanted that feeling back, and more.

  Jay’s interrogation of the settlement’s computer systems had given him certain specific pieces of information that he had effortlessly and perfectly committed to memory: the address of the Chief Administrator’s home, where Tia Swift lived with her father. He even knew exactly where her room was. And accessing the computers in Merrill Swift’s office told him that Tia’s father was busy this evening, conferring with Chief Administrators of other colonies that lay in outlying areas of Terran space as Stellarforce and the Union briefed them about the Dhurian situation. If Tia were home tonight, she might well be home alone, which would suit his needs ideally. Outside, night had fallen, which was good. Though he was no longer a prisoner, it stood to reason he should not call too much attention to himself to go where he wanted to go—and do what he wanted to do.

  Chapter Six

  When the door sounded at the Chief Administrator’s dwelling, Tia was curious. After the melee of her birthday party, her friends had offered to throw her another party tonight to make up for it, but Tia had declined. She decided that after all that madness and how scared everyone had been, tonight she wanted just to have a quiet, mellow evening at home. But when the front door slid open, she saw that her evening was once again about to become something other than what she expected it to be.

  “Can I come in?” asked Jay.

  Scarcely believing he was actually at her door—that he had actually come to her house—Tia let him in. And there he was—every gorgeous inch of him, now dressed in a jacket, pants, and boots that she guessed the Colonial Administrators had printed for him.

  There was an awkward pause before Tia found the voice to ask him, “Do they…my father and the other Admins…know you’re here?”

  “No,” said Jay. “They’re not watching me anymore. They’ve kind of released me on my own recognizance. They’ve been in touch with Command; they know my story. They know I won’t do anything.”

  “What is your story?” Tia asked.

  “That’s what I came here to tell you,” he said. “I actually shouldn’t tell you; I’d probably get a reprimand and a mark on my record for it. They might even throw me in the Stockade. But after what happened to you, what you went through…I thought you deserved to know. Since, you know, it pretty much struck home for you, actually. You can’t tell anyone until it goes out through official channels. But I thought you deserve to know first after the way I scared you. Can we sit down?”

  They sat on the sofa facing the sunken fireplace in the middle of the living room. And Jay told her the whole story. Tia took it in, by turns amazed and frightened and stunned. She listened quietly to all of it, and watched him carefully as he did. During his telling of the story of what happened at Sigma Pegasii and how he came to Sigma Cygni, he remembered the Dhurians—not just the fact of the attack; not just what they did to him, cocooning him for assimilation and use as a weapon against his own people. At last he remembered them.

  Their shape was all that they had in common with humans. The Dhurians did not speak, at least not audibly. They were either telepathic, or they communicated cybernetically on some channel or frequency to which Stellarforce had no access. As far as the humans battling them were concerned, the Dhurians only moved and acted. Their eyes were luminous red ellipses set into flat faces with slits for nostrils and mouths. Their bodies looked as if they had been formed of purplish grey clay. Each of them apparently had a particle-beam weapon built into its right arm; they could all discharge energy bolts right from their arms the way Jay and his fellow members of the exosuit training program could fire from the gauntlets of their suits. The battle on board the station was terrible, raging through corridors and decks and chambers, casualties mounting on both sides. Then Jay remembered the terrible moment that a Dhurian unfurled its cocoon from its non-blasting arm and enveloped him with it. He recalled the terrible sensation of struggling against the membranous sac in which he was abruptly sealed, while it filled with the noisome bio-agent that would penetrate first his suit and then his body—if he let it. After that came the slimy, churning, all-enfolding darkness, the desperation to get out, the flailing and the blasting inside the cocoon, the rupturing of his membranous prison—and the madness.

  Hunched on the edge of the sofa, staring into the flames in the sunken fireplace as if he were staring into the battle of Sigma Pegasii and the violence and violation that still haunted him, Jay said, “First I felt myself about to lose everything. Then I felt myself lose my mind. I couldn’t see anything the way it really was. All I could see was them. All around me—them. If it was really them or my own people, I could only see them. And I had to get away. And where I ended up was here.” He looked over at her. “You know the rest.”

  At first, Tia did not know what to say. She only sat watching him, seeing the play of emotions across his face, the most handsome she had ever seen. She thought nothing should ever cause pain to anyone who looked like that. No one so beautiful should ever know a moment of hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Tia,” said Jay. “I’m sorry for what I did. If I could take it back, if I could make it never have happened, I would. I could have hurt you. I could have…I don't even like to think what I could have done to you. But I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Tia said earnestly. “You didn’t know what you were doing. That bio-thing, whatever it was, got into your suit which was linked up to your mind. You weren’t responsible. And you were still strong. You still fought it.”

