by Dixon, Ruby
I'm just shocked you'd keep such a thing from me. I thought we were friends, Sentorr.
It's not something you bring up casually. Heading out to Saan Takhi Station, and oh, by the way, we're infested with humans.
No, I guess not. Still, wow, humans.
I'm surprised you haven't run into them much with your line of work. We're always careful not to say exactly what it is we do because it is an open ship channel, of course.
You would think, but nope. I think my brothers try to protect me from that sort of thing.
From the way she's described them, they're extremely protective, as all good mesakkah brothers are. I'm glad they're protective. It makes me feel better knowing you're safe with them. I hesitate, then continue on, because I'm hungry for more than just a simple conversation tonight. Maybe it's seeing how the others are with their females, and maybe I'm feeling alone. Maybe it's that she feels a little distant and I can't figure out why. I want to hear your voice tonight, Zoey.
Her reply is immediate. Me too. Do we dare?
I can wait no longer. I buzz directly over to the Little Sister, using a private, encoded comm band. Zoey's used to this, though—she knows exactly how I encrypt the band and picks it up right away. We've done this many times, but every time it leaves me equally tense with anticipation. "Hello again," I murmur, adjusting my earpiece so I won't miss a moment of her voice.
"Were you expecting someone else?" There's sly amusement in her voice, and just the barest hint of an accent. She speaks mesakkah nearly perfectly, but there's a lilt to certain words I haven't been able to figure out. She says she grew up in a small, insular city and hence the accent, but I don't hear that. It's familiar, and yet…not. Whatever it is, it adds a fascinating edge to everything she says.
"I'm not interested in talking to anyone else," I admit. "Where are you at?"
"Currently skirting a very busy shipping lane just outside of Andor IV. Poking at my nav charts. Watching a comet drift incredibly close to a freighter that's not paying attention and enjoying the lightshow of a distant meteor shower one system over that's just screaming for a visit. You?"
"Opening a comm line with my favorite female. You on a delivery run?" It's been days since I've talked to her and I've keffing missed the sound of her voice. It's like now that I've heard it again, I feel whole. Remade. Which is stupid, but it's true. I think about Zoey all the time—when I sleep, in the shower, when I'm around the others. I think of her when the others share affectionate caresses with their mates. I think of her when I'm alone here on deck. I think of her when I get myself a cup of noodles, because I wonder what noodles are her favorite.
I'm obsessed.
I don't care, either. If being obsessed with a female who has an attractive voice is a problem, then I am quite content to be a male with problems.
"Nah. We're wrapping up. Escorted our nice discreet couple to the nice discreet planet of their choice and are now heading discreetly back to the nearest station to refuel." She sighs. "Unfortunately, the nearest station is 3N-Station and it's kind of a pit. I swear, the air there smells like cheap meat and body odor. You ever been there?"
I can't believe it. She's so close and yet so far away. Out of all the stations I was thinking about taking the Fool back to for refueling, 3N was on that list. 3N is nav slang for Three Nebulas, one of the largest stations on this end of the galaxy. It's also one of the most overrun with people of every shape and size and species, and she's not wrong about the smell. I was going to skip it…but now that I know she's heading in that direction? I lean over my monitor and tap out a few coordinate changes. We'll spend a bit more fuel, but I'll tell Kivian to take it out of my share if we need to. "I've been to 3N many, many times. Aren’t they having trouble with pirates lately?” Iris has been telling me about that. She likes to listen in on scattered comm bands in the hopes of hearing information we can use.
“Pirates, huh? You don’t say.” Her tone is sly, teasing.
“Yep. Pirates.” We both appreciate the joke for a moment, and then I press on. “What would you say if I told you we're heading that way, too? We just happened to offload our shipment and we're heading in that direction."
"Huh. Isn't it a little out of the way from where you were running? I thought you were taking goods out to Primus's third moon?" I can hear the confusion in her voice and the light tap of her fingers on her monitors. For some reason, she types very loudly and quickly. It's odd but adorable.
