by Lia Nox
I had no concept of time to measure our lovemaking against, but I guessed an hour or two must have ticked on by since we’d entered this cave. My ears couldn’t even pick up the din of the storm anymore, but I couldn’t be sure of whether that was because our moans filled the air instead or because the winds had died down.
All three of us barking and moaning, my gasps light and high pitched while theirs’ were deep and low, we came together as a foursome.
It was the first time we’d ever all orgasmed together so perfectly, each one of us in time with the other. I had no doubt that some people would have shrugged at this and been nonplused, they’d have claimed that sex was sex and be done with it. But they’d be so wrong, the idea was laughable to me.
Sex, when done correctly, when performed the way we did so seamlessly together, was the most magical and breathtaking experience anyone could hope to endure.
If I was to die upon this very spot, it would be with a fullness that went beyond the tight spasms holding all three of them inside me.
It would be because of love, even if I never admitted this to anyone but myself.
Talos
If I'd ever thought about having a soul, it hadn't been for long.
But what we'd just shared in the cave had shaken me, down to the very depths of my being.
All of this, could it possibly be right?
It pained me to tear myself away from Erin, but it had to be done. As much as I wanted to stay in her embrace, I needed time to process my thoughts. A lot had happened in such a short space of time; if I didn’t unpack it, I’d be frantic. I almost was.
Softly, I parted from her touch. Instantly Erin’s face dropped, her expression dejected. In an attempt to reclaim some of the passion I’d dashed, I reached out a hand to her cheek.
“Rest. I need to go scout the area, now that the storm has passed.” My words were tender, meaningful—I hoped they conveyed my sincerity. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Roth and Kern eying me curiously. They were surprised I’d pull away from her, but they also knew me well enough to know that I needed time to myself.
Even if I stayed within the confines of the group, I needed to escape inside myself.
It wasn’t a place where Erin could join me.
She offered a smile. It was tighter than usual. If the time had been right, we’d still be caught in a tender embrace right now, and I couldn’t deny how amazing that would be. I hated how my mind worked at times like this.
Through gritted teeth I muttered a quick goodbye. I wouldn’t stray far, however I needed to be away from their. . .noise. It didn’t matter if they remained silent, their need to speak would be chaotic enough to throw me off.
And right now, I couldn’t afford to be distracted by it.
What we were doing, what we were becoming, meant something.
But I couldn’t forget the words of the other human woman, Delia.
She’d offered to take Erin away from us. To try to leave this world behind.
Should we have let Erin go?
Would it be the best for her, the best for our unit?
I sulked like a petulant child; I could imagine Kern stifling laughter as I went. The bastard took too much pleasure in my melancholy.
Yet, despite his coltishness, I appreciated how free he was with his emotions. I wished I could be so open. So carefree. Kern had the ability to bulldoze through the worst of what this planet could throw at us because he didn’t hold back.
The anxiety inside of me as I settled just a ways from them was tremendous. It was heavy. Thick with worry.
Part of me was grateful to learn of Delia’s presence, if nothing else, it had caused Erin to make the decision to stay with us.
And every day since then, she’d reaffirmed that decision with her actions.
With her closeness.
But had it been the right decision?
I knew how tempted she’d been to take Delia’s offer to leave with her, to potentially go home. I was pleased she hadn’t, but would that eventually change?
Thinking about that possibility was worse than thinking about what two humans being here meant. I knew there was a deeper meaning to it. There couldn’t not be.
Yet, in spite of feeling this, I wasn’t sure if it was the Masters who were responsible. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the capabilities—assuming they still lived—but rather it seemed unnecessarily messy for them. They preferred order. Being in control.
But humans were unpredictable. They followed their hearts rather than their heads, and the way we’d bonded to Erin was the same as how Axar, Zuvo, and Tarnan had connected with Delia.
The Masters would hate such relationships. Of that, I had no doubts.
Fixing my mouth into a thin line, I thought on whether leaving was the wisest choice. Was our home even here anymore, really? We’d been trapped here since our “birth”, pets of the Masters. They’d not cared for us.
There’d been no love between us. So why did we want to stay? I understood our desire to rebuild, however there was that underlying worry that we wouldn’t manage the task. It was a massive one to take on, after all. Then there was the issue of why we desired to rebuild, was it out of a sense of duty or true affection for our planet?
“Would you like company?” a familiar voice asked.
Turning, I was glad to see Roth’s stern features gazing back at me. Despite wanting to be alone, sometimes it helped to have another's perspective. As long as that other wasn’t a confused human or a foolhardy youngling. I nodded.
“You surprise me—you’re normally all for being completely alone,” Roth stated as he moved towards me. He wasn’t wrong.
“True,” I agreed. “But I feel having someone to talk to is better than driving myself to madness.”
“Ah. Yes, I’d prefer you to stay sane. For all of our sakes, not just your own.”
We both smiled while he sat beside me. For a brief time, there was nothing between us except respectful quiet; I relished how he understood the mood. Roth could be a powerhouse—he was one, in fact—but he could also adapt if it was needed.
