Close Encounters Of The Erotic Kind

Space Girls Are Easy-3

Finally she was finished, and she spat into the basin, trying to clean her mouth of the foul taste of her own vomit. A cup was pressed into her hand, and she took it, sipping at the cool water gratefully. For a moment she thought she would be sick again, but for now her stomach seemed willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The voice spoke again, the questioning tone obvious. She frowned, trying to make sense of the words. It repeated the question, a little louder and slower.

“Are you all right?”

She looked up. A male stood over her, his face worried. Clean brow, firm jaw, kind mouth. Eyes of an indeterminate bluish-green looked at her from over a jutting beak of a nose. Medium height, medium weight. His alert pose betokened the reflexes of an athlete, perhaps even a pilot. His gaze was firm and clear, obviously intelligent, though clouded now by confusion and worry.

Language. What language was that?

Right. English. The main language spoken in the northern two-thirds of the continent on which she had landed. She dredged her brain for an appropriate response.

“Yes. I am well. Thank you for your care.”

He sagged in obvious relief and laughed shakily. “Thank God. When your ship landed I thought you were some sort of alien, making first contact. I was afraid you’d died, slipping on a beer bottle I’d left lying around.” He made a face. “I mean, how embarrassing would that be?”

It all changed right there. Shayla knew it. She could have told him a comforting lie, strung him along, and had him take her back to her ship. She could lift away from this half-civilized world, and no one would be the wiser.

Instead, she sealed her own fate. “From my perspective,” she said slowly. “You’re the alien.”

He goggled at her. “What?”

“Well,” she replied, her lips turning up in an unaccustomed smile, ‘This is an alien world, to me. So if this is an alien world, and you live on it, you must be an alien.”

“You mean…” he trailed off, then pointed his finger at the ceiling. “You come from up there? Space?”

“Yes.”

*****

Mark stared at the alien woman.

This cannot be happening. Things like this…they don’t happen to guys like me. They happen in movies or books. Usually with lots of explosions. And robots.

They certainly didn’t include a man holding a stainless-steel pan, half-full of alien-woman barf.

“Excuse me for a minute,” he said shakily, then walked out the door. He tipped the odious contents into the toilet, then rinsed the pan and set it on the sink to dry. He splashed cold water on his face and stared in the mirror, as if his reflection could give him some advice on how to proceed. But his reflection was unsurprisingly uncommunicative, and he went back down the hall to the guest bedroom.

She was probing tentatively at the back of her head. “Don’t touch that,” he said sharply, as he walked through the door. The strange woman…he frowned. “By the way, what’s your name?”

She raised her chin. “I am Scout Lieutenant Shayla den’Kurona, Clan Andrade.”

He nodded. “My name is Mark Paxton. What would you like me to call you? Scout? Lieutenant?”

“Shayla will do.”

“Shayla.” The name felt strangely comfortable in his mouth. “Please don’t mess with the bandage. I won’t pretend I’m a doctor. But you took a nasty whack to your head. I don’t want you to rip the scab loose and start bleeding again. And your other symptoms tell me you’ve got a concussion, at least.”

She lowered her hand with obvious reluctance. “Where am I?”

“My house.” She nodded as if that was not unexpected. “Um. What…what are you doing here? In Illinois?”

She frowned at him, then her expression cleared. “Illinois. Ah. The subgovernmental region in which you reside. Yes. I understand. I did not intend to be found.” A faint flush stained her cheeks. “I was bored and wanted to feel the free air on my face. I had been bound to my ship for too long.”

“You got cabin fever?”

“What?” Her eyes were confused.

He shrugged. “It’s a saying we have. When someone is cooped up in a small space for a long period of time. They start to go a little…wonky.”

“I don’t know what…wonky…is. But yes. I had been confined for too long.” Her accent was strange. The liquid vowels reminded him of French or Italian, while the slurred gutturals brought to mind Spanish. “I wanted…I wanted to walk on firm earth again, to feel the free air on my face, to breathe deep, to walk as far as I liked in any direction, without constraint.”

“Well, I can understand that.” He took a moment to look at her, taking simple pleasure in the act.

She was simply lovely. Without the bandage on the back of her head, clumsily tied with surgical tape, she would have been a candidate for a fashion shoot on a beach wearing a white bikini. Or better yet, nothing at all. Her hair was silver, falling from her head in a single shining wave, only marred by the wound on her head. Her eyes were wide and deep, a blue so dark as to be nearly violet. And her skin was dark, bringing to mind dusky maidens on tropical beaches in the years before they met Europeans.

Her clothes were strange. Her shirt did not fasten with buttons, but instead with a single long cord, threaded through innumerable small holes, tied in a jaunty bow beneath her delicate throat. Her trousers were made of some tough material, but gray, not the blue of denim. She had worn low boots on her feet, which he had set neatly beside the bed, and he had been obliged to remove a jacket, the leather incredibly heavy and thick, black as midnight.