Can't pull one over on a navigator. I'm both amused and chagrined that she's seen through me so quickly. "It's a little bit of a fuel-burner, but we have a contact to meet there." I manually change a few more settings, adjusting the ship's course as I do. Given time, the Fool will chart her own course as long as there's an end point, but I like giving my hands something to do.
Zoey's silence makes me nervous.
We've been talking on bands for months. Longer than that. Maybe a year now. Every night, we send messages to each other, and over the last few months, we've been doing private comms. Intimate comms. I thought we were close, but her silence is a bad sign.
Maybe she's shy and waiting for me to say more. It's already out in the open, so I plunge ahead. I pull up the location of the Little Sister on my charts, since I know their particular signal. "It looks like you should be there tomorrow, if my charts are right. We'll be there the day after." I pause, then continue. "I want to meet you, Zoey."
I want that more than anything. You're my mate. I'm tired of just wishing for you. I want to hold you.
She makes a soft sound in her throat. "I'd love to meet you, too, Sentorr."
Her voice is breathless and sweet, and my body tenses with need. Hearing her husky, soft voice makes my sac tighten, and I know my cock's hard. She arouses me like nothing I've ever keffing seen and I haven't even looked her in the eye. I don't need to. I know she's perfect.
Which is why her next words feel like a punch in the gut. "—But we're just doing a quick stopover. We're not staying for long. There's another passenger we have to shuttle and he's making noises about extra jingle in our pockets if we get there faster, so you know my brothers are all over that." Zoey hesitates. "I'm sorry. Maybe next time?"
I grunt. "Maybe so." I punch the coordinates to 3N anyhow, though I feel like shoving the entire monitor off my station and kicking it once or twice.
"Don't be sad," she tells me, and her voice is light and coy, a frisky note edging in. "I'll just have to make it up to you."
A groan tears from my throat, and I glance over at the bridge doors—closed—before rubbing my hand against the front of my trou. "You're in one of those moods tonight, I see."
"God, I'm 'in one of those moods' every time we talk. I'm like that every time I hear your voice." And she lets out this keffing sexy little whimper that tells me she's touching herself.
It's too much. The throb of my cock becomes aching, and I quickly unfasten my clothes, freeing it. "Let me see your face tonight," I demand. "Call me with a visual comm, not this audio shit."
"I can't," Zoey whispers. "I don't like my face…I'm too ugly. I don't want you to see it."
We've had this conversation a dozen times, easily. She refuses to go to visual communication and says it's because of her face. I don't care if she has a nose bigger than her horns, I want to see her face. I know I'll find her lovely. I hate nothing about her, and not seeing her face feels more like torture than anything. "Zoey, you know I don't care—"
"I care," she says stubbornly. "You're killing my lady boner with this, Sentorr. If you want to talk to me, it has to be like this. Please."
There's a quiet note of desperation in her “please” that makes me sigh. I don't understand her fear—she's so brave over the comm, and from what she's told me about her brothers, she's equally bold with them. "You frustrate me."
"But you love me," she teases back, the playful note back in her voice, along with an edge of hope.
Funny how she throws “love” around. That's a
human term if there ever was one. Maybe she picked it up on one of her runs. I grin to myself, thinking how apt the term is. "I do love you. You have my heart. You know this."
"Well if I do, then can we not argue with each other? I'd much rather engage in some dirty talk. I could…tell you what my hand's on right now."
"Your cunt?" I murmur the words low, because even though I'm alone on the bridge, it needs to be a private thing between us. I want to share my mate with no one.
Zoey gives a trilling little sigh. "It is so filthy when you say that. God, it makes me wet."
I stroke a hand over my cock. "You'd better be touching yourself," I growl.
"Oh, I am. Are you stroking your big thick cock?" Her voice is throaty. "I'm imagining you touching it, the head slick with pre-cum."
The breath hitches in my throat, because she's not wrong. I'm so hard for her that I ache, and my pulse throbs through my body with the need for release. "I am."
"You should picture me with my mouth on you," she says. "Licking you up and down like I've never tasted anything better."
