by Annalise
She remained where she was, her palms on the railing, making sure her body was arranged with her legs slightly apart. She knew without looking that he was in there, in the darkness, watching her. She reveled in the knowledge that he cared enough to say he loved her. But she also knew he’d ship out again and forget her for the next ten years of his life, back on Mars.
This time, she wouldn’t humiliate herself by begging him to stay. Even now, so many years later, she cringed inside, had to wrap her arms about her waist in a protective gesture against the memory of that last-minute, final breakdown while he’d been making love to her in the ship-out center.
Thank heaven the couple in the next room had hammered on the wall because Link had fucked her so forcefully against the wall. And they’d laughed.
And the moment had been saved.
But she still cringed to remember how the tears had run down her face, how she’d been begging him to stay, how she’d kept repeating those three words.
I love you. Love you. Love you, to the rhythm of his thrusts into her and the banging against the wall.
She’d been called to sick bay and her bruises examined during her training in the Homeland Security squad. Some grunt had seen the bruises in the locker room.
Homeland Security didn’t want any abused partners in the squads. They wanted recruits with their minds on their jobs, recruits without baggage.
She’d frankly confessed to the enthusiastic fucking. They’d nodded and okayed her. But that night, she’d stripped in the bathroom and looked at the marks of his fingers on her buttocks, hips, breasts. For the first of many times, she relived the way she’d gotten those marks.
Not the way she’d become bruised during a few sessions with guests at The Palace. No, these bruises were simple marks from Link’s passion. From holding too tight, from squeezing her when his orgasm overcame him.
The marks had faded quickly, along with any possibility she’d ever see him again.
With a sigh, she realized she was cold. The tub would help a bit and if she made the water really hot, the dripping sweat would camouflage the tears if she couldn’t hold them inside.
Chapter 13
Link heard the water thunder into the old tub. He belted his robe and went in search of a few cookies of his own.
His grandmother ran a successful restaurant in town. Even turning a hundred and ten hadn’t slowed her down. Thankfully, she rarely visited the old homestead. She preferred her completely automated flat in town.
He rummaged in the deep freezer and found what he wanted. Cookies. Vanilla sugar cookies. Peanut butter. Maybe even with real peanuts in them, if he knew his grandmother and her black market dealings. He saw chocolate and knew that would be synth, but still, it would taste good to a domer who spent his time off-planet. Earth-bought synth was always better than the tasteless stuff that made it to the outposts.
He pulled all the cookie packages out and scattered them on the counter like decks of cards.
Next, he rummaged around some more and whistled softly. “Good ol’ Granny. I really owe you for this. My providing angel.” He pulled out several box-shaped packages that were labeled with tantalizing words in her quaint script. Words like meatloaf and spaghetti.
“I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
He shoved one of the packages of spaghetti into the old cooker and in a few minutes removed a steaming, mouth-watering serving of pasta covered with what looked like real tomato sauce. While he transferred it to a proper bowl, he took a moment to savor the aroma, breathing in the steam before he smiled to himself and headed for the master bath.
She lay back, eyes closed. Her head rested on a folded towel, her long dark hair fanned out across it. He realized he didn’t mind it now. The long hair suited her classic features.
He eased the door open and came up behind her. He knelt on the fluffy rug, stifling a groan as his knees protested the position.
But anything for love, he thought. And seduction.
He plucked a strand of spaghetti from the plate and dangled it over her partially parted lips. Lightly, he dangled a strand until it grazed her mouth.
She licked her lips, then her eyes flew open. She rounded on him. “Pasta?”
“God bless Grandma.” He smiled at her flushed face. And breasts.
The room was steamy. Sweat dripped on her skin. “Lean back.”
She did as he bid and he said, “Close your eyes, or no food.”
Obediently, she shut her eyes, but her mouth opened like a baby bird’s awaiting a worm.
He laughed at the picture she made, dragged a footstool close to the tub to spare his knees, and sat beside her. One strand at a time, he fed her the spaghetti. He played with her, tempting her with a touch to her lips, then pulling the pasta away to drip sauce across her breasts.
She played along. It took a long time to feed her. She had sauce on her cheeks, her chest and her lips when he was finished.
He set the plate down and began to savor the sauce while he licked her clean. One drop at a time, starting with her chest, lapping up the goodness and ending with her mouth.
“Mind fuck me, Link.”
So now she wanted to play games.
He stood up and shed his robe. He climbed into the tub and shoved at her legs until she had them pressed close together and he was standing with his feet on either side of her hips.
“Okay, Evans. Here’s your mind fuck. When I was lying in my bunk, hurtling through space—the first time—I went to sleep with these thoughts. I remembered this tub. Standing just like this, over you. I thought about how you were, lying back just as you are now, and how I’d told you to suck me. That’s exactly how I said it, didn’t I?”
He winked. She winked back.
“I believe I told you a good soldier takes orders from her superior. We argued over just who was the superior back then. But there’s no question today, Evans. Now, comply with the order just as you eventually did that day.” He fisted his penis. “Suck it.”
