by Robin Smith
In the safety of her room, huddled small in her own bed, she replayed the whole ridiculous thing start to finish. Will you miss me, light and teasing. Was she supposed to say yes, no, what? Six months shut up with him in a silver pear in space…all the stupid petty arguments and all the clumsy goodwill gestures…all those nights with his weight balanced above her, his hands digging at her hips, the inadvertently comical sounds he made when he was trying to make it last and losing the battle. Four words: Will you miss me?
No, I’m sick of slime and I want my own bed and even Battlehammer gets old when it’s all there is to do. I want to taste fresh air and feel sunlight again and rain and even snow, if it’s cold enough, and I want to buy a bike and go on long rides down bumpy trails and smell trees. I want to eat real food and I want to learn how to cook it so I can eat it some more and even wallow naked it in if I want to. I want to burn these clothes so I never have to look at them again and buy all new ones. I want a big stone house on a hill by the ocean and I want to sit outside in the cold air in a big quilt and do crossword puzzles all day if I want to. I want to get out of here.
Yes, dammit. I’m missing you already, you big scaly jerk.
His footsteps crossed heavily back and forth in the hall. Skye listened, waiting for this sick knot to loosen. She wasn’t angry at him, not even a little. It just wasn’t a get-angry situation. It was more like one of those awful high school dances, where you show up alone and spend all night working up the nerve to ask the kid you like—the one who smiles at you in the hall, asks what you got for question three on the quiz, occasionally eats lunch with you and complains about egg salad—to dance, only to see his puzzled face and hear him say, “Oh hey…You know I was just being friendly, right?”
God.
Pacing, pacing in front of the door.
Skye groaned and pulled the cushion over her head. “Leave me alone! I’ll be fine, I swear! Just leave me alone for one night!”
“I have to talk to you.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, rolling over. “Men don’t talk to women where you’re from. I never appreciated that arrangement before. I think I’d like to give it a try.”
He snarled something in his own language and opened the door. For only the second time in all these months, he crossed the threshold and came all the way inside. She heard him stomp over to the bed, and with one heave of her covers, she was utterly exposed.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
Skye dragged the pillow off and obeyed with a weary sigh. “Okay,” she said. “I started it. I admit that. But I’ve been trying to end it too. You’re the one determined to have a scene tonight. I’d just like that on the record.”
Faint green markings were beginning to bleed up through his scales. Her heart sank, seeing them.
“You don’t distract me,” he said tightly. “Because there is no one else here. I’ve grown accustomed to the freedom of showing my true emotions, sharing open speech, laughing when I think something is funny, sympathizing when you complain about the food. What I feel for you is not a distraction. My work is.”
“Stop trying to make me feel better. You wouldn’t be finishing up so early if that were true. I don’t need to be placated here, Vala,” she said as he started to argue. “We’re not equals, remember? I’m not your partner. I’m just here to serve you, and seriously, it wasn’t so bad. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“You are making me so angry,” he said distantly, distinctly. The warning was unnecessary. The green markings were now extremely evident all down his back and sides from his head to his hips.
“I know, but I’m not trying to. Being stupid about emotions is just a human thing.” All at once, tears threatened. Honestly surprised, Skye rolled away from him before she lost one, curling on her side and squeezing her burning eyes shut. “I’ll be fine in the morning, I swear. Or, you know, whenever morning is for us.”
“How can you act like this?” he exploded. “After all this time, how can you act like you don’t know me?”
She started crying. Damn it.
“What did you want me to say?” she wailed. “That I’m happy I’m going home early? I am! I’m thrilled! That I’m sorry I’ll never see you again? I am! And now I’m going to be sorry every time I see you now! Jesus, why did you even bring it up?”
“Stupidly, I wanted to talk about it!”
“For God’s sake, why?”
A long silence followed, broken only by her hoarse struggles to control her sobs and his clawed feet scraping at the floor as he paced beside her bed.
“I wanted to know how you felt about me,” he said at last. “If…perhaps…you wanted me to come with you.”
Skye wiped her eyes over and over, staring at the wall. “With me?” she repeated in a small voice.
“I’m the Emissary. I don’t have to stay here after my report is complete, I just have to maintain a discreet presence. I could go to Earth. I could live…quietly. Somewhere remote.” He paced three steps and stopped again. “You spoke of an island once.”
Skye wiped her face once more and turned back over. He was staring fixedly out her window, even though the Earth wasn’t visible yet. His skin had faded back almost to its natural color, but his body was still very stiff.
“You don’t mean it,” she said finally, hopelessly. “You’re still the first-born of the highest caste in blah blah blah. You’d have to go home sooner or later. I’d rather rip the tape off all at once than have to live with the anticipation of it forever.”
“I’ll take you with me,” he said, with great confidence.
“So you can put me in a room in the rear of your house and never speak to me again?”
He frowned. “A courtyard. And only when others could hear.”
“Great. I get to be your personal dirty little secret instead of the whole Space Administration’s.” Skye faced the wall.
