Alien Terrain (5 page)

He’d said that before in the same sultry whisper.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It means the state of my cock should never worry you.”

“Can you just make that thing go up and down at will?”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” said Jane. Could Earth men do that too? She didn’t
know.
Didn’t know much of anything about sex, actually.
Before Rick there’d been little opportunity to learn, and after Rick there’d
been a strong desire not to know more than she had to. “What counts as sex for
you?”

He paused. She thought she felt his body shift a tiny bit
beside her. “Any honest, unreserved exchange or pleasure counts as sex to me.”

“Like food sex?
Vampire sex?
The kind that keeps you guys alive?”

Another meditative shifting of his body
beside hers.
“It isn’t actually like food,” he said. “Perhaps a little
like vampire blood, assuming anyone has any idea what that’s like. To me, the
closest parallel is temperature.”

“Temperature?”
His skin felt very
warm to her.

“My sexual balance is the same as your internal thermostat. A
lack of contact is more like exposure to the elements than starvation. If
you’ve ever been very, very cold, you know that there’s a strong drive to get
warm again. A drive so powerful and all-consuming it can overcome the will to
reason. From what I’ve heard, sexual deprivation is much like that: an alarming
kind of pain that triggers a will to survive, precluding any other thoughts.
After which, there’s a gradual lessening of awareness, followed by a deep and
final sleep.”

“Huh,” Jane said again. That actually made sense. She hated
to be cold. For a moment she imagined dying huddled somewhere in the icy
mountains. Was he really suffering that way? He didn’t seem to be. “What about
Backusian women? Do they suffer from sexual cold as well?”

“They do,” he said. “But men are more susceptible.”

“So how does that work out? Are women just expected to be
cock-warmers when they don’t feel like it?”

“Not likely,” he said with a chuckle. “Backusian women
wouldn’t stand for that. Long centuries have taught us how to make sex worth
their while.”

Jane was skeptical.
Maybe even cynical.
But she was also ready to help him balance out his sex-o-stat if she could.
He’d helped her with that spider, which was something huge for her. The fact
he’d taken care of everything without making her feel bad for needing it was
worth a less than pleasant favor in return.

Within reason.

“So what really counts as sex?” she said. “Spell it out this
time. No poetry.”

“Anything is sex,” Raj said.
“So long as
it’s real and hot and satisfying.”

Jane took a second to consider that.

“Anything,” she repeated.
“Including
handjobs.”

“Delightful,” Raj said easily.

Jane let out a sigh. She’d been through the list of sexual
contacts she could maybe stand, and handjob was the only thing she’d ended up
with. Assuming the hard-on in the shower had been an invitation.
Maybe not.

“Does it matter who you have sex with? Don’t you have to be
attracted to them?”

“I don’t know if I
have
to be attracted. I only know I always am.”

“Always?”
This seemed crazy to her.

“Have you ever seen an ugly fire?”

“You mean the kind that burns down houses full of sleeping
children?”

“No.”
Of course not.
But he
answered her with so much patience. Patience, as it happened, was a quality she
liked in men. “I mean the
kind that warm
you on a
chilly night.”

“So you’re saying women are like fire in the cold.” It was
the nicest version of
a hole’s a hole
she’d ever heard. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Okay means I can do a handjob,” she explained.
“Not very well, of course.
But I can stand it. I’m sure that
doesn’t sound particularly sexy, but you did say you liked honest exchanges.”

“I did.” He nodded. “I do. And I accept your offer, provided
that it’s freely given.”

Jane thought it over one last time. The complete darkness
inside the tiny bedroom made it easier.

“Just hands,” she said.

“Just hands,” he agreed.

She reached for him and he was hard already, slightly bowed
and straining up into her palm. The hard-on was impressive. The skin that
covered it was baby soft. She stroked it like a kitten, and it seemed to arch
and purr for her—soft and warm and eager. Jane shifted closer to him, got up on
one elbow.

His hard cock mesmerized her, which was strange. Rick’s had
been a little like a pointed finger, but this one was as tactile as a living sculpture,
pulsing in her hand. Raj held still for her, letting her explore the texture
and the give. After which, Jane still had no particular idea how to get him
off. “Feel free to offer some suggestions,” she said, stroking up and down his
length.

“All right.”
Raj folded his hand
over hers; his body lifted upward. “My suggestion is that you lie back and
spread your legs.”

RAJ LISTENED TO the skidding heartbeat and the shallow
breaths of the woman lying still beside him. Again he felt the bravery beneath the
fear, and that was moving.
Very moving.
She’d saved
his life already once today.
And now another sacrifice.
For that he swore he’d serve her well.