As always, I'm shocked by her words—shocked AND aroused. "Plas-film?" I murmur thickly.
"Never."
I shudder, nearly coming at that. Zoey has such a dirty mouth. She knows just what to say to make me come quickly and hard. "You…you'd put your mouth directly on me?"
"All over your cock," she agrees. "I'd rub it all over my face, hungry for more. I bet you're so big that it'd stretch my lips just trying to fit you into my mouth."
A hard grunt escapes my throat and I stroke my cock, hard. I'm already ready to come, my sac tight with need. "I want to hear you come first, Zoey. Those are the rules."
"Mmm," she says, and then I hear her moan lightly. My ears prick as I can barely make out the sound of her rubbing her wet flesh, and I imagine her fingers gliding between her folds. It's enough to make a man insane with lust, but I manage to hold out, slowly stroking my cock and murmuring encouragement as she works her cunt until she gives a soft, muffled cry that pierces my soul. With a groan, I give my cock another few rough strokes until I come, too.
Zoey sighs happily. "I always feel so naughty after we do that."
"Next time, I want to do it looking into your face," I tell her. "I mean it when I say I want to meet you. I don't care what you look like. I just want to hold your hand and touch your face."
"Maybe we'll both be in the same place at the same time," she says wistfully. "At some point."
"Maybe." I'm going to make it happen sooner rather than later. As the conversation turns towards idle chatter, I keep messing with the Fool's current course. If I keep making minute changes, I can shave time off of our travel. A minute here, ten minutes there. If I keep doing that for the next eighteen hours or so, we should make it to 3N late, late tomorrow.
And hopefully the Little Sister will still be there.
Because I want to claim my female. I'm tired of waiting for maybe, or for someday.
2
ZOEY
After I hang up with Sentorr, it's nearly time for Adiron to wake up and relieve me of the night shift. It'll give me a chance to catch a nap before my three brothers descend on 3N and wreak havoc. I haven't yet decided if I'll go—on the one hand, I've been cooped up in the Sister for a long damn time, but on the other, visiting stations isn't all that fun. Every look I get makes me wary and anxious. Adiron can have fun no matter the place, but I know it bugs Mathiras and Kaspar when I'm miserable and they bail out early because I'm unhappy.
Which just makes me even more miserable, because they deserve shore leave as much as the next person.
I give my station one last caress, picturing Sentorr's face before I get up to run to the lavatory. I need to wash up before Adiron wakes and smells the scent of arousal on the air. I learned the hard way that their noses are way more sensitive than mine, and the incident when I was fourteen and had to explain to my three older brothers that I was masturbating? That's a moment I'd like to never live again.
So I rush to the lavatory and turn on the water, then pause. I'm still thinking of Sentorr's face. His ship doesn't have an ID tag on it, but I looked him up on old prison records. The only holo I have of him is an old 2-D, but it's burned into my mind (and might be printed out and tucked under my pillow). He's got tall, arching horns, a too-serious face, and the most impressively plush mouth that should have never been on a male and yet somehow looks perfect and sexy on him.
My hand slides back to my pussy, and I start to touch myself again. God, I have it bad. I give myself a quick rub to release, and then plunge my hands under the spray of water. For the first time, I look up in the mirror at my face.
Humans?
Shocking, isn't it?
Feel sorry for me.
Feel sorry for me. Those four words are burned into my brain as I stare at my human nose, human eyes, human mouth, and hornless head. I hate my face. I hate the freckles on my nose, the mousey brown hair, the skin that's not quite white, not quite pink, not quite gold but some pasty shade in between. I don't have the gorgeous blue mesakkah skin. I don't have horns or the plated brow that looks so ruggedly fierce. I'm all soft and wimpy with no plating anywhere and boobs that stick out no matter how much I bind them down.
Feel sorry for me.
Kef me, I didn't expect it to hurt so much. I know most mesakkah have a very unpleasant view of humans. We're somewhere between a taboo fucktoy and a trained dog. In the ten years since I was snatched by slavers, the only other humans I've seen are other women who have been forced into slavery, black market playthings that are doomed to have a shitty life under an alien master's thumb.
