I received a contract offer from Dreamspinner Press today for my almost-long-enough-to-be-a-novel-but-not-quite novella A Blinded Mind. This is a story that I wrote for NaNoWriMo, and it's really pretty dark considering my usual fare, but also much more structurally complex. Which is not to say I'm shooting for the Pulitzer of erotica here, but I'm really happy it's going to be published.
Of course, I did end it with something of a cliffhanger. Which means I'll have to do a sequel eventually if it sells. Which, as my regular visitors know, is not my strong suit. I can write good sequels, but writing them in good time...yeah, I tend to fall down on that front. So why do I do this to myself, leave plots and characters hanging? Poor planning, latent love and inspiration for improvement. And alliteration, I get a huge kick out of that:) Anyway, more soon about the release.
In other areas of my life, it looks like my darling man will have not just a job but a good, tecnhologically and creatively interesting job when we get back to America, if, y'know, congress passes a budget. So, um...what's the hold-up? C'mon, Congress! You can do it! Pass that budget! Yeah!
I swear, I haven't been drinking.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Pandora Pt. 15
Title: Pandora
Part Fifteen: The Man Behind The Curtain
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. This particular chapter is long and rated NC-17 for explicit naughtiness. No joke, no April Fool’s, just pure Pandora. Enjoy!
***
Garrett stared into the climate modeler and watched his latest simulation come to life. The S-series machines had a slower computing power than the later models, which meant that his simulations took longer to create and to load, but it had the best visuals package of any of them. Watching the weather unfold in the heart of the machine was like being on the planet itself. Garrett adjusted the imaging equipment on his head, then used the control pad to move his point of view further into the oncoming storm.
This particular simulation was investigating the probability of wintertime tsunamis and how they might affect Pandora’s single, solitary outpost. The Neptune would arrive on the planet’s main continent during its summer season, and would have about eight standard months of building time before the worst of the weather hit and working outside would become untenable. Not that summer was a hell of a lot warmer than winter, but the storms were milder, and there was even a brief growing season that they’d have to take ruthless advantage of if they were going to become self-sustaining in five years, which was the Pandora Project’s current goal. Originally it had been three years, but Doctor Sims’ biologists and botanists had stated in firm unison that such a thing was impossible, and eventually they’d managed to convince their supervisor of that as well. Which didn’t mean that there hadn’t been plenty of fights over it, but nothing was ever easy with Martina Sims.
Garrett moved his view to the walls of the outpost and gazed out over the dark, storming ocean. On a planet beset on a yearly basis with hurricanes, tidal waves and floods, the founding colonists of Pandora had chosen to put their only settlement right next to the damn sea. Yeah, growing seasons and subtropical jet streams and blah blah blah, but from an efficiency perspective it was ridiculous. For six months of solid and impassable winter, the settlement—called Pandora City but commonly referred to as the Box—was completely shut in. No building was done except for repairs, no one went outside except in dire circumstances. Over the few centuries of low-level colonization, almost all the deaths that weren’t attributed to old age, illness or murder happened when someone found a reason to go out into the fury that was winter outside the Box.
And here it came, like clockwork, the first great tidal wave of the winter season, not always the worst but terribly shocking for all that. Garrett watched from his virtual vantage point on top of the wall, watched the water melt away from the coastline as ever-shifting tectonic plates battled for supremacy miles below the surface of the water. He sped the simulation up, and saw water slide with terrible speed, away over rocky beach and out, out into the horizon, then come crashing back with a growing force, higher and taller than anything nature-made that he’d ever seen before. The front edge of the water boiled with energy, and it crossed the ground between the coast and the Box in moments, a dark purple wave with its edges foaming a sickly, rabid white. Garrett could almost feel the foundations of the sturdy settlement shudder beneath his feet as the wave rose up and then crashed over them, flooding his vision with blackness and covering the Box with water. The Box could take it, obviously, it had for many years and with the environmental shields up the water just sheeted over them, but it was nevertheless shocking to be plunged into such a deep darkness, and surrounded by so much total, sepulchral silence.
“-arrett. Garrett!” A hard hand smacked him sharply on the shoulder. “Are you listening to me?”
It took a moment, but Garrett finally pulled himself out of the simulation and removed the imaging helmet from his head. He felt strange, shaky and a little ill. His supervisor, naturally, ignored that. Martina’s pretty face glared at him, her mouth twisted in a frown. “I’ve been calling your name for the last two minutes.”
“I was working,” he said slowly, putting himself back together after it felt like everything had been washed away.
“No, what you should have been doing was working. What you were doing was watching your cute little climate simulations and wasting my time. And why didn’t you tell me that you have a first aid class scheduled today?” She pointed at the hardcopy of his work schedule that she had fisted in one hand. “You’re supposed to participate in all expedition-required educational classes on your days off.”
Garrett shrugged insouciantly, getting into the flow of fighting with Martina. “I scheduled it for an off day, but then the class was cancelled. I didn’t choose when it was rescheduled, and—oh, look here.” He checked the schedule she was brandishing in his face. “It says here that it’s the last standard first aid class being offered before we make Pandora. Looks like my attendance is non-negotiable.”
“You shouldn’t have waited until the last minute,” she fumed. “There’s too much work to be done for you to go swanning off and leaving a dozen projects just sitting—”
“It’s one afternoon,” Garrett pointed out. “One tiny little afternoon. A blip on the radar of life.”
Martina put her hands on her hips. “Every moment counts.”
“Look—”
“No!” she said stridently, her voice rising with agitation. “Every moment counts, Garrett! And when those moments are supposed to be spent working for the greater scientific advancement of the expedition, I expect them to take place here, in the lab. Your professional time is mine and I don’t like to share it. Plan better in the future.” She turned and stalked off down the lab, leaving a wake of startled glances passing between her and Garrett. They didn’t often have confrontations, mostly because Garrett gave as good as he got, so watching anything happen between them that went beyond monosyllables was a surprise.
Garrett shrugged it off. He’d almost forgotten the first aid class. Again. Now he definitely had no choice, though. He turned off the climate modeler and set the imaging helmet back on its stand, then stood up and stretched, rubbing lightly at his lower back.
“Oh please,” Shekar said from where he sat a few tables away, “Don’t even pretend that your highly ergonomic lounge chair makes your back hurt.”
“You know, jealousy is an unattractive emotion,” he advised his friend.
“It’s not jealousy!”
“Envy, then,” Garrett grinned. “Avarice. Greed. Covetousness.”
“Covet what?” Shekar shook his head. “That isn’t even a word.”
“It is, my friend, and it applies to you.” Garrett patted him on the shoulder. “But don’t worry, I forgive you.”
“Thanks,” Shekar said dryly.
“My pleasure.”
“Speaking of off hours, it’s my turn to cook tonight,” Shekar said, looking between Garrett and Lila. “Are we doing dinner?” They’d taken to cooking for each other one night a week, and of the three of them Shekar was by far the best cook.
“I should be done learning to amputate limbs with my teeth by then,” Garrett agreed. “Lila?”
“Oh, I can’t,” she said apologetically, her cheeks flushing slightly. “I, um, I have a date.”
“A date?” Shekar asked, his face falling. “Really?”
“Yes, and it’s the only night he could get off this week, otherwise I wouldn’t have scheduled it during our dinner,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
“Like an actual date with a person?” Shekar persisted. “In person?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“He’s a teacher.”
“What, like a children’s teacher?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re a scientist,” Shekar said, looking totally confused. “What do a geologist and a children’s teacher have to talk about?”
Lila rolled her eyes. “What do a geologist and a mathematician have to talk about?”
“Lots of things! Soil mechanics, geotechnical engineering, the calculations for the core sampling equipment…we have plenty to talk about, we work together!”
“Exactly,” Lila said shortly. “And I’m tired of talking about work.” She turned her eyes resolutely back to her own equipment.
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“You already said that.”
“Yeah, well, I meant it,” Shekar snapped. “And actually, this is all for the best, because there are plenty of things I need to catch up on and I think tonight’s the night. Garrett,” he turned back to their bemused audience, “sorry to disappoint you, but my cooking will not be on the menu this evening. I have things to do.”
“What kind of things?” he asked mildly.
“Just…things. Important things. I have to go talk to Doctor Sims.” Shekar stood and took off down the lab, his tatty white coat fluttering behind him. Lila looked after him and sighed.
“That went well. Not.”
“He’ll get over it,” Garrett said quietly.
“He’ll have to.” She looked down again and Garrett put a hand on her shoulder, then left the lab and made his way to the infirmary.
“Doctor Caractacus!” The perky nurse at the front desk grinned when she saw him. “Great to see you! The class is almost ready to start, they were just waiting on you, so go right on in.”
“Thank you.” He walked into the room she indicated and found himself the subject of numerous stares from no one he recognized. The medical technician at the front of the class, a burly older man, frowned and pointed at a seat. Garrett sat.
“Let’s get started.” He stood behind a table covered with numerous bulky medical devices. “First off, before we get going with the hands on stuff, I want to explain a few things to you. I assume everyone here knows that you can’t put a natural in a Regen tank, give them injections of Regen or use any equipment on them that relies on Regen.” He waited for his students to nod en masse.
“That being said, though, there are a lot of devices that you can safely use on a natural, and I’m going to show you how to work them. There’s a medical locker in every wing of every floor of this ship, and each of these lockers is stocked with everything you’re going to see today. Some of these will be unfamiliar to you, so pay attention while I go over how to use them. This,” he held up a boxy thing with electrical pads attached to it, “is a defibrillator. It jumpstarts a person’s heart by charging it with an electrical current. You turn the machine on, stick these pads on the guy’s bare chest, and when it zaps you let it do its thing. If it tells you you screwed up, you rearrange the pads and try again. Red light means don’t touch, because there’s current running through it. Green light means you can touch.” He dropped it back onto the table, then moved on to the next device. “This…”
The session stretched into five long, droning hours of boredom. As far as Garrett could tell it mostly boiled down to, “Apply pressure and call for help” if it was bleeding and “do CPR and call for help” if someone wasn’t breathing or had no heartbeat. The devices were good if they were there but mostly, caring for a natural was too complicated for a layman. They all had to memorize the number for emergency services on the ship, practice setting limbs and caring for burns and doing chest compressions, and a lot of other things that Garrett remembered having to learn as a child but never using. By the end of the five hours he was tapping his foot on the floor and struggling not to drum his fingers. Fuck it, he needed out of here. He needed to be doing something. Or someone.
Less than two weeks away from Pandora and he hadn’t been laid since the night before they left Olympus. It was pitiful. So what if Jonah had been amazing? Garrett had slept with plenty of amazing people. Jonah wasn’t his first drifter, either; he’d carried on a very satisfying affair for several months with the head of a drifter clan while he traveled with his father, helping him juggle being a senator and an active Federation general. That had been right after he and Robbie had called it quits…three years of the good, the bad and the ugly, and Garrett treasured every minute he’d had of the longest relationship in his life to date, even if sometimes Robbie had frustrated him to the point of losing his temper. He hadn’t spoken to Robbie, or Wyl, for almost a week now…too long.
The class was abruptly ended, and Garrett leapt for the escape route, more than ready to kiss the infirmary goodbye. He didn’t need to get his brain chemistry checked today, he was done with the damn class, he didn’t need a shot of Regen…
“But I don’t like shots,” a small, familiar voice whimpered pitifully from behind a curtain.
“Gotta have it anyway, bucko,” another voice, equally familiar but completely not who it sounded like under any circumstances, replied.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
“It will only take a second,” the female doctor’s voice said soothingly. “Then you’ll be all done.”
“But it hurts.”
“It didn’t hurt your friend last time, did it?”
“No…”
“His friend?” the man’s voice—not that man’s voice, oh no—asked under his breath.
“Doctor Caractacus. He and Cody met the last time Cody was in to get a shot, and they ended up getting theirs together.”
“Daddy…”
“C’mere, bucko.” Garrett heard a creak and shift as the weight on the infirmary cot changed. “Just relax, okay? I’ve got you. You’re gonna be fine.”
“You’ll just feel a little pinch,” the doctor promised. There was a small whine a moment later, then the noise of a band-aid being unwrapped and the softer, muffled smack of a kiss. Garrett intimately knew all of the sounds two bodies made when they connected, and this was a reassuring, gentle kiss, probably the father’s lips to his son’s head. A moment later the doctor pulled back the curtain, and Garrett saw what he had been sure he wouldn’t see.
His one night stand, Jonah, sitting on a cot with Cody in his lap, both of them admiring the Space Ranger band-aid that decorated his son’s arm. The doctor saw Garrett first.
“Doctor Caractacus! Cody, look, it’s your friend from before.”
The two men’s eyes met, and Garrett would have been hard pressed to say which of them was more shocked. Jonah looked a little less put together than the last time Garrett had seen him, but anyone would be disheveled with a squirmy five year old on their lap. His sandy brown hair was tied into a ponytail, but several hanks had been pulled free, and there were stress lines clearly visible around his eyes and mouth. He was a little paler than Garrett remembered, and clean shaven now instead of alluringly scruffy, but Garrett’s stomach still clenched with sudden want at the sight of him.
“Garrett!” Cody wiggled until his father put him down, and he crossed the few meters between them with a bouncy step, the pain of his shot forgotten. “Daddy came with me this time and it didn’t hurt all that much, and look, I got another Space Ranger band-aid! This one is the purple Space Ranger though and he isn’t my favorite, and last time I got the green one and I like him better. Remember?”
“This is your friend?” Jonah asked in a slightly-strangled tone.
“Yeah Daddy, he sat with me and then we got shots. Are you getting one today?”
“Um, no,” Garrett said, finally pulling his mind out of the memory gutter. The last thing he needed was to get an involuntary erection in front of a child. “Today I had to come in for a class.”
“Like a school class?”
“Exactly like that, except more boring,” he confessed.
“That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Garrett drawled, looking straight at Jonah with slightly hard eyes. “If I hadn’t come in for my class, then I wouldn’t have gotten to meet your Daddy. Something tells me he can be a hard man to find.” Not that Garrett had tried to find him, he’d made himself resist, but the man had blown off their morning after, and the almost inevitable prospect of more intensely hot sex, with no explanation, and now he was here? It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
To his satisfaction, Jonah winced. “Doc, how about you check on Cody’s ears while we’re in?” he suggested. “Maybe find him a red or green Space Ranger band-aid.”
“Sure,” the doctor said, a little mystified. She took Cody by the hand and led him over towards another partition. Garrett crossed his arms and stared at Jonah, and Jonah stared right back.
“You cut your hair,” Jonah said at last.
The non-sequiter threw Garrett. “Yes. When the environmental controls were offline.”
“I saw you then.”
“Where?”
“Skin room on the top floor. I didn’t know it was you,” he added when he saw Garrett’s eyes narrow. “Cody and I could just see your back. You seemed kinda into whatever you were doing, so we found another place to look at the stars.”
“I can’t believe you’re Cody’s dad. He told me all about how wonderful and perfect and protective you are.”
Jonah winced again. “He mentioned your name, but I didn’t think it was actually you. You had a private ship; I took you for a private contractor. Never reckoned you’d be joining the expedition to Pandora.”