  “I signed up for the exosuit program, went through the changes the Stellarforce medics made to my body, my brain, because I wanted to serve and protect, like nobody else could. I volunteered for that, competed for that. I wanted that. But the Dhurians…they were turning me into something else. Something I didn’t want to be, something no human should be.”

  “And you fought it, and you won,” said Tia. “You were stronger than what they tried to do to you.” She looked at him as if to underscore her meaning. “You won, Jay.”

  Tia’s hand rested on the sofa, just inches from him. Jay saw her hand there, so soft, so warm, and could not stop himself. He moved his own hand from his knee where it rested, and slid it over the few inches between them and put it on hers. A feeling passed between them like a sudden electric tingling. Tia kept her hand right where it was, together with his. She looked down at their hands together, then back up at him. “I never could have lived with myself,” Jay said, “if I came out of that and found out I’d hurt you. I’d never want to see anything hurt you, ever.”

  The tingle of their touch became a flash of warmth inside Tia’s body at the sound of him speaking words so much like the ones she had thought. “I don’
t think you could ever hurt me, Jay,” she said softly.

  “Not now,” he replied. “And …not ever. I could never do anything to hurt you, Tia.”

  Gently, Jay went from just touching her hand to taking it in his. Now the warmth spread between the two of them.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

  Quietly startled, Tia blinked at the question. “N-no…I don’t,” she managed to answer, her heart fluttering. Then, she ventured, “Is there…a girl? Someone back home?”

  “There hasn’t been for a while,” said Jay. “Not since I signed on with the exosuit program. I haven’t been with anyone, haven’t…done it…since then.”

  Tia’s heart fluttered all the harder. “Oh,” she simply replied.

  “You’ve never had a guy do it, have you?” he asked. “I mean, I’m not judging. Maybe I’m assuming wrong…”

  “I never have,” she replied, surprised at both the quickness and the frankness of her answer. On one level she was surprised at how open and forthright she was with him. On another, she thought that if there were anyone on any world with whom she could be open and forthright, it was Jay Goodwill.

  “I would never, ever hurt you, Tia,” Jay said. “And I’d never ask you to let me do anything you didn’t want. But ever since I realized what happened at your party and what I could have done to you there… I want to make it right, Tia. I want to make it better, make you feel something better than I made you feel then. That is…if you’d let me. It’s up to you.” In spite of his words—and the fact that he meant them—Jay felt a hot rush of blood and the stirring of growth and hardness in his loins. And in his mind he called out to her, Please say yes.

  Tia did not answer in words. She moved herself a little closer to him on the sofa, making his blood rush down below to make him harder yet. And with the hand that Jay was not holding, Tia touched his face. She touched the face that had filled her mind with his incredible handsomeness in all the time that had passed since her disastrous party. It was the most beautiful thing she had seen that night. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Jay closed his eyes at her touch at first, then he opened them again and fixed her with a look as if she were everything in the universe.

  “I want you, Tia,” he said. “Will you let me—please?”

  Surprising herself again, and again feeling a certitude that it was truly right, Tia half-whispered, “Yes.”

  In the next second, there was no space between them at all. He came all the way to her and drew her into his arms. He brought his face to hers; his face—and his lips. And he took Tia’s mouth in a kiss unlike any other kiss she had ever felt in her young life; a kiss that felt as if she were being not only kissed—but claimed.

  The kisses melted from one into the next, and Tia took in the urgent press of his lips and the slipping and sliding of his tongue and wanted more and more of him. In the midst of the kisses, and between them, Jay shed his jacket and his upper leotard, rendering himself half-naked. For the first time since he began kissing her, Tia could see his body—at least from the waist up—in all its glory. In the flickering of the firelight, he was the perfect boy, the perfect man, and a god all at once. She had never seen such lean, beautifully cut muscles in all her life. And she knew that he would only get better. There was still the matter of what awaited her inside those slacks. Sensing the desire radiating from her, Jay slipped off his boots and the slacks, sitting beside her now in just the bottom of the leotard. Then he went for her clothes.

  Tia’s blouse, slippers, and capris soon lay on the floor beside the sofa, leaving her clad only in her panties and the supports on her bosom. Jay quickly had those off her as well, and there she sat, naked with a man for the first time. He stripped away his leotard bottom and revealed the rest of himself to her. The thing she most wanted to see fell into view, long and thick, pulsing and ready. Jay climbed up to put one knee on the sofa and keep one foot on the floor, presenting his amazing boy-manhood to Tia. He took her by one hand and kissed it, then moved that hand between his legs where Tia’s entire being thrilled with the feeling of touching an erection for the very first time.

