Page 34 of Adrift!
Chapter 11
Across the lightyears, Ikaryo had found beauty and devastation, oddities and wonders. He’d memorialized some of those moments on what was left of his skin, but always, he’d kept himself just enough apart that the only scars were ones he chose himself.
Holding Remy McCoy, he grasped a universe in miniature between his hands. She was a compelling paradox with more facets than the capacitorus, a fusion of dark doubts and brilliant boldness, her cool, cynical façade cracked only rarely by the soaring inspiration of the songs she kept swallowed.
But he’d had a glimpse within, and now he wanted to never let it go. Every synapse and circuit was aligned in that aspiration.
Ikaryo reveled in the feel of her, all his senses tuned to frequences he suspected only she could arouse, overloading with her textures and tastes. Every gasp and moan resounded through him, magnifying his own pleasure until it bordered on agony—the awakening of a yearning he’d left behind on his closed world and on all the ships thereafter that he’d never seen again.
The wonder in her voice when she’d called him beautiful echoed in some hollow space inside him, as forsaken as the Zarnax Zone. He’d nearly come undone, right then. In service behind a bar, he’d blended into the scenery, just a sentient beverage dispenser, but she’d seen him, sought him out. She’d chosen him.
Being in her bed was his prize.
As he kissed his way back up her body, rising over the curve of her belly to dip into her navel, past the heave of her ribs, the myriad scents of the shower washes teased him, like she was a whole garden of impossible flowers blooming for his delight. Butit was the perfume ofher—the faintest sheen of sweat on her bare skin—that truly intoxicated him.
Tiny sparks rose with each contact of his lips, the ambient charge between their bodies turbulent enough to dance for a heartbeat before dissipating. When he paused with his chest wedged into her tender core, she reached out—he thought to capture the wayward particles, her green eyes shining with delight.
But then her hands clasped tight around him instead, the green darkened with desire. “Ikaryo…”
Augments pulsing in rhythm with their matched heartbeats, he hauled himself above her, drinking in the sight of her flushed skin and tousled hair, the way her chest rose and fell with quickening breath, her tight nipples as red as her hair. He had to kiss those too, devoting tongue and teeth to worship the pebbled flesh until she writhed against him, and he exulted in the hint of salt and the musky tang of her arousal like he’d just fashioned the most precious potion, an incomparable infusion—and it was all for him.
For him, no universe existed outside this bed, only the ecstatic eternity he might find with her.
“Fuck me,” she growled. “Now.”
The Earther obscenity shocked him almost as much as her impatient command delighted him. “Remy—”
“Together,” she repeated, pulling him down for a desperate, deep kiss.
Finally poised at the crux of her body—so ready for him, as he needed her—he paused one last time, the wanton sprawl of her tattooed in his imagination forever. Then he obeyed.
Echoing her tongue in his mouth, he joined her as demanded, feeling her inner muscles shift and soften to accept him, her flesh yielding to embrace his alien presence, choosing him again.
Not just compatible, not just perfect. Sublime.
A memory swept through him of the moment when the relocation transport ship had cleared the broken towers, piercing the muddy, poisoned skies of his homeworld. The scarred curvature had vanished behind him, and he’d seen the stars for the first time in his life: pure light in the flawless dark. As everything had fallen away, he’d felt only awe.
To feel it again now with her, after so many years of wandering alone… How could he begin to share that with her?
Sinking against her, he began to move, flexing into her secret spaces even as he reached down between their bodies to find the subtle knot of nerves he’d memorized earlier with his tongue. When he touched the little nub, she surged up into him with a strangled cry of his name, so violent he fantasized for a moment she’d shorted his circuitry.
Never had he been so glad of the power in his augmented arm to hold himself up while his unaltered fingertips learned every nuance of loving her.
As he played with the swelling bud, she gasped against his mouth, her legs tightening around the backs of his thighs as she found the rhythm with him. “Oh—yes. Just like that…” Her fingers dug into his shoulders, nails scoring his skin.
He turned up the sensation in his enhancements as far as it would go, until he swore the individual ridges of her fingerprints, the microfluctuations in her skin conductivity, the bioelectric hum of her cells would burn an unforgettable memory into not just his body and every synapse, but into the eternal energy of him that would one day return to the universe.
So amplified, the boosted cybernetics cast patterns of light across her skin, painting her in silver and blue and then ultraviolet, as if she was made of starlight.
In that moment, she was every distant light he’d ever chased, every home he’d never found. Two displaced souls calling across an impossible distance. Finally a chance…
As they moved together, matching breaths, each point of contact between them blazed, as his enhancements reacted to the cascading stimuli. He realized she must feel the wild current arc where their bodies joined. Before he could pull back to diminish the exchange, she bowed up into him, seeking even more of that stimulation, and a primal satisfaction rushed through him, that he and only he could give it to her.
Releasing her so he could brace both hands on the mattress, he drove harder into her body, her whimper of need urging him on.
“Ikaryo—” Her voice hitched higher, her body tensing beneath him. “I…”
“Yes,” he groaned, angling deeper within her to find that hidden spot. “Now.” Positioning a fingertip above her softest flesh, he released a tiny jolt…
