Page 130 of Sky Song
They had the same silent, basic, hard sex three more times before the dawn broke. By then, she was sore, sleep-deprived, and happy with a trippy exhilaration where her body floated on air and her mind swam, saturated-drunk on the intimate freedoms they’d shared.
But as the first morning light began to glow, this heady, unadulterated happiness started to tarnish.
Lyle went back to the window and pulled the curtain aside. The only difference was that now he stood there stark naked. She looked at his motionless form, and when her eyes traveled all the way up to his face, a small smile played around his mouth. He was letting her look.
Cricket’s face warmed a little, but she didn’t drop her eyes. A persistent thought that their time together was - had always been - finite, made her catalogue his every feature, as if to better recall him later from memory.
Her human brain still shorted from seeing his smooth crotch, such a stark deviation from the males of her own species. You wouldn’t know what he packed until he was ready to slide it in, inch by delicious inch.
When she was done inspecting his crotch, she looked him over again. Lyle carried his weight in noticeably different places now. The gentle roundness lifted off his sides and formed a smooth muscle mass around his shoulders and torso. There were no peaks and valleys of human males in their prime, only the super-taut firmness, cool to the touch, velvety from the cover of peachy-fine down, and wickedly resilient. She knew all that from kneading his flesh, from hanging on tight to his shoulders under the force of his long thrusts.
He pushed his hair back and away from his face, bringing the perfect oval of it in sharp relief. With hair off his face, he was more of a Lyle from the pirate video feed. No matter the scenario, he was almost too handsome, saved from a boyish prettiness by the rugged scar on his lip and that flat, reptilian way he looked at the world out of his opaque black eyes. Not a boy. Not even a good man.
And she loved him completely.
“Come. We can’t hide in this room forever, my hearts.”
The endearment made Cricket blink. Lyle. Yet not Lyle. The gentle man she’d known and the lover who gave her everything she wanted - were they really the same person? The man standing in front of her now was neither - he was the one from that darkened metal cabin, and the only thing that was missing was a ripped apart headgear.
He picked up his clothes and efficiently put them on.
She frowned. “Do you think we should ask Ren to borrow some of his clothes for you?”
The downy arches of his eyebrows went up. “Why? I will never pass for a human.”
“You’re too easy to spot when you’re dressed so differently,” she argued.
“If they spot me, I lose. I don’t intend to lose. Not with you around.”
It was Cricket’s turn to frown. “You always make it sound like you won’t stay.”
“I’m flying you out, remember?” His answer was a non-answer.
“Hypothetically speaking, if I agree to go with you, with Paloma and Ren… would that change anything?”
He approached the bed on which she sat, naked and vulnerable. He smoothed her hair like she was a child. “Leaving this planet is your only choice, my hearts. Trust me on that.”
“Would that change anything for you and I?” she pressed. “Our future?”
He straightened up. “Our future has already been changed when you said the traditional greeting in the conference room at the hospital.”
Ah, here he went again, with the elusiveness and non-answers.
“I love you, Lyle,” she said. It was a very easy admission.
He smiled his tooth-gaped boyish smile, and he was her Lyle again. “It’s a very human word, my hearts.”
“Oh, cut it out with the human crap. Do you even know the meaning of it?”
“I learned it when I learned Universal from a tortured Sakka back at the Commons. If you must know, Rix language doesn’t have words for what’s inside you.”
“Inside you.” She chuckled. “You mean, feelings?”
“If you will,” he allowed. “No words can express the swirl of energies that control your every action, every breath. Much less one word. Pfft.”
She stared at him, fascinated and frustrated in equal parts. “Then how do you express to your dear ones what you feel?”
“Not in words, that’s for sure.”
