Crowded house, p.14
Crowded House, page 14
When she had strength to move again, he helped her slip her blouse off so her aching arms were no longer pinned in position. His fingers rubbed feeling back into her shoulders.
“Would you like to see your new haircut?” he asked.
She managed to find words this time. “Yes, please.” Still breathless, but her grin broadening. “But maybe not yet. Can I thank our guest first? Can I thank you?”
The glint in his eye turned dark. His lips twisting, pleased and hungry. “Well. Far be it from me to deny that request.”
He reached up an inviting hand to Delia, who put down her scissors at last and came to join them on the floor.
Hours later, she finally got to see her new haircut.
Standing once more before the bathroom mirror with Caleb at her back. Each of them clothed again, cleaned up and satiated. His arms around her, solid and grounding, as he finally let her see her surprise new look.
Long locks gone and with them the safety and comfort of the familiar. The length was something of a revelation: it was so short. So sharp and modern. Undeniably a very cool cut very well done and more fashionable than she’d worn her hair in years. But different. Like nothing she’d ever have chosen for herself.
Who was she, if she wasn’t that awkward girl of many years ago, who’d received a compliment or two on her hair and clung to it ever since? Who was this woman in the mirror, now grown up, with her strange kinks and fetishes and needs she couldn’t always understand, but neither could she deny? A woman who might retain a sense of identity tied up in a hairstyle and yet get off so hard on having another take it away from her?
How did that make sense? How did she make sense?
A smile twitched at the corners of the mouth of this woman in the mirror. A smile growing on her own face broad and strong. Maybe the new haircut wasn’t the real surprise; maybe it was how well it suited her. Maybe it was how little a haircut actually changed anything after all. Whoever she was, she was certainly no longer that awkward girl; she was adult and experienced and growing in self-assurance. She might not entirely know herself yet, but she was going to have fun figuring herself out.
“Okay, sweetheart? Not too much of a shock?” Caleb said, with perhaps a hint of his own nerves. It’d taken him time to accept himself too and sometimes he needed the reassurance from her, just as she needed it from him.
She turned in his arms with a happy shake of the head, new short hair light and flicking.
“Caleb, I love it.” She kissed him. “Best haircut ever.”
HUMAN OUTREACH
Adrian Amato
I’m an alien prostitute. Whether that means I’m a prostitute for aliens or an alien that’s a prostitute is a matter of perspective. For my clients, I’m an alien who is a prostitute. For members of my own species, I’m a prostitute for aliens.
Actually, to both I’m an Extraterrestrial Liaison Officer, or ELO (pronounced “ee-low”) for short. Few other humans know what I do for a living. Not all ELOs have sex with aliens.
According to the air force recruitment website: A career as an Extraterrestrial Liaison Officer (ELO) can provide you with the exciting opportunity to be an integral part of building positive relations with Earth’s newest neighbors.
After ten weeks of the Basic Military Officer Qualification (BMOQ) course you will complete a six-month Extraterrestrial Cultural Education Course (ECEC) at Canadian Forces Base Shilo in Manitoba. After ECEC, you will specialize in either Human Outreach or Cultural Outreach. Human Outreach involves embedment in the daily lives of the Gannitans, living amongst them, and establishing a positive rapport with them. Cultural Outreach involves exchanging and participating in traditional practices with Gannitans and establishing and maintaining a presence in their cultural institutions. Both subtrades carry the possibility of deployment to Ranteranan, the Gannitan home world.
Not only did I go through basic training to become an alien prostitute, I get saluted for it because it’s an officer position. Four months into ECEC (pronounced “ee-sec”) I had a meeting with Major Doe to discuss which subtrade I had the intention of specializing in. “There’s no delicate way to put this,” he began before I could get a chance to start in on awkward chit-chat about the cookie-cutter family framed on his wall. “Human Outreach involves more . . . um”—he made a circular fanning motion with his freckled left hand—“intimate aspects of building relations than you were probably anticipating. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” I said. Heat rose from my heels to my neck like I was sitting on a vent connected straight to the Earth’s core.
“Just to be sure, what do I mean?”
Intimate, a word that can have more than one meaning, but only one that begs for clarification, requires asking if the other person understands, wink wink, though Major Doe didn’t wink. He didn’t even blink. He kind of looked constipated.
“You mean that I’ll be fucking them, sir?”
“Yes,” Major Doe said.
I tilted my head to the side, looked at the picture on his desk of him shaking hands with Ranteranan’s president.
