Call and Response

by Sara Rustan

  He pushed in just a little, hardly enough to cover the silky head of his cock, and pulled back. Over and over he teased her with short, tantalizing thrusts. Her body melted like ice cream in the sun, and she could hear the wet sounds of him moving in her.

  She breathed in short, sharp pants, and she burned to have him fill her all the way.

  Finally she tilted her hips and pushed up, impaling herself on him. The broad width of his cock finally filled her full, and her sensitized sex clenched around him.

  His motion stopped, and he paused, buried inside her. “You’re very tight and wet.”

  “Goddess, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this good.” She throbbed around him, the lack of motion making her even more aware of his cock inside her, of its head pressing against her womb.

  “I’m glad.” He pulled back slowly, and she whimpered at the feel of his crown moving through her sensitive flesh. Then he slammed forward, driving impossibly deep.

  Janeth’s head swam with her own pleasure and Tom’s. Everything left her mind except the need for completion. Their emotions were the same, their physical need was the same. Every breath a moan or a whimper as he pounded into her.

  Anticipation curled in shimmering waves, and she realized that this was Tom who was giving her this gift, that she would do anything to have this again—and again and again.

  He reached between them to press a finger to her clit, and her body shattered. Waves of orgasm steamed through her. He slammed into her one last time and she could feel him spasm inside her.

  He collapsed on top of her, and gradually their breathing calmed and their sweaty skin cooled.

  The deed was done. Janeth had infected him with the mating virus. And she was glad. She wanted Tom; she wanted more sex like this. She wanted him for her mate.

  Tom turned his head to kiss the closest skin to his lips. “Wow. That’s all I can say—wow.”

  “I say wow too.”

  “Didn’t we do this to clear our minds, to get away from being horny?”

  “I remember that as an issue, yes.”

  “It didn’t work. My mind isn’t clouded from arousal anymore. But it’s clouded by you.” He rubbed his face into the curve of her neck.

  “My mind is clouded from fatigue. I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.”

  “Then don’t. Go to sleep, and we’ll deal with everything in the morning—after some more hot sex.” He kissed her again.

  Well, yes. They would have things to deal with in the morning. But not just what Tom expected. The sex was just the initiation of the process. Genetic changes had been introduced through her sexual fluids. It only happened at plenerty—and only this once. Once they made love again with the Shenkiloi genes activated, some of his genetic material would be returned to Janeth, and they would be bound together, like lock and key.

  Things would be different in the morning. Tom would be different in the morning. She snuggled up to his body, holding his hand up to her face. She had to treasure these minutes. They might be the only ones she would have.

  She pressed the length of her body against his firm strength. She felt suspended in time between the satisfaction and sensuality of making love, and the morning. She could try to stay awake all night, just listening to him breathe and feeling his heart pound in his veins, enjoying being next to him. But she knew she wouldn’t last. Already she could feel the heaviness of sleep dragging her down. She gave up and drifted.

  Tom woke with a splitting headache from a dream in which beautiful witches were torturing his sexual parts with hot irons. He remembered having glorious sex with Janeth last night, and falling asleep curled around her. Now it felt like an iron pick was lancing through his head. He opened his eyes, and the light flashed through, bringing with it even worse pain. He closed his eyes and moaned.

  He felt a cool hand on his forehead, and Janeth whispered in his ear, “We need to have sex again.”

  “Can’t. Head hurts.”

  “It will hurt even worse if we don’t.”

  What she was saying made no sense. Was this horrible pain connected to her somehow? Maybe he was allergic to her talents. Pain speared through him. He curled up in a little ball and tried to breathe.

  A hand grasped his cock. His skin there was so sensitive it felt like it was on fire, but a fire that turned him hard as iron. It was a sexual arousal so over the top that it was closer to pain than pleasure. “Stop. Hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom. We have to do this.”

  He just moaned. Her hand firmly and efficiently stroked up and down, circling the sensitive part just underneath the head at the end of each upstroke. His dick was a fiery hot pole, and her hand was the blowtorch. Then he felt her tug on a nipple, and more molten arousal flowed through him. He couldn’t breathe.

  Her cool, yet flaming hands unrolled him and pushed him flat on the bed. He felt her position her feet on either side of him, and he opened his eyes a crack to see that she crouched over him. She placed the burning-hot head of his cock at her cool, moist entrance and sank down. He screamed. Though her flesh felt cool to him, the heat in his erection increased.

  “I’ll try to finish this as quickly as possible,” she murmured. He didn’t understand what was wrong with him.

  She pumped up and down while pulling on his nipples, and he felt her hand on his balls. A finger pressed into his anus. The sensitized flesh spasmed around the finger, which pressed farther in and touched a spot that sent his arousal up so high, so fast that it felt like a volcano. The fiery tension mounted, spiraling up and up, until finally, with a feeling of intense relief, he came in long slow pulses, spurting hot lava through him and into her. The spasm went on and on until he felt like he was spasming dry, and then, suddenly, he was cool again, as though cold water had washed over him.

