Tempted by Celestial Bodies

7

A dim, pale blue glow seeps into the room, cold and diffuse as dawn. Roused by a new chill in the air, Kat opens her eyes to find herself alone.

She stirs, her muscles sore, but deliciously so, each ache an exquisite memory of the pleasure Cassiel wrung from her. Nothing binds her here anymore. Her green satin jumpsuit lies crumpled beneath her, torn and shed like a skin. She pulls a sheet from the bed and wraps it around her instead.

“Hello?”

she calls softly. “Cassiel? Where did you go?”

No answer. Her bare feet meet a chilly, quiescent surface, no longer humming with electric warmth. Shivering, she tilts her head up, trying to gauge the dimensions of the ship’s hull.

A fathomless dark expanse stretches above her, its dizzying depths pierced here and there by a faint point of light. Stars.

She stands beneath a translucent dome, a shell of sorts, its curvature visible only in the refraction of light. Seeking the source of that faint illumination, she turns in place, then stops with a soft gasp.

For a moment she doesn’t understand what she’s looking at, as a sliver at the meridian grows to a wide, shallow crescent of white light. Then it expands into a curving slice marbled with blue and speckled white, here and there broken by greenish-brown?—

Earth.

“Holy shit,”

she breathes, and the bright half-circle blurs, her eyes wet with sudden tears.

“Your world is beautiful . ”

She jumps at the voice. The transparent dome brightens with the bluish glow of Earthrise, but Cassiel is nowhere in sight. And this voice isn’t quite the same: more resonant, less human. It echoes from everywhere and nowhere, leaving whispers trailing through the air behind it.

“Where are you?”

she says. “Where did you go?”

“If you mean the one who brought you here,”

the voice says calmly, “he is gone. He served his purpose. Not well, in the end, but he did the best he could.”

The words have an edge to them, and her skin prickles. “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Cassiel?”

The hissing response might almost be laughter. “We are Cassiel, just as much as he was. That name is merely a collection of sounds he gave you to call upon.”

“You’re not him. No way. He was…”

Kind. “Different.”

“We made him for that, so you would believe as much. The truth is more complicated.”

Then, in a contemplative tone, “There is much about us that a human would find difficult to understand.”

Kat huffs. “On second thought, maybe you’re just the same. He didn’t answer my questions either.”

“He answered more than enough,”

the voice rumbles. “Now, time grows short. We are bound to do as he agreed. We will send you home.”

“No,”

she says, breathless. “I want to see him.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“Why not?”

she demands, and then a terrible thought occurs to her. “Did you kill him? You creepy great fuck. You bring me out to the edge of the solar system, have him rail me senseless for reasons , then bring me back here, and for what? What was the point? ”

“That doesn’t matter now.”

It seems to grow distant, as if withdrawing from her fury. “You seem…distressed. Perhaps we shouldn’t have woken you.”

Then, on a whisper, almost another voice entirely: “We wouldn’t have, but he said you might like to see your world from another perspective.”

She twists around to look at her home planet again, fully risen now like a small blue sun. The other side of the craft must face the true sun, somewhere far beneath her feet. “It is beautiful,”

she says. “I’m glad I saw it like this. But I wish…”

I wish I could have seen it with him.

“We did not expect you to be angered by it,”

the voice says, softly, and for a moment, it sounds familiar.

Her throat catches, a new ache, different from the rest.

She shouldn’t care this much. It was one night. Wasn’t it? How long did she spend in that bed with him, as he found every world-shattering way to make her come, except for one?

You’d be mine…mine forever, he said. No turning back.

I won’t do that to you.

She turns back.

Then she blinks, because the bed has transformed. It’s a shuttle pod of some sort, curving hatch open and waiting, the bedding inside rucked to fit the new shape contained within a gleaming, nacreous carapace. In its cushioned center, neatly folded, she recognizes the t-shirt and shorts she wore when she arrived.

“Um,” she says.

“There is little time. This will take you home.”

The command in the voice presupposes her obedience.

“I’m not getting in there.”

But she grabs the t-shirt and pulls it over her head. It smells clean and soft, freshly laundered. She lets the sheet drift to the floor.

“You must.”

It’s almost gentle, now. “It is the only way.”

Kat stares at the pod. She casts a glance over her shoulder at the pale blue marble hanging in a vast black space. Vertigo seizes her, a disorienting sense that nothing is as it should be, with the Earth above her head, the sky below. The weight of her world presses at the back of her neck, rank and damp as the breath of a great beast, breathing.

She can go home. See her friends, go on with her life. Act like nothing has changed.

But now, in the cold light of morning, it seems that everything has.

He told me he needed me.

If I leave, what happens to him?

“I said no,”

she says, and takes off running.