“I am a private contractor,” Garrett said, “in the science lab. For the next three years, at any rate. Keeping the ship was part of my contract. I haven’t really joined the expedition.”
“Huh.” A little of the warmth seemed to leave Jonah’s face. “Well, that figures. You sure as hell aren’t a natural.”
“Neither are you. What’s a drifter doing heading into the Fringe with a group of colonists? Why aren’t you off on your own ship somewhere?”
Jonah’s lips thinned. “My boy’s a natural. Couldn’t keep him healthy on board a ship, not with all the places we stopped. He needs a real home, some place he can have a real life. I heard about Olympus’ call for colonists and signed on as a pilot.”
“Oh.” That made sense. Still… “It must have hurt to leave your family behind.” Drifter clans stayed tight for generations, the entire extended family living on a ship that added on more space as more children were born.
“Nothing’s more important than Cody.”
Why did that sound so…final? Garrett decided to let go of his irritation and lighten the mood. “I still owe you a cup of coffee, you know.”
“You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
Garrett frowned. “Why so vehement?”
“Because I know where you’re headed, and the answer’s no.”
Well, fuck. Way to cut through the small talk. “No, you won’t have coffee with me, or no we won’t be sleeping together again?”
“Both,” Jonah said firmly. “Don’t get me wrong, that night was damn fine and you’re more than just easy on the eyes, but I’m not gonna be bringin’ someone home for a casual thing, and I won’t be passing my son’s care off to other people just so I can go and get some action on the side. It’s just me and Cody now and he’s my priority.”
“Cody likes me,” Garrett pointed out.
“’Course he does, you were sweet to him and you’re a nice guy,” Jonah said with an easy shrug. “Thanks for helping him out when I couldn’t be here.”
“My pleasure,” Garrett muttered. “I still don’t understand why you don’t want to see me again, though. What we did was really, really…” fucking amazing incredible wonderful perfect, “nice.”
“I know. But that’s not the point.” Jonah shook his head. “I’m not looking for a relationship right now, ‘specially not with someone who isn’t going to settle on Pandora. I shouldn’t even have had that one night, really, but it had been a long time for me and you, well, you’re pretty irresistible.” He smiled a familiar half smile, and Garrett’s stomach clenched again.
“Why not get together for something we could all do?” Garrett shocked himself by asking. Holy shit, was he really this desperate? “Dinner in one of the restaurants, or we could go to the gravity gymnasium.”
Jonah’s jaw seemed to tighten. “Damn it Garrett, I don’t want Cody liking you any more than he already does.”
“You’re bound to see me around. This ship is big, but it’s not that big.”
“Managed to miss you until now,” Jonah countered. “And no, no dates. No coffee, no dinner, no—”
“Are you coming over for dinner?” Cody asked, appearing as if by magic at Garrett’s side. The boy grabbed onto one of Garrett’s long-fingered hands with both of his own. “We’re having macaroni and cheese. It’s my favorite. Do you like it?”
“I do like it, but your daddy doesn’t want me to come to dinner,” Garrett said a little spitefully. He saw Cody’s face crumple with confusion and Jonah’s eyes go pleading and sighed. “Besides, I have other plans for tonight. Maybe another time.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t pester the man, Cody,” Jonah said, getting up off the cot. His long body unfolded to its full length, and just looking at it vividly reminded Garrett of how it had felt to have all of that pressed against him, weighing him down, pushing inside of him…
“I have to go,” Garrett said suddenly. “It was nice to see you again, Cody. And you, Jonah…?” He knew but he wanted to hear it from Jonah's lips.
“Helms,” he said softly. “Jonah and Cody Helms. Nice to see you too, Doctor Caractacus.”
“You got it on the first try,” Garrett said, a little bemused. He shook his head slightly to clear it, then gently detached himself from Cody. “Have a nice evening.” He then turned on his heel and left the infirmary, his mind whirling with so many emotions that he had no idea how to sort through them all. Mechanically, his feet took him back towards his quarters, where he would be alone, with no friends to eat dinner with and no lover to have sex with and no child to be chatty with. When his com rang in the elevator it was almost a palpable relief. “This is Garrett.”
“Good evening, Garrett.” Jezria’s smooth voice penetrated the fog of his emotions. “Would you mind joining me in my quarters? An issue has been raised concerning your work and I’d like to discuss it with you.”
“Concerning my work?” Anger, one of the many swirling things he’d been feeling, suddenly took the fore. “Who’s been talking to you about my work?”
“I’d rather discuss it in person,” Jezria said. “May I expect you soon?”
“I’ll be there immediately,” Garrett snapped, then disconnected and rerouted the elevator. It took him five minutes to get to Jezria’s spacious quarters, and in that amount of time he’d managed to work himself into a satisfyingly indignant lather. Jezria buzzed him in and he got right to the point, despite the fact that several of her aides were with her.
“Who’s complaining about my work?”
“Please sit down, Garrett.”
“I feel like standing,” he gritted. “Who. Is. It.”
“Doctor Sims expressed some concern today over your work ethic. She feels you undermine her authority and don’t fully dedicate yourself to the time you have in the lab.”
“Doctor Sims is an idiot.”
“I have to take this complaint seriously, Garrett, and so should you,” Jezria reproved him. “She said you spent over an hour watching simulations this morning, and then you took the afternoon off to do a first aid class.”
“The class was rescheduled and beyond my control, and as for the simulations, well, I need to see them in order to be able to evaluate my work.” Garrett began pacing, trying to describe something he found very difficult to articulate. “Martina is a structural engineer, she works with numbers and equations and concrete designs. Climatology is chaotic, it’s fluid, it’s changeable. The environment won’t conform to an equation no matter how many hundreds or thousands of data points we have to go off of, and to be honest the data collection that’s been done so far on Pandora has been pretty shoddy with regards to weather patterns. I can’t get a good idea of the magnitude of the potential errors in our assumptions unless I can get a feel for what’s happening, and for that I need to design and review simulations. I’m a scientist, but I’m not a mathematician or an engineer. I need visual cues to facilitate my understanding.
“I’ve done everything Martina has asked of me in good time, when it makes sense for me to pursue it. Do I have a handle on the weather patterns on Pandora for the next hundred years? No. Am I getting there? Yes. But I can’t work miracles, and frankly no one working for Doctor Martina Sims will ever be able to work miracles the way she second guesses and double checks every bit of work we produce.” Running abruptly out of steam, Garrett flopped down on the couch across from Jezria, who looked at him concernedly.
“Are you all right?”
The temptation to shout, “Do I fucking look all right?” was almost overwhelming, but he managed to restrain himself. “No,” he said simply. “But I can handle it.”
“Very well. I’ll add my opinion of the formal complaint to the file before it goes into admin, and so you know, my opinion is that her objections are unfounded and that no further notice should be made of it. But you’ll have to deal with Doctor Sims on a daily basis, so please try not to overly antagonize her.”
“If you had any concept of the amount of control I use on a daily basis with her grand high misanthropic majesty, you wouldn’t be cautioning me, you’d be praising my godlike restraint,” Garrett sighed.
“I’m sure I would, dear. How is your father?”
“Busy,” Garrett replied. “I haven’t spoken to him for a while. I did talk with Claudia the other day, though. Things are kind of riled up in the capitol. He might have to institute a curfew.”
“That won’t be popular.”
“Well, I know I hated it as a teenager.”
Jezria smiled and smoothly shifted gears. “Thank you for addressing this matter so promptly, Garrett. I think you’re doing very good work.”
“From your lips to God’s ear.” Or whatever the saying was. “Mind if I go now? I have a hot date with my hand that’s not to be missed.”
“Crass,” Jezria chided him.
“Honest,” Garrett said, standing up and straightening his suit.
“Go, then. And Steven,” she turned to one of her aides, “I’m done with the food security information for now as well. Thank you for collecting it all for me. Go and have a nice evening.”
“Thank you,” Seven said, also standing. He looked at Garrett and smiled slightly, then motioned towards the door. Garrett took the hint and led the way out. Once they were both in the hall Steven’s smile got wider and more sympathetic. “Bad day, huh?”
“You could say that,” Garrett replied, rolling his neck in a circle before focusing on the aide. Steven Miyakawa, the first person to welcome him aboard the Neptune and, by all accounts, a very rewarding lay. Garrett remembered flirting with him, that first day, making the other man blush, and he thought, Fuck it. Jonah got his engine revving and then didn’t want him? He’d play with somebody else. “Want to go out for a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” Steven said with a faint smile. “I’m an ascetic.”
“Really?” Garrett was instantly intrigued. “Are you a sexual ascetic as well?”
“Kind of. I have sex, I just don’t allow myself to orgasm,” the other man explained. He took in Garrett’s expression and laughed. “I know, it sounds like a punishment, but self denial really works for me, and I love bringing other people to orgasm.”
“What do you get out of self denial?”
“A sense of personal power and control,” Steven said. “Asceticism as my clan follows it is about not being ruled by your desires. Sex can be pleasurable for reasons other than coming.”
“So you never have orgasms?”
“Well…almost never.” He shrugged slightly. “Sometimes it happens, but not often.”
“I bet you’d have one with me.”
Steven arched one eyebrow. “Really? You’re that confident in yourself?”
“Yes.”
Steven stared at Garrett for a long moment, then asked, “Do you want to test the theory?”
“Absolutely.” Just get me out of my head for a while. “Your place?”
“That’s fine with me.”
Steven’s place ended up being just one level down from Jezria’s. It was far smaller than hers and very sparsely decorated, but there was a shower and a bed and at the moment that was enough for Garrett. He was tired of being alone. He was tired of not being touched; he missed the comforting everyday physical contact that being with his family and friends had provided him, not to mention the feel of a warm, willing body against his own. He had never had sex with an ascetic before, but given the amount of time it had been since he’d been laid, Garrett had no doubt that he’d be able to bring Steven off eventually. That was what he wanted, exhaustive, mind-numbing sex without emotional entanglements.
They took a shower together, and Garrett took his time bathing Steven, rubbing his slender body down with a plain white washcloth and not letting the other man distract him with caresses. Garrett was a man on a mission. Steven was almost too skinny, but it looked good on him, and he seemed to enjoy being explored. He had an erection the whole time, but no matter how Garrett stroked and fondled him, he didn’t tense up or begin to leak. The gauntlet was thrown down.
Garrett had never minded exerting himself for his partner’s sake and he loved a challenge, so once they were out of the shower he pressed Steven back until he leaned against the bedroom wall, then sank to his knees in front of him. “I want to blow you,” he murmured.
“Whatever you want,” Steven replied, threading thin fingers into Garrett’s hair. Garrett leaned forward and took the warm, hard velvet into his mouth, moaning at the sensations that flooded through him. God, he missed this. He missed doing this for someone, missed being the reason for their pleasure. Admittedly, now he was doing it to a man who made a lifestyle out of denying himself pleasure, but it was as much for Garrett’s sake as it was for Steven’s. He licked every inch of his cock, then suckled insistently on the head while his hands manipulated Steven’s sack. Then he drew back and plunged down and stroked around the base for a while, and pulled off and did it all over again. Garrett went down on Steven until his jaw was aching and his lover finally, finally, was flowing with precome.
“Will you come if I fuck you?” he asked, removing his mouth from Steven’s cock with a slick pop.
“No,” Steven panted.
“Will you come if you fuck me?”
“Maybe…eventually.”
“Oh, you tease,” Garrett grinned. He stood up off the floor just long enough to tug Steven back onto the bed with him, more of a pallet really, then arranged them to his liking. Garrett laid Steven out flat on his back, stroking his dick firmly with one hand while he prepped himself with his fingers and oil with the other. Steven avidly watched every move he made and so Garrett made it a show, whimpering and groaning as he opened himself up in preparation to take Steven’s cock. He wasn’t really feeling it, but under the circumstances pretending was half the fun. He didn’t want genuine emotions right now, he wanted to fuck with no strings attached. No more falling in lust with one night stands. The old ways were the best ways.
Garrett sinuously straddled his lover’s slender hips, holding his cock in place and pressing against it, just enough to barely breech himself, before pulling off again. He allowed Steven to penetrate him by millimeters, just a little deeper every time, and he tensed and relaxed in a regular rhythm as he took Steen deeper inside. By the time he was finally down all the way his thighs were burning with exertion and his cock was aching with need.
“Can you keep going if you come now?” Steven whispered, splaying his long fingers over the tops of Garrett’s thighs.
“Yes…”
“Then come.” He wrapped those long fingers over Garrett’s cock and stroked firmly, and it was all he needed to fall over the edge. His orgasm swelled and burst and he came with a drawn-out groan of pleasure. It felt good, very good. It was the pure physical release he was looking for, not less than he had hoped, not disappointing in any way. It wasn’t Jonah, but apparently he didn’t get to fucking have fucking Jonah, so…
Garrett caught his breath, and then he began to move again on Steven, longer strokes this time, rising and falling and fucking himself slow and steady, then fast and hard. He came again before he finally drew an orgasm out of his lover, and it lasted so long and was so satisfying to watch that Garrett didn’t even feel his own discomfort any more. After a few quiet minutes, they cleaned up, then went to sleep. They didn’t touch each other during the night, and waking in the morning wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn’t emotional either.
“Tea?” Steven offered, pulling a few cups from a cabinet.
“There’s no coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee, but I could order you some from the kitchen.”
“Tea is fine,” Garrett said. They drank a cup of pale green tea together, more grassy than caffeine-imbued, and then Garrett leaned in and kissed Steven’s cheek. It was the first kiss that had passed between them all night. “Thank you. That was fun.”
“It was. I really didn’t think you’d be able to make me come.”
“Are you kidding? Darling, all you demanded was patience and stamina. We didn’t even get into pain play, or domination and submission, or nerve fetishes—”
“No, we didn’t,” Steven said, his cheeks faintly pink. “And we won’t be.”
“I know.” They both knew that they wouldn’t be doing this again. It had been a good night, but there hadn’t been any real connection between them. “Give Jezria hell today.”
“She has you for that.” Steven walked Garrett over to the door, clasped his arm, and said, “Enjoy your day off.”
“How do you know my schedule better than I do?” Garrett huffed. “Yeah, I will.” I’ll have lots of fun sitting in my apartment alone doing, huh, let me think, nothing! Sounds great. Garrett left Steven’s apartment and drifted slowly back to his own, physically wrung out and satiated but not really there mentally. He should have been there. He should have been basking in the afterglow and the feeling of a job well done, but instead he felt untethered, like he’d been reaching for something and just when he thought he’d grabbed it, it turned out to be further away than ever.
He reached his floor and his quarters, and absently let himself in. There was a message light blinking next to the door, indicating that someone had stopped by and found him gone. He ignored it and headed back into his bedroom for a long shower. He washed himself from head to foot with rich, expensive body wash and rubbed honey-scented cleanser into his hair. Luxuries…they made life worth living. Didn’t they?
He dried off, shrugged on a azure silk robe, ambled back into his kitchen and ordered a cup of coffee worthy of Wyl. It was dark enough to make him wince, and so he immediately adulterated it with milk and sugar until it was palatable. He drank it and ate a small breakfast, checked to make sure no one had tried to call him while he’d been out—and no one had—then pressed the button to receive the message that someone, probably a crew member of some sort, had left outside his door.