  He collapsed, completely wrung out from resisting the pain and the brutally quick sex. He tried to think, to figure out what was going on, but darkness flooded over his brain, and he faded out.

  Chapter Four

  Janeth sat and watched Tom sleep. His flushed, sweaty skin gradually dried and returned to a more normal color. One part of her wanted to leave while he was out. She didn’t want to face him. But it would be the act of a coward to sneak out and throw away her only chance to make something of this.

  That last act of sex had felt dangerously close to abuse, but it had been necessary to finish the connection between them. She had passed the mating virus to him and initiated the changes. He had to give it back to her so that they were truly matched. Stopping halfway was not an option. He would have had no relief from the change for days, maybe even weeks. Leaving the mating unfinished would have destroyed her chance to rescue her brother—and create something with Tom.

  On Lorelly, there were treatments to slow the process down, to make it less painful and intense—yet another reason why Shenkiloi didn’t mate off-planet.

  Finally he stirred. His eyes flashed open, and he saw her sitting there. “What the fuck was that about?” he croaked. “You did something to me. Why can I feel you in my head? What did you do?”

  She stood, her muscles stiff and awkward. “Having sex with someone who’s going through plenerty causes certain changes in the brain of the partner.”

  “You fucked with my brain?”

  “Not me. Exactly. There’s a virus that’s released in the sexual fluids…”

  “Oh, right. Like it wasn’t something I got from you.”

  She knew it. She knew he would be angry. This was the part she’d been dreading. She could feel all of his emotions, his anger and confusion, his feelings of betrayal. He was right to be angry, right to feel betrayed.

  “Oh, as if the fact that I’m justified does me any fucking good. Can you change me back?”

  “No. But if the changes aren’t…fed, they’ll eventually fade.”

  He rolled up to a sitting position, his feet on the floor. “You’re concealing something. I can tell.”

  “It’s not
hing that need concern you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He stood, and stepped closer to lean toward her, his hands tightly fisted, his eyes narrowed. “Get out. Go away and don’t come whining to me with your lies and deceptions again.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

  Pain flashed in Janeth’s chest, and she breathed carefully and deeply. This was no more than she had expected, and what she deserved, though the pain of rejection surprised her. Tom had started out a stranger. He wasn’t a stranger to her now.

  At least now she could look for her brother without dying of plenerty need. Binding to Tom had bought her a week or two of life—and sanity. And if she did find Darian and he wasn’t too far gone, there was the chance that he could act as her anchor until they booked passage in cryosleep. It wasn’t a strong chance, but it was all she had.

  Unless Tom chose to satisfy the binding. But she guessed it would be a cold day in hell before he had sex with her again.

  Tom spent a long time in the shower, letting the water needle his skin and run down his face. He knew when Janeth left the house, even though he couldn’t hear a thing. He could feel her presence with a much more powerful and sensitive empathic sense than he ever had before, and he could feel the change when she left. He could even tell how she was feeling, and that ticked him off even more. He didn’t want to know that she was suffering, that she hadn’t wanted to hurt him but had felt she didn’t have a choice. Leave him his righteous anger, damn it!

  He stalked out of the house in no mood for the scheduled meeting with Ram Nori, the local official who was his liaison on Dragnath.

  None of the people he passed were empathic broadcasters, thank the goddess. That would have been almost impossible to handle. But his newly enhanced empathy kept picking up random emotions as soon as he forgot to shield his mind. His formerly low sensitivity hadn’t required such continuous shielding. Now, the faint sense of something wrong was replaced with a solid perception of malevolent emotion. It drifted by like fog, but he couldn’t tell where it came from.

  He realized that if his empathy had been kicked up several levels, he might no longer be safe on Dragnath. Hell! Sex with Janeth might have compromised his ability to finish his assignment. That woman owed him big time.

  By the time he reached Ram Nori’s office in the governmental complex, he had another splitting headache and was having a hard time concentrating.

  Ram Nori wasn’t happy with Tom’s lack of progress on the investigation. He looked down his long nose and said, “I’m not at all convinced that there is anything at all to this person’s claim that they suffered an empathic attack on Dragnath. We have no records at all of such a thing ever happening. If you haven’t found anything, it’s because there isn’t anything to find.”

  “I didn’t say I hadn’t found anything. I said I hadn’t located the source of the attack.” Tom leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. “I have found indications that there is a rogue empath on Dragnath, including several anomalous events.”

  Ram leaned closer and furrowed his forehead. “What events?”

  “The investigation of those events has not been completed, so I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “So, you haven’t found the rogue, and you can’t tell me what you have found. You’ll forgive me if I don’t find your position very convincing.”

  “My empathic ability tells me that there is a rogue,” Tom said through gritted teeth.

  Ram glanced at the computer screen in front of him. “But your empathic abilities are actually quite weak, according to the report. That’s why it was considered safe to send you here.”

  Tom opened his mouth to respond, and realized there was nothing much he could say. It wasn’t supposed to be possible to increase empathy. So he just shrugged. “In my judgment, there are enough grounds to continue the investigation. I’ll let you know if I find anything important.” He stood and turned to go.

