No, really. Electric. There was something magical and technological and desperately unfair about those fingertips. They weren’t a man’s fingers moving atop Garrett’s synthcotton shirt, reading his form. They were superheated swordpoints, advancing over him with strategic placement and pressure, carving unendurable pleasure paths in their wake.
The kind of fingers he needed to feel on bare skin.
“Chloe…”
“Mmmhmm?”
“This is about you having an experience, right? And Dan-Dan too, eventually since I’m guessing he’s recording everything. So why don’t you walk me through it, word by word. Tell me a story.”
“You want the biology version or the porno version?” she asked.
He leaned in and kissed her cool lips. Not like the lips she wore in Antarctica. Different, softer, like satin ribbons. They didn’t part on instinct the way the others had, not until he tugged the bottom one with his teeth. “How about the Chloe version?”
Between their bodies, she reached the hem of his shirt, bunched it in patient hands, and drew it back up his chest. Slowly. An inch at a time. When she nudged, he rolled to his back, lifting his shoulders off the futon, and she pulled the shirt over his head, leaving him bare from the waist up. He forced himself to stay still. Let her run this. But it was hard to breathe and harder to not rush. Or, just, you know, hard all over.
“Actually, it’s the weirdest thing,” she said, fanning both hands over his pelvis and rising over him, her bulk and shape cutting into the star-sprinkled expanse at her back. When he looked at her, he saw Dan-Dan, yeah, but he also knew she was there, operating the ride. And honestly, even if she wasn’t inside that body, even if she was just watching, he was pretty sure at this point he could give her a good show.
“Only one weird thing? Really?” he said.
“You probably noticed how wired these hands are. The sensory feedback loop is super advanced, so there’s that.” Her voice had grown husky, and even though he knew that rough texture was intentional audio manipulation, his fantasy brain wanted to believe she was overcome by passion. For him. Because wouldn’t that rock.
“I could talk a lot about biomechanics and robotics and N Series breakthroughs,” she continued, pressing him against the futon, getting a little too hard with a nipple tweak, “only now, in the moment of actually literally touching you, you know what? I don’t have any context for what it feels like. I’ve experienced so few things, I mean in a sensory way, that I guess I lack referents. It’s like nothing I’ve ever done. But it’s also like everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“Building experience, Fig,” he reminded her. “You can’t do this wrong.”
“Sure I can. This body is unbelievable. Responsive, I mean, and really strong. I could break your back if I did some of the things I’ve researched. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be gentle under these circumstances?”
Okay, Garrett’s type, if he had to pin down just one, wasn’t an anatomically correct four-hundred-pound robotic man with titanium bones. However, when she put it that way, it flipped all his switches. Break him? With sex? He kind of wanted to beg her to try.
“So promise you’ll tell me if anything hurts or squicks or, like that?” she said.
“Yeah.” But he wouldn’t.
“No, wait,” she said, a note of triumph cording her words. “I’ve got it. Supernovas.”
Funny she should mention the deaths of stars, and he’d just been watching them burn behind her, nudging the corresponding heat that flared beneath her magic hands.
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. Not even. Ride with me here.”
Like he had a choice. Like he wanted one.
She pushed long thumbs beneath the waistband of his orbit shorts, and he let her slide them free, down his legs, chased by hot, scattered kisses, sparks from a fire untended.
With her mouth brushing the inside of one knee she explained further, “Here’s how it goes. A trillion acts of fusion compact the star, rid her of all her extraneous layers and pieces and compress her to her most essential self, right? Like I am right now. Bare bones, running hot, borrowing space.”
Shit, that wasn’t breath. That was tongue, words, and melted fire, scrolling patiently inward of his left knee. And she thought he could fucking answer? Out loud?
“You’ve done that to me, over the years, you know,” she said. “You’ve worn me to such a fine point of heat and need that I am starving for the next step, even if it destroys me. Because I’m too pressurized, you see, too wanting, and gravity isn’t kind when you’re this compact, this dense. There’s nothing simple left, no low-atomic-weight matter to toy with, no hydrogen or helium. We’re so very complicated now. I have to burn, ache to, but there’s no fuel left.”
She pushed her hands, thumbs up, into the creases where legs met torso, and he slammed his eyelids shut, suffused with holy-fuck-ness.
“A little star can stop at that point and go cold, but we are giants, Garrett.”
Cupped him beneath his balls, lifting, testing weight. Oh shit, shit. She’d never done this, really? Never even touched a man before?
His Fig was the best researcher in the history of people who researched things.
She went on, pouring that voice over him like syrup, “You and I, we are made of heat and pressure, a near infinite state and completely unsustainable. All the natural laws—physics and philosophy and history—deny us even one more fusion, one more deep burn on the core. But fuck the rules. We are outlaws.”
She ducked into the darkness, arched over him. He saw her wide shoulders in the starlight, smooth and strong and terrifying and amazing.
She caught air in her mouth, held it, then bent and blew it into eddies over the base of his cock. “Together, we are brighter than nature,” she said against his skin.
Jesus.
