by Robin Lovett
I sit back on my heels to observe my work, double-checking all the links in my setup.
“Ready?” Koviye says behind me. I look over my shoulder, and his smile is bright with excitement. He’s loving this as much as I am.
“Ready for some fireworks?” I wag my eyebrows, light the fuse, and turn. “Let’s go.”
“Hang on.” He wraps his arms around me, and a strange tingling sensation happens. My hands and arms disappear in front of me. I inhale hard and watch myself—and him—become invisible.
I don’t have time to scream in delight. He runs, carrying me with him, moving faster than my eyes can see. Everything passes in a blur, so fast that the air around me rushes loud around my helmet like wind.
I hang tight to his forearms, just enjoying the sensation of moving faster with him. I had no idea Fellamana could move so fast. He is so full of surprises.
We’re back to the dark hallway of our docking bay. We leap through the doors, re-entering the weightlessness of the outside. Koviye opens the bay door again with his Exstare. We close ourselves in the speeder and fly away from Lolly Galactic in time to see the bright firework of the entire northern sector, satellite included, blow to pieces.
Only to run into a blockade of twenty Ten Systems fighters in attack formation.
Chapter Twenty
Koviye
The explosion is impressive, but I don’t have time to ask her how she did it or to cheer our success. I realize why she kept saying being invisible would not save us.
The formation of Ten Systems fighters surrounding the transmission hub is tight, and, even with our invisibility, they can’t shoot us, but we still have to weave through them to escape without being hit.
“Shit,” I swear. “How do we get past that?” I may have been able to run faster than the speed of sound back to the ship, but I cannot fly the speeder through that wall of defense.
Jenie adjusts the controls and settings and takes a deep breath. “With tactics and speed.” Rather than nervous, though, she seems exhilarated.
“You like this?” I smile.
“Blowing things up, knocking down Ten Systems soldiers, escaping from a full battalion of fighters?” She chuckles gleefully. “Yeah, I like it.”
She punches the gas of the speeder to full power, heading straight for the center of the enemy fighter formation.
I grit my teeth, terrified she’s going to ram right into one of them. They’re swirling and moving as tight as asteroids in a field. It’s a tactic, created to be sure no one escapes. My instinct is to scream at her to slow down, but I have to trust her. She knows what she’s doing.
I hope. Either that or we’re going to die.
She weaves down toward the bottom of the formation as though trying to go beneath the whole fleet. But they swarm around us. I know they can’t see us—we are invisible—but getting between moving, rotating targets defies physics.
I’m about to scream at Jenie to SLOW DOWN. Before we collide with two fighters, she pulls up and weaves into the field—ascending into the thick of it.
I will myself to keep my eyes open, even though all I want to do is close them because of how close she weaves and dodges through the ships. As though she can predict their movements, as though she knows exactly the path to take to get through, like it’s all been pre-rehearsed.
She circles one last fighter in a dive that I swear takes us within arm’s length of its weapons system. Then ZOOM!
She shoots us out the other side of the field, fast as a laser from a blaster barrel.
“Woohoo!” she cries out in victory.
I glance behind us at the fiery wreckage of Lolly Galactic and the wall of Ten Systems fighters. “Holy shit, you’re amazing!”
She glances behind us and laughs. “And they’re not even chasing us!” She looks at me with a gleeful expression. “Because we’re invisible!”
“Did you see that explosion?” I’m so impressed by her skills, I can’t even express it. “How did you do that?”
She shrugs like it’s no big deal, but her smile is full of triumph. “Just a little trick I picked up with the aid of a fancy kit in my belt.” She taps her weapons belt.
“Ah.”
“And you!” She sets the steering to autopilot. “You never told me you could move that fast. Or that you could make things explode with your Exstare!”
I am pleased I impressed her. “It works nowhere near as well as your explosives though.”
“We’re a great team.” She’s utterly stunning in her thrill at what we’ve done.
I feel like I might burst out of my skin if I don’t get to touch her, kiss her…make love to her. She’s leaning toward me, too, her eyes on my mouth, and I think maybe, just maybe all the hurt I caused her when we were in the purple gas cloud, maybe she can overlook it. Maybe the adrenaline from our success will be enough to get past how much I hurt her.
The emotions around her are a riot of blue self-confidence and green-orange excitement, but under it, what’s increasing is the crimson of passion, and I can scent her arousal on the air.
A flashing light goes off on the console.
She reads the warning, and her shoulders sink. “We’ll be back in the chaotic bubble in a few minutes. We should probably put those gas masks on this time before we get there.”
“Oh.”
She’s right. We don’t want that to happen again. Even if she wanted me to touch her, there isn’t enough time before putting the masks back on.
But she surprises me.
She unbuckles from her seat and starts to take off her armor, stowing each piece into the compartments. Sly glances at me between each piece she removes as if to broadcast what she’s wanting to do to me.
I wait, watching, breathing, until she’s wearing nothing but the translucent Fellamana suit. The even tone of her human skin, the subtle curve of her breasts, and the swell of her hip to her muscle-hardened thighs. My hands, my open empty hands, clench on air, wishing I could be touching her. But I wait to see what she’ll do.