  Ram called after him, “I’ll be filing a protest with your department.”

  Tom didn’t reply.

  Her emotions were raw and painful, and she was tired of poking at them like a tongue at a sore tooth. She needed some activity to take her mind off Tom, so she spent the morning looking for her brother. She covered the area where she had lost him the day before on foot, expanding outward until her feet were sore.

  She finally gave up and ate chapattis and curry by herself in one of the utilitarian downtown restaurants that was filled with people eating lunch alone. The hills surrounding the city were visible behind the orderly rows of plascrete buildings, and the thought of being away from the emotional push and pull of endless trivial emotions—not to mention the tendrils of frustrated anger she picked up now and then from Tom—was attractive. She needed a break.

  She got directions from the cashier and caught a tram to a park on the other side of the hills away from the city. The place was deserted in the middle of the day, and the chittering of the birds and the rustle of small animals in the bushes soothed her jangled nerves.

  She followed a path to the top of another hill and sat down on a convenient bench. She closed her eyes and let all tension drain out of her, relaxing into the rhythms of nature. Peace stole through her, but then an odd wisp of malevolent emotion floated by, so slight and hazy that she didn’t quite trust her perceptions—except that this was the same source she had felt in the city. It was somehow connected to her brother’s difficulties. She knew it.

  This was an ideal location to exercise her talent. She stood and ran through her usual warming-up exercises until her voice was pure and effortless. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and sang out with both her voice and her empathy. It was a light, questioning trill, a run up the scale that ended with an unresolved note. At the same time she empathically called the equivalent of “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?”

  The barely perceptible wisp of emotion grew larger, full of darkness and loneliness and surprise. Whoever was broadcasting the negativity wasn’t used to receiving from another empath. As she continued to call and sing, she could feel the broadcaster focus on her.

  The strength of the emotion grew until she had to stop calling and put her strength into a shield. Anger speared into her, sharp, wild anger. And despair. Uh-oh, this wasn’t very smart, she thought, right before she slipped into blackness.

  She came back to consciousness several hours later, no other emotions detectable around her. Tired of not having a good label to stick onto the…entity, she decided to call it the troll. In the last seconds before going unconscious, she had gotten the impression that it was male—at least it matched better to the concept of male than female. She also knew the troll was trapped somewhere in a cave, though all she had gotten was a vague impression of darkness and rock and endless caverns—and the impression of truly amazing power. Somehow he had gotten stuck in this planet and couldn’t escape—and he was very, very angry.

  She awkwardly stood, glad to find that her only injuries were a strained shoulder, a bruise on her hip, and a kink in a leg muscle. She had no idea whether the information about the troll was useful or not—but at least she now knew it was dangerous to attract his attention, ruling out one of her best options for locating her brother.

  At least it had taken her mind off Tom. The binding, his anger, her uncertainly about their future—if any—all rushed back, and she spent the rest of the journey back to her lodgings trying not to think about him. Quite unsuccessfully, of course.

  ***

  In the middle of the night, Tom woke up suddenly. His dick was stone-hard and sensitive, leaking fluid, his balls drawn up tight as though he were about to come. He shook his head to clear the sleep from his mind. Had he been dreaming of sex? Then he felt the pull of Janeth’s emotions, like the first time she called, except much stronger. “Oh, hell. Not again.”<
br />
  His own emotions were swamped by the intensity of her yearning, and the urge to do something to stop the sadness was overwhelming. But this time he wasn’t going to respond. If she thought she could pull on his chain anytime she wanted, she was dead wrong.

  She had looked and felt so warm and nice and…sexy. And then she played this truly nasty trick on him, infecting him with some goddamned alien virus that changed him, screwed up his empathy, and made him so horny it hurt like hell.

  He grabbed his erect cock and stroked hard. He groaned, unsure whether he was relieved or irritated by the stimulation. He was so hot and dry. All he could think of was quenching the fire in her wet sheath, but he only had his hand. He stumbled into the shower and jerked off under the stream of water until his balls pulled up tight. Orgasm spasmed through him and come splattered the wet wall. He toweled himself dry and headed back to bed.

  But another wave of Janeth’s emotions caught him, and his sore cock swelled to full, aching hardness again.

  He had to stop her. He pulled on his clothes, wishing his pants were even looser, and headed out into the night.

  The landlord of her lodging house was baking the morning bread, and just nodded him through. He opened the door to her room expecting to find her awake and broadcasting to him, but it was dark and quiet, her body a dark lump on the bed. He walked quietly to her side. The moonlight showed that she was asleep, though from her restless movements and soft whimper, he guessed she was dreaming.

  Janeth drifted in a dream, a dark, fearful dream. She was a princess in a tower with no exit, and she was leaning on a thick stone wall calling to her mate to rescue her, to relieve her intense sexual need. She called and called, growing more and more desperate, until she became convinced that he wasn’t coming, and waves of grief and physical frustration engulfed her.