by Meg Ripley
The man’s lips curved in a slow smile. “I am Joran,” he told her with an odd kind of firmness. Adriana watched him, waiting for his explanation of where he was going, and why he was traveling there. He simply watched her from behind the dark glasses, and Adriana started to feel—for the first time—slightly uncomfortable as the silence stretched out.
“So, Joran—pleased to meet you. By the way, where are you headed?”
Joran shrugged. “The middle of nowhere, like you,” he said. “I am to perform research.”
“Oh? What kind of research?” Adriana glanced around the train compartment; there were only a few other people in the car with her, and she hoped that at one of the next stops, there would be more. If it turned out that this Joran was creepier than he seemed, she wanted to be able to make a getaway, or at least get someone else’s attention.
“Genetics research,” Joran said, that faint almost-smile curving his lips again. “Actually, I am recruiting volunteers—and I had thought that you would be a good candidate.”
Adriana felt her cheeks warming; that was one of the stranger come-ons she had ever received from a man in her life, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. “Oh really?” she asked. She struggled to keep her voice level.
“I have offended you,” Joran said, pulling away from her slightly. “I apologize. I did not mean to do so.” Adriana stared at him in confusion. “It is just that I became excited when I saw you, because I am supposed to recruit—if I have overstepped a social boundary…”
Adriana shook her head, licking her lips as she tried to work out what was happening to her. “Why don’t you tell me about this research,” she said slowly. “And why you think I would be such a good candidate?”
The smile returned to Joran’s face. “My fellow scientists and I are looking for healthy h—women, of childbearing age, to study genetic fertility.” Adriana felt her blush deepening and wasn’t quite sure why. “You look very healthy to me, and I estimate your age to be somewhere between twenty and thirty years?”
Adriana shrugged, still bemused by the man’s strange demeanor and words. “I’m twenty-four,” she admitted. “What—what exactly would this entail?” She frowned in thought.
“There are some tests that we would run; none of it would be painful. We are interested in the genetic diversity of humans.”
Something about the statement sounded an alarm in Adriana’s head, but she pushed it aside. He was clearly foreign; he was also—she thought wryly—very clearly a scientist. “How do I sign up?”
Joran’s shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug. “You would provide me with your contact details, and I would invite you to the laboratory I have set up. There are many of us, in many different locations around the planet; we are performing research independently, but all of our findings are combined in one final report.”
“And it won’t hurt?” Adriana confirmed.
Joran hesitated—as if not sure he understood the question—and then shook his head. “I promise you that it will not.”
Adriana glanced out through the window, considering. “As long as it won’t interfere with my life too much, then sure,” she said finally. It occurred to her to wonder just why she had agreed to the proposition so readily; but Adriana thought to herself that Joran seemed mostly harmless, and at the worst case, she could probably investigate in some way, to find out more about his research.
“I will leave you to your thoughts,” Joran said with another strange smile. “But I will ask you before you depart the train for your contact information.”
“Okay. Could you—do you think you could send me some references?”
“Any security you need.”
Adriana watched as the man stood and gave her a final smile before going back to his seat.
****
The building at the address that Joran had directed her to seemed oddly out of place to Adriana as she approached it. Well, if it’s a new lab, then it would look different, Adriana told herself. Joran had sent her reams of documentation, all of which pointed to a perfectly legitimate study: abstracts and proposals, information about the study. She had read through the forms he had sent her along with it, perusing the information while she was watching her young cousins playing in the sprinklers. All in all, she had been reassured. Why Joran had recruited her for the study, Adriana couldn’t fathom; but she was apparently going to receive a small sum of money for participating in the project, which was always helpful.
As she stepped into the small, nondescript building, punching in the code that Joran had given her in one of the emails he had sent, Adriana worried her bottom lip. There was terminology in the forms she had read that had seemed innocent to her when she had first read it—but now that she was entering Joran’s lab, something about the wording gave her pause. “Subject agrees to submit to testing, including non-harmful probes, blood tests, and sexual function examination…” The last bit—sexual function examination—had seemed straightforward at first, but as Adriana wandered through the hallways to the room number Joran gave her, she began to wonder how exactly a person’s sexual function would be tested.
A door opened in silky near silence, startling Adriana out of her thoughts. The paperwork in her hands—which she had printed on her cousin’s printer and signed—rustled and rattled. A second later, Joran appeared; he was not wearing the sunglasses from before, and Adriana stepped back, her heart beating faster in her chest. “Joran!” Adriana clutched the paperwork to her chest, taking a deep breath to try and calm her reaction.
“Hello, Adriana,” Joran said, smiling slightly. As her initial startled reaction began to face, Adriana noticed that without the sunglasses, she could see his eyes; they were a strange, aquamarine blue—which didn’t seem to fit with his grayish-dark complexion and dark hair. She wondered idly if they were contact lenses of some kind.
“You startled me,” she said, smiling nervously.
“My apologies,” Joran replied. He extended a hand towards the paperwork. “Are these your forms?” he asked. Adriana nodded.
“Yes…yes they are. I—I feel like I signed them without actually knowing what you intend to do.”