She pulls herself over me, down onto my lap. Her delicate hands caress my shoulders, and she tucks her legs on either side of my hips.
“Jenie…” I sigh, lifting my chin to her, praying she’s about to do what I hope she is.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” she rasps in a throaty, sexy purr.
“Please,” I whisper against her lips, and she presses them to mine.
I inhale her scent, suck on her lips, and dig my fingers into her hips. I soak up the softness of her lush human body against me. She is so firm with muscle, so strong, and yet her flesh so giving and tender. I wrap my arms around her and pull her flush against my chest.
Her mouth is hungry with all the thrill of our battle, the fear we wouldn’t make it, and the joy at surviving and accomplishing our goal of defying the Ten Systems. It’s a biological imperative, like asserting one’s aliveness after risking one’s life. I’m grateful she wants this moment with me. Even if it’s just a moment.
She kisses down the edge of my jaw. “It’s been eighteen hours. We’re going to have to sleep soon.” Her mention of sleep sends a bolt of lust through me. Please gods, let her be implying what I hope she is.
She reaches for the gas masks in the compartment behind my chair and hands me one with a glint in her eye. “I’ll be dreaming of you,” she whispers. “Will you be there?”
“Nothing can keep me away except you.”
I expect us to be in her garden again, but she brings us somewhere else. Somewhere…clear. Somewhere that looks like nowhere, an empty colorless place.
She stands watching me, waiting for me, dressed in her regular Ten Systems uniform. But with her hair down. The brown locks hang to below her breasts, the long tresses shining in the light.
I walk toward her, basking in the suggestive turn of her lips. “Where are we this time?”
“Well.” She clasps her hands. “I was wondering what your dreams look like.”
; I pause. “My dreams?” Oh no.
“We always end up in mine.” She walks to me and traces her fingers across my cheek. “What if we went to yours this time?”
My heart beats faster, and if I wasn’t already aroused from being here, from falling asleep with a hard-on just for knowing what we were going to do, I’m ready now. “Do you know what you’re asking?”
Her brows go up. “What am I asking?”
“We can go to my dreams if you want, but once we’re there, you know what happens, right?”
Her mouth parts, and her response is breathless. “What happens?”
I lean my mouth down to hers and whisper, “You’ll do what I want you to do, see what I want you to see, and feel what I want you to feel.”
Her lips curve up at the corners, so high it crinkles her eyes. “And what will that be?”
I brush my fingers through her hair. “You want to find out?”
She steps as close to me as she can and rests her hands on my chest. “Take me.”
I wrap my arms around her and hold her to me, her warm body enveloped in mine. I lay my face in her neck and inhale the scent of her hair. “Here we go.”
The sensation starts off as spinning, as though we’re both on a circular rotation, then we’re lifted. And suddenly, we stop. I lift my head and open my eyes; we’re in my dream.
She opens her eyes, and I’m not certain how she interprets what she sees, but I know what I see and what she looks like while she’s seeing it.
It’s her. Over and over. Again and again. Her. Images of her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her ears. The way her fingers move when she’s attaching her armor to her uniform. The way she lowers her gaze at me when she doesn’t believe me. The way her face lights up when she sets off a bomb that will destroy a space station.
The way her eyes transform with ecstasy when she comes.
I watch her watching these images of herself, and her expression isn’t one of surprise or pleasure, like I want it to be. Her expression tightens with confusion.
“What is all this?” She gestures at my impressions of her, the way I see her in my mind.
“My dream.”
“This…?” She glances again at an image of her screaming in triumph after she flew us through the Ten Systems fleet.
“…is my dream.” My palms start to sweat because she looks panicked.
“I can’t.” She waves her hands in front of her face and clenches her eyes shut. “I can’t do this. Make it stop.”
“Jenie, it’s—”
“Stop it!” she screams at me.
I wipe my mind blank, shutting off all my thoughts of her, and drift back into her mind. The spinning sensation is harsher this time, less graceful, since I have to do it so abruptly, but we land back in the beige, colorless room of her dream.
She falls over on the landing, and her breathing is so loud and fast, she doesn’t get up from the floor. I think for a moment she’s hurt and try to go to her.
She holds up a hand. “Don’t touch me,” she says then sits with her head on her knees staring at the floor. “Did you make that up for me? Was that supposed to impress me?”
“No. To both questions.” I’m afraid to move, afraid to talk, afraid anything I do will upset her. I don’t understand why she’s upset at all. Her emotions are a chaotic storm of colors—so beautiful I can’t look away, so complex I could never decipher any of the specific emotions she’s actually feeling.
My Fellamana abilities are useless.
And she won’t show me her face, just keeps staring at the floor. I am totally blind to her feelings. It is beyond disconcerting and fills me with a sense of panic.
I’m afraid my being here is upsetting her, and perhaps I’m the problem. “I can go if you want.”
She laughs in a maniacal way. “Oh, that’s right. It’s my dream, so if you’re still here, that means I still want you.” She finally looks at me, and her eyes are spikes of bitterness.