He stalked away, snarling. The doors hissed open and shut…and open. “Do you think it’s easy for me to talk about my feelings to a woman?” he demanded.
“It isn’t easy for you to talk about wood lice to a woman.”
“I want you with me!”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Do you or do you not love me?”
Skye sighed, pressing a hand over her eyes. “I’ll get over that, too.”
Silence.
In retrospect, she supposed she really didn’t expect him to leave quietly after that.
He came to the bed in two long, angry strides. Before she could flinch, shout, do anything at all, he seized both her ankles and yanked her legs off the pad. Her knees hit the floor; his hand played out between her shoulderblades and shoved her belly-down and flat against the bed. She felt the scrape of his scales on her arm when he braced one bent knee beside her, and the next thing she felt was his open palm slamming down over her out-thrust bottom.
She let out a broken yell before she’d even known she’d done it. Funny, how Time erodes expectations. She’d known he was capable of this, of course, but the handful of punishments he’d doled out in the past somehow paled in her memory beside his recent foray into the more sensual side of spankings. Now, all over again, she was not and could not be prepared.
Skye howled as Vala’s arm swung, her bare feet sliding and drumming on the slick metal floor as if she were trying to kick her way into the mattress and burrow through it to freedom. Her struggles had no effect on either him or the bed. His hand rained down, the air popping and cracking like fireworks in that rapid-fire assault until she’d exhausted her first panicked efforts and regained enough lucidity to try and reason with him.
“You said you’d never spank me just because you were mad!” she cried, frantically trying to fend him off one-handed. “You promised!”
His answer was to catch her hand, hold it at the small of her back, and then flip up her nightie, drag down her panties, and start all over again.
She never would have believed two thin l
ayers of slinky nothing could have afforded her so much protection until he took it away. The shock of his hand had gone, now it was wholly fire. And not a gentle fire either, but fire like the tip of a 4th of July wand, white-hot and sparking as it sizzled. Each new blow slapped away the burn of every other, leaving a void behind that filled up with molten immediacy.
Her struggles were reborn, exploding phoenix-like from the embers of the first spanking into the conflagration of this one. She kicked and clawed and bucked and tossed and was held perfectly in place the whole time and spanked anyway. It went on until she lost her strength, lost her breath, and lost a few more useless tears into the forgiving pad of her bed. Then there was nothing else she could do but lie there, and she did, until the seemingly endless barrage of ear-splitting slaps rained itself out.
The second silence in her room was heavier, charged, like the air before a thunderstorm. If it weren’t for the painful proof throbbing in her flesh, she’d think they were at the start and not the finish.
Then he lifted his hand and his weight away from her. He sat down, stroked her hair once, then put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto her lap as easily as if she were a small child. Sitting was torture, but her head against his shoulder was too essential to give up, so she sat and suffered, held him and wept.
She hated crying, hated crying in front of him even more, but he didn’t let her pull away. Her efforts to slip out of his grip somehow ended with her straddling his hips, his left hand tucked under her thigh to help support her roasting ass out there in empty space, and both her arms around his neck, bawling into his shoulder while his claws combed through her hair in slow, steady passes.
“You’re not supposed to spank me just because you’re mad at me,” she said, ages later.
“Perhaps I spanked you for lying.” His hand, that same ruthless hand that had set these fire ants swarming over her, caressed her trembling shoulder and brought her in even closer. “Now I will have an honest answer. Do you or do you not love me?”
Skye groaned and pushed weakly, futilely, at his immoveable chest. “Oh, why are you even asking? You’d never ask a Vaaji woman!”
“I’d never sleep with one either. Or laugh with one. Or play foolish computer games in front of one.” He growled under his breath, and said, “You told me once that who you are matters more than what you do. I like being who I am when I’m with you, and not some mindless honor-machine for the Empire. I like it enough even to like being here, in this sun-forsaken metal box, where I can do nothing but tap through the detritus of some other planet’s media, eat, sleep…and be with you. I want to know that you love me.”
“I have to. There’s no one else here.” Skye sniffled, scrubbing at her tear-damp cheeks until Vala moved her hand and firmly brought her chin up to face him. She looked into his alien face and could not remember how it had felt to find it unfamiliar, unreadable. Her heart ached. “Would I get all crazy like this if I didn’t?” she asked in a voice that cracked.
He waited.
“I love you,” Skye whispered.
“And you want to be with me.”
“Yes.”
“On Earth, for however long we have, and on the homeworld thereafter.”
“I don’t know if—”
“I will give you a courtyard in my house with a garden and a pool of your own, and you will never scrub floors again if you wish it. You will learn the ways of a proper Vaaji woman and you will adhere to them when there are eyes upon us, and we will both disregard them when there are not.” He started to speak, fought and mastered some flare of intense emotion, and then said, “We will be partners.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Nothing about you is simple,” he muttered, and rubbed her back. “I want you anyway. A Vaaji warrior fights for what he wants, what he cares about. If it means fighting with you first, so be it. I have never been defeated.”
