Tempted by Celestial Bodies

4

Her sharp gasp cuts through him—has he miscalculated, frightened her further? Then his higher processing kicks in. Data gleaned during his brief orbit of her world and the pheromone spike in her salt-sweet biochemistry provide context for her parted lips, her wide, startled eyes, the slide of her long, graceful throat.

She’s hungry in more ways than one, drinking the sight of him like he’s a wellspring on a dust-dry moon.

He didn’t expect her to choose the garment she did. It suits her, a splash of green in his empty halls. It belongs to the world he stole her from, the color of photosynthesis, life that builds kingdoms out of air and light.

“This is…”

she says. “You’re…”

He waits for additional morphemes that will make sense of her speech. With none apparently forthcoming, he chooses an appropriate response at random. “I wasn’t certain you would come.”

This seems to jolt her out of her daze. Her posture closes, brow creasing and mouth pressed into a thin line. “Did I really have a choice?”

“Of course. I would have sent sustenance to your chamber, had you asked it of me.”

“Right,”

she says. “Like a prisoner.”

“Like a guest,”

he corrects her, as the hope her initial response sparked in him sputters and fades.

“An unwilling guest, yes. So very different from a prisoner.”

It takes him a long interval to parse her tone, a mere fraction of one of her seconds. “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t have sarcasm where you come from, do you?”

Such feints and games of meaning make little sense from the colony’s perspective. He’s almost forgotten what it’s like, interacting as an individual with another discrete organism, her inner processes unknowable to him. “I am, you might say, long out of practice.”

The fluidity in her emotional affect has him straining to adapt. Her expression changes again, and she steps toward him, stopping at the bottom of the wide, shallow steps. She’s hungry, still, but hiding it, examining him as if running her own analysis. “Where do you come from, anyway? Are you alone in this place? Or are there…”

She swallows. “Others, here. Like you.”

How to answer such questions? “Come,”

he says, instead. “Sit. Eat. And then if you like…perhaps I can show you.”

He can show her where he came from, even if it’s not what she meant. He is alone, but not, and there are others, like him and not. He can embody any preference, give her almost anything she wants, except an explanation that will make sense to a member of a species with binary definitions of alone and together.

There are so many of him. There is only one him.

And now, her. Singular. Alone, with me. Together…

He extends a hand, inviting her to move closer, to join. For another long moment, she stares at his hand, then at him. Some Earthly threat assessment runs in the background of her gaze before she finally seems to come to a decision.

Her movements deliberate, almost challenging, she takes his hand and lets him lead her to the table, but frowns again when she takes in the foodstuffs spread there. “That can’t be—mac and cheese? If we’re so far from Earth, then where…Did you make all this?”

“I wasn’t sure what you liked,”

he says. “You seemed partial to a prepackaged form, but I prepared a variety of other dishes popular in your home region.”

She’s already plunked herself down in a chair. For a moment he stands still and closes his eyes, feeling what it’s like to hold her, the warm weight of her thighs pressing into this other part of him. In the cleft between her legs, her heat pulses like a beacon, satin fabric clinging to the slick folds at her core.

With a shudder, he drags his awareness back from the whole to focus on this interaction. Oblivious to his lapse, she heaps food on her plate: the ground-wheat paste, shaped and boiled, that she calls macaroni , hot and dripping with molten, creamy cheese and topped with tidbits of cured meat; starchy tubers cut into straws, fried to a light crisp and salted well; greens and protein in a spiced sauce over soft, steamed whole grains.

She tries a bite of each, tentative at first with wide eyes, then with a soft sound in her throat that calls his every cell to attention. Her pleasure, his prerogative, a pull as steady as a magnet.

“This is amazing, ”

she says, and then opens her eyes to frown at him. “I suppose I should thank you for not eating me instead.”

“I told you,”

he says, stung. “That’s not why I brought you here.”

Then he swallows, hard, as the still, breathless part of him now cupping the curves of her seated body whispers, not to eat, no. But to taste…

“Right. That’s the part you haven’t explained.”

She pops another forkful of food into her mouth, savoring it this time, and he tries not to fixate on the way her lips wrap around the implement and pull it into the hot, wet depths of her mouth. “Why did you bring me here, Cassiel? Seems like a lot of trouble to go through, just to ask a girl to a fancy dinner date.”

