by Robin Lovett
I bonded to him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Koviye
I feel strange—stranger than before. I fly back to my home, my planet, the place I have lived all my life, full of people I love and care about and have never thought of leaving.
But I’m filled with a dread, a lethargic feeling as though my whole body is suppressed in a heavy weight. And not just the reassertion of gravity on my body. It’s an internal suppression, my heart and my blood, my stomach and my lungs, all being pulled downward as though into my feet.
I never realized how light I normally feel. My usual emotional state is one of optimism, excitement, interest, humor.
This is…something other. This is something that I’ve seen happen occasionally in other Fellamana. This must be a small taste of what they call depression. I don’t think my Exstare will work when I’m like this. I know it’s because I left Jenie that I feel this way. There’s a vacancy in my heart. I can only pray she’s not experiencing this misery, too, and she is too distracted by her duties on the Liberator to miss me.
I open a live communication channel as soon as I enter the atmosphere and agree to present myself to a full council meeting. I have to face my judges and explain what Jenie and I accomplished on our mission.
I land the speeder on the airfield, and I’m escorted by an assigned guard to the council’s chamber. They don’t trust me not to run. I deserve that.
Povape meets me at the entrance. “Koviye!” he blurts in shock in Fellamana. “What’s wrong?” He’s staring at my skin.
I look down to find I am pale, white as death, an emotionless color that is normally a cause for admittance to a medical center. But nothing will help me but being with Jenie again. “Don’t worry about it.” I walk past him, straight into the council chamber.
They’re abuzz and flurry of talk, a semi-circular room of twelve Fellamana sitting in glass chairs. I take my place standing in the center, and, anxious to get this over with, I take over with the authority I’m supposed to assert, though rarely do.
“I have a lot to tell you, so let’s get started.” They all notice me and gasp in similar reaction to Povape. “Don’t be alarmed by my emotional state. I’m perfectly fine.”
Someone tries to protest, but I cut them off, rolling into the story of my mission with Jenie. I give them every detail of our journey, minus the private things, things that are between Jenie and myself. They gasp at my telling of the events in the destruction of the transmitter satellite, horrified that I put myself in danger.
I silence them and continue my story, finishing with the assertion that this venture, while I admit was reckless for me to undertake, was necessary for the safety of our people.
There’s silence, and the many varied colors of their emotions swirl in their skin tones, many not deviating from their usual states, but some blending into a fearful palette of alarm.
“We will deliberate,” says the organizer in the center. “In the meantime, I advise you to feed your desidre. Your people need you, and you are in no state to help them as your emotions stand.”
My emotions have remained a stagnant, pale nothingness; I know this. But the mere mention of feeding my desidre, of having sex with someone, anyone, other than the woman I am missing, makes me ill, and I have to swallow back vomit in my mouth.
“This human female you travelled with,” one of the more stern skeptics in the semi-circle says. “She is responsible for this”—he sneers and waves at me in disgust—“unfortunate state of emotion you’re in.”
I don’t want to lie to them, so I admit, “She is part of it. Yes.”
“I knew it!” chimes another, who has always been one of my starkest critics. “These humans are a danger to us. They will suck the Exstare dry from our people’s greatest treasure.”
“No!” I boom, my voice echoing through the chamber. “You misunderstand. She gave me pleasure as I have never experienced among the Fellamana, and I am missing her, severely.”
There’s an audible gasp that echoes around the table, and one or two make the sign of our gods on their foreheads.
“Koviye,” one of the more reserved though compassionate members says, “it is your obligation to share your Exstare and pleasure equally among the Fellamana people. For you to—to”—it’s so hard for them to say it, as though it’s sacrilege—“attach to one of them…” They shiver. “You must stop this now. It cannot be tolerated.”
“The humans may not be a danger to us,” says the lead organizer. “But I’m sure everyone here will join me in advising you not to risk sharing your Exstare with any more of them.”
Everyone around the table nods in agreement.