She sat up with a grin and reached for him. He watched as the head of his cock disappeared between her lips.
Her mouth was silky, wet, warm. He groaned.
“Harder,” he ordered and she complied.
“Deeper,” he said and she gulped him in.
“More tongue,” he demanded and she stroked him.
“Use your teeth… gently,” he said. She raised the stakes and dragged her teeth up and down his shaft.
“Swallow it,” he just managed to gasp as he shot his hot come into her mouth.
He sat down in the tub and planted his big feet by her shoulders.
“You did pretty good, Evans. You obeyed orders just fine. But your technique hasn’t progressed much in ten years.”
“And you have no idea how to fuck with a woman’s mind.” She shook her head.
He reached out and hooked his hand behind her head. He jerked her forward and kissed her hard, thrusting his tongue into her mouth, tasting his come on her, sliding his own tongue into the residue.
He broke it off, practically shoving her back against the tub. “Is that what you think? I don’t know how to read a woman’s mind and produce the kind of reaction you produced in me?”
“No. I think you can’t.” She watched him lean back and clasp his hands behind his head. Water beaded in the hair under his arm. She wanted to reach out and stroke the soft tufts, knowing how he would shiver and drop his arms, trapping her fingers.
But she remained where she was, in the tub, his physical presence dominating her just by his sheer size.
The water was dangerously close to the tub lip. He shifted and some slopped over.
“I like tasting my come in your mouth.” He said it quietly, his eyes closed, his head lolling back on his hands. “I like feeling your tongue on my penis. And if you rub my balls, I can feel it in the soles of my feet. I never understood that. How can rubbing my balls make my feet ache?”
He gave a short, low laugh. The sound curled her
toes.
“Do you remember the first time we camped out? How I took those drugs to keep from ejaculating since we’d be in a sleeping bag?”
“You got a rash. And vomited.”
Link opened his eyes and nodded. He sat up. “That’s why I’m unimproved as well, Evans. I’m one of the two percent of the population that can’t tolerate sperm suppression drugs. Or the erectile enhancers.”
“So, are there dozens of little Link Taylors running around somewhere?”
He shook his head and leaned back again, this time folding his hands over his belly. “I’ve never screwed a woman who wasn’t taking care of herself.”
“If this is how you romance a woman, you’re failing.”
“Are you wet inside?” he asked, eyes still closed.
“Dry as a bone.” She knew she was still wet from their deck wrestle.
“I’ll take care of that. Okay. Where was I? Ah, yes. The camping trip. I know I was sick and I blew it for you, but I had great plans. I intended to make you howl at the moon. A little like you just did out on the deck.”
Superior shithead, she wanted to tell him with scorn, but instead, she said, “I howled because I worked you up so well, you performed really well. Without my mind fuck, as you called it, it would have just been a run of the mill screw.”
“I remember telling you that I’d make you come once for every shooting star we saw. Remember it was the Leonids that time? The meteor shower in November?”
“I remember.” She wished she hadn’t said it. She needed to put him in his place. “And we know how impossible that would be. They may have discovered how to keep you guys from making wet spots, and science may be able to keep you stiff for a certain amount of time, but they haven’t figured out how to increase the number of times you can get it up.”
He smiled, but kept his eyes closed. “I only wanted to do it twice. Once before I asked you to marry me and once after.”
“Link.” She sat up and pressed her hand to her pounding heart. Typical of his love of all things old, he’d used the antiquated word for a life partnership. “You were going to ask me to marry you?”
“Yeah. Stupid idea. I was headed for Mars and you were headed for Homeland Security. What made you drop out, by the way?”
“Drop out?” she mouthed the words and realized they’d shifted focus, to the here and now. She tried to remember her cover story. If she screwed it up in one little detail, Link would zero in on it like a targeting laser. “Oh. I didn’t drop out. They threw me out. Drugs. I got hooked on drugs.”
He surged to a sitting position. Water sloshed over the side of the tub in a tidal wave. He grabbed her shoulders. “Drugs? Is that why you embezzled the base funds? And how the hell did you get involved with drugs?”
She looked down so he couldn’t see the lie in her eyes. She looked at the dark hair encircling his penis and slipped her fingers into the thick thatch and stroked him.
“Old story. I pieced it together much later. I got somebody else’s drink at a party, one somebody’d boosted with their drug of choice. I was hooked and ordering up a storm with the base supplier before I knew what hit me.”
He lifted her chin on his hand and examined her face. Not for lies. For signs of drug addiction.
“What was the drug?”
“Nine-oh-two. One of the virtual ones. I was spinning after you in space, Link, trying to reach you in my mind.”
“Shit.” He kissed her and enveloped her in a bone-crushing embrace. “I should have insisted you sign on for the Mars study. You’d have been safe with me.”
“No, I’d have slit your throat the first time you fucked someone else. And there were other someones, weren’t there?” She placed a finger over his lips. “No, don’t answer that. What you and I have done in the interim has nothing to do with now. With us here. And you are such a miserable mind fuck.”
He cupped her face. “Kiss me and consider yourself mind fucked anyway.”
