Joston
Niya escorts me to the couch that I had the stupidity to suggest and disappears down the hall opposite to where Aeryen’s room is. Here I am in the middle, on the damned couch.
Today’s ecstasies are turning to ashes.
Then I make the mistake of turning the Marinax channel of my comm back on.
As if things couldn’t get any more frustrating, Nik is telling me repeatedly that I have to report back to the ship first thing tomorrow morning, not in the late afternoon, as I’d originally been scheduled to do.
Well, at least I don’t have to report back now.
I turn off the comm, lie down on the couch that’s almost not long enough for my tall body, and tell my cock I’m sorry—but it doesn’t accept my apology. It’s more interested in its own needs, its own dissatisfactions, and its own departure from the norm, back on Choryn, where I never had to have an internal conversation like this one.
At least she kissed me. Several times.
Yeah, Joston? What the hell good is that?
Have you ever had better kisses?
I’m not keeping track.
Think harder.
Try not to use that word so loosely.
Think with greater care, then.
Fuck you.
Is that all you think about?
Right now, it’s all I can think about.
On Choryn, before my cock and I had a chance to get into any such futile disputations, I’d already be halfway into my tried-and-true routine, the one that Chorynean females were so fond of. Especially the about-to-be-mated Chorynean females.
Ah, those were the days.
Although those days had no Niya Redmors in them. Who, if everything else she does is like her kisses, then . . .
I get up and pace around the living room, or whatever room it is that has a couch in it here on Engra, and remind myself that I got to be a pilot again today, for the first time in months. That I get to do it again tomorrow and for the next few days while we’re here on Engra.
I remind myself that even if I’m dying of sexual need, I’m not actually dying and that, anyway, there are, as Niya said, a million females here on Engra who’d be more than happy to have dinner with me. To do a lot more than just have dinner with me.
And even if none of them would have those soul-deep gray eyes or those sensuous lips or luscious curves or a passion that I’d like to try and get enough of—even so, I’d be in their bed instead of on their sofa.
My cock reminds me that I asked to be on the sofa. Which I’m not on. I’m striding around the room, as though that will relieve my needs.
Stop thinking about her, I tell myself.
Niya Redmor’s got enough problems already. She’s got a kid who’s probably not hers and whose Chengdry origins are about to become obvious to everyone on Engra. She’s got no mate, probably never had one, and, because of Aeryen, probably will never have one. She doesn’t need Joston Lynar to appear out of nowhere, fuck her during every minute he’s not doing business here, and then desert her. Flying away in the Marinax, where he won’t be able to pilot again until the next port. If then.
I don’t even know exactly where her bedroom is, but I can feel her need as it bursts through the walls. She needs me as much as I need her.
That’s what I tell myself as I walk faster and faster, in circles now.
Then I tell myself the truth—that even if she does need me, she’d be better off having nothing more to do with me. And so would Aeryen, who’s the nicest kid I’ve ever met.
Damn. I promised I’d take them to the Marinax tomorrow.
“Joston?” says a voice behind me. I turn around.
“Are you okay?” Niya says. She’s wearing a long kind of a T-shirt, and nothing else. At least, nothing else that I can see. And my night vision, like all Choryneans’, is excellent.
I nod.
“I heard you pacing around. Do you need a blanket?”
“No.”
“It can get cold here at night.”
“Niya,” I say, “go back to bed before we do something neither one of us will be happy about in the morning.”
“Joston,” she says. “I already have passage to the Marinax arranged.”
“Damn you,” I say. “I said I’d take you there.”
“But you don’t have to,” she says.
“I don’t go back on my word.” I don’t. Not when I can avoid it.
“Good night, then,” she says. She starts to walk away. I can’t stand it.
“Niya,” I say.
She stops.
“Joston?”
“I need you tonight.” No finesse at all.
But despite my lack of subtlety, she extends her arms toward me, right now a safe distance away, and says, “I need you too.”
Niya
I should never have come back out to the living room. But I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well lately anyway, but tonight it was impossible.
While I was shifting and kicking at the covers, I convinced myself that it was because I’m too worried about everything. About Aeryen. About seeing Chlo. About doing what I’m thinking of doing. About discovering I’m capable of a hundred thousand times the passion I thought I had in me. Or wanted to have.
Yes, all these things are true.
But truer still is that I want Joston Lynar. I probably wanted him even before I saw him but was staring at the thrilling things he was doing with that transport raft. At that moment, everyone in the control room probably wanted him, or wanted to be him.
