by Tinnean
“I think you’d better find out,” Anderson said carefully, because he did know what that was about, but he didn’t want to hurt his friend’s feelings. “Especially if Kate’s the only person here you want to have sex with.”
Bobby blinked at him. “Of course she is.” He blinked again. “God, Anderson, I can’t imagine having sex with anyone else. It’s like… for the last year, I looked at her and thought… thought she was everything. She made my stomach tingle, and… I couldn’t look at her without blushing. And that day….” He blushed now. “That day I caught you, you know”—he blushed harder—“caught you—man, it was like, that day, I finally knew what part of my body I wanted to engage, you know? Suddenly, I looked at her, and she wasn’t just another girl… she was the girl. She was… she was everything.”
“You said that already,” Anderson said, but his throat was dry and his eyes burned too. Everything.
Bobby stood up and started pacing. “Why doesn’t she know that?” he said unhappily. “And why did caring more about the sex than the other bullshit in those books make her so mad?”
Anderson started to laugh then, helplessly. “You moron!” he gasped, as Bobby just stared at him in disgust, and it was a long time, and his stomach muscles hurt from giggling, before he calmed down enough.
“What in the hell is so funny?” Bobby fumed. “Seriously!”
Anderson stopped giggling and wiped his eyes. “You’re so stupid! Don’t you realize that all that romance stuff you hate so much is the same stuff you just told me about Kate being everything? That’s all she wants to hear, you know. God—go give her a present that has nothing to do with sex and tell her she’s everything! You two will be rolling around like… like….” His mind flailed for comparisons, and all he could call up were the science and nature vids that had also opened with the health and hygiene subsection. “Like humping Altarian lemming-birds.”
Bobby looked at him in horror. “Okay, okay, okay—I get it. Romance, it gets you sex!”
Anderson blinked and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Fine. Romance gets you sex. Look at it that way.”
Bobby’s expression changed, grew crafty. “What are you reading?”
Anderson flushed. “Romance,” he said, hiding his face.
“With a boy and a girl?”
Anderson’s flush intensified. “Yeah, this one. They have some with girls and girls and some with boys and boys. I like those too.” That was an understatement. Those had been his favorites, but he liked the boy-girl ones too. The story seemed to be the thing that pulled him under, and family, the happy banter, the interest. But yes, he liked it when the story showed two men. He’d had no primer for this part of his life, none at all, until that health and hygiene file had opened.
Bobby looked at Anderson’s reading tablet speculatively. “Send that one to me, okay?”
Anderson shrugged. “Yeah, all right. Are you going to go make up with Kate yet?”
“Yeah. But, uh, send her the boy-boy romances you like, okay?”
Really? “Really?”
“Yeah. I think she’d get a kick out of ’em.” And with that, Bobby went trotting out of the sleeping quarters, propelled by nothing Anderson could think of.
Of course, a half an hour later, he heard the now-familiar noises from Kate’s quarters, including the new addition of Kate screaming, “Oh… Bobby… yes!”
The sounds never failed to arouse Anderson, partly because he could hear Bobby making his own demands and partly because now, after a couple of months saturated in health and hygiene, he had a much deeper, much more vivid imagination with which to picture making sounds like that of his own. He switched the feed on his tablet to an explicit picture of two young men, naked, reversed against each other so that each one could swallow the other’s genitals in open, needing mouths.
He pressed play on the video with one hand and, with the other, unzipped his coveralls and began to slowly stroke his erection. Even as he threw back his head and enjoyed the pretty young men and enjoyed the sensation of his cock in his fist, he had to wonder, of course he had to wonder, if he was destined to do this alone.
TWO WEEKS later, a new student enrolled in Mr. Kay’s class and was introduced as Alex. He had a square-chiseled chin, a chest far more developed than most sixteen or seventeen-year-old boys’, and piercing blue-black eyes. He swaggered into the class, surveyed the students with mild contempt in his lazy, hooded gaze, and smiled faintly when his eyes landed on Anderson.
“No worries, teach,” he said with a smirk. “I know where I’m sitting.”