It struck him again how different she was from the women
he’d known. At the Body House, his partners all, by definition, wanted sex.
Jane was his first taste of uncertainty.
Reluctance.
And it was quite a nuanced delicacy.
Thousands of women.
And her.
A different breed.
Amazing, in his years of experience, to come upon this sudden novelty: a new
note, a new shade, a new blush of arousal in a man who’d spent his life
immersed in it.

But as for hating sex, he didn’t think so. What she hated
was frustration, as any normal being would. At least he could be certain he
would spare her that. Raj was quite good with his hands.

He rolled onto his side and pushed up at her T-shirt.

Jane tugged it down again. “If you have to take my bottoms
off, okay, but I don’t like the way my body flops around when I lay down
without my clothes on, so let’s keep this top part on.”

Raj smoothed the T-shirt back in place. As to her “flopping
around,” nothing could be more appealing. He was going to enjoy watching her
body move and shake and spasm from all angles. This, however, was no time for
argument.

“That means your T-shirt might have cum on it when you wake
up tomorrow. Will that be all right?”

Jane
shrugged,
eyes on the ceiling.
“There’s a washer-dryer in the pantry. Come away.”

“All right, then.” He pressed his cock into her thigh and
touched the cotton covering her sex. “These can come off?”

She wriggled out of the soft, boxy garment, kicking at it
when it reached her ankles. “Okay?” she asked.

“Oh yes.” Raj cupped the silky hair between her legs and
waited while she settled back.

When he’d joined the Lover’s Temple as a very young and
ardent man, Raj had spent the first year learning how to stroke a woman into
orgasm. Lottha, Mai, and Pan had all been warm and patient tutors, but when
they’d left him, he still practiced on the skin above his knee, so obsessively
that even now he sometimes felt his fingers moving through the old, familiar
patterns—swirling, pulling, tapping—the movements were all second nature now.

For some reason he never teased a woman into orgasm with
just his fingers at the Body House. That would make this night a rare and
memorable delight. Raj began to pulse his hand between Jane’s thighs. He bent
his head into her neck to nibble at her ear. The wariness hadn’t left her. She
was stiff and still but trying to relax, he’d give her that.

He dipped two fingers into her warm slit.

She was wet.
A gratifying fact.
To
both of them, it seemed. She gasped and wriggled on his fingers, surprised by
her own body. Maybe that was why he had such trouble reading her. She didn’t
know herself.

He moved his fingertips up and down her pussy.
One side.
The other side.
Just shy of her hardening clit.

She liked it. Even through her tension, every out breath
brought her slightly closer to him. He lifted his hand away, set it down again,
and then he tapped, one finger just a fraction of an inch below her swollen
nub.
Tap, tap,
tap
.
For some reason, that simple gesture always had his lovers writhing up into his
hand. Jane included.

Methodically and with great care, Raj moved into the
circling strokes. He brushed her lightly with one fingertip, deeply with the
better part of his whole hand, lower to build up arousal, higher to sweeten the
pleasure. Reading her breath, her movements, the rush of heat that rose into
her neck and cheeks, he gathered, circled, tapped, and circled back again. He made
the wetness wetter, slicker, wetter still. In time the moist flesh became plump
and full, her clitoris a hard and straining place inside the growing dampness.
He used both hands now, pinching the flesh of her mound to raise her hood a
little higher while he caressed her.

Jane’s thighs rotated outward, hips circling, hands rising
in abandonment and passion. He stroked her with more purpose now, up and down
from cunt to clit. She tightened and began to quake. From time to time he heard
a small, ecstatic cry.

When he slid his fingers into her, she gasped, stiffened,
the breath locked in her chest. He waited, looking down at her, his fingers
flexing against the soft, fleshy underside of her distended peak. “That should
feel good. You don’t enjoy that?”

He swept his thumb upward into her dripping slit.

“Oh God.”
She moaned. Her body
arched. He slipped his fingers in a little deeper. He could make her come now,
a
deep,
shaking orgasm she’d remember until the next
time her legs spread for him. It would be good, but he could make it so much
better.

“Pull this up.” He nodded toward her T-shirt.

She sighed, not wanting to.

“Pull it up.” This time he nibbled on her neck and let the
words rumble along his breath next to her ear. “Let me see your tits.”

She arched a little off the bed, excited by the words or the
idea or both. Her outer thigh rocked back and forth against his straining cock.