“Kaitlyn, wait!”

She ignores the voice, racing away from the outward curve of the dome toward the center. This space can’t represent the whole vessel. There has to be a way to go further in.

And there is. The dome resolves into the whorled head of a descending spiral. A rounded corridor opens before her, curving gently downward into darkness. Blue-green phosphorescence blooms around her, as if the ship lights the way for her, under some obligation still to ensure she doesn’t tumble down a long slope to her death.

“Go back,”

the voice entreats, less booming now that it has a smaller space to amplify it. “This place was not made for you. It’s not safe.”

“Oh, shut up,”

she snaps, but when she rounds the next corner, the corridor opens up, and her own voice fails her.

Bodies. They line this long, tiered chamber, tens of them, hundreds of them. Each hangs suspended in a glowing blue-green pod, not so different from the one she ran from. Some are human, or at least humanoid with bestial or monstrous features: curled horns, folded leathery wings, scales or fur, tusks or tentacles…but all naked, and all unmistakably male.

Kat stares, half in horror, half in fascination at the wide array of phallic diversity. Then she shudders. None of these people are awake. It feels wrong to stare at them, hanging there like slabs of meat, no matter how impressive a display of the meat in question.

“We didn’t mean for you to see them. Not like this.”

The voice sounds almost worried. Apologetic, even.

She doesn’t know where to look. “Like what? Flaccid ? I’m sure it happens to all the…”

Say it. She didn’t want to hurt him, when he said that before. Now... “Monsters. No offense.”

For the first time, amusement tinges the disembodied voice. “Of course it must look alarming. We weren’t certain what you liked, so we may have over-prepared.”

“Wait. You’re saying—these are all you.”

“Yes,”

he—it—they say. “You could have had any of these, more than one. All of them. You only had to ask.”

Made to order from her very own why-choose catalogue. Intriguing. Horrifying. Checks out. “And they’re all…alive?”

“In a sense. They are only segments, undifferentiated from the whole.”

“But when they differentiate, they’re still you. They’re all the same.”

“Genetically identical. Our zooids exist in synchrony but act independently. These are specialists.”

She doesn’t have to ask what specialty. “This is where Cassiel came from. Made for one purpose.”

She picks up her pace. “You used him. He was just bait. ”

Bait, who had defied his collective’s will to send her home.

“No!”

The voice seems shaken, for once. “For a much higher purpose. Some might say the most essential.”

“You mean fucking.”

“ Mating ,”

the voice rumbles, and despite herself, her stomach flips.

“And here I thought aliens would be enlightened.”

She rolls her eyes, walking faster, deeper into that rogue’s gallery of masculine fantasies. “Apparently male single-mindedness is universal. Why him?”

Her unseen companion takes a moment to answer, as if nonplussed. “What?”

“Out of all these,”

she sweeps an arm wide, encompassing a thousand variations on a theme of cock, “he was the chosen one. I want to know why.”

“We didn’t choose him,”

the voice says, after another long pause. “He was the one you chose.”

“Oh, fuck off. When did I get to choose? ”

She peers into each translucent pod as she passes. Not at their…attributes, now, but at their faces. “I was asleep. And then I was afraid. And he made me feel…not afraid at all. But that was a trick. He didn’t even deny it.”

“Biochemical compatibility. Not a trick. You knew him in your body.”

Then, dropping lower, “Didn’t you?”

“Stop it,”

she grates out. “Trick or no trick, you don’t get to play me. Whoever and whatever you are. Tell me where he is.”

“Why?”

It’s the second time he’s questioned her, instead of the other way around, and she can’t deny how good it feels to throw him off-balance.

She’s tired of asking. “Cassiel must be here somewhere. I want to see him.”

“That’s not possible.”

“You keep saying that.”

Her fists clench at her sides. “If you’ve hurt him, punished him because he wouldn’t impregnate me or fulfill whatever weird hellish plan you had for us, I’ll destroy you.”

A heavy silence falls.

“Oh, now you’ve got nothing to say? Come on, you coward! You could at least show me your true face. You owe me that, at least. Look me in the eye when you tell me what you’ve done to my?—”

She snaps her mouth shut around the word, but it seems to hang there anyway in the quiet corridor, at home among the rest of the attractive horrors.

My mate.

“I don’t understand.”

It’s a murmur, one she has to strain her ears to hear. “You didn’t want that. Didn’t want to stay.”

“Yeah, well. Humans are complicated. ”

She casts a glance around at the gallery of rogues and monsters. For a moment, it’s like she’s trapped in a hall of mirrors, every reflection a facet of… her. Her own lust, in all the shapes it’s taken. “There’s so many of you, but we can hold a whole host of conflicting desires in one individual psyche. I can want ten impossible things before breakfast. Maybe that’s our specialty.”