Not quite so seamlessly as Kern, but that one was unique. Within a few days, he’d become more flexible with each passing minute, and while it overjoyed Erin to witness, I was less thrilled. I didn’t want him to lose his culture, not when it had taken us so long to recognize its importance.
“Do you want to talk about what’s on your mind?” Roth finally asked. I sighed, though not because of annoyance, I just didn’t know what to say.
“In a way, but I’d rather keep my thoughts to myself for now, if it’s all the same with you.”
“You know it is.” Roth belted his hand against my back; it was bracing to say the least. “I’ve learned to accept your private moments over the years,” he added, a grin breaking across his face.
“It wouldn’t have changed anything even if you hadn’t. I’m stuck like this, I don’t know how to be any other way.” As I spoke these words, I realized the bitterness of their truth.
I really didn’t know how to behave differently. I could try to be alpha like Roth, just how I could try to be as fun-loving as Kern, but neither suited my personality; the Masters had designed me to be brooding. Thoughtful. To the point of letting few in.
Not wanting to lose myself to that nightmarish tangle of woes, I decided to turn my attention elsewhere. “What are Kern and Erin up to—fucking again?”
I couldn’t help but ask. It slipped out, but there wasn’t any jealousy to my question. In truth, I wanted them to be having fun. One of our group should be, at least. Roth bellowed out loud, his laughter rolling like snow from a mountain top: it was thunderous.
“Erin calls it snuggling.”
“What?” I barked out.
“No idea at all,” Roth admitted. “And yet I think they’re just talking things through. Maybe I’m wrong and we’ll return to the smell of sex, but somehow, I doubt it.”
Locked in by my circling thoughts, Roth kept me s
ilent company. I welcomed being able to be myself. If Kern was here, he’d try to coax little snippets of information out of me—he wouldn’t be satisfied until he knew everything inside my mind. I suspected Erin would be the same.
Those pair went together better than the gods themselves could have planned. If fate had orchestrated all of this, it had done a good job.
Fate.
The word taunted me as I thought on its meaning, on how it touched all of us in one way or another. We couldn’t escape it.
Our feet would never be fast enough. But still, I wanted to be able to free myself from its shackles so that I could follow myself for a change.
In spite of everything, I still felt caged. If not by the Masters, then by my emotions. I’d never be free.
I wanted to be optimistic, that somehow all of this would work out, but it became ash in my mouth.
Hope was for children. It was a pretty lie.
I wanted facts, wanted realism.
That was all we could hold on to. The only way to survive.
Erin
I was surprised when Roth left to find Talos. I thought we’d made a break through, the four of us together.
That I’d felt something change in the air between us.
But maybe it was just me?
Sighing, I allowed depressing thoughts to engulf me. I didn’t mean to, but before I knew what was happening, I was swamped by them. One thought led to another. All of them tumbling together, all of them vying for my attention. It felt like I couldn’t breathe.
What was I doing here? Why hadn’t I left with Delia, taken the opportunity to get away, no matter how slim it was?
“Erin, are you okay?” Kern was on hand to pull me back from the brink.
Momentarily gasping, I quickly tried to hide my embarrassment. I didn’t want him, or any of them, to think I was weak.
When I blushed even harder yet still didn’t respond, Kern forced my head to look at him. Although he was controlling my actions, his hands were gentle, tender even. He didn’t exert any undue control over me, he simply wanted to look me in the eyes.
“Erin, please. . .” His probing was as soft as it could be; it touched me to see him act so sweetly.
“I’m just thinking things over.” I sighed, already aware of how much it would hurt him to hear me say this. But I’d made my mind earlier. We were past the time for evasions and half-truths. “Thinking about Delia.”
“What Delia said?” he finished it for me. “About. . .leaving?”
I nodded back at him, unable to speak. I didn’t want to speak about it. How could I?
These were my men, my lovers, yet I wanted to leave them. Not fully, but enough that I was still pondering over my options.
“We can talk about it if you want?” Kern suggested.
As heartwarming as it was to hear that, I still wanted to decline. Still did decline. He wasn’t the person to talk with about this.
In fact, the best person to discuss this with was the one person who’d left: Delia. She knew what I was going through, in more ways than one.
But without knowing where she was headed, catching up with her would be near impossible.
Moreover, there was the issue of raising this with the guys. I didn’t know if they’d take it well, or whether they’d see it as a slight against them and their characters.
I was torn.
I was emotionally spent.
I wanted it to stop.
Nervously, I began to fiddle with my fingers. My nails picked at any sharp skin on my fingertips they could find. It was strangely therapeutic.
To Kern it must have looked horrific because he hurried to cover my hands with his own. The way they outsized mine was comical; he was a giant compared to me. As I looked at his hand covering mine, I realized how much I savored contact with them as soft as this—it didn’t have to all be about sex.
The sex was incredible, but there was more to our connection than that. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t still be here.
Nevertheless, was this growing connection enough to keep me away from fellow humans? That was the question dogging me.
