Summerhill (15 page)

Memories that felt so distant flitted into mind. The ship. The hostess and thief. What about them? What about any of it?

“I...” Tek swallowed and squeaked. “Well, I mean, my cabin’s right back down the hall, here, but—”

Summerhill started walking, clasping one of Tek’s paws firmly in his own hand as he pulled the otter along. “Your cabin sounds just fine,” he said with a wink.

Tek’s hesitation wavered and wavered until it disappeared completely. “I guess that works,” he said, his attempts to hold in his excitement quite transparent. He worked his short legs faster until he was the one leading Summerhill.

Summerhill’s own steps were filled with a jaunty exuberance such as the dog had never felt before. As he followed Tek down the hallway, his vision narrowed, making the walls and floor and ceiling disappear outside of his vision until the otter was the sum total of his world.

Twelve

Incensing

The door to Tekutan’s cabin slid open silently at the simple touch of a finger. Summerhill had part of a moment where he made the assumption that a vessel with the
Nusquam
’s level of technology probably had advanced biometric sensors and the like. The rest of that moment, however, was given over to the more immediate concern of the following the otter inside.

Given his time spent wallowing in the brig, gallivanting through service passageways, and crawling through the crowded galley, Summerhill had forgotten, on some level, that the
Nusquam
was a luxury liner. The inside of Tek’s cabin recalled all the charm, wealth, and splendor of the grand ballroom, with animated sculptures, interactive three-dimensional vidscreens, a polished minibar, and—very importantly—a large, lavish bed.

As far as Summerhill was concerned, this room contained everything he could possibly need. He’d found this mysterious little otter, the one that had left such an unusual hole in his heart, and now they were together (together again?), and they could patch together whatever was missing.

“So, who is this fellow I remind you of?” Tek asked, grinning up at Summerhill as the cabin door slid shut, sealing the two of them off in their own world.

“Just you. You remind me of you.” Summerhill’s words were barely more audible than a mutter. His hands caressed Tek’s sides, the fabric of the neatly pressed tuxedo nowhere near as nice as the otter’s fur would be. That would come in due time, though.

Tek reached up and set a webbed paw on Summerhill’s chest. “Ever been to Rydale before, then?” he asked with a bright and curious smile.

Rydale.
The name flashed through Summerhill’s mind, almost taking root as something familiar before getting pulled into the emptiness that was his memory from before the World of the Pale Gray Sky. “Don’t think so. Is everyone there as cute as you?”

The insides of the otter’s ears went bright red. “Wow, you don’t waste any time with your flattery, do you?”

“Why waste time?” Summerhill asked before cupping Tek’s cheek in his palm. Time, of no consequence now, not ticking by with each second, but whirling around meaninglessly like the nonsensical arms of a broken pocket watch. He steered the otter’s hesitant gaze back to meet his own before leaning forward to kiss him square on the lips.

The instant their lips touched, Summerhill felt as well as saw a brilliant burst of color behind his eyes. His head swam and spun, and he let out a throaty whimper as he heard words echo inside his head.

“Would you tell me?”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

Then, his own words:
“Why waste time?”
They urged him to deepen that simple kiss into something more, his lips and tongue tingling and twitching, as if being burned and simultaneously cooled by some freezing flame.

If Tek was still feeling shy, he didn’t show it. The way he kissed back was soft and delicate, like he was relishing something new. Summerhill was torn between matching that innocent, careful pace and giving in to his urges to turn the kiss more fierce and passionate. In a compromise, he kept the kiss soft for the time being while also allowing his hands to grope and knead more intimately at the otter’s hips and flanks.

Bit by bit, Summerhill nudged and pushed Tek back towards the bed, and bit by bit, Tek acceded. The otter kicked off his dress shoes as he backpedaled, losing even more height to Summerhill as the dog pressed in more heavily against him. Now it was Tek’s turn to let out some impassioned whimpers, and the sound of those simple noises was like music to Summerhill’s ears, so much so that the dog could hear an actual tune forming in the back of his mind.

Tek’s legs bumped up against the edge of the bed. The otter broke the kiss with a wet gasp and looked dumbly up at Summerhill. “I, uh, I’m r-really not completely sure I’m ready for this,” he stammered, “but, I mean, I guess...” Prevaricating wasn’t his strong suit; Summerhill could see and smell just how much he wanted it.

The cabin now spun with a rainbow of colors. Perhaps, at some point in the shuffling trip across the room, Tek had turned on some mood lighting or whatnot, but Summerhill couldn’t recall when the otter would have had the time to speak any commands or push any buttons. For now, he was too caught up in that swirl of colors to care, especially in how they reflected off of Tek’s eyes, and the way they appeared to spin and whirl from
within
those eyes, impossibly. Summerhill brushed his thumb over one of the otter’s stubby ears and smiled. Here they were, together at last, and everything was okay. “I want to if you want to,” he said. “And I know you want to.”

