by J. Naomi Ay
He touched my face while I leaned over him.
“Did it hurt?” I said. “I mean, when this was done?” I was running my finger through the groves while he was very lightly tracing my face.
“Hell yes,” he replied, touching my lips with his finger.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, as his finger drew a line down my chest. I think I forgot how to breathe and my heart stopped beating as paralysis started to sink in. In a moment, I would fall over dead.
“It wasn't my choice,” he said, unhooking and removing my wet bra. He took my breasts in his hands, stroking the nipples with his thumbs. My heart kick-started into action and I nearly stroked out. I stared at his hands on my skin and considered how fortunate I was that he was a brain surgeon.
He bent his head toward my nipple.
“Wait!” I screeched and pulled away.
“Wait? For what?” He let go of me and I quickly covered my chest.
“Uh…Uh…let me see your teeth.”
“My teeth? Why? I’m not going to bite you. Unless you want me to?”
“Please.”
He sighed and lay back in the grass, his arms crossed on his chest. I knelt over him and pulled back his lip exposing his slightly longer than normal, slightly crooked, and sharp incisors.
“Yep, you are really Senya,” I concluded, releasing his lip. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me down on him, kissing me hard and pulling off my panties at the same time.
"Wait!" I cried again and pushed off of him. "I'm not ready for this. I hardly know you."
Now, he made a groaning noise and released me again. "You want to talk more?" His eyes flashed so bright for a moment, they nearly blinded me.
"No." I twisted like a pretzel to cover myself forgetting that he couldn’t see me anyway. "It's just that...well, I mean, it's been a really long time and you kind of weren't really there and this is all very sudden and...and I'm not sure I'm not just hallucinating this whole thing!"
He made another groaning noise.
"I did just have brain surgery and a concussion and all that. Maybe I'm psychotic. Maybe I've been psychotic for years because of all that Vicodin I took when I broke my leg when I was nine. I mean, who would believe that a boy from Rozari with silver eyes and strange powers would come to my bedroom back on Earth and sleep in my bed and...and…"
"Katie," he sighed.
"What?"
"Perhaps we should get dressed and go back to the city and have some coffee. Yes? Is that what you would like?"
"No. Why?"
"You are not ready for anything more. I will take you back to the spacebase and tomorrow, maybe we will go out for dinner." He pulled out his cell. "I will check my calendar."
"Oh."
"Why are you disappointed? You do not remember me. You do not understand who I am. You are not ready to make love with me so we will go have dates first."
“Oh.” I looked at his flat stomach and the thin line of black hair that led downward. I put my hand there, on his belly, in the fine hairs. This was Senya, I told myself. His skin was warm here beneath my hand. I could feel his pulse. He felt real.
"Senya." I swallowed hard.
I wanted him. I wanted him like I had never wanted anyone before, and I didn’t want to go to coffee or dinner. I wanted to have dinner with him every night and coffee in bed with him every morning for the rest of my life.
His eyes were closed, his face tipped to the sun. I unbuttoned the top button on his jeans and cautiously slipped my hand a little lower. He opened his eyes and that strange silver light shone in my face. He took my adventurous hand and kissed it. Inexplicably, I started to cry.
"You're real. You're really real."
"Don't cry, Milaka." He kissed my tears and then laid me back in the grass.
"I've been searching for you forever."
"I know, Milaka MaKani. You found me." He kissed my neck, my shoulders, and each of my breasts. He kissed my belly and ran his tongue across my inner thighs.
I gasped. "Oh! What are you doing?”
"Shall I stop? Shall we get coffee instead?"
"Uh...no."
"I thought not," he laughed. Caroline was right. In short order, he did make me sing an aria.
"You really do have cool powers," I said.
He didn’t respond. He might have been sleeping, he was so quiet. We were lying on the beach and the Rozarian sun had moved behind the hills. I thought about going back in the water to rinse off again but I didn’t want to move. I was stuck against him, coated in sand and sweat and other stuff too. His face was snuggled into my neck and I was viewing the bay through the screen of his black hair. I remembered lying in my bed just as this, holding him throughout the night, feeling his body tremble, fighting off whatever demons were plaguing him in another world. His hair was gone then. Now it was long and thick and smelled like lavender. I buried my face in it and kissed his head. He shifted and his breath caught.
"Hey," I said and stroked his scratchy cheek with my hand.
He pushed himself up, his eyes flashing, momentarily blinding me. Then he lurched away from my touch. My heart sank. One and done.
He sat back in the sand and clutched his temples mumbling something in a language I didn’t know. I sat up too and reached for my clothes, damp and sandy, dried stiff in some places.
"I guess I should get back to the spacebase," I said quietly. "Could you give me a ride?"
His eyes lit on me again as if he just realized I was there. "Ta firach ke lekarati....sorry." He shook his head. "Sorry? You wish to go to the spacebase now?"
"Well, yeah." I started to rise. I needed to get my other uniform out of my kit. If I showed up at the spacebase in this dirty, wrinkled one I’d get kicked out of the force.
"No," he said.