Anderson looked to his right where a thin, fair-haired girl, who reminded him of his sister Jen just enough not to hurt, usually sat, and sure enough, it was vacant.
Anderson turned to his left and glared at Bobby with pure venom.
Bobby gave an unconvincing smile and said, “What?”
“‘No worries, teach’?” Anderson echoed. “Where did you get this guy?”
Bobby hushed him and looked at Alex from underneath lowered eyebrows. “He’s. Right. There.”
Anderson turned to his blind date and smiled thinly. “Hi, Alex. My name is Anderson. It’s nice to meet you.”
Alex smiled arrogantly and raised his eyebrows like a pro. “Hello, beautiful!”
Anderson looked at Bobby, who grimaced back. “Well, maybe Alex isn’t quite your type.”
“It’s like he was made for me,” Alex purred, and Anderson lowered his forehead to his desk and started a rhythmic thumping designed to hustle them through the next four hours of school.
It didn’t work. Alex was like… like a Hydran slime leech, only tighter to Anderson’s skin and twice as gross. He fawned, he grabbed, and by the end of the school day, Mr. Kay had reprimanded him twice for imposing on Anderson’s personal space, and moved his seat. The kicker was when Alex gave that heavy-lidded smirk of his and said, “No worries, teach. Tomorrow, I’m sure a new seat will be in the program.” He winked at Anderson and said, “Get it, brown eyes, get it? Program?”
Anderson glowered at his best friend. “Oh, I get it,” he muttered, and Bobby had the grace to blush, even if it was the thousandth time.
“So?” Kate asked eagerly as they met her after school. They walked through the carefully designed pathways, around buildings and secret corners, and right into—
“Oh. My. God.”
And there was Alex, his impressively large, thick cock elongated and full in front of him and one of the weaker-willed, less attractive girls in their class on her knees before him.
Anderson simply gaped, but for Bobby, this seemed to be the last straw. After grabbing both Anderson and Kate by the arms and hauling them out of earshot of the smirking Alex, he turned to Kate in outrage, snapping, “Bi? Of all things, you made him bi?”
Kate shrugged and looked sheepish. “Well, Anderson clicked ‘standard’ on everybody’s proclivities. I figured this way, if he didn’t work, he could, you know, find someone else who liked him.”
Anderson looked at her, feeling a little queasy. “He’s, uh, sort of a sleazebag, Kate. Do we really want to, you know, squander our energy on a sleazebag?” The “squander the energy” thing wasn’t simply metaphor. Anderson had been doing fuel calculations over the past few months, trying to see if the extra use of power that had converted the entire shuttle to a holodeck was fully compensated for by the lack of the thirty people that the shuttle would normally have been carrying. Since it was only designed to be in space for a year, the whole prospect was an iffy business, and after having Bobby and Kate and Mr. Kay double-check his calculations, Anderson had been forced to make some modifications. Kate would have graduated two years before anyway, so now, when she would have normally been in school, her program was diverted to the shuttle’s autopilot. This did two things—it meant that her school program didn’t have to be run, and, honestly, it made Anderson feel a little better knowing Kate was steering the shuttle.
They’d begun to eliminate other things too—t
rips to the amusement park had become fewer and further between. Mr. Kay became Anderson and Bobby’s only teacher, and their class had stabilized to the twenty people they really liked and with whom they worked well together. And the curriculum was leaning more and more to things that might possibly get them out of hyperspace and to a closer space station than the one the shuttle had been programmed for. So the question was real. Could they really afford to squander fuel on a sleazebag?
They talked about it—Anderson hated “cheating,” as he called it, but after three days of getting his ass grabbed on a constant basis and wondering who was going down on Alex for the other eight hours of the day, he was pretty sure they were nowhere near closer to coming to a resolution.
Until the next day when Alex was gone, and a shy boy named Len was introduced. Len had dark hair and blue eyes, like Alex, but his blue eyes were a lighter, brighter, happier color of sky-blue. He also had a stammer and a terminal blush.