Tek’s soft laugh was again accompanied by a tinkling scale of notes. “Well, you
are
the sort of fellow I’d like to get to know better,” he said, his voice adding to the music wafting through the air. “I guess this counts as getting to know someone.”

“I want to know you, too,” Summerhill said, and once more he pressed his muzzle to the otter’s. His eyes screwed shut, and instead of blackness he saw explosions of color like fireworks as he and Tek kissed, soft warm tongues pressed together, fingers and paws groping and searching.

All it took was Summerhill leaning his weight forward some more, and Tek fell backward onto the bed, his knees buckling at last. Summerhill fell with him, landing atop the otter, grunting into his muzzle as he made sure not to let their kiss break. Yes, now they were here, together, at long last, for the first time since—since whenever it had been.

Maybe their future was behind them and their past was ahead of them. Time didn’t matter anymore. Summerhill knew indisputably that he wanted to know Tek, that this was without a doubt the one who’d been missing from his life, that this was the key to what had been bothering him for so long. They could be together now, the two of them, like they were meant to be.

Thirteen

Aphrolucinogen

The bed was gone. So were the moving sculptures, the vidscreens, the minibar, and the rest of the cabin. There was only Summerhill and Tek. One moment, there was an icy chill and a sensation of all-consuming cold, and in the next, there was an equally overwhelming surge of warmth and contentment.

Then that passed, as well, and Summerhill felt the open air on his fur. Tek was still beneath him, the dog and otter still holding that passionate kiss, but beneath Tek, Summerhill could feel grass, dirt, stones and flowers. The scent of nature flooded the dog’s nose, enough that it made him break the kiss and throw his head back with a deep, sharp gasp of delightful fresh air.

His eyes opened, and the scene before him was just as invigorating as the feeling of the warm body beneath him. He and Tek were in a field of flowers that stretched out as far as the eye could see. The flowers themselves comprised a mind-boggling spectrum of colors, like an insane rainbow where the colors were the pure indigo of passion, the shimmering crimson of delicious hatred and the blinding white of an exploding star destroying everything in its path. Each of those beautiful and heart-rending colors rippled and whirled and changed within the petals of each individual flower. The sight of it held Summerhill entranced, and when he tried to reach out with his mind to touch those ever-changing flowers, the sense of vibrant life and unblemished purity burned through his very being, making it hard to see, to hear, to breathe or to think.

Up above was the open sky, strewn with wispy clouds that pulsated and changed shape, their shadows glowing with an array of colors, just like the meadow far below. The wind picked up, ruffling the fur on the back of Summerhill’s neck, between his ears and atop his head. The dog enjoyed the chill that traveled up his spine, and then he looked down at Tek with a big smile.

The otter wasn’t wearing his tuxedo anymore. Somehow, his attire had been reduced to a simple black shirt and a pair of iridescent blue shorts—a far cry from the immaculate formal wear that had been de rigueur aboard the
Nusquam
.

Wherever Tek’s new clothes had come from, Summerhill made sure the otter didn’t have them on for much longer. Soon enough, his own clothes were out of the way, too, and it was just the two of them, down to nothing but the fur, their bodies pressed together, pressed against the grass and the flowers, twisting this way and that.

Summerhill couldn’t bring himself to stop kissing Tek. He kissed him on the lips, on the side of the mouth, at the hollow of his throat. He licked and lapped at the otter’s fur, dragging his tongue over that whiskery snout, those bushy cheeks, his warm neck and sleek chest. With each soft kiss, each firm press of his lips, each swipe of his tongue, Summerhill felt a surge of life and color explode inside his mind, accompanied by the ever-increasing grip that adrenaline had on his entire body. He surrendered to it, and Tek’s musical cries begged him not to stop.

Somewhere in the middle of their ardent lovemaking, Summerhill and Tek managed to lock eyes again. The otter’s irises swirled with all the same colors as the sky, all the same colors as the wildflowers, whirling around inside his beautiful eyes. It was an effect that would have been hypnotic if Summerhill weren’t already fully mesmerized by the otter. He knew that he was fully under his lover’s control, and he was happy to be so.

It was the sweet and reassuring fragrance of wildflowers that overpowered Summerhill’s sense of smell as he allowed himself to be subsumed in a rush of ecstasy unlike any he’d ever felt. The dancing colors on the backs of his eyelids grew fainter and blurred together more hazily as his pulse slowed down, his breathing grew raspy, and his body grew tired. He felt Tek’s furry arms slipping around his body as he stopped trying to fight the exhaustion that was claiming him, and it was the rhythmic pattering of the otter’s contented heartbeat that kept Summerhill lulled into complacency as he drifted off.