I can’t deal with this. My heart crashes so hard to the bottom of my chest, I fear I will lose my balance and land on my knees. I can’t listen to another word. I cannot even bring myself to remain for their dismissal.
I turn and leave, ignoring their cries of protest behind me, their threats against me for not adhering to their protocol and the unbreakable laws of our society. The last word I hear is something about me being on probation, before I slam the door behind me.
My exhaustion in my depressed state is so total, I’m incapable of doing anything but sleeping. Though I know I’ll be tormented by dreams of her, while not being able to enter her dreams, partly because of distance with her being off planet but also knowing she has locked me out forever.
I fall into unconsciousness, and my mind drifts to nowhere. Sometimes I swear I hear her voice, but every time I turn toward her, she’s gone. I can’t even conjure up images of her. I wander aimlessly, fruitlessly trying to find her. My heart trudges in my chest, like slugging through mud, slowing beat by beat the longer I go without finding her.
But out of nowhere, I hear a cry of pain that sounds so much like her, I freeze. I want to pray it’s not her. She should never feel such pain as that. But then I hear her again, except this time—
“Koviye!” Her voice making the sounds of my name, even in cries of pain, is irresistible.
I race toward the sound, tearing blindly through an opaque fog, my heart speeding the closer I get, the louder her voice becomes. Until I find her, lying curled on her side, her body tight in a ball as though trying to squeeze herself hard enough to make her pain stop.
Her eyes are closed. She cries my name again.
I kneel beside her. “Jenie, I’m here.”
She’s so harshly curled around herself, rocking in agony, she doesn’t hear me.
I lean closer to her ear and brush her cheek with my fingers. “Lulipah, it’s me.”
She opens her eyes wide and inhales a jagged breath. “Koviye?” Her shaking hands reach for my face. “Are you really here?”
I glance around to be sure, not certain if this is my dream or hers, but I see her garden. The plant life is wilted and browning, the ground beneath us too hot for anything to survive, but by the shape of the place, it is unmistakably her dream.
“I am.” I glance down at her. “You brought me back.” Emotions swell within me, a consuming tide of things I’ve never felt before, but I let go, giving myself up to them, feeling them fill me and lift my heart and sink into my soul. The strength of it is overwhelming and has to be expressed, or I feel like it will burst in my chest.
But she is more important than anything I need. I cup her delicate, beautiful face. “You’re in pain, my love. What can I do?”
Her mouth opens like she means to speak, but she doesn’t. She only moans my name again and squeezes her arms around my neck. I wrap my arms around her, cradling her head, lifting her in my lap and holding her as tightly as I dare without hurting her.
I think I know what’s wrong, why she’s in such pain, though it catches the breath in my lungs. “Is the pain—is it—?” I can’t say it. I can only hold her tighter, my arms beginning to shake.
She eases her lips to my ear, and her breath comes slow and unsteady. “I’ve bonded to you.”
My gut twist
s, and a storm of guilt washes over me. “Oh gods, I’m sorry. Jenie, I—I—” I want to tell her I’ll make it right, that I won’t leave her like this. That I’ll come to her. I’ll be with her. That I’ll never betray her, and I’ll stay with her forever.
But it all catches in my throat, and it’s my turn to groan with agony. I can’t. It’s impossible, even if I could overcome my biology and learn to love her with the strength of a human’s love, I cannot desert the Fellamana. My obligation to my people runs deeper than the force of the planets orbiting the sun.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I rock her in my arms, wishing with every ounce of my Exstare I could break the bond for her. That I could stop this pain I’ve caused her. Although… “Was it my Exstare, do you think, that caused it to happen?”
“I don’t know.” She digs her fingers in my hair and groans with all the ferocity of the dominaq she is. “Make love to me.”
“Please. Gods. Yes.”