“Can you feel how hard I am?” Perhaps it was his voice she
liked. Her hips lifted a little higher off the bed. He swept his thumb in a
wide circle through her pussy, the stroke that added torment and delay.

“Are you warm?” she asked.

She put so much into that question that at first he didn’t
dare to answer.

“My love,” he finally said, “you could set snow alight. I’m scorched
and ready to go up in flames, once I’ve had my fill of what’s under that
shirt.”

Jane yanked her T-shirt to her armpits and turned her head
away from him. Raj took his time examining the offering. Her breasts were
absolute perfection. Full and sexy like the rest of her. Temptation sent a
tingling rush of blood into his cock.

He bent his head and licked the soft skin with a slow, flat
tongue. She moaned. Her head changed sides, and she let out a shaking breath.
Ah yes, of course she’d wanted all along to be admired, as she should be. It
was a sacred duty Raj had been born to uphold.

With tongue and lips and teeth he gave her nipples the
attention they deserved. Between her legs his strokes were shortened, stopping
shy of that hard, swollen bud. He rubbed his cock against the soft skin of her
thigh and kept pace with her, standing ready to explode into a brilliant pulse
of pleasure when she wanted that last testament of his appreciation.

Her legs spread wider. Her hips moved with his hand to bring
him higher, lower, there where it felt best of all. In her passion Jane merged
utterly with his ideal of sex, the perfect woman on the edge.

It was time to push her over.

He stroked his thumb over her clit until she moaned and
lifted into him. He stroked again.
Again.
And there
she was. Soaring, shaking,
sighing
in descent. Her
body shuddered with a prolonged climax that was the most gratifying thing he’d
ever seen. Raj drank it in. He warmed himself against the flame and waited for
the moment when she almost fell to earth again to give her his echoing
pleasure.

“Say it and I’ll come.”

“Yes, come,” she sighed, and he thrust hard against her. The
pain that lingered in his body glowed red hot and ratcheted the pleasure
higher. And Raj did come. With his face cradled by her luscious tits, he rocked
himself against her heated flesh and let the pleasure shoot from him. Desire
boiled up and overflowed onto the hot, sweet give of her exquisite body.

Rick Bard was a fucking moron. Any doubt Bill Dancer might
have had on that count had been wiped out in the last twenty-four hours. Dancer
tapped his chin and glared up sideways, going through his growing list of
grievances against the man.

To start with, Rick’s fat wife had freed the alien in his
garage. That was hard to believe and even harder to forgive. They’d spent all
night kidnapping that sex monkey. Bill had personally sat freezing his nuts off
through the whole thing. He’d arranged the fake hookup, the ambush. And even
with his expert planning and his supervision, not to mention a few bats and
nine irons, that space motherfucker had almost killed Seth with one lucky punch
upside the head. It had been a real pain, wrangling that freak, and he’d been
kind of hoping it would all be worth it.

The first alien they’d got hold of had been too young and
scrawny to put up any real fight. Publicity-wise the whole thing had been
damned near pointless. The kid hadn’t regained consciousness long enough for
them to even get their cameras out. But this big, dark one might have been good
fun. If Rick hadn’t let that stupid cunt he’d married walk off with him.

Bill scowled. He spread his bad mood in a slow pan from
Rick’s house to his garage. Five fucking men eight feet away and all of them
had sat around while she just cut the creature loose and hauled him off
somewhere. Those dopey grease monkeys probably waved good-bye between bites of
their goddamned turkey sandwiches.

So now those months of planning were all down the tubes. No
mutilated body to deliver. No torture to send out to infocasts. Not now and not
for a long time to come. He wasn’t fool enough not to see that.

Those Backus fuckers were disgusting, but they weren’t
exactly dumb. After this kidnapping, they’d circle their wagons. Step up their
security. It would take more than a horny phone call to get one out alone
again. So that was good and fucked too, thanks to Rick.

The hijacked alien already had Bill in a temper. Staying out
a second night to check out every motel/hotel/shithole between Nordhup and the
Jackson City suburbs had taken him into a fury. Now come to find out the
limp-dicked weasel’s wife had taken all his money too. Dancer watched Rick
stare into the dirt and shift from one foot to the other while he calmed
himself enough to speak.

“What do you mean she took your money? How the fuck did she
do
that?”

Rick raised his head. “We’re married,” he said in that
squeaky voice of his. “Both our names are on the account.”

“Well, I guess we both know that was kinda stupid, wasn’t
it?”

“She needs to be able to write checks and shit to buy the
groceries, Bill.”