Joran’s eyes widened slightly and he took a step back. “Come into the lab,” he suggested. “We can discuss things better there.” Adriana hesitated for only a moment before walking through the door.
The lab was not what she was expecting; as the door closed behind her, she looked around, spotting something that looked like a bed, screens that looked like they belonged to some kind of very advanced computer system, and medical equipment both familiar and completely foreign. “What the hell is all this?” Adriana said, turning towards Joran with more than a little alarm. “Why is there a bed here?” Joran winced—or at least, it appeared to Adriana’s eyes that he had winced—and sat down.
“Please have a seat,” Joran said, fixing his gaze on her. In spite of her fear, Adriana had to admit that there was nothing precisely intimidating about the man; she realized that he was in some strange kind of coverall—not the scrubs and jacket that she would have assumed a scientist would wear. There were markings that meant nothing at all to her splattered across it.
Glancing once more around the room, unable to fight the sense of having been maneuvered into what could very well be a dangerous situation, Adriana sat in the only other chair, holding Joran’s gaze levelly. “Are you going to explain what the hell all this is?” she asked him.
“I will,” he said slowly. “But I do not think that you will find it easy to believe.”
“Try me.”
Joran took a deep breath and exhaled, setting her paperwork aside. He leaned forward, folding his hands in front of him. “I am researching female humans,” he said. “Specifically…your reproductive capabilities and genetics.”
“My…our…reproductive capabilities?”
Joran nodded. “You have likely realized that I am not… from here.”
Adriana raised an eyebrow. “Ye
s,” she admitted cautiously.
“I am not…from this planet; I am from Khatanar.”
Adriana stared at Joran in shock. “You…are not…from this…planet,” she said slowly. Her heart raced in her chest.
“I am not.”
“You’re from…another planet.” Joran nodded. Oh good God, I’m with a crazy man. He’s probably…schizophrenic or something, or has some kind of multiple personality disorder. Oh, God—is he even a scientist? Adriana’s thoughts whirled in tight, panicked circles.
“I need to leave. This is—you—I—I need to go.”
Joran stood quickly, and Adriana realized that in her panic she had gotten out of her chair. “You need proof that I am who and what I say I am,” Joran suggested.
“Mostly I need to not be in a small laboratory with a bed in it with a crazy person,” Adriana countered.
“I am not a crazy person,” Joran said firmly. “I will show you.”
Adriana staggered backwards, her heart pounding in her chest, her mind spinning. Joran stood straighter, his gaze steady on her. He closed his eyes and Adriana bit her bottom lip, feeling a mixture of confusion and concern. Joran ran his hands over his face, rubbing slightly. Adriana gasped as some kind of paint came away from his skin, revealing streaks of slightly purplish-gray underneath. She stared in unabashed shock as Joran wiped away at his skin some more, doing something to his eyes. The face that emerged from beneath his hands still looked human—but also utterly and completely foreign and strange.
He had dark blue eyes, slightly larger than any human’s, with flecks of what looked like slowly whirling gold inside of the irises. Joran’s purplish-gray skin was not a tone that any human being possessed. Adriana saw that he had absolutely no facial hair, not even real eyebrows. “You…are definitely not a normal human,” Adriana said slowly, swallowing against the tightening of her throat. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or even more frightened. “You—you’re—you are definitely an alien. What the hell! You’re an alien!” Somehow the fact of his existence made her angry.
“I am. And my existence here on this planet is a closely guarded secret.” Joran held her gaze and Adriana found herself staring into his unearthly eyes, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
“But—how is it possible?”
Joran shrugged, smiling slightly. “Our ship is very advanced,” Joran said. “Your detection capabilities are…limited.” Joran smiled again.
Adriana took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “So, why exactly are you—experimenting on humans?” she asked. She remembered the wording of the forms she had signed. “Oh God! Probes! You—are you even serious? You’re going to probe me?”
Joran made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “I must admit,” Joran said, moving closer to her; up close, Adriana noticed that he smelled faintly lemony. She wondered how it had managed to escape her notice that he was so utterly foreign. She had known he had an accent, and his skin tone was strange, but the idea of him being an alien was impossible to believe, even with the proof in front of her. “I must admit that there is a certain kind of probing I would like to do with you. I must test your sexual function.” Adriana’s mouth fell open, and she stared at him in a mixture of shock and amusement.
“You—that’s—what kind of line is that?” Adriana laughed, shaking her head.
“Is it a good line?” Joran asked her, a faintly vulnerable tone coming into his voice. Adriana sat down heavily.
“Just…how much do you know about humans?” she looked up to look at Joran, who was watching her intently.
“I know that the female must reach climax for reproductive viability,” he said. Adriana coughed.
“That’s not—what I meant,” her voice left her throat in a squeak. “Also, that’s…” she blushed from the roots of her hair down to her chest and took a deep breath. Do I really want to tell him that women can get pregnant without climaxing? She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “What exactly were you going to do with me?”
“I was going to put you at ease, and then take some blood samples to examine your genetics, and then…” Joran smiled slowly. “I would have attempted to determine your level of sexual functioning.”