He swallowed as he took her in. A light scent, vaguely spicy, seemed to emerge from her body that bypassed his waking mind and drilled directly into the pleasure centers of his brain. He wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms, remove the obviously unnecessary clothes, and to make love to her until the stars fell from the sky. She was incandescently lovely; her small, ripe body infused with a dancer’s grace while still maintaining a woman’s allure. He could even see the firm outlines of her n*****s pressing into the sheer cloth of her shirt.

“But what were you doing here? On Earth?” He made an effort to distract himself from the temptation of her body. Besides, his mind commented sarcastically, she might have some sort of strange alien poison that’d make your pecker fall off if you looked at her sideways.

Shayla sighed. “I was on the garbage run.”

“The what? Trust me. We have enough garbage here. We don’t need any more.”

She shook her head, then grimaced, her face tight with pain. “I’m sorry, Mark. My head hurts and it is hard to speak in your language.” She set a small hand on his forearm. “Would it be all right if we spoke of this later? In the morning, perhaps?”

“Of course.” He reddened, ashamed of his behavior. His father would have had his hide if he knew he’d been interrogating a woman who was recovering from a head injury. “Let me show you a couple of things, then I’ll let you go back to bed.”

He extended a hand, and she took it, hissing and closing her eyes as she wavered upright. She had to wait several seconds until the bright blue sparks stopped swirling in her head, but finally recovered enough to open her eyes again.

Mark led her down a short hallway. “This is the bathroom. If you need…” he closed his eyes, and Shayla looked at him curiously. “If you need to urinate or…or defecate, you can do it here.” He pointed at a ceramic object, slightly filled with water. A push on a metal toggle set to one side whisked the water away, and she nodded her understanding.

“How should I clean myself after using this?”

He pointed at a roll of soft paper. “We use this. Just drop it into the toilet and flush when you are done.”

She grimaced with distaste, but she could not expect these people to have access to sonic cleaning facilities. “And when I wish to bathe?”

Mark took a pair of quick steps to one side, pulling aside a cloth hanging. She found herself admiring his unconscious grace. If this planet access to the Galactic Health Network, he would certainly have been tested to see whether he had sufficient skill to qualify for pilot training. “This is the shower,” he said, and she pulled her mind back to the moment. He demonstrated the functions of the various levers and knobs. “You should probably let me look at your head before you take a shower, though,” he commented. “I’m not a physician. But I didn’t think you wanted to draw attention to yourself.”

“You thought right,” she said, smiling at him.

He smiled back, and she found herself suddenly struck by his boyish charm. He reminded her of several of her younger cousins.

But much better looking.

Cousins clan pilots…wait!

“Where is my jacket?” she asked, her voice urgent.

“Oh. In here,” he said carelessly. He opened a small wooden door in the room where she had woken. Black spaceleather hung from a wire hook around a rod, the sight a welcome one in her current state.

She pulled the jacket towards her, her fingers dipping into the various pockets. She sighed in relief. Everything was there.

“Everything all right?”

She raised her eyes to Mark. “Shipkeys,” she said, showing him the trio of metallic objects. “Pilot’s license.” A silver rectangle, stamped with her name and date of rank. “Currency.” A GalactiCredit card, genetically sealed to her alone. “The three things any pilot needs. Along with a ship, of course. Everything else,” she flipped her hand, “can be discarded in an emergency.”

She folded the jacket over one arm, inhaling its aroma

“What’s so special about the jacket?”

“A pilot’s jacket,” she said. She shouldn’t be telling him so much. But she was tired and hurt and a very long way from home. It suddenly seemed very important that at least one person understand. Her fingers rubbed the scarred leather absently, feeling the places where it had been scuffed or ripped, and then painstakingly mended. “Such a thing as this…it cannot be bought. Not at any store or bazaar on any planet, at any price. It can only be earned, be given to a new pilot by an existing one.

“This was given to me by my teacher, by the Dragon herself. Towanda ne’Loami Clan Bevelt. Scout Commandant and one of the greatest mathematical minds on the planet. She was mostly retired when I met her, but she still taught a seminar on piloting.

“The day she put this around my shoulders was the proudest day of my life.”

He nodded, his eyes solemn. “I understand. I’ll let you get some sleep. He gestured toward the window. “You should get a little light through there. This,” he touched a plastic plate on the wall, “will turn the lights on and off.” He backed away from the door, closing it behind him. “Sleep well.”

She stripped quickly and climbed into the bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

*****

She woke the next morning feeling refreshed, if still somewhat sore. She stretched luxuriously in the bed, savoring the feel of warm bedclothes on her nude body. There was something about sleeping on a planet with real gravity that no artificial gravfield could ever duplicate. Even the best felt subtly off to her finely-tuned senses.

Her clothes lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, and she looked at them in distaste. Her shirt was spotted with dried blood, and her trousers were caked with dirt and stained with vegetable matter. They would need a good laundering before they were fir to wear again. The room yielded nothing promising. The various drawers and cupboards were empty. Obviously, this was a room for guests.