Taking him into her mouth and lighting up his universe. A sleeve of delight, sweeping from tip to root and then out again, replaced by her grasp. She watched him while she stroked, and at first he struggled to make his facial expression match the pleasure that rode him. But then he figured, fuckit. Let her see.
Voyeur vintage Chloe, doing what she did best.
And also some other things at which she was also becoming a fast expert.
“Right at the moment we think that all is lost and we can’t endure even a second more of this glorious agony, that’s when the volatile elements fall in.”
She bent her head and pulled him deep into her mouth, further than was technically possible. He tried not to think of the body she used in service of his pleasure, but damn. That body? Was the absolute shit.
“We meld,” she said, walking the words up his cock, “producing a burst of so much energy the whole cosmos sees us, beautiful burning us. And it can’t stop watching.”
Licked a line of furious heat, tracing a vein there with the tip of her tongue before engulfing the end. And sliding down, down. Ring of her mouth at his base, and how did she even do that? He could feel the back of her throat and resisted pushing, thrusting.
But she wasn’t fragile. She was built for this. The body was. With a sound that was more roar than groan, he pushed, and she moved against him, hardness upon hardness, rock to stone, no give, only resistance, friction. Pressure.
Perfect heat at the core of dark stars.
He surged into her mouth again and again, hard and thrusting until his legs, his ass ached and his whole body was a frenzied mass of pent-up want. She urged it free and wild, a cart careening that he could neither stop nor steer. He could barely hold on for the ride.
She took it, all of him, her hands delving between his body and the futon, grasping his ass, pulling him into her, too strong, too fast, too much. He was coming apart. Not breaking into component pieces after all, but fused like starlight into something stronger, fiercer. Fused
with her. And he could neither make sense of nor resist it. His control ruptured. A howl tore from his throat.
He became a liquid under pressure, shaken until all it knows is air differential. Exploding against the back of her throat.
Except explosions were bright points, finite and brief. This was more like a star death, drowning them both in a time-dilated burst of photonic energy. It was a long, long time before he even remembered to breathe. Before he recalled that he was a person after all and not a cosmic event, entangled in stardust.
“See, there are no secrets left now for stars like us,” she said in a voice that was too smooth. If it weren’t digital, it would be raw and raspy from the mess he’d made of her throat. But whatever, the fiction was too damn gorgeous to argue. This was her lullaby voice, and he loved it. “We are supernovae, wild and out in the open, bright and hot and burning up the sky. Every sky, hurling heavy elements into space. We are drenched in stardust.”
He sank back into the futon, depleted and throbbing with the echo of orgasm. She came up beside him, wrapping him up in her strong arms. Her embrace was cooler than he expected, but also welcome. After a lifetime of wandering, running, this was the embrace of home. Acceptance.
“And after the explosion, we drift—nitrogen and carbon and cobalt and gold—throughout the whole universe. Making planets. Making us. We are made of exactly the same things, you and I. One of which things is want.”
And the other is love.
Or at least it was for him. So much. So much love, so much perfect.
She could say it back. Right now she could. She didn’t even need to make it into poetry. He just wanted her sincerity. He was so soaked through with love himself, and it would just be a retelling of the story he already knew, a confirmation of the truth that suffused him.
Please say it. Please stay with me. Please want me.
Instead she placed her mouth against his throat, below the hinge of his jaw, forming a perfect circle of warmth. A touch of tongue, wet and sleek, a deft application of vacuum. Her last kiss would leave a mark, but even that would fade over time.
Nothing was permanent. Not even stars.
And the truth of it was, inside, he wasn’t a supernova. Wasn’t even a mainline star. He was a dwarf, cold and alone and living in shadow, unseen. Only sometimes she could make him feel bright, Chloe could. She’d always had that ability, didn’t even need a body for it. All she needed to do was shine on him and let him feel her light.
“That was a pretty good story,” he said.
“Just pretty good?”
“Maybe too good? Too fast anyhow, and that’s my fault. Sorry. Gonna have to give me a little while to recharge, and then we’ll see what we can do for Dan-Dan.”
“Silly, you aren’t run on batteries, and also Dan-Dan’s hands and mouth are really his best parts, receptively I mean. He’s going to dig this when he gets around to watching.”
“Sounds like you didn’t limit your research to human male physiology.”
“Oh, I have lots more to show you. Because, whoa, expressively you’ve got to see what this thing...” Her head bobbed up, and she slung a questioning look at him. “How long to recharge?”
If it would keep her here in bed with him and safe and happy? Forever, maybe.
“It’s not like I have a timer hooked up to my dick, Fig.”
“I know that,” she said, but she was grinning. And still holding him. And not going away. “Research, right. And also, we’re getting kind of close to the Florida tether. So, soon though, okay? Promise me.”
“Soon.”
She dipped her head back against him, nuzzled her cheek against his hair. He heard her draw an unnecessary breath. “Would you like me to put your clothes back on or…? Because I love watching you be naked. If it’s not too weird for you.”
Clothes on. Not because she didn’t want to watch him but because she worried he might be embarrassed about Dan-Dan seeing him bare? So she was already thinking about calling Dan-Dan, letting him have his body back. Letting the magic go and reality return. And of course that was always going to happen, eventually. Nothing permanent had changed here. It was just sex, experience, entertainment.