But I wanted him. I’d already heard his voice and it was ricocheting off my flesh, inviting me to pleasures I’ve been denying myself for a very long time.
And those kisses.
“I need you too,” I say, my inhibitions and hesitations unhinged as soon as I hear him say, “I need you tonight.”
I hold out my arms. He stops his frenetic pacing and comes over to me.
Now I’m in his arms again and it just feels so perfectly right. But when he starts pulling up my nightshirt and puts his hands on my ass and I press myself into him, I remember that we’re in the living room.
“Joston,” I say. “Let’s go to my bedroom.”
“Mmm,” he says between the kisses that he’s laying on my neck. His hands are all over me, stroking me. He’s discovered that I have nothing else on. Just this tee. His hands are underneath it, driving me wild with his touch.
“Joston,” I say. “Aeryen’s right down the hall.”
“Yes,” he says, then he stops everything he’s been doing and I feel like I’m going to go insane with desire. I press myself against him and feel his rock-hard cock through his uniform pants.
“Come to my bedroom,” I say.
We walk down the hallway together, not touching, but the current between us is so strong that it’s as though we are touching.
“You won’t mind when I leave in a few days and we never see each other again?” he says. Is he trying to be gallant? Cruel? Or just pointing out the obvious?
“Is that your idea of foreplay?” I say, trying to put some humor in this situation.
“No,” he says.
Just outside my bedroom door, he backs me into the wall and leans into me. I need him so desperately, it’s all I can do not to tear his pants off and jump onto him. My entire body is throbbing with an unfamiliar intensity.
Then he leans closer into me and starts rubbing his granitelike shaft against the inside of my thigh while he pulls my shirt off over my head, leans down, and plants kisses on my collarbone, my chest, and my breasts, until his hungry mouth finally breathes fire over my left nipple.
He kisses it with a very light kiss while he presses even harder against me.
“This is my idea of foreplay,” he says.
Before I lose my mind completely, I pull on his arm and say, “We have to go into the room. Aeryen.”
“Right,” he says. He’s clutching my shirt in one hand and with the other he pushes open the door to my bedroom and guides us both inside. Then he kicks the door shut behind us.
“Tell me now if you want to turn back,” he says as he opens the front of his shirt, revealing a muscular, seemingly hairless torso. The light from Engra’s smallest moon shines through the shades and I see that his chest is actually covered with a dusting of fine white-blond hairs.
He’s staring at me. Choryneans have notoriously excellent night vision, so I realize that he can see everything even though I can’t. But I can see that he’s now undoing his pants.
“I don’t want to turn back,” I say.
I can’t believe it’s me who’s saying this. But I am. And I don’t want to turn back. If anything, I want to go back to earlier, back to when he said he’d sleep on the couch, and laugh at him, since we both have known all along that this was the inevitable consequence of our having met.
He comes over to me, his proud, nude body the very definition of masculinity. I try not to stare at his large, stiff cock, and I end up staring at the slot on his left hip instead. Isn’t that where Joston Parst keeps his hidden weapon?
I back up a little.
“Wrong Joston,” says my Joston—Joston Lynar. “This”—he grabs hold of his ever-larger cock—“is the only weapon I’m carrying. And it’s hardly concealed.”
“Joston,” I say, swallowing the word. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you did,” he says. “Even on Choryn it’s kind of a joke, even when it isn’t a joke.”
I go toward the bed.
“Did you just move in?” he says, moving closer.
I sit down on the bed, which is the only piece of furniture in the room. My clothing’s all in drawers in the closet. I don’t need anything else.
I usually don’t need anything else.
“No,” I say.
“Lean back,” he says, the gravelly tones of his voice insistent. I can feel his words inside me.
I lean back.
“There’s no turning back,” he says.
“I don’t want to turn back,” I say, but there’s something in my voice that’s not hiding everything I’m thinking, because Joston says, “Forget about tomorrow. It doesn’t exist.”
Then he’s on the bed beside me and he’s touching me everywhere and I’m touching him everywhere and I feel the fine, soft hairs on his chest and the hard muscles on his arms and back and the smooth flesh covering his sex, which I try to climb onto, but he moves me aside.
“Slow,” says the daredevil speedster pilot as he caresses my breasts, touching everywhere except the nipples. He traces circles around them, then blows on them with his fiery breaths.
“We’re going to go very very very slow,” he says while he uses his hands, his lips, and his flesh to turn my body, turn my very being, into a throbbing inferno of need and passion.