"No, what? You're not going to give me a ride?"
"No, you are not going to leave. You have until Wednesday. I will return you to your spacebase then."
I sat back down, torn between being pissed off that he was ordering me around and thrilled that he wanted me to stay.
"I don't want to take you back now." He moved closer and pulled me against him.
"Really?" He put his hand on my face, seeing me. "I thought...when you bolted away from me just now,” I said.
He shook his head again sending slivers of light through his hair. "I'm sorry. I was...I was somewhere else for a moment."
"Where?"
"It doesn't matter. Now I am here with you."
“Senya? What happens next?” I tried to look in his blank eyes. "I have to go back to space and you live here. Will we see each other again? Well not see see. I mean I'll see you but you'll, well you know what I mean." Sometimes, I really wanted to slap myself.
He held my chin and kissed me.
“We will be married and live happily ever after,” he said.
“Really?”
“Mhm. Well, no actually. Maybe some of the time?”
“What about the rest of the time?”
“Absolute hell,” he winced, “sorry.”
In the boot of the Porsche he had packed a picnic of wine and cheese, fresh bread and fruit, and a couple blankets. After fetching them, we hiked the grounds late in the afternoon when the temperature started to drop. I was wearing his t-shirt which hung nearly down to my knees and he was only in a rolled up pair of jeans.
On one end of the property, there was a tropical forest complete with rivers, ponds and waterfalls. The meadow side of the property had a wonderful building site and then a smaller forest that backed up to a national park. All told including the two forests there was about fifty acres.
“So why doesn't the rest of Rozari look like here?” I asked as I followed him through an uphill stretch toward the waterfall. The hike was exhausting even though I worked out almost daily. I had a second degree black belt and was working on my third degree but life in space took a big toll on your muscles.
“It did at one time,” he replied. He
didn’t seem tired at all. It probably helped to have longer, stronger legs. “After few thermo nuclear explosions, and a thousand years, only now the planet is starting to come back.”
“There was a nuclear war here on Rozari?”
“The Wars of the Saint? You did not study that in your academy?”
I shook my head.
“The Karupatani continent was decimated. This continent took a lot of damage but survived, although there are still areas that are uninhabitable or domed.”
“What happened to the people?” I took his hand and walked beside him as the trail levelled out.
“A few Karupta families left the planet before they were attacked. The Sainted people remained here and rebuilt. Nearly a hundred years later, another war broke out between two of the Saint's grandsons and their followers. Mishka Kalila and his people followed the Karupatani to their new planet, Rehnor. A whole new round of warring began once they settled there.”
“I haven't heard of Rehnor,” I commented.
“It is not a member of the Alliance. It is where I am from.”
I digested this, wondering if that would have any possible effect on my Spaceforce career. “I guess that's why you speak Rozarian with an accent.”
“Ay yah. I speak four languages and every one of them I have an accent.”
We set up camp by the waterfall.
“So what were the wars about?” I walked around collecting sticks for a campfire.
“The same thing all wars are about,” he replied, clearing a space for the fire and placing some of my sticks there. He pointed at them and a flame burst up through them. It wasn't cold but it definitely had cooled and the fire immediately warmed us. “Land and God. Fish, yes?”
“The wars were about fish?”
“No, you would like to eat fish?” He left the fire to burn and went over to the grass beside the pool. Then he lay down upon it and reached his hand into the water.
“Ok,” I shrugged as he pulled out what looked like a trout. He reached in again and took out another. “How'd you do that?” I dropped another pile of tinder on the fire and went over to look in the lake. “What did you do? Overstock it with tame trout?”
“No, I am very quick about it.” He picked up a flopping fish and cut off its head with a large knife.
“Ew. Hey, where'd you get the knife?”
“My pocket?” He sliced the fish down the middle and gutted it.
“That was not in your pocket,” I replied. “That would not fit in your pocket.”
“Oh? Perhaps you are right.” He prepared the second fish.
“Where'd you get the knife?” I insisted.
“This is complicated,” he said and he put the knife aside and picked up the two fish. I bent down to pick up the knife but it was no longer there.
“Where'd it go?”
“I told you this is complicated. There is a good rock, yes?”
He pointed at a large flat rock near my foot so I picked it up and walked back to the fire with him. He took the rock from me and put it in the center of the fire and laid the fish on top of it. When the fish began to sizzle and bubble, he used the knife, which was somehow back in his hand, to move the fish around on the rock. “There is a lemon tree next to the waterfall. You will like lemon with this.”
“Ok,” I said warily and trotted off.
“Are we staying here tonight?” I asked. I was satiated with fish, bread, fine wine and awesome sex. We were lying on the blankets and I was staring at the stars and spaceplanes that shot across the sky. He was smoking a cigarette which I had learned was something he did almost continuously.
“Terrible habit,” he agreed nearly choking me as my neck was in the crook of his elbow. “Would you like to stay here?”
“I would like to stay here forever.”
He didn’t respond, just blew grey smoke into the air.
“Senya?” I turned back to him, running my hands across the hard muscles of his arms and chest, biceps, triceps, quadriceps, gluts. “How did a doctor get to be so built up?”