Also, he could stop lying to himself. Any time now.
Because maybe nothing had changed for her except adding another item to one of her lists, but he was broken and different and so gut-achingly in love with her he wasn’t sure he could ever leave this bed. Not emotionally at any rate.
He carefully wrapped up this memory, stored it in that sealed box at his core, and pressed a kiss against the base of Dan-Dan’s throat.
“My whole life is made of weird,” he told her. “And naked isn’t weird. It’s just bodies, right? Not who we are. You can give Dan-Dan a holler if you want. I’m good.”
“Best,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
They lay on the futon, twined, talking, planning, positing, and watching blackness and stars until the station broke in to whisper their arrival over Florida.
Chapter Nineteen
ATLANTIC OCEAN | IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
Chloe watched his hands on the storm hunter’s control board and all but sighed. Garrett was in his element again, and she was in hers, more or less. Back to watching, back to wanting. Back to only making things happen by taking over others and invading.
It didn’t help that Dan-Dan had come with them on this mission and was acting relaxed and completely oblivious to what was on his recording and even possibly a little bit happy as they flew into the massive stormy maw of death.
In a rickety plane that, no lie, was a piece of shit.
No weapons, no reactor, no weight-sensing deck plates or environmental controls with fun names like lavender and neroli and isoflurane. This plane was all business, devoid of toys.
Also, it whined. A lot. And no, it didn’t even matter that the thing seemed in hero-worship of Chloe.
“I fail to see why Chiba cannot move us over the storm and drop us into the calm part,” the plane—Vera—groused even as they banked left into an outer band.
She spoke through an interpreter box, a chatbot you could plug into more complicated systems and question them for diagnostics. The chatbot made it easier to fix things, maybe, and it made Garrett’s task of flying a plane he’d logged zero hours on possible, but still. Chloe didn’t like her.
“The head on that storm rises above fifty-thousand feet, sweetpea, and at your best you couldn’t top thirty-thousand,” he said.
Chloe didn’t miss the pet name. He had never called her sweetpea. Was he like this with all the machines who weren’t real girls?
“You could retrofit,” Vera insisted “I could become a spaceplane.”
She was way too into this fantasy.
“And look who’s getting delusions of grandeur,” Chloe said witheringly, forming her holoprojection in the cramped space of the cockpit. It was her job to clue the plane into who was in charge here, and the holoprojection made intimidation easier. “You know spaceplanes burn for orbital re-entry, though, right? So even if you did get yourself modded, even if we had time for it, you’d still need a lot of area to decelerate, and that eye is only twelve miles wide. We’d run right into the eyewall and figure out really fast why they call it a wall. Nope, better to fly into it, like this. Which should be no trouble for you since you’ve done it one hundred seventeen times.”
“No trouble at all, Miss Chloe. I am on it,” replied the plane, but with considerably less snoot. Vera had come on board here like she was an expert on all things hurricane, but Chloe wasn’t impressed by that expertise. Other people tracked storms. She fucking made them. Or, well, she had that one time.
“Pardon please for the intrusion, but will we be required to penetrate the eyewall itself?” said Dan-Dan, pushing his voice over the internal com system. Physically he was aft, manning the r
adar, which was the one, and only, super fancypants part of this plane.
“Yep,” said Garrett cheerfully. “I want to place Chloe smack in the middle of what’s happening, so she has the best chance of collecting her whole swarm.”
Chloe zoomed in on his face, searching for hesitation. Fear. Finding none of the above.
“Would you like to throw up in advance, get that out of the way?” she asked.
He cracked a grin, that sideways one that only lifted the left side. Cocky. Rogueish. Got her yum going every time.
“It’s really not that bad,” he said. “Storm hunters like our Vera do it all the time, and she can handle the stresses, can’t you, gal? Plus, we have the best radar in the cosmos.”
Another leftward lean, and a patch of turbulence dropped them about three meters. Chloe watched Garrett carefully, and he didn’t seem fazed. It had to hurt, though, right? It had to feel awfully strange to fall like that. Did he not realize he was mortal and fragile and dear?
She tried not to think how he’d worried over her back in Antarctica. But also she thought about it a lot.
“I am hardly the best radar in the cosmos,” said Dan-Dan, in a voice that sounded like the aural version of a blush, “though I do appreciate the vote of confidence.”
He did, too. Chloe could feel the positive vibe invading their aircraft, their team. Garrett didn’t lead by impressing everybody with his authority and then give them orders. His way was more subtle. He reminded all his teammates how impressive they were, and then trusted them to do their jobs. Dispersing authority, rather than hoarding it.
And then typically he’d fall back into shadows and let the others shine.
Only now I see you. I see what you do.
The closer they edged toward the storm’s center, angling left and then left again, like they were sneaking up on it, the calmer Chloe became. Peace invaded her.
Look at them, just look. Dan-Dan, Garrett, even Vera, they were so confident, so certain, so willing to sacrifice. Not for her, but for the millions of—
More Than Stardust Page 24