“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Skye said, pushing her face against his chest.
“Good.” His hand moved gently up and down along her spine, then slipped down all the way to cup one throbbing nate and lightly squeeze as she squirmed. “Because now I want to make love with you.” He paused, and awkwardly added, “Damn. That was insidious.”
She giggled, still tasting tears.
He was quiet, his expert fingers kneading and caressing her, stealing away now and then even lower, to stroke at her from below, as if he were attempting to transfer heat from one point to the other. It was working. Still, she didn’t move, drowsing in this moment as hurt turned inexorably to bliss.
“I’ll let you be on top,” he said finally.
Laughter burst out of her again and took away the last ghost of misery. “Vala, you deviant!”
He grinned and lay back in her bed, still holding her against him. When the blue light of Earth finally poured in through her window, neither of them noticed or cared. One planet or another didn’t really matter at that point. Home was where the heart lies, and both of them were home.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Smith is an inveterate liar who lives in the middle of Nowhere, where she has disguised herself as a very poor person so that she won't upset the natives. She shares a dilapidated old house with an assortment of family members, furry animals, and surly turtles, and in addition to the massive stacks of accolades she's received for her writing over the years, she's also been awarded Deadliest GameMaster five times. Her first publication was in her fifth-grade newsletter, but she has since appeared in all sorts of periodicals, including "Dagger of the Mind," "Dark Desires," and "Hustler" magazine. She hopes to someday win the coveted Golden Tissue for her work in mainstream erotica, just as soon as they start awarding one.
A MESSAGE TO MY READERS
If you enjoyed reading Blue Light of Home, I would appreciate it if you would help others enjoy this book, too.
Recommend it: Please help others find this book by recommending it on readers' groups and discussion boards.
Review it: Reviews help authors a great deal, particularly on Amazon. Please tell others why you liked this book at Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and / or Blushing Books.
Other books by Robin Smith
Agent Vogle’s Eagles
(originally published as Eagle Eye)
Alpha
The Blue Light of Home
The Casablanca Cruise
Charla’s Shadow
The Clearwater Chronicles
Digging Up Bones
Hopler’s Happy Toads
The Many Adventures of Nick and Virginia and the Mesopotamian Marital Aid
(originally published as The Challenge)
Millennium Falls
Naughty Tails 1
Naughty Tails 2
Naughty Tails 3: Spankings Thru the Year
Penitent
Reiko
X on the Beach
Also:
The Complete Adventures of Owl and Dylan: Warrior of Gaia
which includes:
Fourteen Hours on Flathead Mountain
Five Nights in Dead Horse Flats
A Long Weekend in Emerald City
Eight Days in Hell’s Canyon
Enjoy this excerpt of Robin Smith’s next novel, Hopler’s Happy Toads
Chapter One:
It was the last straw, that’s what it was. The proverbial camel-breaker. The end.
Tom was late for dinner.
But no, it was more than that. Eve Hopler, nee Ferguson, was not the sort of woman who flaked out just because her husband of twelve years wanted to stop at the store on the way home. And shop for a few hours. On their anniversary. Without calling. That would be forgivable, and if that was really what it was, that would almost be a cause for celebration.
But no.
Eve sat at the table watching the candles burn down, watching the little bubbles in her champagne glass float and pop, watching the juices from the pot roast—Tom’s favori
te—slowly dry. One hour had become two, become three, become four. He wasn’t at the store. She didn’t know just who he was with at the moment—Caroline had been last month’s flavor; Rina was always a possibility, she was such a loyal secretary; and there had been a new girl recently, but she didn’t know the name, wasn’t even sure Tom knew it—but wherever he was, he wasn’t at the store.
‘You don’t deserve to feel bad,’ Eve told herself, and it was true. This was all her own fault.
When she’d met Tom, he had been the stereotype of a tall, dark and handsome older man, as well as intelligent, charming and ambitious. He’d told her that he needed her, that she was going to be the foundation for his climb up the corporate ranks. She hadn’t realized then that her position as his ‘foundation’ meant exactly that—she was beneath him.
Things had begun to change even before they were married. Oh, she’d heard all the rumors about him and his other girlfriends, but Tom was a good-looking man. There were bound to be a few hangers-on, bound to be some difficulties in convincing the more obsessive of them that it really was over. She understood when he told her that he had to let them down easy. She’d never had anyone fall madly in love with her, never had anyone look at her twice, and she didn’t know the burdens of a man like Tom. During their engagement, she’d had to endure all sorts of petty gossip and pitying looks, but Tom was always there with reassurances…and little criticisms on the way she dressed, how much time she spent on the phone, the way she wore her hair, but it was all for her own good, he said, because no one could ever love her like him. Her friends were dominating her time, he said, turning her against him; one argument at a time, he erased them from her life. And then, of course, after they were married, he’d taken a position at the company that involved a move across country, and now she had no one. No one else but him.