Dancer took one small step closer to the man. “She doesn’t
need twenty thousand dollars for a couple bags of bullshit and some beer. You
ever once think of putting the real money somewhere that fat cunt couldn’t get
at it?”

Ricks face contorted, not with anger but with hurt. The real
sad kind that said
my little wife just
left me
.
Sickening shit.
“I never thought she’d
go.” And that was so clear it was downright pitiful. The man probably would
have sworn the little woman was as happy as a clam. Five years with her and he
had no idea what went on in the space between her ears. Bill Dancer turned on
him again. How had he not known what Jane had been thinking? A woman was either
with you or too cowed to cross you. Everyone around these parts knew better
than to leave one free to get ideas. Rick’s head was so far up his ass, he’d
let that fat bitch watch them drag a dead man out of his garage. And just
thought what? What, Rick? That she wouldn’t mind her husband joining in with
murderers. Good fuck, he was one ignorant hick.

Dancer had had doubts about that girl from the beginning.
She was too intent on staying out of trouble not to be hatching some shit.
All that cooking, washing, mending.
Dutiful
and useful drudge.
If he’d given himself two seconds to think about it,
he might have asked a question or two. But it was too late now.

“Guns and explosives cost money. You know that, right?”

“I know,” Rick told the dirt.

“So now that it’s gone and the alien’s gone and we’re all
fucked with a good six months of planning shot to hell, what do you suggest we
do?”

It was an easy one.
A real softball.
But Rick was already lifting up those bony shoulders, acting like you’d need a
roomful of eggheads and a baby Jesus to come up with any answer to that
quandary.

“We need to find your fucking wife and get the money back,”
Bill said with all the patience he could muster. “How the hell you stay married
to a woman five years and not
know
she was wet between
her legs for alien dick?”

It made him feel a little better to be hateful like that.
Otherwise it did no damn good whatsoever. Rick seemed to get stupider the
meaner he got.
Time to try another tack.

“Come on, boy.” Bill wrapped a hand around Rick’s shoulder,
pulled him in for a rousing man’s embrace. “We have got to get that money back,
and to do that, we have got to find her. So think now. How do we manage that?”

That chin was swinging back and forth again, his pointy
Adam’s apple irritating even when Bill didn’t want to kill him. Dancer squeezed
his shoulder harder. “Now I know you can do this,” he urged. “There has got to
be some drawer where there’s a receipt of some kind.
A scrap
of paper with a scribbled-out address.
Someone or someplace she
mentioned.
An old friend from her school days, popping into
conversation out of the blue.”

“I’ve been all over that damned kitchen,” Rick complained.
“There’s nothing in those drawers that hasn’t been there since we moved in.
You’re welcome to go through everything yourself. I’m telling you she didn’t
have
no
plan. I’d have known it if she’d been thinking
about running away like that. It was just that alien.” The word made Rick look
miserable for all of the wrong reasons. “I should have thought. I shouldn’t
have left her alone but…” His hands flew up, and he tilted his bewildered face
to the sky in a helpless way that made Bill wonder how he’d make it through the
day without cutting the pathetic bastard’s throat.

On the other hand, Bill was sure somewhere in that poor
excuse for a mind, Rick had the answer. They were gonna find it.

“Tell me who her friends are,” Bill suggested in his warmest
voice.

“She don’t have
no
damn friends,”
said Rick. “She’s shy.
A homebody.
You know that.”

Bill took a breath. “There’s someone,” he assured Rick Bard.
“A church in Nordhup she goes to every year to mark the day her daddy died.
Someone at the coffee shop she’s gotten friendly with. Fuck a duck, Rick, let’s
take this one step at a time. Tell me what she does all week.”

“She cooks. She cleans.” He looked at his garage a minute.
“You don’t think it was one of them, do you? We’ve all just been assuming it
was Jane.”

“One of the boys?”
Bill took a
moment to consider that. If it was one of them, the man was the best actor in
the world with balls of steel besides. “They’re all still here and your wife
ain’t.”

“Okay.” Rick folded his arms across his chest. He nodded to
himself. Finally ready to come clean. “She goes to Nordhup sometimes.
Volunteering.”

“Does she?” Bill said, knowing right away they’d all but
found the bitch. “Well there you go, Rick,” he said, patting him hard on the
back.

Rick squeezed himself tighter, looking mournfully toward the
house. Bill could almost see the wispy sentiment for his gone wife. Once he got
the money back, he was going to have to put this man down for his own good.
Sloppy feelings like that were enough to take the good right out of good old
boy.