He came to sit down next to Anderson, and Anderson smiled encouragingly. Len excused himself abruptly to run to the bathroom and be sick from, as he explained through his stammer a few moments later, sheer nerves.
Anderson made a good-faith effort with Len, but after four days without even getting a complete sentence from the poor boy, even the eternally optimistic Bobby had to admit it was a wash.
“I’d sort of feel bad about pulling the plug on the guy,” Bobby said that night, “but really, he seemed so bloody miserable the entire time, it was sort of merciful really.”
Anderson scowled at him. He didn’t like “pulling the plug” on anybody. It felt like cheating, that he and Bobby and Kate could essentially play God with the people who came and went on the holodeck.
But then, he didn’t want to be permanently alone either, so the scowl was as harsh as his expression got, and the next day, Peter was introduced to the class.
Peter had plain brown hair and plain brown eyes, a pair of spectacles that he liked to push up, and a studious, earnest expression that appealed to Anderson immensely. Peter lasted a little longer than the first two boys. He was invited to dinner with Anderson’s family and allowed to watch vids with them as well. But by the fifth date, when Peter excused himself early to go home to do homework, and he hadn’t cracked a smile, even once, not even at some of Bobby’s more inspired clowning, Kate had shaken her head.
“No, Anderson, I’m thinking this one is a wash.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Bobby looked hurt. Peter must have been a whole lot of his idea. “He’s quiet, he’s serious, and he’s a lot like Anderson!”
“Well yeah!” Anderson burst out, throwing some popcorn at him. “Except I like to think I’m not a complete tool!”
“Not all the time,” Bobby conceded with a badly concealed smirk, and this time it was Kate who threw popcorn at Bobby.
“Yeah, Bobby,” she chortled, “only when you’re not!”
Bobby responded by throwing popcorn back at the two of them, and when they were done, very little of the popcorn had been eaten, they spent an hour cleaning the front living space of their dorm, and the three of them had laughed until their stomach muscles hurt. (Bobby whined about it most of the next day, and Anderson figured Kate was just a lot more stoic.) It was a good time, with the three of them, and they left it that way for a month or two.
ANDERSON’S LONELINESS grew more and more apparent, though, and Bobby and Kate became less and less eager to share their own intimacy with him. He began to spend more time studying the explicit sex vids on his own, and his own body with them. He was on the verge of asking the synthesizer if it could possibly program some sort of sexually stimulating anal probe when Henry was introduced in class.
He was so grateful for some hope that he couldn’t even glare at Bobby this time.
Henry was great. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and he and Bobby could tell bad jokes and make fun of vids for hours. He was a little dryer than Bobby, though, and a lot less expressive. He was dry and sarcastic and analytical, and interesting.
Kate liked him—just not for Anderson.
Anderson might have been inclined to ignore her, but he realized that after their sixth or seventh date that he had no desire to hold Henry’s hand, or kiss him, or even share a moment of breathless anticipation with him.
Henry was a friend, and nothing more.
Anderson walked him to his dorm that night (all of the students lived in the same complex—one of the driest bits of programming Anderson had done) and told him that they’d see him in the morning, and Henry—who had dark hair, glasses, dark brown eyes, and a dimple in his cheek, gave him a crooked smile.
“Really?” he asked softly. “The other kids talk, you know.”
Anderson blushed. He didn’t know. He thought of the first three boys who had simply not shown up the next day and felt bad. “You’ll be there,” he said softly. “You’re a friend. And you help. We… we don’t have a lot of fuel, and we can’t use it on people who don’t make things run better, but you’re fine.”
Henry nodded and, unexpectedly, kissed Anderson’s cheek. “You’re a good person, Anderson. I wish you and I could have been something.”
Anderson shrugged. “So do I. See you tomorrow night for vids?”
Henry grinned, surprised and, hopefully, pleased. “Absolutely. Can I bring someone?”
Anderson was a little startled. “Sure. Who is she?”
“How did you know it was a she?” Henry was impressed, and Anderson smiled a little sadly, not wanting to explain.