“Hey, Garrett.” It was Jonah, and he sounded a little sheepish. All the energy that had abandoned Garrett this morning shot like lightning back into his limbs. “Cody and I came by this mornin’ to ask if you wanted to have breakfast, but you weren’t in.” There was absolutely no inflection in his voice as he said this part. “We’re going to a movie in the big theater later on today though, and Cody wants you to know you’re invited to join us.” Garrett heard a high voice say something kind of muffled, then Jonah picked up again. “It’s Space Rangers versus the Meteor of Death, which apparently is not to be missed. The show starts at eleven. It’d be nice to see you there. I’m sorry I left things kind of…well…look, I’m just sorry. I didn’t mean to be an ass.” There was more muffled speech, and Garrett heard Jonah say, “No, you can’t say that word, it’s a grown up word. Look,” his voice was louder again, “we’ve gotta go. Hope to see you later.” The message ended.
Garrett sat completely still at the counter, letting the offer seep in. Jonah Helms, his one night stand, the father of a bouncing little natural and a man who seemed antipathetic towards relationships in general and relationships with someone like Garrett in particular, was inviting him to a movie. With his son. All together. Undoubtedly there would be zero chance for sex, but Garrett considered the offer as the olive branch that Jonah was probably intending it to be and gave in. He’d wanted something to do with his day, and now he had something. Space Rangers. Oh boy.
It was already ten-thirty, and he still had to get dressed and style his hair and get to the entertainment complex…Garrett grinned and jumped off the stool. If he hurried, he could make it.
Part Fifteen: The Man Behind The Curtain
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. This particular chapter is long and rated NC-17 for explicit naughtiness. No joke, no April Fool’s, just pure Pandora. Enjoy!
***
Garrett stared into the climate modeler and watched his latest simulation come to life. The S-series machines had a slower computing power than the later models, which meant that his simulations took longer to create and to load, but it had the best visuals package of any of them. Watching the weather unfold in the heart of the machine was like being on the planet itself. Garrett adjusted the imaging equipment on his head, then used the control pad to move his point of view further into the oncoming storm.
This particular simulation was investigating the probability of wintertime tsunamis and how they might affect Pandora’s single, solitary outpost. The Neptune would arrive on the planet’s main continent during its summer season, and would have about eight standard months of building time before the worst of the weather hit and working outside would become untenable. Not that summer was a hell of a lot warmer than winter, but the storms were milder, and there was even a brief growing season that they’d have to take ruthless advantage of if they were going to become self-sustaining in five years, which was the Pandora Project’s current goal. Originally it had been three years, but Doctor Sims’ biologists and botanists had stated in firm unison that such a thing was impossible, and eventually they’d managed to convince their supervisor of that as well. Which didn’t mean that there hadn’t been plenty of fights over it, but nothing was ever easy with Martina Sims.
Garrett moved his view to the walls of the outpost and gazed out over the dark, storming ocean. On a planet beset on a yearly basis with hurricanes, tidal waves and floods, the founding colonists of Pandora had chosen to put their only settlement right next to the damn sea. Yeah, growing seasons and subtropical jet streams and blah blah blah, but from an efficiency perspective it was ridiculous. For six months of solid and impassable winter, the settlement—called Pandora City but commonly referred to as the Box—was completely shut in. No building was done except for repairs, no one went outside except in dire circumstances. Over the few centuries of low-level colonization, almost all the deaths that weren’t attributed to old age, illness or murder happened when someone found a reason to go out into the fury that was winter outside the Box.
And here it came, like clockwork, the first great tidal wave of the winter season, not always the worst but terribly shocking for all that. Garrett watched from his virtual vantage point on top of the wall, watched the water melt away from the coastline as ever-shifting tectonic plates battled for supremacy miles below the surface of the water. He sped the simulation up, and saw water slide with terrible speed, away over rocky beach and out, out into the horizon, then come crashing back with a growing force, higher and taller than anything nature-made that he’d ever seen before. The front edge of the water boiled with energy, and it crossed the ground between the coast and the Box in moments, a dark purple wave with its edges foaming a sickly, rabid white. Garrett could almost feel the foundations of the sturdy settlement shudder beneath his feet as the wave rose up and then crashed over them, flooding his vision with blackness and covering the Box with water. The Box could take it, obviously, it had for many years and with the environmental shields up the water just sheeted over them, but it was nevertheless shocking to be plunged into such a deep darkness, and surrounded by so much total, sepulchral silence.
“-arrett. Garrett!” A hard hand smacked him sharply on the shoulder. “Are you listening to me?”
It took a moment, but Garrett finally pulled himself out of the simulation and removed the imaging helmet from his head. He felt strange, shaky and a little ill. His supervisor, naturally, ignored that. Martina’s pretty face glared at him, her mouth twisted in a frown. “I’ve been calling your name for the last two minutes.”
“I was working,” he said slowly, putting himself back together after it felt like everything had been washed away.
“No, what you should have been doing was working. What you were doing was watching your cute little climate simulations and wasting my time. And why didn’t you tell me that you have a first aid class scheduled today?” She pointed at the hardcopy of his work schedule that she had fisted in one hand. “You’re supposed to participate in all expedition-required educational classes on your days off.”
Garrett shrugged insouciantly, getting into the flow of fighting with Martina. “I scheduled it for an off day, but then the class was cancelled. I didn’t choose when it was rescheduled, and—oh, look here.” He checked the schedule she was brandishing in his face. “It says here that it’s the last standard first aid class being offered before we make Pandora. Looks like my attendance is non-negotiable.”
“You shouldn’t have waited until the last minute,” she fumed. “There’s too much work to be done for you to go swanning off and leaving a dozen projects just sitting—”
“It’s one afternoon,” Garrett pointed out. “One tiny little afternoon. A blip on the radar of life.”
Martina put her hands on her hips. “Every moment counts.”
“Look—”
“No!” she said stridently, her voice rising with agitation. “Every moment counts, Garrett! And when those moments are supposed to be spent working for the greater scientific advancement of the expedition, I expect them to take place here, in the lab. Your professional time is mine and I don’t like to share it. Plan better in the future.” She turned and stalked off down the lab, leaving a wake of startled glances passing between her and Garrett. They didn’t often have confrontations, mostly because Garrett gave as good as he got, so watching anything happen between them that went beyond monosyllables was a surprise.
Garrett shrugged it off. He’d almost forgotten the first aid class. Again. Now he definitely had no choice, though. He turned off the climate modeler and set the imaging helmet back on its stand, then stood up and stretched, rubbing lightly at his lower back.
“Oh please,” Shekar said from where he sat a few tables away, “Don’t even pretend that your highly ergonomic lounge chair makes your back hurt.”
“You know, jealousy is an unattractive emotion,” he advised his friend.
“It’s not jealousy!”
“Envy, then,” Garrett grinned. “Avarice. Greed. Covetousness.”
“Covet what?” Shekar shook his head. “That isn’t even a word.”
“It is, my friend, and it applies to you.” Garrett patted him on the shoulder. “But don’t worry, I forgive you.”
“Thanks,” Shekar said dryly.
“My pleasure.”
“Speaking of off hours, it’s my turn to cook tonight,” Shekar said, looking between Garrett and Lila. “Are we doing dinner?” They’d taken to cooking for each other one night a week, and of the three of them Shekar was by far the best cook.
“I should be done learning to amputate limbs with my teeth by then,” Garrett agreed. “Lila?”
“Oh, I can’t,” she said apologetically, her cheeks flushing slightly. “I, um, I have a date.”
“A date?” Shekar asked, his face falling. “Really?”
“Yes, and it’s the only night he could get off this week, otherwise I wouldn’t have scheduled it during our dinner,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
“Like an actual date with a person?” Shekar persisted. “In person?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“He’s a teacher.”
“What, like a children’s teacher?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re a scientist,” Shekar said, looking totally confused. “What do a geologist and a children’s teacher have to talk about?”
Lila rolled her eyes. “What do a geologist and a mathematician have to talk about?”
“Lots of things! Soil mechanics, geotechnical engineering, the calculations for the core sampling equipment…we have plenty to talk about, we work together!”
“Exactly,” Lila said shortly. “And I’m tired of talking about work.” She turned her eyes resolutely back to her own equipment.
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“You already said that.”
“Yeah, well, I meant it,” Shekar snapped. “And actually, this is all for the best, because there are plenty of things I need to catch up on and I think tonight’s the night. Garrett,” he turned back to their bemused audience, “sorry to disappoint you, but my cooking will not be on the menu this evening. I have things to do.”
“What kind of things?” he asked mildly.
“Just…things. Important things. I have to go talk to Doctor Sims.” Shekar stood and took off down the lab, his tatty white coat fluttering behind him. Lila looked after him and sighed.
“That went well. Not.”
“He’ll get over it,” Garrett said quietly.
“He’ll have to.” She looked down again and Garrett put a hand on her shoulder, then left the lab and made his way to the infirmary.
“Doctor Caractacus!” The perky nurse at the front desk grinned when she saw him. “Great to see you! The class is almost ready to start, they were just waiting on you, so go right on in.”
“Thank you.” He walked into the room she indicated and found himself the subject of numerous stares from no one he recognized. The medical technician at the front of the class, a burly older man, frowned and pointed at a seat. Garrett sat.
“Let’s get started.” He stood behind a table covered with numerous bulky medical devices. “First off, before we get going with the hands on stuff, I want to explain a few things to you. I assume everyone here knows that you can’t put a natural in a Regen tank, give them injections of Regen or use any equipment on them that relies on Regen.” He waited for his students to nod en masse.
“That being said, though, there are a lot of devices that you can safely use on a natural, and I’m going to show you how to work them. There’s a medical locker in every wing of every floor of this ship, and each of these lockers is stocked with everything you’re going to see today. Some of these will be unfamiliar to you, so pay attention while I go over how to use them. This,” he held up a boxy thing with electrical pads attached to it, “is a defibrillator. It jumpstarts a person’s heart by charging it with an electrical current. You turn the machine on, stick these pads on the guy’s bare chest, and when it zaps you let it do its thing. If it tells you you screwed up, you rearrange the pads and try again. Red light means don’t touch, because there’s current running through it. Green light means you can touch.” He dropped it back onto the table, then moved on to the next device. “This…”
The session stretched into five long, droning hours of boredom. As far as Garrett could tell it mostly boiled down to, “Apply pressure and call for help” if it was bleeding and “do CPR and call for help” if someone wasn’t breathing or had no heartbeat. The devices were good if they were there but mostly, caring for a natural was too complicated for a layman. They all had to memorize the number for emergency services on the ship, practice setting limbs and caring for burns and doing chest compressions, and a lot of other things that Garrett remembered having to learn as a child but never using. By the end of the five hours he was tapping his foot on the floor and struggling not to drum his fingers. Fuck it, he needed out of here. He needed to be doing something. Or someone.
Less than two weeks away from Pandora and he hadn’t been laid since the night before they left Olympus. It was pitiful. So what if Jonah had been amazing? Garrett had slept with plenty of amazing people. Jonah wasn’t his first drifter, either; he’d carried on a very satisfying affair for several months with the head of a drifter clan while he traveled with his father, helping him juggle being a senator and an active Federation general. That had been right after he and Robbie had called it quits…three years of the good, the bad and the ugly, and Garrett treasured every minute he’d had of the longest relationship in his life to date, even if sometimes Robbie had frustrated him to the point of losing his temper. He hadn’t spoken to Robbie, or Wyl, for almost a week now…too long.
The class was abruptly ended, and Garrett leapt for the escape route, more than ready to kiss the infirmary goodbye. He didn’t need to get his brain chemistry checked today, he was done with the damn class, he didn’t need a shot of Regen…
“But I don’t like shots,” a small, familiar voice whimpered pitifully from behind a curtain.
“Gotta have it anyway, bucko,” another voice, equally familiar but completely not who it sounded like under any circumstances, replied.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
“It will only take a second,” the female doctor’s voice said soothingly. “Then you’ll be all done.”
“But it hurts.”
“It didn’t hurt your friend last time, did it?”
“No…”
“His friend?” the man’s voice—not that man’s voice, oh no—asked under his breath.
“Doctor Caractacus. He and Cody met the last time Cody was in to get a shot, and they ended up getting theirs together.”
“Daddy…”
“C’mere, bucko.” Garrett heard a creak and shift as the weight on the infirmary cot changed. “Just relax, okay? I’ve got you. You’re gonna be fine.”
“You’ll just feel a little pinch,” the doctor promised. There was a small whine a moment later, then the noise of a band-aid being unwrapped and the softer, muffled smack of a kiss. Garrett intimately knew all of the sounds two bodies made when they connected, and this was a reassuring, gentle kiss, probably the father’s lips to his son’s head. A moment later the doctor pulled back the curtain, and Garrett saw what he had been sure he wouldn’t see.
His one night stand, Jonah, sitting on a cot with Cody in his lap, both of them admiring the Space Ranger band-aid that decorated his son’s arm. The doctor saw Garrett first.
“Doctor Caractacus! Cody, look, it’s your friend from before.”
The two men’s eyes met, and Garrett would have been hard pressed to say which of them was more shocked. Jonah looked a little less put together than the last time Garrett had seen him, but anyone would be disheveled with a squirmy five year old on their lap. His sandy brown hair was tied into a ponytail, but several hanks had been pulled free, and there were stress lines clearly visible around his eyes and mouth. He was a little paler than Garrett remembered, and clean shaven now instead of alluringly scruffy, but Garrett’s stomach still clenched with sudden want at the sight of him.
“Garrett!” Cody wiggled until his father put him down, and he crossed the few meters between them with a bouncy step, the pain of his shot forgotten. “Daddy came with me this time and it didn’t hurt all that much, and look, I got another Space Ranger band-aid! This one is the purple Space Ranger though and he isn’t my favorite, and last time I got the green one and I like him better. Remember?”
“This is your friend?” Jonah asked in a slightly-strangled tone.
“Yeah Daddy, he sat with me and then we got shots. Are you getting one today?”
“Um, no,” Garrett said, finally pulling his mind out of the memory gutter. The last thing he needed was to get an involuntary erection in front of a child. “Today I had to come in for a class.”
“Like a school class?”
“Exactly like that, except more boring,” he confessed.
“That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Garrett drawled, looking straight at Jonah with slightly hard eyes. “If I hadn’t come in for my class, then I wouldn’t have gotten to meet your Daddy. Something tells me he can be a hard man to find.” Not that Garrett had tried to find him, he’d made himself resist, but the man had blown off their morning after, and the almost inevitable prospect of more intensely hot sex, with no explanation, and now he was here? It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
To his satisfaction, Jonah winced. “Doc, how about you check on Cody’s ears while we’re in?” he suggested. “Maybe find him a red or green Space Ranger band-aid.”
“Sure,” the doctor said, a little mystified. She took Cody by the hand and led him over towards another partition. Garrett crossed his arms and stared at Jonah, and Jonah stared right back.
“You cut your hair,” Jonah said at last.