She wills our clothes away, and her bare chest is against mine, her nipples stark points digging into my skin. She spreads her legs around my hips, and the heat of her succulent cunt covers my hardening cock with a pooling wetness. She’s so ready, already open, swollen and aroused. I lean her back and start to slip inside her.
She arches her back into me with an ecstatic groan and grabs at my ass. Her body demanding all of me.
Blood surges in my cock, and just the small feel of her has me hard and ready for her.
“Now, Koviye!” she cries, her head tossing mindlessly.
I can’t deny her. I brace my arms beside her and thrust into her in one hard drive, burying myself to the hilt in her excruciating tightness. My shout of pleasure mingles with hers.
She screams, “Yes!” and pumps her hips against mine with abandon. Her inner muscles grip me like a fist, seizing me with every ounce of her strength as though her life depends on having me inside her.
I pull out and drive back into her, matching the frantic rhythm of her hips. Harder, harder, faster, faster.
Her body shakes, her breasts bouncing before my eyes, and she’s incapable of being quiet. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Koviye!” Every muscle in her body gathers; she’s about to come.
I lie on my forearms and hold her head still to keep her from hurting herself. “Watch me while you come,” I say, knowing how much she likes it.
Her eyes burst open, and what I see there… Gods in paradise and devils in hell, this is what love looks like. Her expression is the trust of her very life itself and the need down to the innermost depths of her soul to be fed and satisfied by me.
Her climax begins, and I don’t know how she can stand the tension. Her body is so tight, I fear she’s going to hurt herself. Her breathing stops, and her cunt grips me so fiercely, I can’t not come with her.
She lets out a horrendously brutal scream of pleasure, and her body shakes beneath me. My orgasm rips me from the core, wringing everything from me—she steals the essence of me—I lose myself to her, and she takes it all, mercilessly sucking everything my body can give her.
She steals my Exstare, my orgasm, my come, my life, my love, and then—
SLAM! It’s my turn to cry out, my body wracked with bliss. All of my pleasure and hers, she thrusts it back at me with an Exstare of her own. All the force of my pleasure twined and braided so intimately with hers, I cannot separate her from me.
“Jenie, Jenie, Jenie,” I chant her name like a litany of worship. I cling to her and rain kisses over her face.
But she is shivering, her teeth chattering, her body so overcome and strained with all of it, I fear it’s too much for her. And as though this has turned into a nightmare, she starts to fade, like I’m losing her. Like she’s waking up.
“No, no, no. Jenie!” I grip her cheeks, trying to call her back to me. “Don’t go. Stay with me. You can’t leave now. I have so much—”
But she drifts away, neither my touch nor my words able to keep her here.
I’m left lying facedown on the ground, naked—without her—my body still quaking from being inside her. I slam my fists into the ground and yell a strained cry of my soul-deep frustration.
I’ve lost her. She’s gone. I don’t know what happened to her. Somewhere aboard the Liberator, she’s writhing with the pain of her body’s bond for me.
A loud noise beats inside my head. I think it’s my own sound of horror and hatred of myself, for me and my cursed Exstare that despite all of her boundaries, despite all of her desperation and fear of bonding to me—I forced her into it anyway.
But the noise isn’t from inside me. It wakes me up.
The commlink on my wrist blares with an emergency signal. In my sleep-hazed, post-arousal state, my bed coverings stained with so much of my come that they’re sticking to my hips, I answer it.
“Hello?” I say in Fellamana.
But a human voice starts shouting at me in the Ten Systems language. “Whatever you did to her in her dreams, stop now, you worthless shit!”
I jerk to sitting and try to decipher who it is. “Dr. Ilena?”
“You’re damn the fuck right! I know it was you who did this. You were in her dreams again, weren’t you?”
“Yes. What’s wrong? What happened?” I hold my breath. Gods, what did I do?
“Her heart rate skyrocketed, and she started seizing so hard, we had to sedate her!”