The voice doesn’t respond.

“Hello?”

She strides forward again. The entire vessel can’t be devoted to the production of sex objects. “Are you even listening? I can want to go home, and also want the stars. I can miss the earth, and also miss the guy who made me come until I’m pretty sure I actually passed out, but more importantly, was kind to me. He cared. I can love you for letting me have him, and be willing to wreck you for taking him away.”

She catches a sobbing breath and finds herself at the end of the assembly line, staring at what could be a door. Or a wall to break herself on. “That’s what humans are like. That’s what I’m like. Is that why you won’t let me stay?”

Raising her hand, she places it flat against the smooth, cool shell in front of her. Exhaustion overtakes her, suddenly, and she leans her forehead against it.

When it shifts, irises outward in a spiral motion, she almost falls forward on her face.

“ Asshole. You could have warned me!”

The corridor that’s opened up to her doesn’t light up the way the upper level did. It absorbs light, an absence so intense it hurts her eyes.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

The words come low and pained out of the darkness, without echoes, as from a single throat.

“I want to see you.”

But she doesn’t have to. She already knows him, even in the dark.

There’s no answer, just a long, ragged hiss like an in-drawn breath.

She takes a step forward into the darkness, lets it swallow her. “I told you I wanted honesty. Give me that, at least.”

In the absence of light, a strange, sweet scent, his scent, suddenly fills her senses. Her trepidation drains away.

With her next step, her foot meets nothing but empty air, and she falls.

This is it, she thinks, still without a trace of fear. It’s clearly a trap. A classic honey pot. Now I’m definitely going to get eaten.

And then, something supple and rippling as corded muscle whips soundlessly out of the dark to wrap around her waist, stopping her fall.

It lowers her gently until her feet touch down on something solid. As it releases her, the darkness ebbs, and she can see him.

Cassiel’s eyes meet hers, wide and wild, his pupils blown. His beautiful face twists with something close to agony. He’s seated on a chair of sorts— a throne? Thick cords bind his wrists and ankles, holding him in place, the same kind that bound her when she first awakened on this ship.

He’s also naked, fully erect, his cock jutting between his parted legs and swelling further under her gaze. “You shouldn’t have come,”

he grates out, teeth bared. “It’s not safe.”

The chamber doesn’t look safe. More of the iridescent dark cords line the walls and snake across the floor. They move in waves and coils, with a strange, sinuous synchrony.

“I’m not afraid.”

His chin falls forward onto his bare chest, as if he can’t hold it high any longer. “You should be.”

“I can’t be. Not around you.”

She steps carefully forward. The tentacle-like cords seem to make way for her, clearing themselves courteously to the sides. “What did they do to you?”

The chair he’s bound to has a curving, organic shape, but it’s part of something larger. The bindings pulse where they touch his skin, and bruise-purple veins stand out rigid and dark on his forearms.

There’s technology here, of a sort, and a tangible crackle of energy, an ultraviolet phosphorescence. She can see it if she doesn’t try to look right at it, like an alien magic eye puzzle.

“I told myself you couldn’t destroy me.”

He doesn’t raise his head, his voice quiet enough she strains to hear him over the deep electric hum in the air, at the very edge of audible frequencies.

“I didn’t mean that,”

she says, flushing. “I didn’t mean you .”

“It doesn’t matter. You already have.”

“What? Why? ”

“Your pleasure,”

he says, voice tight. “Our power. We’re almost finished now.”

“Power…”

She stares around her. “This is an engine room, isn’t it?”

A half-formed idea teases her mind. Unity. Resonance. Fusion.

Connection lies at the core of this alien technology, potential energy released by the merging of wildly different elements. It answers a question she didn’t know to ask until she came here, saw this, knew him . It blows her pet theorems out of the water, upends them in an instant. It changes everything.

Experimental physics comes with inherent risks. A good scientist must cultivate the will to understand the incomprehensible, to unmake the knowns of the universe to account for new data.

“I said I’d bring you home.”

Cassiel writhes in the chair— a pilot’s chair? —as if he’s trying to escape his bonds, and he bites his lip like he’s in pain. “I made you a promise. Why won’t you let me keep it?”

You already did. “They plugged you in like a battery. They’re using you, Cassiel.”

“This is what I am,”

he grates between bared teeth. “I told you. You should…leave. She did.”

That gives her pause. “ She who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The tentacles whip out from the throne, from the walls. They push her backward. “It was…a long time ago.”

Apparently even aliens have ex-girlfriend trauma. “I’m not her , ok?”

Digging in, she slaps the whipping tendrils back. “I’m not going anywhere. My choice.”

“We’re out of time, love.”