The non-sequiter threw Garrett. “Yes. When the environmental controls were offline.”
“I saw you then.”
“Where?”
“Skin room on the top floor. I didn’t know it was you,” he added when he saw Garrett’s eyes narrow. “Cody and I could just see your back. You seemed kinda into whatever you were doing, so we found another place to look at the stars.”
“I can’t believe you’re Cody’s dad. He told me all about how wonderful and perfect and protective you are.”
Jonah winced again. “He mentioned your name, but I didn’t think it was actually you. You had a private ship; I took you for a private contractor. Never reckoned you’d be joining the expedition to Pandora.”
“I am a private contractor,” Garrett said, “in the science lab. For the next three years, at any rate. Keeping the ship was part of my contract. I haven’t really joined the expedition.”
“Huh.” A little of the warmth seemed to leave Jonah’s face. “Well, that figures. You sure as hell aren’t a natural.”
“Neither are you. What’s a drifter doing heading into the Fringe with a group of colonists? Why aren’t you off on your own ship somewhere?”
Jonah’s lips thinned. “My boy’s a natural. Couldn’t keep him healthy on board a ship, not with all the places we stopped. He needs a real home, some place he can have a real life. I heard about Olympus’ call for colonists and signed on as a pilot.”
“Oh.” That made sense. Still… “It must have hurt to leave your family behind.” Drifter clans stayed tight for generations, the entire extended family living on a ship that added on more space as more children were born.
“Nothing’s more important than Cody.”
Why did that sound so…final? Garrett decided to let go of his irritation and lighten the mood. “I still owe you a cup of coffee, you know.”
“You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
Garrett frowned. “Why so vehement?”
“Because I know where you’re headed, and the answer’s no.”
Well, fuck. Way to cut through the small talk. “No, you won’t have coffee with me, or no we won’t be sleeping together again?”
“Both,” Jonah said firmly. “Don’t get me wrong, that night was damn fine and you’re more than just easy on the eyes, but I’m not gonna be bringin’ someone home for a casual thing, and I won’t be passing my son’s care off to other people just so I can go and get some action on the side. It’s just me and Cody now and he’s my priority.”
“Cody likes me,” Garrett pointed out.
“’Course he does, you were sweet to him and you’re a nice guy,” Jonah said with an easy shrug. “Thanks for helping him out when I couldn’t be here.”
“My pleasure,” Garrett muttered. “I still don’t understand why you don’t want to see me again, though. What we did was really, really…” fucking amazing incredible wonderful perfect, “nice.”
“I know. But that’s not the point.” Jonah shook his head. “I’m not looking for a relationship right now, ‘specially not with someone who isn’t going to settle on Pandora. I shouldn’t even have had that one night, really, but it had been a long time for me and you, well, you’re pretty irresistible.” He smiled a familiar half smile, and Garrett’s stomach clenched again.
“Why not get together for something we could all do?” Garrett shocked himself by asking. Holy shit, was he really this desperate? “Dinner in one of the restaurants, or we could go to the gravity gymnasium.”
Jonah’s jaw seemed to tighten. “Damn it Garrett, I don’t want Cody liking you any more than he already does.”
“You’re bound to see me around. This ship is big, but it’s not that big.”
“Managed to miss you until now,” Jonah countered. “And no, no dates. No coffee, no dinner, no—”
“Are you coming over for dinner?” Cody asked, appearing as if by magic at Garrett’s side. The boy grabbed onto one of Garrett’s long-fingered hands with both of his own. “We’re having macaroni and cheese. It’s my favorite. Do you like it?”
“I do like it, but your daddy doesn’t want me to come to dinner,” Garrett said a little spitefully. He saw Cody’s face crumple with confusion and Jonah’s eyes go pleading and sighed. “Besides, I have other plans for tonight. Maybe another time.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t pester the man, Cody,” Jonah said, getting up off the cot. His long body unfolded to its full length, and just looking at it vividly reminded Garrett of how it had felt to have all of that pressed against him, weighing him down, pushing inside of him…
“I have to go,” Garrett said suddenly. “It was nice to see you again, Cody. And you, Jonah…?” He knew but he wanted to hear it from Jonah's lips.
“Helms,” he said softly. “Jonah and Cody Helms. Nice to see you too, Doctor Caractacus.”
“You got it on the first try,” Garrett said, a little bemused. He shook his head slightly to clear it, then gently detached himself from Cody. “Have a nice evening.” He then turned on his heel and left the infirmary, his mind whirling with so many emotions that he had no idea how to sort through them all. Mechanically, his feet took him back towards his quarters, where he would be alone, with no friends to eat dinner with and no lover to have sex with and no child to be chatty with. When his com rang in the elevator it was almost a palpable relief. “This is Garrett.”
“Good evening, Garrett.” Jezria’s smooth voice penetrated the fog of his emotions. “Would you mind joining me in my quarters? An issue has been raised concerning your work and I’d like to discuss it with you.”
“Concerning my work?” Anger, one of the many swirling things he’d been feeling, suddenly took the fore. “Who’s been talking to you about my work?”
“I’d rather discuss it in person,” Jezria said. “May I expect you soon?”
“I’ll be there immediately,” Garrett snapped, then disconnected and rerouted the elevator. It took him five minutes to get to Jezria’s spacious quarters, and in that amount of time he’d managed to work himself into a satisfyingly indignant lather. Jezria buzzed him in and he got right to the point, despite the fact that several of her aides were with her.
“Who’s complaining about my work?”
“Please sit down, Garrett.”
“I feel like standing,” he gritted. “Who. Is. It.”
“Doctor Sims expressed some concern today over your work ethic. She feels you undermine her authority and don’t fully dedicate yourself to the time you have in the lab.”
“Doctor Sims is an idiot.”
“I have to take this complaint seriously, Garrett, and so should you,” Jezria reproved him. “She said you spent over an hour watching simulations this morning, and then you took the afternoon off to do a first aid class.”
“The class was rescheduled and beyond my control, and as for the simulations, well, I need to see them in order to be able to evaluate my work.” Garrett began pacing, trying to describe something he found very difficult to articulate. “Martina is a structural engineer, she works with numbers and equations and concrete designs. Climatology is chaotic, it’s fluid, it’s changeable. The environment won’t conform to an equation no matter how many hundreds or thousands of data points we have to go off of, and to be honest the data collection that’s been done so far on Pandora has been pretty shoddy with regards to weather patterns. I can’t get a good idea of the magnitude of the potential errors in our assumptions unless I can get a feel for what’s happening, and for that I need to design and review simulations. I’m a scientist, but I’m not a mathematician or an engineer. I need visual cues to facilitate my understanding.
“I’ve done everything Martina has asked of me in good time, when it makes sense for me to pursue it. Do I have a handle on the weather patterns on Pandora for the next hundred years? No. Am I getting there? Yes. But I can’t work miracles, and frankly no one working for Doctor Martina Sims will ever be able to work miracles the way she second guesses and double checks every bit of work we produce.” Running abruptly out of steam, Garrett flopped down on the couch across from Jezria, who looked at him concernedly.
“Are you all right?”
The temptation to shout, “Do I fucking look all right?” was almost overwhelming, but he managed to restrain himself. “No,” he said simply. “But I can handle it.”
“Very well. I’ll add my opinion of the formal complaint to the file before it goes into admin, and so you know, my opinion is that her objections are unfounded and that no further notice should be made of it. But you’ll have to deal with Doctor Sims on a daily basis, so please try not to overly antagonize her.”
“If you had any concept of the amount of control I use on a daily basis with her grand high misanthropic majesty, you wouldn’t be cautioning me, you’d be praising my godlike restraint,” Garrett sighed.
“I’m sure I would, dear. How is your father?”
“Busy,” Garrett replied. “I haven’t spoken to him for a while. I did talk with Claudia the other day, though. Things are kind of riled up in the capitol. He might have to institute a curfew.”
“That won’t be popular.”
“Well, I know I hated it as a teenager.”
Jezria smiled and smoothly shifted gears. “Thank you for addressing this matter so promptly, Garrett. I think you’re doing very good work.”
“From your lips to God’s ear.” Or whatever the saying was. “Mind if I go now? I have a hot date with my hand that’s not to be missed.”
“Crass,” Jezria chided him.
“Honest,” Garrett said, standing up and straightening his suit.
“Go, then. And Steven,” she turned to one of her aides, “I’m done with the food security information for now as well. Thank you for collecting it all for me. Go and have a nice evening.”
“Thank you,” Seven said, also standing. He looked at Garrett and smiled slightly, then motioned towards the door. Garrett took the hint and led the way out. Once they were both in the hall Steven’s smile got wider and more sympathetic. “Bad day, huh?”
“You could say that,” Garrett replied, rolling his neck in a circle before focusing on the aide. Steven Miyakawa, the first person to welcome him aboard the Neptune and, by all accounts, a very rewarding lay. Garrett remembered flirting with him, that first day, making the other man blush, and he thought, Fuck it. Jonah got his engine revving and then didn’t want him? He’d play with somebody else. “Want to go out for a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” Steven said with a faint smile. “I’m an ascetic.”
“Really?” Garrett was instantly intrigued. “Are you a sexual ascetic as well?”
“Kind of. I have sex, I just don’t allow myself to orgasm,” the other man explained. He took in Garrett’s expression and laughed. “I know, it sounds like a punishment, but self denial really works for me, and I love bringing other people to orgasm.”
“What do you get out of self denial?”
“A sense of personal power and control,” Steven said. “Asceticism as my clan follows it is about not being ruled by your desires. Sex can be pleasurable for reasons other than coming.”
“So you never have orgasms?”
“Well…almost never.” He shrugged slightly. “Sometimes it happens, but not often.”
“I bet you’d have one with me.”
Steven arched one eyebrow. “Really? You’re that confident in yourself?”
“Yes.”
Steven stared at Garrett for a long moment, then asked, “Do you want to test the theory?”
“Absolutely.” Just get me out of my head for a while. “Your place?”
“That’s fine with me.”
Steven’s place ended up being just one level down from Jezria’s. It was far smaller than hers and very sparsely decorated, but there was a shower and a bed and at the moment that was enough for Garrett. He was tired of being alone. He was tired of not being touched; he missed the comforting everyday physical contact that being with his family and friends had provided him, not to mention the feel of a warm, willing body against his own. He had never had sex with an ascetic before, but given the amount of time it had been since he’d been laid, Garrett had no doubt that he’d be able to bring Steven off eventually. That was what he wanted, exhaustive, mind-numbing sex without emotional entanglements.
They took a shower together, and Garrett took his time bathing Steven, rubbing his slender body down with a plain white washcloth and not letting the other man distract him with caresses. Garrett was a man on a mission. Steven was almost too skinny, but it looked good on him, and he seemed to enjoy being explored. He had an erection the whole time, but no matter how Garrett stroked and fondled him, he didn’t tense up or begin to leak. The gauntlet was thrown down.
Garrett had never minded exerting himself for his partner’s sake and he loved a challenge, so once they were out of the shower he pressed Steven back until he leaned against the bedroom wall, then sank to his knees in front of him. “I want to blow you,” he murmured.
“Whatever you want,” Steven replied, threading thin fingers into Garrett’s hair. Garrett leaned forward and took the warm, hard velvet into his mouth, moaning at the sensations that flooded through him. God, he missed this. He missed doing this for someone, missed being the reason for their pleasure. Admittedly, now he was doing it to a man who made a lifestyle out of denying himself pleasure, but it was as much for Garrett’s sake as it was for Steven’s. He licked every inch of his cock, then suckled insistently on the head while his hands manipulated Steven’s sack. Then he drew back and plunged down and stroked around the base for a while, and pulled off and did it all over again. Garrett went down on Steven until his jaw was aching and his lover finally, finally, was flowing with precome.
“Will you come if I fuck you?” he asked, removing his mouth from Steven’s cock with a slick pop.
“No,” Steven panted.
“Will you come if you fuck me?”
“Maybe…eventually.”
“Oh, you tease,” Garrett grinned. He stood up off the floor just long enough to tug Steven back onto the bed with him, more of a pallet really, then arranged them to his liking. Garrett laid Steven out flat on his back, stroking his dick firmly with one hand while he prepped himself with his fingers and oil with the other. Steven avidly watched every move he made and so Garrett made it a show, whimpering and groaning as he opened himself up in preparation to take Steven’s cock. He wasn’t really feeling it, but under the circumstances pretending was half the fun. He didn’t want genuine emotions right now, he wanted to fuck with no strings attached. No more falling in lust with one night stands. The old ways were the best ways.
Garrett sinuously straddled his lover’s slender hips, holding his cock in place and pressing against it, just enough to barely breech himself, before pulling off again. He allowed Steven to penetrate him by millimeters, just a little deeper every time, and he tensed and relaxed in a regular rhythm as he took Steen deeper inside. By the time he was finally down all the way his thighs were burning with exertion and his cock was aching with need.
“Can you keep going if you come now?” Steven whispered, splaying his long fingers over the tops of Garrett’s thighs.
“Yes…”
“Then come.” He wrapped those long fingers over Garrett’s cock and stroked firmly, and it was all he needed to fall over the edge. His orgasm swelled and burst and he came with a drawn-out groan of pleasure. It felt good, very good. It was the pure physical release he was looking for, not less than he had hoped, not disappointing in any way. It wasn’t Jonah, but apparently he didn’t get to fucking have fucking Jonah, so…
Garrett caught his breath, and then he began to move again on Steven, longer strokes this time, rising and falling and fucking himself slow and steady, then fast and hard. He came again before he finally drew an orgasm out of his lover, and it lasted so long and was so satisfying to watch that Garrett didn’t even feel his own discomfort any more. After a few quiet minutes, they cleaned up, then went to sleep. They didn’t touch each other during the night, and waking in the morning wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn’t emotional either.
“Tea?” Steven offered, pulling a few cups from a cabinet.
“There’s no coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee, but I could order you some from the kitchen.”
“Tea is fine,” Garrett said. They drank a cup of pale green tea together, more grassy than caffeine-imbued, and then Garrett leaned in and kissed Steven’s cheek. It was the first kiss that had passed between them all night. “Thank you. That was fun.”
“It was. I really didn’t think you’d be able to make me come.”
“Are you kidding? Darling, all you demanded was patience and stamina. We didn’t even get into pain play, or domination and submission, or nerve fetishes—”
“No, we didn’t,” Steven said, his cheeks faintly pink. “And we won’t be.”
“I know.” They both knew that they wouldn’t be doing this again. It had been a good night, but there hadn’t been any real connection between them. “Give Jezria hell today.”
“She has you for that.” Steven walked Garrett over to the door, clasped his arm, and said, “Enjoy your day off.”
“How do you know my schedule better than I do?” Garrett huffed. “Yeah, I will.” I’ll have lots of fun sitting in my apartment alone doing, huh, let me think, nothing! Sounds great. Garrett left Steven’s apartment and drifted slowly back to his own, physically wrung out and satiated but not really there mentally. He should have been there. He should have been basking in the afterglow and the feeling of a job well done, but instead he felt untethered, like he’d been reaching for something and just when he thought he’d grabbed it, it turned out to be further away than ever.