“How exactly were you going to do that?”
“I would have offered you any number of what you call sex toys with which to masturbate… or I would have offered you myself.”
“You want me to have sex with you.”
Joran considered the almost-question and nodded. “I must tell you a thing, Adriana,” Joran said, moving slightly closer to her. “I am sexually attracted to you.”
“That’s rather a frank way of phrasing it,” Adriana said.
Joran shrugged, smiling slightly. “I realized it after I left you,” he told her. “On the train. My response to you was not simply curiosity—I felt the way a male of my species is said to feel when he mates with a female.”
“So you have—I mean…” Adriana shook her head, trying to clear it. “I have a lot of questions, but I feel like probably we should deal with you wanting to have sex with me, first.” She let her gaze travel down over Joran’s body, even as she felt warmth stirring inside of her at the implication that Joran wanted her. There was something about his long, lean frame that appealed to her—and his eyes, when she got over their strangeness, were very nice. She wondered irrelevantly whether he didn’t have body hair at all—and then blushed a deep red, thinking that she didn’t even know if he had a penis.
“Would you like to compare anatomy?” Joran’s eyes seemed to glimmer with amusement.
“Okay—important question, and this is above and beyond the sex thing,” Adriana said. “How do you know what I’m thinking?” Joran laughed.
“We have studied your body language extensively,” Joran explained. He moved closer to her, his hands reaching out to touch her lightly; at first Adriana began to flinch—but then she found herself relaxing. “There is also a sort of—latent capability that we have, to read…” Joran frowned. “It is like…we can know emotions, in sentient creatures.”
“Oh, so humans qualify as sentient. Good to know.” Joran smiled.
“You are very sentient,” he said. “So did you want to compare anatomy?”
Adriana laughed, shaking her head not in rejection but in disbelief. “Okay, sure,” she said, chuckling in spite of herself. The situation was so extraordinary—so far out of her range of experience—that it seemed like all she could do was go along with it.
Joran’s fingers—surprisingly deft, Adriana thought—moved over the front of his jumpsuit, quickly opening the strange fastenings. “You should strip, too,” Joran suggested, his gold-flecked eyes glittering with amusement and something that Adriana recognized as desire. She hesitated for only a moment before beginning to unbutton her blouse, her fingers fumbling from her uncertainty and—to her surprise—her rising arousal.
Am I actually attracted to an alien? Whoa, girl. You don’t even know what kind of equipment he has… She blushed as she freed the last button, tugging her blouse down over her arms and letting it fall to the ground. “I think this is probably the kinkiest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said in disbelief, reaching down to push the waistband of her skirt down over her hips. “Playing doctor with an alien.” Joran laughed, and Adriana looked up.
She stopped in her efforts to undress as the alien kicked the fabric of his coverall off at his feet. He stood before her, completely naked; he hadn’t applied whatever cosmetic that was on his face to the rest of his skin, Adriana noticed. Her gaze traveled down along his lean, muscular body, taking in the fact that he did not have any hair on his chest or arms. Her gaze moved down to his hips, and then below, and almost stuttered as it came to a stop. “That…is…interesting,” Adriana said, her mouth drying. In spite of her shock, she felt a hot jolt of arousal at the sight of what appeared to be Joran’s penis. It was, to her eyes, enormous; and more alarming still, instead of a smooth s
haft, it was ridged—almost bumpy-looking. She noticed the fact that he didn’t seem to have testicles almost as an afterthought.
“You have not finished undressing,” Joran said quietly. “Do you require me to help you? I understand that is sometimes part of your mating ritual.” Adriana continued to stare at the alien’s almost comically large and utterly strange genitals—were they his genitals? She wondered.
“I didn’t exactly agree to—mate—with you,” Adriana said absently.
“You did not answer the question,” Joran said with slight amusement in his voice. Adriana gave herself a shake. In spite of the strangeness of the alien’s erection, she was surprised to find herself intrigued. What would that feel like inside of me? She thought. She remembered his comment that he knew human women needed to achieve orgasm in order to conceive and felt the heat rising in her face.
“I can undress myself,” she said briskly. She stepped out of the pool of fabric that her skirt had become, standing before the alien in nothing more than her bra and panties. Joran’s gaze on her was intent as Adriana reached around to her back, unclasping her bra. She let the garment slide away from her skin, guiding the straps along her arms.
Adriana heard a sharp intake of breath as she dropped her bra to the floor, her breasts bouncing slightly as the fabric came away. She met Joran’s gaze; his expression was definitely one of desire rather than scientific interest, and Adriana felt herself smiling, amused at his reaction. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her panties and tugged them down over her hips, pushing the thin lace down over her legs and then letting the fabric fall to the floor.
“May I touch you?” Joran asked. “I wish to touch you.”
“Yeah,” Adriana said, feeling breathless without knowing why. “Yeah, you can touch me.”
Joran closed the distance between them, and Adriana shivered as his hands brushed against her skin, caressing her tentatively. She bit her bottom lip as Joran cupped her breasts, giving them a careful, light squeeze. Adriana moaned, closing her eyes, as her nipples began to harden to his touch.