Risa was the timid little blonde girl who kept moving to make room for Kate and Bobby’s next attempt at matchmaking. She said very little most times, but when she did say something, it was usually memorable and unintentionally outrageous. Henry and Risa made a nice addition to their little group, though, and for a while, Kate and Bobby gave it up, allowed the new people to help make up the blank in Anderson’s life, and stopped pestering him with potential bedmates.
In the meantime, Anderson started having really explicit, highly satisfying dreams about Mr. Kay. Well, why not? he figured with some resignation. He was seventeen now, and Mr. Kay was in his late twenties. The age gap wasn’t unheard of, and, well, it was a small community, right? Dreaming about the guy wasn’t such a bad thing, right?
That was what he thought, at least, until he accidentally confessed his new crush to his best friend.
“Mr. Kay?” Bobby said, not incredulously, not laughing, like Bobby usually was, simply puzzled. “Really? Hmmm… Mr. Kay. Interesting.” It was the speculative tone in Bobby’s voice that made Anderson’s warning alarms sound.
“Hey, Bobby, man, don’t read anything into this, okay? I’m just… you know. Telling you to tell someone, all right?”
Bobby smiled at him, brown eyes twinkling. “I get it, Anderson. No worries. You know me, just always looking for the joke, right?”
Except Bobby wasn’t laughing, and a week later, neither was Anderson.
THE AIR turned electric when he walked into the room. He was good-looking—sandy-blond hair, electric-blue eyes, high cheekbones, a narrow face, and a surprisingly firm jaw—but it was more than that. He didn’t have Alex’s arrogance and swagger, but he didn’t have Len’s terminal shyness by a long shot. He was quite simply In Command. He was a couple of years older than Bobby and Anderson, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one, but he walked as though he’d commanded starships, planets, solar systems. He didn’t need to swagger, but any shyness he’d possessed had been burned out of him by his experiences as well. His body was long and thin, with slightly wider shoulders and big, capable hands. His blue eyes smoldered, and although his gaze didn’t dismiss Anderson completely, it didn’t linger on him either.
Mr. Kay introduced him as the new teacher’s assistant, and he stood in front of the class and inclined his head modestly.
“Good morning,” he said crisply, with a faint smile. “My given name is Aaron, but you all may call me Alpha.” Alex Leonard Peter Henry A
aron. Nice.
There were no titters, no laughs, and not a soul looked back at Anderson, even though everyone knew what this man was here for. Henry shifted a little to his right and said, “Jesus, Anderson, no wonder you made Bobby try again.”
Anderson couldn’t even smile, couldn’t crack a joke, couldn’t hardly breathe.
Alpha was no laughing matter.
Chapter 4
Oxygen Warning
Six Years Later
ANDERSON’S HEAD hurt, and he moaned a little as he rolled out of bed.
They’d done it again.
Alpha’s warm body moved next to him, and one leanly muscled arm barely missed throwing itself around Anderson’s middle. Anderson dodged the arm but didn’t dodge the bony hand as it clasped tightly around his wrist.
“You’re going to be okay, you know that, right?”
Anderson looked away from those intense blue eyes and barely restrained himself from rubbing the bruises on his throat. “Yeah,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from the night before, from shame, from fear. “I know.”
“Anderson,” Alpha said warningly, “you know you made me do that.”
Anderson nodded, not really in agreement but more in self-defense. If he nodded, Alpha would let him out of the room, and he could go check on the warning alarm that was echoing through the ship.
“Let me come with you,” Alpha demanded, and Anderson shook his head.
“No. Kate and Bobby are better at navigation and steering. You need to stay here.”
Anderson zipped up his coveralls—one of the last few pairs that hadn’t been cannibalized for fiber or used for substance for the synthesizer—and hurried out of his room, wondering if Alpha would put to rights the knocked-over lamps and furniture or if all of it would be in a pile in the center of the room when he got back. He didn’t know, sometimes, which tack Alpha would take in his increasingly desperate attempts to manipulate Anderson’s behavior.