He reached his floor and his quarters, and absently let himself in. There was a message light blinking next to the door, indicating that someone had stopped by and found him gone. He ignored it and headed back into his bedroom for a long shower. He washed himself from head to foot with rich, expensive body wash and rubbed honey-scented cleanser into his hair. Luxuries…they made life worth living. Didn’t they?
He dried off, shrugged on a azure silk robe, ambled back into his kitchen and ordered a cup of coffee worthy of Wyl. It was dark enough to make him wince, and so he immediately adulterated it with milk and sugar until it was palatable. He drank it and ate a small breakfast, checked to make sure no one had tried to call him while he’d been out—and no one had—then pressed the button to receive the message that someone, probably a crew member of some sort, had left outside his door.
“Hey, Garrett.” It was Jonah, and he sounded a little sheepish. All the energy that had abandoned Garrett this morning shot like lightning back into his limbs. “Cody and I came by this mornin’ to ask if you wanted to have breakfast, but you weren’t in.” There was absolutely no inflection in his voice as he said this part. “We’re going to a movie in the big theater later on today though, and Cody wants you to know you’re invited to join us.” Garrett heard a high voice say something kind of muffled, then Jonah picked up again. “It’s Space Rangers versus the Meteor of Death, which apparently is not to be missed. The show starts at eleven. It’d be nice to see you there. I’m sorry I left things kind of…well…look, I’m just sorry. I didn’t mean to be an ass.” There was more muffled speech, and Garrett heard Jonah say, “No, you can’t say that word, it’s a grown up word. Look,” his voice was louder again, “we’ve gotta go. Hope to see you later.” The message ended.
Garrett sat completely still at the counter, letting the offer seep in. Jonah Helms, his one night stand, the father of a bouncing little natural and a man who seemed antipathetic towards relationships in general and relationships with someone like Garrett in particular, was inviting him to a movie. With his son. All together. Undoubtedly there would be zero chance for sex, but Garrett considered the offer as the olive branch that Jonah was probably intending it to be and gave in. He’d wanted something to do with his day, and now he had something. Space Rangers. Oh boy.
It was already ten-thirty, and he still had to get dressed and style his hair and get to the entertainment complex…Garrett grinned and jumped off the stool. If he hurried, he could make it.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
The Dark Side
Hot season must be getting to me. I yelled at a small Togolese child to EMBRACE THE HATRED today after she and her band of misfits sang the yovo song one too many times. Of course I yelled in English, so she thought I was just singing back at her and laughed, but still. *smacks head with hand* Bad Cari!
More Pandora tomorrow, and it's a long one. No foolin'.
More Pandora tomorrow, and it's a long one. No foolin'.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Pandora Post #14
Title: Pandora
Part Fourteen: Skin
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. Those who know where I live know what inspired this chapter. Oh yes, you certainly do.
***
“Journal Record Four, beginning.”
“Ship technicians who don’t have the educational background to be engineers aren’t under the oversight of the science lab. This is a lucky thing for them, because if they were, Martina would have fired most if not all of them by now. One paragon of intellect decided that the environmental controls for the ship needed to be tweaked, and fourteen hours later we’re drenched with sweat and using power up at a disgusting rate. The self-proclaimed mastermind couldn’t fix it, none of his buddies could fix it, then the ship’s engineering department had a look and determined that the programming that controls the air and water temperature has been pretty much demolished, and it’s going to take another eight or nine hours to get something jury-rigged enough to be functional.
“What this means for me is that right now, it’s hot enough to melt in my apartment and the halls aren’t much better, but I’d boil alive if I tried to take a shower. The only bright spot so far has been that my first aid class was cancelled, although I’ll probably regret that when some natural collapses in the hall outside my door due to heat exhaustion or something. Also…I’m starting to reconsider my vanity at this point. This hair has got to go.”
***
Garrett wasn’t sure why he kept his hair long. He didn’t actually do very much with it, just tied it out of the way while he was working and let it hang loose the rest of the time. Women seemed to like it more than men, although his lovers had been known to use it as a handle at times, and since Garrett had no genuine desire to attract women and didn’t care to style it for himself, he never thought about it much one way or the other. Until now.
Right now he was lying in a pool of sweat, his limbs akimbo on the polyblend sheets. Cotton. First thing he was having shipped for himself: cotton sheets. Polyblend didn’t stain but it didn’t absorb either, so he was left damp and miserable. The fan just blew hot air. The water…the less said about that, the better. And then there was the mass of pale blond hair spread across his pillows was achingly hot, and heavy when he tried to tie it up.
Well, why don’t you whine about it a little more? That’s sure to help. Garrett mentally slapped his subconscious, then reached over and grabbed his communicator. He asked for Lila.
“Hmm?” her voice responded tiredly a few moments later.
“You cut your own hair, right?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“Because I’m dying, and the gods demand a sacrifice to save my life. It’s either my sanity or my hair, and I’d rather keep my sanity. Want to come play high priestess?”
There was a long pause. “It took me a moment to work through that one. You’re seriously strange, Garrett. Are you sure you want me to cut off your hair? It’s so pretty…”
“Utterly sure. It’s just hair, it grows back.”
“But it’s so pretty.”
“Damn it, Lila, you can have it if you like it so much. Just come over here and cut me into something that doesn’t look stupid.”
“Aw honey, you don’t look stupid,” she said soothingly. Garrett caught up after a second and groaned.
“Me walking right into it is no excuse to make terrible jokes. Will you help me or not?”
“Sure. I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks.” Garrett turned off the communicator and flopped back onto the bed, then remembered that he was stark naked. Clothing would be uncomfortable, but being ogled by a coworker he wasn’t interested in fucking would be worse. He slipped on a pair of loose shorts, thankfully synthetic cotton, and forced himself to drink another glass of water. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above his dresser and tugged mournfully on a lock of sodden blond hair. “It’s not you, it’s me,” he told his hair seriously, then went and sat down in the living room. A few minutes later the door chime sounded. “It’s open,” he called.
Lila walked in, carrying a small bag of supplies. She wore a loose, formless dress that looked comfortable rather than flattering, and her bright red hair was pulled up in a knot. “Goddamn, it’s hot,” she said as soon as the door closed behind her.
“Is it?” he asked languorously, “Really? I’d barely noticed.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t start with me, Mister ‘I’m Always Hot’. I know you were thinking it,” she added as she sat down beside him on the couch. “And do you own any clothes that don’t make you look like a meal? Jeez, have a care for the rest of us.”
“Why, do you want to taste me? Are you sure you wouldn’t just prefer a beer?”
“Senator Dowd probably wants to taste you, and no, I wouldn’t prefer a beer. Your beer is undoubtedly warm and undrinkable, like everything else since those morons went above and beyond,” Lila replied sarcastically. “And while I do like to look, I don’t want to taste you, because I prefer men who wouldn’t think sleeping with me was a chore.”
“Like Shekar.”
Lila pulled out an automatic clipper. “I’m not sleeping with Shekar.”
“Not for his lack of trying.”
“I won’t be sleeping with anyone I work with, Garrett; it would be too confusing. I’m going to Pandora to start over, and I don’t want to screw up my job.”
Garrett watched her take out a very shiny, very sharp pair of scissors. “You’re not a natural though.”
“Not really. One in five shots of Regen gives me an adverse reaction, but I’m on additional meds that compensate for it. If I choose to reproduce, however, thanks to some squirrely genetics from my folks, I’m almost guaranteed a natural child.” She shrugged slightly and pulled out a comb. “I want any children I have to grown up feeling comfortable, not caged.” She looked at him assessingly and changed the subject. “How short do you want to go?”
“Short enough that my hair doesn’t hang down and touch my skin.”
“That’s very short.”
“If you make me look like a marine, I’ll kill you,” he warned her. He could just picture the look of Robbie and Wyl’s faces when he spoke to them next if he had a butch haircut. Robbie would be incredulous and Wyl would choke himself laughing and…no. Just no.
“Fine, no marines, but no complaints about what you do get either,” Lila said, snapping the shears menacingly. “Now scoot over here, shut up and let me work.” He obeyed, and a moment later she made the first cut, the thick sheaf of hair separating with a smooth schick.
Immediately his head felt lighter, as if he’d had lead weights dangling from it instead of fine white-gold hairs. The next two thick snips got rid of the rest of it up to the nape of his neck, and then Lila paused.
“We need to cover you with something, so the hairs don’t get everywhere. Ordinarily I’d just say take a shower afterwards, but in this case…”
“Right.” Garrett got up and walked back into his bedroom, finally deciding on his pillowcase as a protective cloth. He had to wash the damn thing anyway. He came back in and saw Lila staring at the picture he had wrapping his room, as though she’d never seen this one before. Then again, maybe she hadn’t; he’d only had it up for five days. “It’s Taua’i.”
“Wow, in the hub of the central system.”
“I lived there for a lot of my life,” Garrett reminded her as he sat down again.
“I know, but you never really talk about it.”
“There isn’t much to say.”
She picked up the tension and changed the subject. “It looks gorgeous there.”
“Great beaches,” Garrett said. “Cool breezes, lots of protected zones. Almost as watery as Griffyn, but way better developed. It’s a resort world.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“A lot of it is.” A lot of it wasn’t, too. Taua’i was populated with the spoiled rich of the central system and the people who worked to cater to them. You could get almost anything you wanted there if you had enough money, but there was none of the oversight of a place like Ceyla City. “Everything to excess” was a fine philosophy for the hopelessly insipid, but the culture of obsequiousness there was grating to anyone with a true need for independence after a while.
Lila wrapped the pillowcase around his neck, letting it drape over his shoulders. “What really made you decide to exchange all that for Pandora?” She picked up the scissors and started snipping, using the comb with her other hand.
“I didn’t exchange it for Pandora. I went to a lot of different places for work, and when I didn’t have work I tagged along with my dad whenever he wasn’t actively pursuing a military operation. I organized his personal staff, ran some of his campaigns...”
“You and your dad sound really close.”
“We are.” Nowadays.
“So what, you just felt like you needed a change from your high society ways?”
“Something like that.” Garrett still didn’t know what he was looking for, but he did know he hadn’t found it on Paradise.
“Hmm.” Lila worked in silence for a while, focused on Garrett’s hair. After a few minutes she tilted his head up so she could see his face, hummed and made a few more cuts, then put the scissors down and unfolded a flexible wraparound mirror. “Well, what do you think?”
Garrett examined his reflection. Huh, not bad. Not having all that hair was…different. It made him look sharper. You could have cut glass with his cheekbones.
“Stop bragging.”
“Oh, sorry, did I say that part out loud?” Lila smacked him on the shoulder and he grinned, then looked again. It was long on top, comfortably non-military, but short enough on the back and sides to not fall against his sweat-soaked skin. “Could you shorten the sideburns some?”
“Sure.” She got out the clippers and cut to where he indicated, brushed up the lines on his neck, then said, “Better?”
“Perfect.”
“Are you positive you won’t regret this once the climate controls are working again?”
“I strive not to regret anything ever,” he assured her.
“Yes, I know.” She got out a soft-bristled brush and wiped away the tiny hairs left along the edge of the pillowcase, then pulled the whole thing carefully away. “We got most of the small stuff. What do you want to do with the long pieces?”
“I don’t know, incinerate them?”
Lila ran a finger down one of the sweat-soaked coils. “If they were clean they could be made into a wig.”
“Who the hell needs a wig?”
“Almost any natural with cancer. The treatment is very hard on the body.”
“Tell you what, you can have it,” Garrett said magnanimously, shooing her towards the pile of hair. “Recompense for your services.”
“How generous of you,” she snarked. “Could I vacuum your couch and floor too?”
“I have robots for that, but thanks for the offer.”
“Whatever.” Lila repacked her kit, carefully gathered the hair, then stood up. “The pool is open, you know. It was cool before the temperature started climbing, but it can’t be more than room temp now. Might be nice.”
“There will be a million people there, then.” He waved her away. “Maybe later. You go. Tell Shekar hello for me.”
Lila rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to meet Shekar.”
“Of course you aren’t,” he soothed her. “Still. When he finds you, please ask him whether he needs more specific variables for the simulation we’re modeling.”
“You. Shut it. Now!”
“Sorry. Bye, Lila. Thanks for your help.”
“Sure.” She didn’t say anything else, just opened the door and left. Briefly Garrett feared that he might have pushed too hard, then dismissed it. Lila just didn’t want to acknowledge that she had a lust-crazed stalker. If Shekar were anything other than the intelligent, sarcastic, emotionally-bumbling person that he was, Garrett might have have intervened, but watching Lila being courted by Shekar was like watching the antigrav on a speeding hoverbike cut in and out. You saw it crash and burn, then bounce and crash again, and then again, and then again…it was too guiltily intriguing not to marvel at.
Garrett lay his head back on the couch and stared at the ceiling for a moment before deciding that he needed to get out of his apartment. It was too quiet, too still. The central server had been showing a marathon of his mother’s old movies lately, nothing he wanted to watch, and he’d seen his own collection a hundred times. He got up, ran a questing hand over his head, then grinned and pulled on some loose, lightweight pants. He knew he had a clean t-shirt lying around somewhere…yes. Now to find a skinroom.
Skinrooms were small, private chambers located on the outer surface of a ship. They were basically a floor-to-ceiling viewport, a thin spot in the hull where a person could stand and be surrounded by space. They were called skinrooms because standing in them was as close as many people ever got to actual exposure, and the viewport window panes were so thin that the freezing vacuum beyond could be hinted at. It was like being a part of the ship’s skin, with no great hull to separate you, no yards of metal and foam insulation, just a slender pane of near-unbreakable glass.
The view disturbed some people, but for others the need to escape the press of walls was as essential as breathing. Federation colony ships were required to have skinrooms, since they had to cater to the mental needs of all their colonists and claustrophobia was scarcely uncommon. Garrett wasn’t claustrophobic, but he did enjoy the view and he’d enjoy the sensation of coolness he could get there even more.
He made his way from the thirteenth level to the twenty-eighth, the highest that there was on the Neptune. There were skinrooms scattered throughout the hull of the ship, but the ones on the top side were the best, since they opened above you as well as around. The twenty-eighth level was used mostly for storage, and only maintenance crews really frequented it, but his ID badge gave him access.
Garrett made his way to the closest skin room, found it happily unoccupied, and stepped into the alcove. It was only four feet wide by ten tall, but as he moved closer to the viewport, the air turned to ice on his sticky, overheated skin, and he smiled with pleasure. Garrett leaned his forehead against the window and sighed deeply, letting his eyes wander into a soft focus and watching the stars blur into a swirling spiral of dark and light. It was perfect, quiet and meditative. He felt his mind relax with his body, and leaned further into the chill.
“Daddy, here’s one—oh.”
“Hush,” a deeper, husky voice said softly. “Don’t disturb ‘im. We’ll find another room, bucko, there’s some not too far off.”
“’kay.”
You could stay, Garrett wanted to say. He didn’t know who they were, but in that instant he was feeling so mellow that the prospect of sharing his space didn’t bother him. By the time he turned around, though, they were gone. He shrugged and turned back, eventually folding to his knees and leaning his entire upper body into the window. He knelt there silently until the environmental controls came back on five hours later.