“I carry the weight of the galaxy on my shoulders,” he smirked.
“Funny guy. Why did you come to me back then? How did you know me? And don't tell me it's complicated. I want an answer. I'm not a brain surgeon but I'm not stupid either.”
“I know you are not stupid.” He took a long drag on his cigarette.
“Then explain it to me.” I threaded my fingers through the silky black hair on his chest.
“I remember what happens in the future,” he replied.
“Everything?”
“No. Only some things. Just as you recall now some things that have happened in the past, I recall what will happen as well as what has happened.”
“How can you do this if it hasn't happened yet?”
He sighed as if I was too naive to understand and tossed his cigarette into the air where it flamed up and disappeared.
“Time is not a straight line, Katie. Time is a vortex. You understand this, yes? Time swirls around in great circles before disappearing into infinity. Sometimes, I can…I can jump between the waves. When I was twelve and my body was near death, I…I skipped ahead, as it were, and found a place that…” He stopped talking.
“That what?”
“A place that I was safe.”
“Safe from what?” My heart skipped ahead too.
“Safe from everything.”
“Where was it?”
“With you,” he replied. “In your arms. In your bed. So that is where I went.”
“Why did someone shoot you, Senya?”
“Because they did not want me to live.”
“Because you're kind of scary with your cool powers and strange eyes? Or because you can skip through time and metaphysically cross the galaxy?”
“You are not afraid of me," he said, stroking my hair.
“That's because I know you. I'll protect you Senya,” I declared. “I'm qualified in four types of firearms and I’m a second degree black belt in mixed martial arts. I won't let anyone mess with you again. You are safe with me.”
He smiled and his eyes flickered in the darkness.
The next day we relocated to his flat in the city. Minimalist would be an exaggeration. It was a nice sized unit on the top floor of high rise with huge floor to ceiling windows and a fabulous view of the city of Takira-hahr, but it was virtually empty. There was a king bed, a table covered in drawings, a tablet sitting on a chair and a beautiful kitchen that had never been used. The refrigerator was completely empty.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“Come here, I want you to see these,” he said and started thumbing through the drawings on the table. I tossed my bag in the middle of the empty floor.
“There, now it looks lived in,” I remarked and went to look at his sketches.
The first few were of buildings and there was a lovely color sketch of a campus.
“We shall go see this tomorrow,” he said. “It is almost complete.”
“What is it?”
“This building is the medical centre. This is the engineering centre and here is manufacturing. I think I will put a fourth building here for sales and administration.”
“Great?”
“Here is the house.” There was a drawing of a fabulous Spanish style villa in the meadow by the sea.
“Are you really going to build that?”
“I am waiting for the permits. The Rozarian government wants more money from me.”
“What are these?” I flipped through some pictures of some sort of equipment.
“Medical devices. These are just ideas about some of the products we are going to produce.”
“And this?” I pulled up the last drawing. “Oh my, that's beautiful!” It was a sketch of a starship. It was roughly the shape of an ancient airplane but a thousand times larger. “Do you have the specs on this?”
“Not yet.”
“Did you design all this stuff?”
“Wow!” I gasped. “Where are you getting all the money to build all these things?”
“I have some holdings,” he replied and tossed the drawings back on the table.
“What kind of holdings? Like rental property?”
He laughed. “Yes, I have a lot of rental property. A whole planet’s worth.”
“Does everybody think you’re full of it or just me?”
“I don't care what everybody thinks,” he replied. “I only care what you think. I only care if you love me.” He trapped me between his arms and lifted me on to the table.
“Love you? You are full of it. As far as I am concerned, you are just a grown up version of that arrogant bratty boy.”
“Ach, well...”
“And you're awfully sure of yourself now too,” I said, running my fingers through his hair. “Even then you acted like you knew everything about anything.”
“Well I do actually.”
“And you were terribly cruel to Harry Potter who did turn out to be a bit of twit.”
“He was. I still do not understand your attraction. Hocus pocus silly stuff.”
“That's right. You have cooler powers and don't need a stick or silly words.”
“Mhm.”
“I don't know if I love you,” I teased. “I thought I was in love with this strange dude Senya who maybe was a figment of my imagination and now you're telling me you're real but you're a blind Rozarian brain surgeon with a lot of rental properties and your name is Ron.”
“You still doubt that I am real?”
“No, you're definitely real,” I said touching him. “At least this part is. Do you love me?”
“That part does!” He pushed me down.
“Well I hope that's not the part you are doing all your thinking with!”
He laughed and taking my hand, kissed my palm then he closed my fingers around it.
“Here you have my heart.” He did the same with my other hand. “And here you have my soul. Take care of them. Many lives will depend upon it.”
“What does that mean? You’re going to make me in charge of collecting the rents on your properties?”
He pulled me off the table and I straddled him as we made our way to the bed.
“It means that someday you will be the most powerful woman in the galaxy. Seas will rise and fall at your command. Men and women will clamor to do your bidding. And I will love you and humble myself before you.”