  Jay whispered to her, “Stroke it. Feel it. Think how it’ll feel in you.” And Tia did. She wrapped it fully in her hand and moved her hand up and down the shaft, feeling it surge at the way she held it. She would have whimpered at the exquisite sensation if Jay had not leaned forward and taken her mouth again in another long, deep kiss—and eased her down onto her back on the sofa.

  Lying half on top of her, Jay kissed her again and again, repeating that deep mingling of their mouths and their tongues, claiming her ever more with every kiss. Then he moved down to her neck and her shoulders—and then to her breasts.

  For a moment Tia was afraid, the first time she had been afraid since he showed up at her door. Jay had done it to other girls, likely many other girls, before her. What if somehow he found some part of her inadequate, wanting, compared to all of them? What if her breasts, or her body, or her inexperience proved to be somehow not enough for him? She need not have worried. He filled his hands with her breasts, cupping and squeezing, and from his touch, she could feel herself filling him with delight. The anxiety ran out of her like water pouring from a stream into a river, and she shut her eyes and sighed a long, sweet sigh at the feeling of him first cupping and kneading her breasts, then taking one nipple into his mouth. Tia wanted to cry out. She moaned softly at the rising pleasure of Jay sucking her nipple. The pleasure fell with his release of that nipple, and rose again with his licking and sucking at the other. Her soft moans went on with his continued attention to her bosom. Then she felt him start to kiss his way lower, down her stomach, towards his ultimate destination.

  Jay parted her legs, letting one dangle over the edge of the sofa, and laid fully bare the pink and slippery young womanhood under the patch of black hair between them. He nuzzled with his nose at the lips of her sex and the bud where her pleasure was most concentrated, and inhaled the girl scent there. Then he licked her petals, making her body suddenly go into a little spasm of heightened pleasure. He licked at the female folds and the tender bud over and over, transmitting joy into and through her. Then, he carefully, tenderly used the tips of his fingers to open Tia’s sex as if it were a delicate flower and gaze at the maidenhood that it concealed.

  This was the first virginity that Jay had known since his own first time when he was sixteen. He never thought he would see another girl’s cherry, yet here before him was the glistening and unbroken seal on Tia Swift, and it seemed to him the most special thing in existence. That, he thought, should not be touched by his fingers or tongue. That belonged only to what he ultimately wanted to give her the most; the thing that surged and strained for her in his own crotch. But it would have to wait a just a few minutes more—until he had her fully prepared for it.

  Jay gently pressed the lips of Tia’s sex between the forefinger and middle finger of one hand, making sure her entrance was closed before he returned his tongue to licking at it once more. He brought to his oral pleasuring of Tia all the experience he had gained in five years of bedding girls on planets between here and Earth. And the way she writhed and whimpered at the wet and eager attentions of his tongue told him how well he was doing the job. With each stroke of his tongue tip and each lapping of the broad surface of his tongue, Jay showed Tia that she was being eaten out by an expert. Her whimpers turned to moans, and she raised the one leg that dangled over the edge of the sofa and wrapped it around his back. Jay responded by releasing her folds from his fingers and taking her entire flower carefully into his mouth. He sucked deeply at her sex and made her back arch. Tia poured out an incoherent sound of all-consuming bliss which reached a crescendo when he carefully, carefully went from sucking her entire womanhood to sucking only the bud that held her greatest pleasure. At last Tia made a sound that was almost a scream, and bucked and thrashed on the cushions, and slapped the back of the sofa with her hand, telling Jay that he had brought h
er to her first orgasm. With a last lingering lick of her labia, he pulled his mouth away from her dripping entrance and unwrapped her leg from around him. The thing he most wanted to do to her would not wait another second.

  Jay climbed all the way up onto the sofa and rested on his knees. He brought both of Tia’s thighs up around his hips. Taking his club of hardened flesh in one hand, he leaned forward and supported himself on the sofa cushion with the other, whispering, “I’m going to put it in you now, Tia. Here it is…”

  Tia almost seemed to hear a drumroll at the back of her mind at the feeling of a hot bluntness sliding up and down at the wetness under her pubic hairs—and then she felt as if she were going over a waterfall into a churning white foam of indescribable, inexpressible pleasure when Jay plunged his long, throbbing hard-on all the way into her. Enfolded by Tia’s inner wetness, Jay gave forth a groan of male satisfaction with the knowledge that he had just passed through her maidenhood and popped her cherry as the blunt head of his shaft made its way deep into her, reaching for the opening of her womb. Tia wailed in wonder-filled ecstasy at the feeling of being entered, stretched, and filled by an erection for the first time. She was united with Jay now, girl and woman joined with boy and man. He settled down on top of her, and she reflexively threw her arms around him, and Jay began to make the two of them one body and one being.