Garrett’s knees ached as he walked back to his apartment, but it was totally worth it.
Part Fourteen: Skin
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. Those who know where I live know what inspired this chapter. Oh yes, you certainly do.
***
“Journal Record Four, beginning.”
“Ship technicians who don’t have the educational background to be engineers aren’t under the oversight of the science lab. This is a lucky thing for them, because if they were, Martina would have fired most if not all of them by now. One paragon of intellect decided that the environmental controls for the ship needed to be tweaked, and fourteen hours later we’re drenched with sweat and using power up at a disgusting rate. The self-proclaimed mastermind couldn’t fix it, none of his buddies could fix it, then the ship’s engineering department had a look and determined that the programming that controls the air and water temperature has been pretty much demolished, and it’s going to take another eight or nine hours to get something jury-rigged enough to be functional.
“What this means for me is that right now, it’s hot enough to melt in my apartment and the halls aren’t much better, but I’d boil alive if I tried to take a shower. The only bright spot so far has been that my first aid class was cancelled, although I’ll probably regret that when some natural collapses in the hall outside my door due to heat exhaustion or something. Also…I’m starting to reconsider my vanity at this point. This hair has got to go.”
***
Garrett wasn’t sure why he kept his hair long. He didn’t actually do very much with it, just tied it out of the way while he was working and let it hang loose the rest of the time. Women seemed to like it more than men, although his lovers had been known to use it as a handle at times, and since Garrett had no genuine desire to attract women and didn’t care to style it for himself, he never thought about it much one way or the other. Until now.
Right now he was lying in a pool of sweat, his limbs akimbo on the polyblend sheets. Cotton. First thing he was having shipped for himself: cotton sheets. Polyblend didn’t stain but it didn’t absorb either, so he was left damp and miserable. The fan just blew hot air. The water…the less said about that, the better. And then there was the mass of pale blond hair spread across his pillows was achingly hot, and heavy when he tried to tie it up.
Well, why don’t you whine about it a little more? That’s sure to help. Garrett mentally slapped his subconscious, then reached over and grabbed his communicator. He asked for Lila.
“Hmm?” her voice responded tiredly a few moments later.
“You cut your own hair, right?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“Because I’m dying, and the gods demand a sacrifice to save my life. It’s either my sanity or my hair, and I’d rather keep my sanity. Want to come play high priestess?”
There was a long pause. “It took me a moment to work through that one. You’re seriously strange, Garrett. Are you sure you want me to cut off your hair? It’s so pretty…”
“Utterly sure. It’s just hair, it grows back.”
“But it’s so pretty.”
“Damn it, Lila, you can have it if you like it so much. Just come over here and cut me into something that doesn’t look stupid.”
“Aw honey, you don’t look stupid,” she said soothingly. Garrett caught up after a second and groaned.
“Me walking right into it is no excuse to make terrible jokes. Will you help me or not?”
“Sure. I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks.” Garrett turned off the communicator and flopped back onto the bed, then remembered that he was stark naked. Clothing would be uncomfortable, but being ogled by a coworker he wasn’t interested in fucking would be worse. He slipped on a pair of loose shorts, thankfully synthetic cotton, and forced himself to drink another glass of water. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above his dresser and tugged mournfully on a lock of sodden blond hair. “It’s not you, it’s me,” he told his hair seriously, then went and sat down in the living room. A few minutes later the door chime sounded. “It’s open,” he called.
Lila walked in, carrying a small bag of supplies. She wore a loose, formless dress that looked comfortable rather than flattering, and her bright red hair was pulled up in a knot. “Goddamn, it’s hot,” she said as soon as the door closed behind her.
“Is it?” he asked languorously, “Really? I’d barely noticed.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t start with me, Mister ‘I’m Always Hot’. I know you were thinking it,” she added as she sat down beside him on the couch. “And do you own any clothes that don’t make you look like a meal? Jeez, have a care for the rest of us.”
“Why, do you want to taste me? Are you sure you wouldn’t just prefer a beer?”
“Senator Dowd probably wants to taste you, and no, I wouldn’t prefer a beer. Your beer is undoubtedly warm and undrinkable, like everything else since those morons went above and beyond,” Lila replied sarcastically. “And while I do like to look, I don’t want to taste you, because I prefer men who wouldn’t think sleeping with me was a chore.”
“Like Shekar.”
Lila pulled out an automatic clipper. “I’m not sleeping with Shekar.”
“Not for his lack of trying.”
“I won’t be sleeping with anyone I work with, Garrett; it would be too confusing. I’m going to Pandora to start over, and I don’t want to screw up my job.”
Garrett watched her take out a very shiny, very sharp pair of scissors. “You’re not a natural though.”
“Not really. One in five shots of Regen gives me an adverse reaction, but I’m on additional meds that compensate for it. If I choose to reproduce, however, thanks to some squirrely genetics from my folks, I’m almost guaranteed a natural child.” She shrugged slightly and pulled out a comb. “I want any children I have to grown up feeling comfortable, not caged.” She looked at him assessingly and changed the subject. “How short do you want to go?”
“Short enough that my hair doesn’t hang down and touch my skin.”
“That’s very short.”
“If you make me look like a marine, I’ll kill you,” he warned her. He could just picture the look of Robbie and Wyl’s faces when he spoke to them next if he had a butch haircut. Robbie would be incredulous and Wyl would choke himself laughing and…no. Just no.
“Fine, no marines, but no complaints about what you do get either,” Lila said, snapping the shears menacingly. “Now scoot over here, shut up and let me work.” He obeyed, and a moment later she made the first cut, the thick sheaf of hair separating with a smooth schick.
Immediately his head felt lighter, as if he’d had lead weights dangling from it instead of fine white-gold hairs. The next two thick snips got rid of the rest of it up to the nape of his neck, and then Lila paused.
“We need to cover you with something, so the hairs don’t get everywhere. Ordinarily I’d just say take a shower afterwards, but in this case…”
“Right.” Garrett got up and walked back into his bedroom, finally deciding on his pillowcase as a protective cloth. He had to wash the damn thing anyway. He came back in and saw Lila staring at the picture he had wrapping his room, as though she’d never seen this one before. Then again, maybe she hadn’t; he’d only had it up for five days. “It’s Taua’i.”
“Wow, in the hub of the central system.”
“I lived there for a lot of my life,” Garrett reminded her as he sat down again.
“I know, but you never really talk about it.”
“There isn’t much to say.”
She picked up the tension and changed the subject. “It looks gorgeous there.”
“Great beaches,” Garrett said. “Cool breezes, lots of protected zones. Almost as watery as Griffyn, but way better developed. It’s a resort world.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“A lot of it is.” A lot of it wasn’t, too. Taua’i was populated with the spoiled rich of the central system and the people who worked to cater to them. You could get almost anything you wanted there if you had enough money, but there was none of the oversight of a place like Ceyla City. “Everything to excess” was a fine philosophy for the hopelessly insipid, but the culture of obsequiousness there was grating to anyone with a true need for independence after a while.
Lila wrapped the pillowcase around his neck, letting it drape over his shoulders. “What really made you decide to exchange all that for Pandora?” She picked up the scissors and started snipping, using the comb with her other hand.
“I didn’t exchange it for Pandora. I went to a lot of different places for work, and when I didn’t have work I tagged along with my dad whenever he wasn’t actively pursuing a military operation. I organized his personal staff, ran some of his campaigns...”
“You and your dad sound really close.”
“We are.” Nowadays.
“So what, you just felt like you needed a change from your high society ways?”
“Something like that.” Garrett still didn’t know what he was looking for, but he did know he hadn’t found it on Paradise.
“Hmm.” Lila worked in silence for a while, focused on Garrett’s hair. After a few minutes she tilted his head up so she could see his face, hummed and made a few more cuts, then put the scissors down and unfolded a flexible wraparound mirror. “Well, what do you think?”
Garrett examined his reflection. Huh, not bad. Not having all that hair was…different. It made him look sharper. You could have cut glass with his cheekbones.
“Stop bragging.”
“Oh, sorry, did I say that part out loud?” Lila smacked him on the shoulder and he grinned, then looked again. It was long on top, comfortably non-military, but short enough on the back and sides to not fall against his sweat-soaked skin. “Could you shorten the sideburns some?”
“Sure.” She got out the clippers and cut to where he indicated, brushed up the lines on his neck, then said, “Better?”
“Perfect.”
“Are you positive you won’t regret this once the climate controls are working again?”
“I strive not to regret anything ever,” he assured her.
“Yes, I know.” She got out a soft-bristled brush and wiped away the tiny hairs left along the edge of the pillowcase, then pulled the whole thing carefully away. “We got most of the small stuff. What do you want to do with the long pieces?”
“I don’t know, incinerate them?”
Lila ran a finger down one of the sweat-soaked coils. “If they were clean they could be made into a wig.”
“Who the hell needs a wig?”
“Almost any natural with cancer. The treatment is very hard on the body.”
“Tell you what, you can have it,” Garrett said magnanimously, shooing her towards the pile of hair. “Recompense for your services.”
“How generous of you,” she snarked. “Could I vacuum your couch and floor too?”
“I have robots for that, but thanks for the offer.”
“Whatever.” Lila repacked her kit, carefully gathered the hair, then stood up. “The pool is open, you know. It was cool before the temperature started climbing, but it can’t be more than room temp now. Might be nice.”
“There will be a million people there, then.” He waved her away. “Maybe later. You go. Tell Shekar hello for me.”
Lila rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to meet Shekar.”
“Of course you aren’t,” he soothed her. “Still. When he finds you, please ask him whether he needs more specific variables for the simulation we’re modeling.”
“You. Shut it. Now!”
“Sorry. Bye, Lila. Thanks for your help.”
“Sure.” She didn’t say anything else, just opened the door and left. Briefly Garrett feared that he might have pushed too hard, then dismissed it. Lila just didn’t want to acknowledge that she had a lust-crazed stalker. If Shekar were anything other than the intelligent, sarcastic, emotionally-bumbling person that he was, Garrett might have have intervened, but watching Lila being courted by Shekar was like watching the antigrav on a speeding hoverbike cut in and out. You saw it crash and burn, then bounce and crash again, and then again, and then again…it was too guiltily intriguing not to marvel at.
Garrett lay his head back on the couch and stared at the ceiling for a moment before deciding that he needed to get out of his apartment. It was too quiet, too still. The central server had been showing a marathon of his mother’s old movies lately, nothing he wanted to watch, and he’d seen his own collection a hundred times. He got up, ran a questing hand over his head, then grinned and pulled on some loose, lightweight pants. He knew he had a clean t-shirt lying around somewhere…yes. Now to find a skinroom.
Skinrooms were small, private chambers located on the outer surface of a ship. They were basically a floor-to-ceiling viewport, a thin spot in the hull where a person could stand and be surrounded by space. They were called skinrooms because standing in them was as close as many people ever got to actual exposure, and the viewport window panes were so thin that the freezing vacuum beyond could be hinted at. It was like being a part of the ship’s skin, with no great hull to separate you, no yards of metal and foam insulation, just a slender pane of near-unbreakable glass.
The view disturbed some people, but for others the need to escape the press of walls was as essential as breathing. Federation colony ships were required to have skinrooms, since they had to cater to the mental needs of all their colonists and claustrophobia was scarcely uncommon. Garrett wasn’t claustrophobic, but he did enjoy the view and he’d enjoy the sensation of coolness he could get there even more.
He made his way from the thirteenth level to the twenty-eighth, the highest that there was on the Neptune. There were skinrooms scattered throughout the hull of the ship, but the ones on the top side were the best, since they opened above you as well as around. The twenty-eighth level was used mostly for storage, and only maintenance crews really frequented it, but his ID badge gave him access.
Garrett made his way to the closest skin room, found it happily unoccupied, and stepped into the alcove. It was only four feet wide by ten tall, but as he moved closer to the viewport, the air turned to ice on his sticky, overheated skin, and he smiled with pleasure. Garrett leaned his forehead against the window and sighed deeply, letting his eyes wander into a soft focus and watching the stars blur into a swirling spiral of dark and light. It was perfect, quiet and meditative. He felt his mind relax with his body, and leaned further into the chill.
“Daddy, here’s one—oh.”
“Hush,” a deeper, husky voice said softly. “Don’t disturb ‘im. We’ll find another room, bucko, there’s some not too far off.”
“’kay.”
You could stay, Garrett wanted to say. He didn’t know who they were, but in that instant he was feeling so mellow that the prospect of sharing his space didn’t bother him. By the time he turned around, though, they were gone. He shrugged and turned back, eventually folding to his knees and leaning his entire upper body into the window. He knelt there silently until the environmental controls came back on five hours later.
Garrett’s knees ached as he walked back to his apartment, but it was totally worth it.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Blogging For Victoria Blisse
Today I'm blogging on Victoria Blisse's website about collaboration. You can check it out here: Playing Well With Others.
But wait, you say. Collaborating? Uh, Cari, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't collaborate. You haven't written anything with anybody. What gives?
Yes, well...turns out my creative muse is a bit of a slut and wanted to have a chance to express herself in another venue. I'm working on a project with a gal in Sydney and once we have something worth posting, I'll let you all into our collective creative boudoir (scandalous!) and show you what we've got. It's very interesting.
I'm working on more Pandora, so sit tight, my darlings. Good things come to those who love me:)
But wait, you say. Collaborating? Uh, Cari, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't collaborate. You haven't written anything with anybody. What gives?
Yes, well...turns out my creative muse is a bit of a slut and wanted to have a chance to express herself in another venue. I'm working on a project with a gal in Sydney and once we have something worth posting, I'll let you all into our collective creative boudoir (scandalous!) and show you what we've got. It's very interesting.
I'm working on more Pandora, so sit tight, my darlings. Good things come to those who love me:)
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
How I Do It These Days
Concerning my writing process, that is, not my sex life:)
A good question deserves a thoughtful answer, and I had to think for a while about how I write before putting this together. Some writers don’t like people to know about how they do things because they don’t feel like unveiling the mystique. Other writers love sharing and want to give you a blow by blow look into how a story comes about. I don’t feel brimful of mystique, but I’m not a blow by blow kind of girl either, kinky as that may be, so this post attempts to lay out my writing process in a general kind of way. Specifics vary depending on the projects that loom.
All writers need some structure, I think, at least if they’re serious about it. The muse is capricious and can’t be relied on to carry you through a story. Inspiration is wonderful for ideas and for beginnings, but in the end the only thing that finishes a story sometimes is forcing yourself to do so. Will it be as wonderful as the beginning, when you fluttered through plot and character light-footed and fancy free? Maybe not, but that’s what editing is for. A lot of people tell me that they have no trouble beginning a story, but can never finish one. I commiserate. Reach deep and find the font of good-willed sadomasochism inside of you, and make yourself finish it. Ignore the other tantalizing beginnings. You’ll feel so much better when you finish the one you’re on.