He rose and plucked her out of the water. Scattering droplets everywhere, he carried her in his arms to the huge bed and dumped her on it. She squealed. “I’m wet. This bedspread is silk.”
“Enjoy.” He gripped her ankles and dragged her to the foot of the bed. He buried his face between her thighs. She would be raw, she figured, but she’d been worse off before—and this was Link, who’d planned to ask her to marry him.
It was her last coherent thought. His tongue was magic, his hands finding all the right places… between her legs, the gentle swell of her belly, her breasts.
Just when she thought she couldn’t stand any more, he stopped, standing up and wiping his face with the robe she’d hung on the bedpost. He jerked the bedspread down and with a gesture indicated she was to get beneath the blankets.
“I want to make love to you, face to face. Like a pair of ancient missionaries.”
He reached out to a touch pad near the bed, and skimmed his fingertips across it in a motion that was almost a caress. He didn’t smile, but his eyes softened.
“And I want to do it beneath the stars.”
The roof curled open like a giant iris. A billion stars appeared, spread across the black background of space. Some bright, some faint, glittering with every color imaginable.
“You see this every day,” she whispered. “I can barely see a few hundred in the city.”
He lay down beside her and rolled on top of her. “Watch the stars, Evans. Keep your eyes open while I love you and enjoy what you see. It may be the only way I can make you see stars and I accept that – for now.”
She guided him between her thighs and the feel of him sliding into her was so familiar, so perfect, she wanted to weep.
She kept her eyes on the heavens as he’d directed, but drew up her legs and lifted her hips to meet each of his thrusts. He went deeply into her, his face buried against her hair.
His breath gusted harshly on her. Every now and then he moaned.
The stars blurred a bit as his hard strokes broke into an arrhythmic thrusting. She felt the spurt of his seed. He must have known she’d not come, because he put his hand between them and touched her.
The stars spun.
Her breath burned out of her chest and she gasped for air. Her nails bit into his buttocks and she ground against his fingers, prolonging the nearly painful climax.
He stroked her gently from breast to mid-thigh, running his hands on her as if smoothing in some silky cream.
“I used to masturbate to thoughts of you, Evans. You in the shower, washing between your thighs. You with your head back, mouth open, gasping when you came. I needed that. The memories. The first woman I slept with after you, I pretended she was you. Shit, Evans. I’ve been mentally replacing every woman I’ve fucked with you in my head.”
“I win,” she said and took his lower lip, a full, sensual lip, between her teeth. “You’re a complete loser. That was a terrible way to end a fuck… telling me about other women you’ve been with. You’re impossible.”
Ignoring the words, he focused on the softness in her tone. She hadn’t minded at all. Her hand found him. Her fingers were easy on him, cupping his balls and kneading them as if he were made of something tender, something fragile.
He shifted around so he could kneel over her in the classic 69 position.
Her bottom was the perfect fit for his palms as he slid his hands under her and raised her butt so he could taste and smell her.
She was drenched with his come. Tasting it on her mouth was titillating, but here, between her thighs, here her taste and scent mixed with his and made a primordial soup he had to lap with his tongue and dip into with his fingertips. He pressed against her knee, flattening her leg to the bed. He licked her with the patience of a cat, then lightly touched a kiss to the mole on her inner thigh.
“Venus, rising,” he said and returned to the slick joy of her swollen clit.
She began to weep. Her body shook. Her thighs quivered.
He released her and cradled he
r in his arms. “Tell me,” he said, wiping away the tears.
“My crotch is raw. You’re going to kill me with sex.”
He laughed. “Here I thought I’d moved you to tears. What a jerk I am.”
He shifted her to her side and curled his body around hers. “Okay. I can take a hint. You’re sore. I’ll give you a few hours to recover. Maybe you can get back into the tub later and soak that twat. I’ll be needing it ready for action very soon.”
She pinched his arm that lay around her middle. “That’s it. You’re a hopeless cave man. Twat. Where did you hear that word?”
“From the same guy on my team who said you were a cock jockey—or was it pole princess?” He yawned.
She felt and heard his breathing shift to the rhythm of a sleeping man.
Cock Jockey.
Pole Princess.
She’d called herself that. Even if it was an undercover assignment, those few words reminded her that he thought she was a professional whore, one in the life because she was working off the penalty for embezzlement.
Tears did run down her face at that thought. She had no need to cover them with the excuse he was chewing her raw. No, now he was asleep. She could weep for real.
Weep because he’d done something from their first time together under the stars.
He’d been in the same position, head between her thighs, mingling his saliva with her juices and his come. Then, too, he’d pressed her knee back, kissed her mole, and said. “This is my small personal mark. Venus, rising.”
From that moment, whenever he found her clitoris engorged, he’d say, “I see Venus is rising.”
* * * * *
Link worked the muscles of his upper body. He liked the old free weights, the ones only useful here on earth, where they worked against the pull of real gravity. He counted so he didn’t focus on Evans.
She wanted a mind fuck. He wasn’t giving her one. If he did, he’d start babbling about loving her. And he couldn’t reconcile this stranger with the one he had loved ten years ago.