He pants, his body flexing against the restraints. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

“Hold on how?”

Why is he holding back? He seems to have some sway over the cord-like tentacles in this room, but if so, that means he could have made them release him.

“I’m weak, Kaitlyn. Don’t you understand?”

His back arches, his cock rigid and swelling larger still, dark, ropy veins standing out along his length. “I’m weak for you. I could lose control, and then…”

“Then you’d take me,”

she says calmly. “You’d make me your mate.”

“ Don’t. Tempt me.”

“Try and stop me,”

she counters, pushing at the resistance of the tendrils. All at once, they make way for her. She strides unimpeded toward his throne.

Finally, he raises his head as she stands looking down on him. “Kaitlyn. Please. I warned you not to?—”

“Shh.”

She reaches out, places a finger over his mouth. “I don’t care.”

His lips part under her touch, his expression dazed. She poises herself over him, bare under her t-shirt, and a feral sound rises in his throat as the tip of his cock nudges against her entrance. The contact jolts through her, electric pleasure with the force of a live wire. It heats her from the inside out, and she’s instantly slick with overwhelming need that coats him and trickles agonizingly down the insides of her thighs.

“You can’t…”

His voice breaks, torment and desire mingling in his eyes. “This will change everything. You won’t be able to go home.”

He thinks he’s saving me. But she doesn’t want to be saved. Somewhere between the promise he made her and all the ways they found to have each other, in the long dark journey back from the edge of the solar system, the change he threatened must have taken hold. She can’t imagine leaving him, not like this, not now.

He warned her of an unbreakable, permanent bond. He didn’t mention it would come with an all-consuming need to have him in her, over her, around her, as close and in as many ways as possible. She would crawl inside his skin, as if it weren’t enough that the ship that carries her is just another part of him.

Is it really my choice?

The answer resonates in every cell of her being. She can’t go back to her life before this, not without having him, not after he laid the universe at her feet.

“Cassiel.”

She leans her forehead against his. “I am home.”

She lowers herself onto him, inch by inch, her body straining to contain him. His head drops back against the coiling shell of the seat, and he bucks his hips up, pushing deep inside her. Driving himself home. Stretching her as the base of his cock swells to fill her even more. When she tries to rise again, she can’t go far.

His eyes meet hers, fathomless, dark, and heated with an infrared glow more felt than seen, a relentless, inexorable gravity drawing her into him, molten at her core. “I warned you. No…going back.”

“Bound together. I want that. God, I can feel it.”

A fractional lift of her hips, and then she slides back down, the curve of him hitting every secret place inside her with exquisite friction. “Fuck, Cassiel…It’s so good, it’s too much, I can’t …”

His hands close around her hips, gripping them hard enough to bruise, but she’s beyond caring. He moves her on him, slamming deeper inside her with each thrust. Then, with a growl and a fluid movement, he surges forward, bearing her down to the floor. She moans at the pressure and sensation as the knot at his base takes more of her weight, dragging her along with him. He’s locked inside her, and she couldn’t stop this if she wanted to, not anymore. Maybe she never could.

She doesn’t want to, doesn’t want anything but this pleasure, forever and always.

The thought almost frightens her before it dissolves in a dizzying, abrupt peak, her cries echoing wildly in her ears. He bears down on her with slow, agonizingly short thrusts. “You take me so well, little mate,”

he groans into her neck. “Want to breed you. Make you mine.”

“ God, yes.”

She wants him spilling inside her, wants to take his seed over and over until her body overflows with him. “I need it. Need you. Please?—”

Her plea dissolves into a helpless scream of pleasure as he rises to his knees and spins her away from him, still sheathed as deep as he can go, her hands scrabbling for purchase as he pounds into her. His rhythm turns ragged, and suddenly he’s not holding back anymore. Each thrust shakes her body, rattling her bones and sending sparks of ecstasy up her spine. He grips her thighs for purchase, pulling her half off the ground as he ruts into her with ragged panting gasps that roll hot and sweet over her neck.

Then, with a roar, he closes his teeth over her nape. With one last shuddering thrust, his release floods into her. Exquisitely sensitized, she cries out with every pump of his seed, each pulling another white-hot wave of orgasmic pleasure from her.

“Cassiel?”

Dimly, she realizes he’s fucking her through her climax, picking up speed again.

“Yes, love?”

She can hardly manage words, but this seems important. “Whatever…happens. You need…to know. I… aaahhh . I chose this. I chose you. My mate.”

“ Mine, ”

he says, driving hard and deep inside her, and she has no more words to give him. Keening, incoherent, she’s barely human anymore, an entity of pure energy, pure sensation, and utterly, entirely his .

This time, when he spends himself inside her and they come together, she sees stars.