I’m not as structured here in Africa as I could be in America. Some days I work in the clinic all day, some days we have no electricity, some days I’m just too sick to muster the energy. Overall, though, I try to have at least four days a week where I’ve done something really productive, either a big piece of story begun, middled or ended, or a next piece written or something important plotted. I only give myself specific word counts when I’m working on something big that has to be done by a certain time. NaNoWriMo was great for that. I don’t write a lot of novels (not yet at any rate), so word counts are easier to meet when I’ve only got to get down 5k, or 10k, or even 20k. On a good day I can write about 5k before my eyes start bleeding. On a bad day, I have to force myself to hit one thousand words.
I write for a lot of anthologies, because I find it a great way to get to know a new publisher and also to get a broader spectrum of people interested in my work. I have a master document that details all the calls for submissions I’ve found that I’m interested in. As the deadline gets closer, I evaluate the call and decide if it’s really interesting to me, if I can squeeze it in without other things suffering, if I can do it justice, etc. If it’s a go I usually get it done within a week. If not, I delete it and move on to other things.
Some people who read my stuff have noticed that it takes me a long time to get a sequel up. When I finish with something, I tend to need to take a huge breath and shove it away from me for awhile, or risk ruining it with rewrites. I’m trying to diminish the time between submissions, though. Breaking an old habit and making a new one is hard, but if the goal is to keep improving (which mine is) I have to constantly revamp my work ethic.
One thing that revs my motivation is the expectation of others, which is why working with another person on a story or hearing from people who expect my next piece of work can make the difference between a project that languishes in the “in progress” folder and one that leaps to the “fully drafted” folder. Is it good for me to rely on others to help me finish things? No, but it is human and I’m as human as they come, and being part of a community is not only a good thing, it’s a necessary thing for a lot of writers. My community right now, while small, is a wonderful help to me. I appreciate every email, every comment, every outreach, and I try to respond in turn as I can.
Honestly, I’m not as structured as I’d like to be, but I do continually try to improve how I do things and what I produce. Writers who are static in their work are either already amazing, happily formulaic or unrepentantly lazy. I see the room for improvement in my own work and that’s a large part of what keeps me going. I have to strive to do better or risk being a dilettante, and because no other career paths really appeal to me at this point, I’d better become the best writer I possibly can. That’s one thing being a Peace Corps volunteer has helped with: honestly apprising my interests. There are fewer distractions when there is next to no media, shopping or the expectations of family/friends. I love writing, I have to write and so I’d better do the best job I can with it, because otherwise I’m cheating myself.
Aaand that’s enough of that for now. Suggestions on improving the process are welcome, by the by. I freely acknowledge there’s a lot I don’t know about that could help me out. Share with me! Thanks to Tiffany for the suggestions already given, btw.
A good question deserves a thoughtful answer, and I had to think for a while about how I write before putting this together. Some writers don’t like people to know about how they do things because they don’t feel like unveiling the mystique. Other writers love sharing and want to give you a blow by blow look into how a story comes about. I don’t feel brimful of mystique, but I’m not a blow by blow kind of girl either, kinky as that may be, so this post attempts to lay out my writing process in a general kind of way. Specifics vary depending on the projects that loom.
All writers need some structure, I think, at least if they’re serious about it. The muse is capricious and can’t be relied on to carry you through a story. Inspiration is wonderful for ideas and for beginnings, but in the end the only thing that finishes a story sometimes is forcing yourself to do so. Will it be as wonderful as the beginning, when you fluttered through plot and character light-footed and fancy free? Maybe not, but that’s what editing is for. A lot of people tell me that they have no trouble beginning a story, but can never finish one. I commiserate. Reach deep and find the font of good-willed sadomasochism inside of you, and make yourself finish it. Ignore the other tantalizing beginnings. You’ll feel so much better when you finish the one you’re on.
I’m not as structured here in Africa as I could be in America. Some days I work in the clinic all day, some days we have no electricity, some days I’m just too sick to muster the energy. Overall, though, I try to have at least four days a week where I’ve done something really productive, either a big piece of story begun, middled or ended, or a next piece written or something important plotted. I only give myself specific word counts when I’m working on something big that has to be done by a certain time. NaNoWriMo was great for that. I don’t write a lot of novels (not yet at any rate), so word counts are easier to meet when I’ve only got to get down 5k, or 10k, or even 20k. On a good day I can write about 5k before my eyes start bleeding. On a bad day, I have to force myself to hit one thousand words.
I write for a lot of anthologies, because I find it a great way to get to know a new publisher and also to get a broader spectrum of people interested in my work. I have a master document that details all the calls for submissions I’ve found that I’m interested in. As the deadline gets closer, I evaluate the call and decide if it’s really interesting to me, if I can squeeze it in without other things suffering, if I can do it justice, etc. If it’s a go I usually get it done within a week. If not, I delete it and move on to other things.
Some people who read my stuff have noticed that it takes me a long time to get a sequel up. When I finish with something, I tend to need to take a huge breath and shove it away from me for awhile, or risk ruining it with rewrites. I’m trying to diminish the time between submissions, though. Breaking an old habit and making a new one is hard, but if the goal is to keep improving (which mine is) I have to constantly revamp my work ethic.
One thing that revs my motivation is the expectation of others, which is why working with another person on a story or hearing from people who expect my next piece of work can make the difference between a project that languishes in the “in progress” folder and one that leaps to the “fully drafted” folder. Is it good for me to rely on others to help me finish things? No, but it is human and I’m as human as they come, and being part of a community is not only a good thing, it’s a necessary thing for a lot of writers. My community right now, while small, is a wonderful help to me. I appreciate every email, every comment, every outreach, and I try to respond in turn as I can.
Honestly, I’m not as structured as I’d like to be, but I do continually try to improve how I do things and what I produce. Writers who are static in their work are either already amazing, happily formulaic or unrepentantly lazy. I see the room for improvement in my own work and that’s a large part of what keeps me going. I have to strive to do better or risk being a dilettante, and because no other career paths really appeal to me at this point, I’d better become the best writer I possibly can. That’s one thing being a Peace Corps volunteer has helped with: honestly apprising my interests. There are fewer distractions when there is next to no media, shopping or the expectations of family/friends. I love writing, I have to write and so I’d better do the best job I can with it, because otherwise I’m cheating myself.
Aaand that’s enough of that for now. Suggestions on improving the process are welcome, by the by. I freely acknowledge there’s a lot I don’t know about that could help me out. Share with me! Thanks to Tiffany for the suggestions already given, btw.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Pandora Post #13
Title: Pandora
Part Thirteen: A Trouble Shared
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. Enjoy!
“How’s the trip so far?” Claudia asked. She looked a little different at almost four months pregnant, a little softer and brighter. Her hair was down, and it fell in dark, shining waves around her face and shoulders. She looked happy, and Garrett appreciated that. He wondered how he looked to her.
“Oh, it’s a thrill a minute. Truly. I can barely contain myself, what with all the excitement around here.”
“Gare.” She sighed with a certain exasperated fondness that Garrett had seen in his father at times. And Robbie. And Wyl. Come to think of it, everyone he was close to made that noise on a semi-regular basis. “Be honest.”
“You don’t want me to be honest, Claudia.”
“Sure I do.”
“No,” he said emphatically, “you don’t. Not if you value your sanity. I can tell you that I want to kill Jezria, however.”
“She sent Miles a message that had him chuckling a few days ago. I think it was about you.”
“Yes, well, they both have sick and twisted senses of humor. Seriously, you’d better hope the baby gets the vast majority of her personality traits from you. In fact, next time, screw the sex thing, just pop off a clone. The universe could use more Claudias.”
“Garrett.” It was too easy to make his step-mother blush. “Be serious for a moment. It’s not really that bad, is it?”
“No,” he assured her. “It’s not that bad.” Because the expedition wasn’t, it was just oddly confining, restricting in a personal way that he hadn’t had to deal with since boarding school. His work was challenging but the atmosphere in the lab was brittle, and the tabs that were kept on his consumption of all things even remotely related to vice made him feel like an inmate. Plus the thing with the guy in the ship…yeah. Strange.
Jonah. Not “the guy”, Jonah. Funny how he didn’t want to forget that name.
“How did the elections go?” he asked, done talking about himself.
“Pretty smoothly. There were a few incidents but no more bombs, and no one was killed. The Federation troops are still out in force as part of a police effort as the new members of Parliament get situated, so Robbie and Wyl are working almost as much as Miles is. Oh!” Claudia smiled suddenly. “Wyl hired a friend of yours for the motor pool. I think his name is Isidore Cain?”
“Seriously?” It had been several months since Garrett had given Wyl Isidore’s information, and he’d thought that nothing had come of it.
“Oh yes. Wyl was way too busy keeping all the vehicles going since all the troops are on call and he really needed the help, and apparently it’s working out very well. I guess that getting the security clearance took longer than expected because of some of his family’s connections, but it worked out in the end.”
“He’s related to people who were against Paradise joining the Federated Colonies?”
“In a big way, but I don’t know the details. He’s here now, though, and I’ve met him. He seems very sweet.”
“’Sweet’ is the perfect word for Isidore,” Garrett said with a lascivious grin, and Claudia giggled. “Get him on his back with his legs in the air and—”
“Don’t tell me about it!” she begged. “Gentlemen aren’t supposed to tell!”
“Who did you think you were talking to, honey? Robbie?”
Claudia opened her mouth to speak, but then a chime went off in the background. “Oh. I’m sorry, Garrett, I have to go. We’re hosting a dinner for the Parliament members and their families tonight and I need to start getting things ready.”
“Better you than me,” Garrett said easily. “I should head to the infirmary anyway.”
“Infirmary, why? Are you okay?” Her pretty features creased with worry, and Garrett swore silently at himself even as he decided lying was the way to go here.
“I’m fine. I just have to take a first aid class. You know, what to do in case a natural gets his arm chopped off or something.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“Go get ready for dinner, Claudia. Tell Dad hi for me.”
“I will,” she promised. “Hopefully next time he’ll be able to talk.”
“When things calm down a little,” Garrett agreed. “Bye, honey.”
“Bye, Gare.” Her image winked out and Garrett shut off his screen. He hadn’t actually signed up for a first aid class yet, but he knew the nurse would bother him again about it today. He’d been receiving perky little messages to that effect all week. In fact, the number of messages he received was huge considering he didn’t have many friends on board the ship. It turned out most of the notices were for group socializing events, which Garrett had no desire to become involved with. Artificially constructed mixers where you got a flashing nametag and had to tell people Three Fun Things About Me!!! was not in the game plan, not if he wanted his brain chemistry to stay on an even keel. Thanks, but no thanks.
Garrett wasn’t a complete shut-in. He had dinner with Jezria once a week, he ate lunches with Lila and Shekar, and he ran regularly with a group of the ship’s security officers whom he knew by sight if not by name. Officer Brady turned out to be Officer Carrie Brady, and she was cute and could run like the wind, so they chatted more often than not while he worked out. The rest of the time, he worked or entertained himself. It wasn’t a wonderful life, but it wasn’t bad either.
Garrett forced himself off the couch and out the door. He wanted to get the infirmary appointment over with. Hopefully all would be well and he could give it a rest after this.
The place was surprisingly busy today. There were at least four doctors bustling around seeing to various people, and when he looked at the sign on the wall Garrett found that they were giving out vaccines today. Vaccines for what he had no idea, but he recognized several scientists who were naturals sitting down, and figured it was specific to them. The nurse was different, but the girl who’d replaced him for today indicated that Garrett should go ahead to Booth Two and let the autodoc do its thing. He went into the small room, but stopped at the door when he saw a small child sitting in the diagnostic chair.
The kid wasn’t being analyzed, he was just sitting there, his knees tucked to his chest and his face hidden in his arms. A wild mess of butter-yellow curls several shades darker than Garrett’s own hair made the boy look like he’d just come in from a windstorm. He peeked over his arms at Garrett.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No,” Garrett replied, squelching his initial impulse to call someone and have them get the kid out of the room. “Not this kind of doctor.”
“You aren’t gonna give me a shot?”
“No.”
The boy sighed deeply. “Okay, then you can stay.”
“Thanks.” Feeling bemused but oddly entertained, Garrett sat down on the bed next to the autodoc chair.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
“Garrett.” There was no way he was throwing his last name at a toddler. “What’s yours?”
“Cody David Helms, and I’m five years old, but I’ll be six in three months, Daddy says.”
Five. Okay, so not a toddler. Garrett wasn’t comfortable with kids. He’d never had the opportunity to get to know any, but he didn’t feel the need to run out of the room screaming yet, so that was good. “Five, huh?”
“Yep.” The boy nodded firmly. “How old are you?”
Garrett cracked a smile. “A lot older. Super old. Probably as old as your daddy.”
“That’s old,” Cody agreed.
“I know.” They were silent for a moment. “Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” He gestured towards the main room.
“Yeah, but I thought they were just gonna check my ears again, ‘cause I have tubes in my ears and they have to make sure they’re okay, but then they said they hafta give me a shot too and I don’t like those, but Daddy can’t come right now and I don’t want to do it without him.” Cody looked thoroughly miserable at the prospect of getting a shot. Garrett could commiserate. It really was easier to be on Regen.
“Well, I don’t know—”
“There you are!” A white-coated doctor appeared in the door, her face set in a slightly scolding smile. “Cody, I’ve been looking for you. It’s time for your vaccination.”
“No.” He hid his face in his arms again.
“You’ll get a treat when it’s over, honey.”
“No!”
“Cody…” She sounded exasperated. “Doctor Caractacus needs this room so he can use the autodoc. We don’t want to inconvenience him.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Garrett confessed.
“You said you were Garrett.”
“I’m that too. That’s what you can call me.” He looked at the frightened boy and the annoyed doctor and made a decision. “How about we get our shots at the same time? That way we can stay here together.”
“You aren’t scheduled for a…” Garrett caught the doctor’s eye and stared until she caught on. “I mean, yes. Both your shots. I’ll just go get one more.” She turned and walked away.
“Is that okay with you?” Garrett asked Cody. “Because I know I’m not your Daddy, but honestly I don’t like getting shots either and I don’t want to do it alone.”
“Will you go first?”
“Sure.”
“’kay.” Cody seemed resigned if not enthusiastic, and after a moment he got out of the chair and pulled himself up onto the bed next to Garrett. The boy’s warm little body pressed against his side, and Garrett found himself actually thinking that the kid was pretty cute, as kids went. His hair was all over the place, but it was a nice color, and he had brown eyes that looked too big for his face but made him look completely adorable.
And this, Garrett thought to himself, is why parents don’t go homicidally insane more often. Cute gets you out of a lot of trouble. It had worked for him, certainly.
The doctor came back, two small syringes in hand. “Who’s going first?”
“I am,” Garrett told her. She nodded and rolled up his sleeve, then wiped the skin just below his shoulder clean. “You’ll just feel a little pinch,” she told him.
All of a sudden Cody was clinging to him, holding his side tight, and Garrett was so taken aback by it that he didn’t even realize he was getting the shot until the doctor pulled back and said, “All done! That wasn’t so bad, huh?”
“Not at all,” he replied honestly.
Cody looked up at his face from under long, sandy brown lashes. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you ready for your turn, Cody?”