Remaining in stony silence, I must have come across like a bitch, some unscrupulous character who cared for no one but herself. It wasn’t true, but I knew how my curiosity painted me.
This was why they couldn’t know all that I thought, all that I felt. If they knew how tempted I truly was, they’d panic. True, they’d do it in such a way that I wouldn’t easily spot it, or at least Roth and Talos would.
Kern was charming. Roth was charming. Even Talos was in his own way. All three of them had qualities I’d never been able to find elsewhere—in all my years stuck back home, no one had seen me the way they had.
Yet the possibility of never seeing another human again was terrifying. I didn’t want to be the only one.
The loneliness of it felt too great.
Kern began making swirling patterns with his bare fingers on my skin; my flesh responded immediately, the fine bumps delighting him. This reaction was one they all enjoyed watching. It was so new to them, even having witnessed several times.
I hoped that the novelty wouldn’t wear off, but dark shadows at the back of my mind worried that it would. I was a gimmick here: the human toy, a doll for them to play with. And no matter how much they grew to care for me, they could still discard me like a child does an old, worn toy.
“Erin?” Kern apprehensively prodded.
“I’m fine, really, but I need some time to think this through.”
“You sound just like Talos.” He sounded exasperated now, almost to the point of anger. It was so unlike him that it took me by surprise.
However, once I started to see it through his eyes, I realized I was distancing myself in a way I’d never done before. Clasping his hand, I made sure to squeeze it tightly as I spoke.
“Kern, I don’t mean to shut you out, I really don’t, but some things have to be worked out alone. You know?”
I so wanted him to answer “sure,” that he knew what I meant. He understood and he wanted to give me my space. Nevertheless, as I watched his face twist into awkward angles, I knew all too well that he didn’t.
Not wanting to lower the mood further, I decided to make an effort to arrange our “camp” into some semblance of respectability. We’d flung ourselves into the cave, tossing down muddy gear as soon as we’d gotten out of the storm.
I could set things out to dry.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
A purpose.
In reality, there was little I could do. We were in the wilderness, the terrain wild and unpredictable. And without food, there wasn’t a reason for me to arrange a fire or to fashion makeshift utensils out of the materials to hand. What I was doing was a useless exercise.
I threw myself into it with all my might.
I went around picking up bits of debris, rummaging through our leftover supplies, and generally doing anything to avoid Kern’s stares. He wasn’t quite glaring at me just yet, but I could tell he was nearing his limit.
Soon he’d break. I’d witnessed too many good men and women try to hold their emotions back for too long. It always broke them in the end. Sometimes the wounds would heal, other times they’d fester.
Would I fester on this planet?
On the one hand I could end up thriving here, a queen to my three kings; a life I’d never had could be mine—if the fantasy lived up to reality. Given how shit my life had been so far, I doubted it was going to improve now.
At least not drastically, anyway. It was more likely that I’d fall back into my old habits, old routines, forever unable to be part of a group the way others could.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be part of their clan, it was that I didn’t know how to. I didn’t believe just fucking them was enough to make me one of them.
“What are you doing, Erin?” he snapped, before realizing how sharp he’d sounded. His face transformed into a look of shame.
/> As I looked back at him, a piece of sodden gear in my hands, I discovered that I didn’t have an answer.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Nothing I was doing made sense to me anymore.
My fumbling around here, my being on this planet, what my purpose in life was—it was all nonsensical to me now.
What the hell was I doing?
Kern
She was infuriating.
All I wanted to do was help her, to see if the two of us together could navigate her emotions. Side by side we’d make it through, no matter what.
Yet all she did was push me away.
I wouldn’t have minded so much if she didn’t know me, but we’d grown so close recently. Extremely close.
I’d believed we had a sort of special bond, one that transcended what she had with the others—she cared for Talos and Roth, but not how she did me. Having told myself that for so long, it stung to think I’d been mistaken.
Had I been wrong?
The way she blinked at me, her eyes blank, unnerved me. She was empty. In all the time we’d spent together, I’d never seen her look so devoid of her personality; she wasn’t the Erin I knew.
Taking a deeper breath than before, I tried to calm my raging mind long enough to get through to her. If I rushed in like a charging animal, blind and senseless, she’d bolt for sure. I didn’t want that outcome. What I wanted was for her to feel comfortable with me, completely at ease to let her guard down and to let me in.
“I’m sorry,” I began.
I wasn’t sure what else to say beyond this, but still I had to try. “Erin, I don’t mean to lose my temper. I just, I want you to be yourself around me. You’re igeseli. This should make you content, more at peace with us.”
“I’m what?” she quickly asked.
I was surprised she spoke so quickly, given how withdrawn she seemed. But then I guessed that the unusual tones of my native tongue had punched a hole through her dulled senses. It had semi-revitalized her. Not enough that I recognized her as mine, but it was a good start.
“Igeseli. It means that you’re part of our family—you belong with us. I…” My tone reflected my nervousness as I stumbled upon my own explanation.