I say calmly, “It’s fine, Jenie. I’ll go.”
“No.” She stands, her shoulders rigid like she’s holding something back. “You’re going to stay right here and answer me. Why would you show me—that?” Her voice shakes on the last word.
I stiffen in confusion. Something about my dream upset her, and I don’t understand why. “You wanted to see in my dreams. So I invited you in.”
“But you have control over your dreams. Why would you dream like that?” She bites, as though I exhibited something hurtful.
“I dream about you. I showed you what I see.”
“You were supposed to bring me to your sex dreams!” she shouts. “Not…not…whatever the hell that was.”
“I don’t understand why it upset you. They’re my favorite thoughts of you.”
“Because,” she grits out. “If you’re trying to prove to someone you’re in love with them, that’s what you show them.”
My heart skips a beat, and I have to force myself to keep breathing. Is that what I did? Is that what that means? “I’m not—” I choke. “I can’t—I’m Fellamana. I don’t fall in love with people.” It’s not supposed to be possible.
“Then why did you show it…to me?!” Her voice breaks on the last part, and it twists at my heart because it sounds like she’s going to cry.
She can’t cry. I don’t want her to cry. I don’t want to cause her pain, but I don’t know what to say. Everything I think to say will hurt her more.
She swallows hard, her throat working. “Are you trying to make me fall in love with you?”
“I…” I mean to say no. I should. I want to but…
What if she did love me? What if she could love me? Maybe if she did, then I could love her back. Maybe. My heart, my Fellamana, limited, incapable heart, gets heavy. It doesn’t trip or falter. It gets more solid, more sure, stronger.
I have to ask. I’m on the bridge of my life, hanging out my self-worth, my whole self, wondering if she’ll take me. It makes no sense. I shouldn’t need her to love me, but it feels like I want her to. Which makes me a sick, torturous sort of hypocrite: unable to give love but desperate to receive it. “Could you—” I choke. “Do you love me?”
She makes a small whimpering sound in her throat, and in the tightening of her eyes, it’s there. I’ve hurt her.
She takes a strong, sure breath. “Get out.”
I’m thrust from her dream with a force that is painful. It jerks me awake. I’m in my cockpit seat, back in the speeder, my face locked in a breathing mask. With Jenie lying asleep in my lap, her head tucked under my chin between my mask and my shoulder.
I feel a little wetness on my skin and look down at her unconscious face. Her eyes clench above her mask in the same expression I saw in her dream—with little drops trailing from the corners of her eyes.
I made her cry.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jenie
I, blessedly, sleep almost the entire journey back. The computer’s navigator takes us not via the solar wind but via the gravitational pull toward the solar system’s sun.
I wake in the back cabin, lying on the bed with the gravity regulator on. He carried me back here in my sleep. It taps at the cracked pain in my chest. The place where I am in love with him. The place where he will never love me back. It may have looked like it in his dream, but even if he does love me in the moment, it’s temporary.
I can only pray that it’s temporary for me, too. I haven’t bonded with him, so there’s a chance I’ll get over him once he’s gone.
We dock the speeder at the Liberator, and he walks with me onto the warship’s docking bay platform. Nemona meets us and tries to greet me with warmth. I’m too emotionally exhausted to return it.
He asks me one more time to reconsider and come down to Fellamana with him for a few more days.
Nemona gives me a slight nod, as though to say, yes, that I could. But I shake my head at her and look at the alien who has made me feel too many things for him. Things that need to sto
p. Now.
“Goodbye, Koviye.”
He winces back as though I’ve punched him in the chest but nods toward the floor. “Thank you,” he murmurs without looking up. “For sharing your dreams with me. It’s been the pleasure of my life.”
It slashes me in the chest like a knife. It hurts me to do this. But I have to. I have to save myself from him.
He hesitates as though he might kiss me. I hold my breath, both hoping and fearing that he will. But he backs away without touching me and closes the docking bay door. The sound of the speeder ignites on the other side.
He flies away, taking my heart with him.
Too suddenly, unexpectedly, a pain like I’ve never felt before lances through my gut, slicing up my chest and into my spine. Like my whole body has been ripped open.
It doubles me over, and I moan in agony, “Fuck!”
“Jenie?” Nemona lunges to my aid, holding me up, taking my weight. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t…know,” I gasp. Another searing pain beats through my body like a severing of every piece of me from myself, like my heart has stopped and my organs have torn and my very center is…
The nexus of the pain, the source, where it all comes from, is from my core. The center of my body, low in my body, between my hips.
The agony comes from the emptiness, from the need to be filled.
From the desperation to have him inside me.
Koviye.
It’s an elevated version of the mating bond urge. Worse than any of what I experienced two days ago. I know what it is. I know what this means.
My mind fogs, and abruptly, I have no idea how to move, how to put a foot in front of the other. Or understand where my will to stay alive will come from without him.
I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t supposed to, but despite everything I did, all my attempts and his care to make sure it didn’t happen, it did.
