Tempted by Celestial Bodies

Chapter 1

chapter one

zyndor

Why wouldn’t my Dilfdamn loincloth stay in place? In the Room of Preparation, I looked over my shoulder in the mirror to see if my ass was covered.

Blurodf rushed past me toward the stage, his costume aligned perfectly over his blue skin. “I can still see your dicks, Zyn.”

“Thank you, Blurodf. Very helpful!” I shouted after him. “Dilfdamn idiot,” I muttered to myself. That was the entire problem I was trying to solve. These strappy costumes weren’t made for a Llurren’s body, and if I couldn’t look perfect, I didn’t want to go out at all.

As if I had a choice.

I readjusted the thin golden chains that held the skinny loincloth over my privates. As a double-hung being, I had a harder time staying covered than dancers from different planetary races, especially when I was dancing. Sure, the crowd went wild whenever my loincloth flew out of place. But since that never happened to the other dancers, it shouldn’t happen to me.

With my loincloth fixed, I checked the high braids on my head—not a blond hair out of place. Back on my home planet of Llurr, I’d cracked the secret to limitless energy. But thanks to a kidnapping and a subsequent botched rescue attempt that killed my rescuers and stranded me on this planet, I was a former Surlep-Prizewinning energy scientist forced to dance like a sex object in the cabaret and casino of Daddy Skirkild the Unrighteous, Crime Lord of Jurdu.

Eyes closed, I visualized the steps to the dance I was about to perform. Without a laboratory and any real scientific work, I’d taken to obsessing over my dancing and appearance. Daddy Skirkild maintained tight control of his prisoners. After five early attempts to fabricate an escape by hacking the security system, the electrical system, and the water systems—and receiving harsh punishment in return—I had to focus on what I could control. For my own sanity.

Maybe worst of all, I missed PrettyScoundrel22. Dancers weren’t allowed onto the galactic internet, so the last she’d heard from me was nearly six months ago. I needed her gentle encouragement, her wry sense of humor. By now she’d certainly found someone else on the LonelyStars chat site to flirt and talk with.

I stretched my back, exhaling jealousy from my body. Foolish to miss someone I’d only ever communicated with through a keyboard, but we’d had a real connection, one that had eluded me in my secluded assignment on Llurr.

No matter. Dancing, apparently, was my fate. I reapplied the gold lip paint required for all dancers which did nothing to differentiate my naturally gold lips from my naturally gold face except to conceal the darker swirls of my Llurren skin.

Did Skirkild even know what he had in me? I smacked my lips in the mirror and rubbed a stray smudge of lip paint away. He could’ve arranged a lucrative deal to hand me over to the Bahltoran President who’d ordered my kidnapping, or even my own Llurren Emperor, or—the lightbulb over my mirror flickered and went out—he could’ve had me update his entire facility with better lighting. I wouldn’t charge him a single credit if he’d set me free.

Maybe Skirkild hadn’t done those things because he didn’t want the Bahltoran and Llurren armies on his doorstep. Then again, when his people found me in the wreckage of my rescuers’ ship, he seemed to not know or care whether I might be worth anything beyond my body. “Grab that sssexy beassst,” he’d said at the sight of me. Then his people scrubbed me clean, slapped a restraining collar on me, and handed me a dancing costume.

I took another look at myself in the mirror. Ridiculous—both the costume and the dancing.

Not that I wasn’t rocking both. Because I was.

“Zyn,” Vleneb called. “It’s nearly time!”

I walked toward the other dancers backstage, trying to ignore the loud, sexual moaning coming from inside the Joining Rooms where patrons of the Casino were allowed to fuck any willing dancers, for a price. The dancers loved the gig—free food and board plus a cut of the credits, which they could save up to buy their freedom. But most simply chose to live in luxury with no plans to leave.

Blurodf eyed me. “Cheer up, Zyn. You always look so depressed. It could be worse—you could be Vleneb.” He grinned, and the other dancers, including Vleneb, joined him in laughing.

Among the dancers, Vleneb had the least offers for joining, and I had the most. I shrugged. “What good does that do me?” Without the get-hard injections on Llurr, my dicks would only become erect if I encountered my biologically ideal partner, the likelihood of which was cosmically infinitesimal. Even Vleneb was rolling in money, but the only credits I had were the five pity credits Blurodf gave me when he first learned about Llurren mating biology.

Vleneb leaned a scaly claw on my shoulder. “You can perform plenty of sexual favors that aren’t penetration, Zyn. Trust me.” He snapped his claws together twice. “Only another Sciccorox wants this inside them, but my tongues are in high demand.”

“True,” I conceded, “but I can’t bring myself to do anything without the desire.”

My fellow dancers nodded their heads in pity, understanding of my dilemma even though they couldn’t empathize with why I turned down every patron, even the beautiful ones. The irony wasn’t lost on me that here, the crowd went wild at the sexualized dancing I’d perfected, and patrons threw themselves at me every night. But back home, the Llurren Emperor had isolated me in a cold northern laboratory so I wouldn’t accidentally find a mate and leave my scientific research for the comforts of a home and family.

From behind the stage curtains, I peered at the hundreds of beings in the casino tonight. Back in my laboratory, I didn’t have a Dilfdamn prayer of finding a mate. And although no Llurren woman would be caught dead on Jurdu, every night in the casino was technically another chance that a human female—really the only other species biologically compatible to mine—would light my body up with desire. Only five had passed through since I’d been here, none of them a match.

Every night brought an almost entirely new crowd of beings. Every night their arrival raised my hopes and dashed them all over again.

I leaned over and plucked one of Blurodf’s fallen feathers from the floor. “I’d rather be Vleneb than have a feather fantail that erects so the whole casino can see when I’m aroused.”

Amid laughing cries of oooh , Blurodf snatched his feather from my hand and stuck it in the strap of his costume, shaking his colorful tail feathers at me with a grin. “How else would I lure patrons to the Joining Rooms?”

The music began as he laughed, and he pranced onto the stage with the first troupe of dancers. The brass horns heralded the start of the next measure, and I fell in line to climb to the stage.