Cody nodded, but there were already tears in his eyes, and when the doctor touched his arm to roll his sleeve back he buried his face in Garrett’s arm. “I don’ wanna watch,” he mumbled.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to watch,” Garrett said, feeling totally out of his depth. The doctor smiled slightly at him, then gave Cody his shot. The little boy flinched but didn’t make a sound, and after a few seconds it was done. The tiny hole was bleeding, though, and Garrett watched in fascination as the doctor wiped it clean again, then put a Space Ranger band-aid over it. Having a band-aid seemed to cheer the kid up some. Huh. Weird.
“There you go,” she said cheerfully. “Good job, Cody! If you come with me now I can check your ears and Doctor Caractacus can finish his things in here.”
“’kay.” He reluctantly let go of Garrett but looked up at him. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Garrett replied. “I didn’t want to do that all by myself. You were a big help.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.” Cody smiled and Garrett felt himself smile back, unable to resist. “You can call my Daddy if you hafta get another shot and we can come help again. Daddy is really good at helping.”
“He can’t be as good as you,” Garrett said.
“He is. He’s the best,” Cody assured him. His insistence was very cute.
“Cody…”
“I’m coming.” He got down off the table and walked over to the door. “Bye, Garrett.”
“Bye, Cody.”
The doctor winked at Garrett and then laid a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder, guiding him out. Garrett watched them go, completely bemused for a few seconds, before he remembered why he’d come into the infirmary in the first place. He moved down to the chair and put his hand in the gauntlet. A few moments later he was being analyzed, and a minute later the hologram informed him that his blood chemistry was back to normal and he could go. It felt cold and impersonal after the interaction he’d just had. Garrett removed his hand, stood up and walked back out into the waiting room.
“Sir!” The perky girl at the desk waved him over before he could leave. “About the first aid class…have you signed up yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Only we’ve got just five weeks to go until we reach Pandora, and all personnel and family members have to be certified by then. We have the classes every other day.”
“Next week, then, on this day.” Maybe if he was lucky he’d see Cody again. The kid was cute, no denying it, and Garrett wouldn’t mind meeting his parents.
“Thank you!” The girl beamed at him. “I’ll make sure you get a reminder before the class.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Have a lovely day!”
“I…will.” Actually, Garrett had no idea what he’d do with the rest of his day. After chatting with Claudia and meeting Cody, however, it was looking up. “Thank you.”
***
“Journal record three, beginning.”
“So, I had a minor epiphany today: children are not the devil. They might seem like it most of the time and I’m certainly happy I don’t have any, but there are moments when their sheer adorableness probably makes having them worthwhile. It’s conceivable that when my stint on Pandora is up I might go back to Paradise and do more than spoil my upcoming sibling rotten during brief trips. Cody Helms is a cute kid, and I hope his father realizes how much he idolizes him.
“I don’t remember if I idolized my father when I was that age, but…I don’t think so. I don’t think I knew him well enough to. Then I got older and I hated him, and it took a long time for us to get past that. I love him now, but I hope he gets that kind of pure idolatry from his and Claudia’s baby, because just being on the periphery of it for a few seconds made it seem like a pretty special thing. Dad deserves that. Everyone should have someone look at them like they mean the world to them…”
Click.
Part Thirteen: A Trouble Shared
Notes: This is the next part of a spin-off story of a series I posted on Literotica (titled Bonded, as Carizabeth) and the subject matter is m/m sci fi. Enjoy!
“How’s the trip so far?” Claudia asked. She looked a little different at almost four months pregnant, a little softer and brighter. Her hair was down, and it fell in dark, shining waves around her face and shoulders. She looked happy, and Garrett appreciated that. He wondered how he looked to her.
“Oh, it’s a thrill a minute. Truly. I can barely contain myself, what with all the excitement around here.”
“Gare.” She sighed with a certain exasperated fondness that Garrett had seen in his father at times. And Robbie. And Wyl. Come to think of it, everyone he was close to made that noise on a semi-regular basis. “Be honest.”
“You don’t want me to be honest, Claudia.”
“Sure I do.”
“No,” he said emphatically, “you don’t. Not if you value your sanity. I can tell you that I want to kill Jezria, however.”
“She sent Miles a message that had him chuckling a few days ago. I think it was about you.”
“Yes, well, they both have sick and twisted senses of humor. Seriously, you’d better hope the baby gets the vast majority of her personality traits from you. In fact, next time, screw the sex thing, just pop off a clone. The universe could use more Claudias.”
“Garrett.” It was too easy to make his step-mother blush. “Be serious for a moment. It’s not really that bad, is it?”
“No,” he assured her. “It’s not that bad.” Because the expedition wasn’t, it was just oddly confining, restricting in a personal way that he hadn’t had to deal with since boarding school. His work was challenging but the atmosphere in the lab was brittle, and the tabs that were kept on his consumption of all things even remotely related to vice made him feel like an inmate. Plus the thing with the guy in the ship…yeah. Strange.
Jonah. Not “the guy”, Jonah. Funny how he didn’t want to forget that name.
“How did the elections go?” he asked, done talking about himself.
“Pretty smoothly. There were a few incidents but no more bombs, and no one was killed. The Federation troops are still out in force as part of a police effort as the new members of Parliament get situated, so Robbie and Wyl are working almost as much as Miles is. Oh!” Claudia smiled suddenly. “Wyl hired a friend of yours for the motor pool. I think his name is Isidore Cain?”
“Seriously?” It had been several months since Garrett had given Wyl Isidore’s information, and he’d thought that nothing had come of it.
“Oh yes. Wyl was way too busy keeping all the vehicles going since all the troops are on call and he really needed the help, and apparently it’s working out very well. I guess that getting the security clearance took longer than expected because of some of his family’s connections, but it worked out in the end.”
“He’s related to people who were against Paradise joining the Federated Colonies?”
“In a big way, but I don’t know the details. He’s here now, though, and I’ve met him. He seems very sweet.”
“’Sweet’ is the perfect word for Isidore,” Garrett said with a lascivious grin, and Claudia giggled. “Get him on his back with his legs in the air and—”
“Don’t tell me about it!” she begged. “Gentlemen aren’t supposed to tell!”
“Who did you think you were talking to, honey? Robbie?”
Claudia opened her mouth to speak, but then a chime went off in the background. “Oh. I’m sorry, Garrett, I have to go. We’re hosting a dinner for the Parliament members and their families tonight and I need to start getting things ready.”
“Better you than me,” Garrett said easily. “I should head to the infirmary anyway.”
“Infirmary, why? Are you okay?” Her pretty features creased with worry, and Garrett swore silently at himself even as he decided lying was the way to go here.
“I’m fine. I just have to take a first aid class. You know, what to do in case a natural gets his arm chopped off or something.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“Go get ready for dinner, Claudia. Tell Dad hi for me.”
“I will,” she promised. “Hopefully next time he’ll be able to talk.”
“When things calm down a little,” Garrett agreed. “Bye, honey.”
“Bye, Gare.” Her image winked out and Garrett shut off his screen. He hadn’t actually signed up for a first aid class yet, but he knew the nurse would bother him again about it today. He’d been receiving perky little messages to that effect all week. In fact, the number of messages he received was huge considering he didn’t have many friends on board the ship. It turned out most of the notices were for group socializing events, which Garrett had no desire to become involved with. Artificially constructed mixers where you got a flashing nametag and had to tell people Three Fun Things About Me!!! was not in the game plan, not if he wanted his brain chemistry to stay on an even keel. Thanks, but no thanks.
Garrett wasn’t a complete shut-in. He had dinner with Jezria once a week, he ate lunches with Lila and Shekar, and he ran regularly with a group of the ship’s security officers whom he knew by sight if not by name. Officer Brady turned out to be Officer Carrie Brady, and she was cute and could run like the wind, so they chatted more often than not while he worked out. The rest of the time, he worked or entertained himself. It wasn’t a wonderful life, but it wasn’t bad either.
Garrett forced himself off the couch and out the door. He wanted to get the infirmary appointment over with. Hopefully all would be well and he could give it a rest after this.
The place was surprisingly busy today. There were at least four doctors bustling around seeing to various people, and when he looked at the sign on the wall Garrett found that they were giving out vaccines today. Vaccines for what he had no idea, but he recognized several scientists who were naturals sitting down, and figured it was specific to them. The nurse was different, but the girl who’d replaced him for today indicated that Garrett should go ahead to Booth Two and let the autodoc do its thing. He went into the small room, but stopped at the door when he saw a small child sitting in the diagnostic chair.
The kid wasn’t being analyzed, he was just sitting there, his knees tucked to his chest and his face hidden in his arms. A wild mess of butter-yellow curls several shades darker than Garrett’s own hair made the boy look like he’d just come in from a windstorm. He peeked over his arms at Garrett.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No,” Garrett replied, squelching his initial impulse to call someone and have them get the kid out of the room. “Not this kind of doctor.”
“You aren’t gonna give me a shot?”
“No.”
The boy sighed deeply. “Okay, then you can stay.”
“Thanks.” Feeling bemused but oddly entertained, Garrett sat down on the bed next to the autodoc chair.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
“Garrett.” There was no way he was throwing his last name at a toddler. “What’s yours?”
“Cody David Helms, and I’m five years old, but I’ll be six in three months, Daddy says.”
Five. Okay, so not a toddler. Garrett wasn’t comfortable with kids. He’d never had the opportunity to get to know any, but he didn’t feel the need to run out of the room screaming yet, so that was good. “Five, huh?”
“Yep.” The boy nodded firmly. “How old are you?”
Garrett cracked a smile. “A lot older. Super old. Probably as old as your daddy.”
“That’s old,” Cody agreed.
“I know.” They were silent for a moment. “Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” He gestured towards the main room.
“Yeah, but I thought they were just gonna check my ears again, ‘cause I have tubes in my ears and they have to make sure they’re okay, but then they said they hafta give me a shot too and I don’t like those, but Daddy can’t come right now and I don’t want to do it without him.” Cody looked thoroughly miserable at the prospect of getting a shot. Garrett could commiserate. It really was easier to be on Regen.
“Well, I don’t know—”
“There you are!” A white-coated doctor appeared in the door, her face set in a slightly scolding smile. “Cody, I’ve been looking for you. It’s time for your vaccination.”
“No.” He hid his face in his arms again.
“You’ll get a treat when it’s over, honey.”
“No!”
“Cody…” She sounded exasperated. “Doctor Caractacus needs this room so he can use the autodoc. We don’t want to inconvenience him.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Garrett confessed.
“You said you were Garrett.”
“I’m that too. That’s what you can call me.” He looked at the frightened boy and the annoyed doctor and made a decision. “How about we get our shots at the same time? That way we can stay here together.”
“You aren’t scheduled for a…” Garrett caught the doctor’s eye and stared until she caught on. “I mean, yes. Both your shots. I’ll just go get one more.” She turned and walked away.
“Is that okay with you?” Garrett asked Cody. “Because I know I’m not your Daddy, but honestly I don’t like getting shots either and I don’t want to do it alone.”
“Will you go first?”
“Sure.”
“’kay.” Cody seemed resigned if not enthusiastic, and after a moment he got out of the chair and pulled himself up onto the bed next to Garrett. The boy’s warm little body pressed against his side, and Garrett found himself actually thinking that the kid was pretty cute, as kids went. His hair was all over the place, but it was a nice color, and he had brown eyes that looked too big for his face but made him look completely adorable.
And this, Garrett thought to himself, is why parents don’t go homicidally insane more often. Cute gets you out of a lot of trouble. It had worked for him, certainly.
The doctor came back, two small syringes in hand. “Who’s going first?”
“I am,” Garrett told her. She nodded and rolled up his sleeve, then wiped the skin just below his shoulder clean. “You’ll just feel a little pinch,” she told him.
All of a sudden Cody was clinging to him, holding his side tight, and Garrett was so taken aback by it that he didn’t even realize he was getting the shot until the doctor pulled back and said, “All done! That wasn’t so bad, huh?”
“Not at all,” he replied honestly.
Cody looked up at his face from under long, sandy brown lashes. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you ready for your turn, Cody?”
Cody nodded, but there were already tears in his eyes, and when the doctor touched his arm to roll his sleeve back he buried his face in Garrett’s arm. “I don’ wanna watch,” he mumbled.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to watch,” Garrett said, feeling totally out of his depth. The doctor smiled slightly at him, then gave Cody his shot. The little boy flinched but didn’t make a sound, and after a few seconds it was done. The tiny hole was bleeding, though, and Garrett watched in fascination as the doctor wiped it clean again, then put a Space Ranger band-aid over it. Having a band-aid seemed to cheer the kid up some. Huh. Weird.
“There you go,” she said cheerfully. “Good job, Cody! If you come with me now I can check your ears and Doctor Caractacus can finish his things in here.”
“’kay.” He reluctantly let go of Garrett but looked up at him. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Garrett replied. “I didn’t want to do that all by myself. You were a big help.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.” Cody smiled and Garrett felt himself smile back, unable to resist. “You can call my Daddy if you hafta get another shot and we can come help again. Daddy is really good at helping.”
“He can’t be as good as you,” Garrett said.
“He is. He’s the best,” Cody assured him. His insistence was very cute.
“Cody…”
“I’m coming.” He got down off the table and walked over to the door. “Bye, Garrett.”
“Bye, Cody.”
The doctor winked at Garrett and then laid a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder, guiding him out. Garrett watched them go, completely bemused for a few seconds, before he remembered why he’d come into the infirmary in the first place. He moved down to the chair and put his hand in the gauntlet. A few moments later he was being analyzed, and a minute later the hologram informed him that his blood chemistry was back to normal and he could go. It felt cold and impersonal after the interaction he’d just had. Garrett removed his hand, stood up and walked back out into the waiting room.
“Sir!” The perky girl at the desk waved him over before he could leave. “About the first aid class…have you signed up yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Only we’ve got just five weeks to go until we reach Pandora, and all personnel and family members have to be certified by then. We have the classes every other day.”
“Next week, then, on this day.” Maybe if he was lucky he’d see Cody again. The kid was cute, no denying it, and Garrett wouldn’t mind meeting his parents.
“Thank you!” The girl beamed at him. “I’ll make sure you get a reminder before the class.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Have a lovely day!”
“I…will.” Actually, Garrett had no idea what he’d do with the rest of his day. After chatting with Claudia and meeting Cody, however, it was looking up. “Thank you.”
***
“Journal record three, beginning.”
“So, I had a minor epiphany today: children are not the devil. They might seem like it most of the time and I’m certainly happy I don’t have any, but there are moments when their sheer adorableness probably makes having them worthwhile. It’s conceivable that when my stint on Pandora is up I might go back to Paradise and do more than spoil my upcoming sibling rotten during brief trips. Cody Helms is a cute kid, and I hope his father realizes how much he idolizes him.
“I don’t remember if I idolized my father when I was that age, but…I don’t think so. I don’t think I knew him well enough to. Then I got older and I hated him, and it took a long time for us to get past that. I love him now, but I hope he gets that kind of pure idolatry from his and Claudia’s baby, because just being on the periphery of it for a few seconds made it seem like a pretty special thing. Dad deserves that. Everyone should have someone look at them like they mean the world to them…”
Click.
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