He almost laughs because of how not wrong she is, but he knows he must take special care with this. He doesn’t want to make her cry again. The next time he tastes her, he wants to know her joy, not her despair.

“You called out,”

he says, cautiously. “We came. And then—perhaps we, or I, acted too quickly. You were so beautiful, you see.”

Her fork pauses halfway to her lips. “What are you talking about?”

“Perhaps you didn’t mean to, but I heard you. All the way across the system, out here in the black—it had been a long time since…We had little choice. I had to follow it. I had to know whose call it was.”

“I don’t know what call you’re talking about.”

There’s no way around it. He must tell her, sooner or later. “It sang to me like a…symphony,”

he tells her, soft with the memory of it. “Or perhaps your myths would liken it to a siren’s spell.”

“You’re saying I enchanted you.”

She sounds skeptical, suspicious even, but her eyes are locked on his, as if some part of her can already read between the lines. “How?”

“Your pleasure. Your desire. You must understand,”

he hastens, at her deepening frown. “I didn’t know, exactly…To our kind, such a call, ecstasy spooled out across the stars, we hear it in a different way?—”

Her fork clatters to the table. “This call. Please tell me it’s not?—”

“I can’t.”

He circles toward her around the table in case she tries to run again. “It woke me from a long sleep and pulled me toward you. I didn’t know you, but I knew what you were. My mate. ”

“A mating call.”

She leaps to her feet. “ Fuck me. ”

Surprised, he freezes behind her, a little to her right. “Are you sure?”

“ That’s not what I meant. ”

She wheels on him. Her skin is flushed, deep pink and deeply becoming. Heat rolls off her in a wave. “While I was innocently, uh, enjoying myself, you were listening in. Getting off on some free earth girl porn.”

“I didn’t intend to! I couldn’t help it. I don’t make a habit of listening in on, hm, earth girls. Just you.”

“Just me,”

she repeats, uncertainly.

“The call is a rare thing for my species.”

She folds her arms over her chest, jaw set. “How rare?”

“We…I was locked,”

he says, “in distant orbit in this system, quiescent, for five hundred million of your planet’s years.”

A heavy silence falls. They face each other on the dais he made for her, the fate of his world hanging in the balance between them.

“You were out here, alone, all that time.”

“Yes.”

“That means you’re older than humanity. Older than sharks.”

“…Sharks?”

“Never mind.”

She waves the question away, impatient now. “It’s not possible. No species can survive that long without…reproducing.”

“No Earth species. We…my people are travelers. Explorers. Builders, when the time is right. But we’re spacefarers first, and space takes a very long time to cross. Longer still, to find what we’re looking for.”

“What does that mean?”

It means I need you. “Your pleasure awakened me. It brought me to you. It made all this—for you.”

It made me what I am . While the greater organism he serves is as old as he said, this body made in the image of her desire has only known an ambulatory existence for a few rotations of her world.

“You still haven’t told me why .”

“This vessel’s power source, its light, its warmth…it’s you.”

“Come again?”

“ Union fuels my people’s journeys between stars. If you let me in, let me taste you…”

He swallows, his mouth watering. “It would mean everything. It would mean we could go anywhere. We could know home, again.”

He emerged from the greater whole for one purpose. That purpose now stands before him, ready to scream, or run, or maybe hit him, or all three at once. He can’t read the complicated emotions storming across her face without far more data and time to study.

We don’t have all the time in the worlds. Not anymore.

But she doesn’t do any of those things. “ Union, ”

she repeats, thoughtfully. “You’re saying you abducted me because you want me for sex. For mating. ”

“That’s not?—”

“And then you’d take me home? Back to Earth?”

She’s brave , his mate. Brave, unexpected, and oh, so beautiful. In the distant stretches of the colony’s awareness, the individual who now calls himself Cassiel feels a sea change, a sensation of something essential, breaking. She’s shaken him. He can feel the utter ebb of grief, the way it will inevitably come crashing down on him. Like the sea after a tremor, echoes of yet another primordial dream.

In this moment, he doesn’t care about that. He's lost sight of the mission. All he can see now is her.

“My heart,”

he says, naming the wild beat inside him. His adopted physiology seems to be developing a mind of its own. Wanting inexplicable things. Individuating. “It’s the only way I can. ”