I swear in Fellamana and put my head in my hands. “Fuck. Shit. I’m—” Apologizing seems like a pitifully inadequate thing to say. It’s my turn to start shaking. If she dies because of this gods-forsaken mating bond to me, I’ll…I don’t know how I’ll survive it. “Please tell me there’s something we can do. There has to be a way to break this bond so we can—” My voice breaks and I have to force myself to finish. “We have to save her. I’ll do anything.”
“Koviye…” she sighs. “Don’t you feel anything for her? How could you not…love her?” It’s her turn for her voice to break.
“I think I do. I feel more for her than I’ve ever felt for anyone in my life. But…” I swallow. It sounds so pathetic but… “I can’t leave the Fellamana. I’m an important figure to them. It’s hard to explain, but my life service is devoted to them.” But if Jenie’s life depends on it, I may just have to forsake them anyway.
“Well,” she muses. “What if she stayed with you? Could you be faithful to her if she remained on Fellamana with you?” Her voice is tight.
“I—” I’m supposed to say I can’t, that my obligations to my people involve sexual experience, and that Jenie wouldn’t be okay with it. But there’s another even more important thing. “Your rebellion means too much to her. I could never take that away from her. There has to be some way to break the bond.”
Ilena sighs heavily, and it muffles the speaker. “There is a way she told me about. But I’ve tried everything and I can’t—” She cuts off in growl of frustration.
“What was it?” Maybe I can help. Maybe the Fellamana could help. “Tell me.”
“There’s an herb she said among the Ulreya that could break a bond. I’ve researched and found what the herb is, but I can’t manage to reconstruct its—”
“What is it? Tell me what it looks like.” The vegetation on our planet is extremely diverse. There has to be something we could use.
She describes its spines, its colorings, the leaf shape, and she sends over a photo and a botanist’s report via her commlink, as well as directions for concocting the antidote to Jenie’s…condition.
I scan the information. “The tullina,” I gasp. My heart stutters in my chest with hope. “It’s so similar. I wonder if it’s the same.”
“Does it bloom once a year?” Her voice goes up in pitch. “With pink blossoms in two layers and four petals each?”
“Yes. Hold on.” I sit at Povape’s computer and log into a Fellamana database. I pull up a file similar to one she sent me, an analysis of the tullina plant. I translate the information using the program I designed to transl
ate the light speeder’s instruction manual for Jenie. It takes an excruciating two minutes, while I tap my fingers and swear at it to go faster.
“There!” I forward Ilena the translated file. “Is that it?”
It takes her a few minutes to download and scan the information, but she murmurs to herself, “Its fragrance is so sweet, it’s almost bitter, yes.”
I vibrate with anticipation, waiting for her to read, praying I can help Jenie in this way.
“The translation is odd and vague in some places,” she continues. “But its chemical compound looks the same. It should work. Do you have access to the plant?”
“In every garden in the town.” I’m up and racing out the door. “I’ll fly to the Liberator and be there in two hours.”
I’ll have to sneak through the dark, steal a speeder, and maybe knock out a few guards to do it. But I don’t care. They can put three strikes against me, sentence me to death—saving Jenie is more important.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jenie
I wake up with a head pounding in nausea, lying in a bed with my hands restrained beside me. I jerk on them but stop—the pain deep in my body. I moan and curse, wishing with everything I hadn’t woken up. Gods, it hurts.
But then I remember the dream with Koviye and what happened when I woke up from that. I start to whimper.
“Shh!” Ilena’s face comes into view. “It’s all right, Jenie. You’re going to be okay.” She caresses my forehead, even with the sweat dotting my brow.
“Why—why—” But I can’t concentrate past the sensations of beating agony to speak. I jerk on my bound wrists, trying to communicate.
Her eyes are gentle with compassion, but her mouth is tight with worry. “We tied back your hands because we were afraid you might hurt yourself.”
In other words, I’d given myself so many orgasms and made myself come so many times, I was in danger of rubbing myself raw. Great. Just what I wanted my colleagues to see. No doubt Nemona knows, too.