I touch my face, wondering if I'm pretty to other humans. My brothers say I look fine—well, Adiron says I'm ugly enough to peel paint off the hull of a freighter, but Adiron's a keffing idiot. I wonder if…if Sentorr wasn't disgusted by humans, would he find me attractive? Or am I too freakish for him? The few mesakkah that I've met that have seen my real face (other than my brothers) looked at me pityingly.
I think if Sentorr looked at me with pity or disgust, I'd die. My heart hurts at the thought. I know it bothers him that I won't let him see my face, but…I can't. I know our flirtation is forbidden, but I can't let it go. It's the only thing I have that's truly mine, and I don't want to give it up.
I can never meet him, of course, but I can always dream about it. It's nice to have something—or someone—to look forward to, someone that makes me breathless and full of happiness at the sound of their voice. Our late-night flirtations started out as just that—a fun, silly way to pass the time. It was months before we got past jokes and shared griping about the latest meteor shower or a law enforcement vehicle waiting to snipe people out near the rings of Cassa IV. He was just a buddy.
It's only recently that it's become…problematic.
Because he wants more. And I want more. I scrub my face, my hands, and then between my legs. It can't be more. It can't.
Feel sorry for me.
BANG BANG BANG BANG.
"Did you keffing die in there?"
"Kef off," I shout back to Adiron. "Can't I get five keffing minutes to myself when I'm on the john?"
"It's been longer than that," my brother calls back. "What the kef did you eat?"
I growl and finish washing my hands, dry them, and then slam the door open to look at Adiron's goofy grin. "I hate you."
"No, Runt, you love me." He grabs me around the neck, tucking me under one of those enormous blue arms and noogies the hell out of my head. "You looooooove me."
"Haaaaate," I snarl back, squirming out of his grasp. "You're such a creep."
"You're stinking up the lavatory and I need to be able to breathe while I'm on the bridge," he tells me, moving to my station and plopping his big feet up on the counter like he owns it.
I make an indignant sound and go slap his enormous boot. "Go sit at your own station!"
"Can't," he tells me, crossing his arms and giving me a toothy,
fanged smile. "It's a mess. You wanna clean it for me?"
I know he's just getting under my skin, but it works every keffing time and I mime strangling him. "It's your damn mess. You go clean it!"
"Nah." He takes his feet down when I smack them again and swivels in my chair. "Did you change our course?"
I can feel my face get hot with a flush. "What? No. Why would I do that?"
"You tell me, Runt." He pokes a few buttons. "Looks like you're changing our arrival time at 3N. There a reason for a delay?"
"Is there a delay? I didn't realize." I cross my arms now, feigning ignorance. "You can change it. I don't care what time we get there."
He narrows his eyes at me, then sweeps his long black braid back over his shoulder and begins to reroute our course. "You sure you're okay? It's not like you to plot a garbage run like this. That's more Kaspar's thing."
I drum my fingers against my arm because…he's not wrong. Kaspar's as reckless as he is brave, and that's why he's not in charge of navigation anymore. That's why it's my baby. I was hoping to maybe delay the Sister by a few hours…just in case…
But that's stupid. More than that, I KNOW it's stupid. And yet I can't help but wonder… I shift anxiously on my feet. "Hey, Adiron, can I ask you a question?"
"No, I didn't eat those Earth tarts you like so much," he mutters under his breath as he taps into my panel, remapping my course to the more efficient one it was earlier.
"Pop Tarts," I correct. Even though I haven't been on Earth since I was ten, I still miss the junk foods I had as a kid.
"Might as well eat a tube of cryo preservative," he tells me. "Probably as healthy."
I make a face at the back of his head. "Do you think I'm pretty? For a human?"
He swivels in my chair, his expression completely aghast. "Did…did you just ask me if I find you pretty? Your brother?" He presses a hand to his mouth and acts like he's going to vomit. "I think I'm going to lose my lunch."