“I know you’re wondering whether I’ve ever—ahem—been with one of them. I mean on the one hand”—he held up his left hand, like one side of a broken scale—“I’m a Human Outreach ELO, but on the other”—here he held up his other hand—“I have a desk job. I mean, I was a major before I even transferred into this trade. Well, the answer is ‘yes,’ once. . . . It was quite strange, they have a different way of doing things, but it wasn’t unpleasant.”
I had no idea what their “different way of doing things” was at the time, but now I know it’s gangbangs. They’re really into gangbangs, though I suppose to Gannitans they’re just regular bangs, because they need three people to reproduce.
Let me give you a rundown on Gannitan reproductive biology. It’s absolutely fucked. Don’t worry if you don’t understand. It took me three lessons and labelled diagrams to get it. Gannitans have two sex-coding chromosomes, just like us, but they have three sexes; TY, TT, and YY. TY Gannitans are what we might consider male, in that they have what we might see as penises and produce what we might call sperm (though theirs is light blue and tastes like the milk left over when you finish a bowl of Froot Loops). However, they are the only ones who pass on their genetic material. They create T- and Y-coding haploid cells. TT Gannitans are what we might consider female, in that they grow fetuses inside their wombs, except these fetuses don’t contain any of their genetic material. TT Gannitans have sex with two different TY Gannitans. One of the haploid cells from one TY Gannitan will combine with one of the haploid cells from the other to create either a TY, TT, or YY zygote. YY Gannitans aren’t involved in the reproduction process at all, though they still go through puberty and have a sex drive.
To Gannitans, it’s kinky just to be one-on-one. It’s more intense, more intimate, like a secret. It used to be considered a form of sodomy for them, to have sex with just one person. It’s still taboo, incomplete, “promotes unhealthily strong attachment and isolation from society within a codependent coupling.”
And that’s just the way they do it, not to mention the way they do it.
For example, they don’t do blowjobs, probably because of the big, pointy, tusk-like teeth protruding from their lower jaws. I tried giving a blowjob to two of them once. One liked it and the other seemed bored. One thing that really gets their rocks off that doesn’t do anything for me, doesn’t even feel like sex, is rubbing the raised bumps of flesh that run in a line down either side of their torsos. Those are sensory receptors for their sense of direction. Gannitans are like walking compasses, attuned to magnetic north. Somehow, they can distinguish its location from magnetic interference. Magnets feel fake they say—metallic, hollow. Magnetic north is richer, mustier, full. According to them Earth’s magnetic north feels rusted. I have no idea what that means.
Don’t get me wrong, having sex with aliens isn’t the only thing I do for a living. I help prepare events, office spaces, and living quarters for Gannitans on Earth, and I do the reverse when I’m deployed on Ranteranan; I help to accommodate humans working and living there within the bounds of what is culturally acceptable to the Gannitans.
I guess that’s one thing that separates me from a traditional prostitute. Another is that I’m salaried. I don’t get paid per dick or vagina. No matter how many Gannitans I fuck, how much overtime I put in, I get paid the same amount.
I might seem blasé about this now, but I was nervous as hell the first time around. Sex is about communication, and it’s hard to communicate effectively when you don’t even speak the same language as the person you’re doing it with.
That’s why I asked for a translator to be there.
A man in camo, a second lieutenant with a nametag that read “Perez,” led me to a room down a side hallway on the top floor of the Extraterrestrial Liaison Unit building.
“The most important thing to know is ‘chet’ means ‘stop.’ As long as you remember that word, you’ll be fine. I’ll be there for all the rest, ma’am.”
“Just call me Carrie,” I told him. “You’re about to see me naked; I think we can be on a first-name basis.”
“Okay, I’m Juan,” he said. He opened the door to a room made up to look like a dimly lit hotel suite, except there was no TV, no indecipherable art on the wall, nowhere to store clothes. I was the entertainment, what they were meant to look at, and if I did my job right, where they put their clothes wouldn’t matter.
“Make yourself comfortable, they’ll be here in a few minutes,” Juan instructed.
I sat on the bed, took off my heels. I wasn’t used to wearing heels. I was more used to combat boots, but Major Doe said not to wear the uniform.
I heard footsteps in the hall and wiped my sweaty palms on the cotton bedspread.
The door opened and two Gannitans entered. One was tall and had a big belly, the other was around my height, skinny.
The tall one walked over to me, hand outstretched, and said something in his language.
“I know it is the custom for your people to do this upon their first meeting with someone,” Juan translated.
I grabbed the tall Gannitan’s hand and shook it firmly. When I let go he said something else.
“May we take our clothes off now?” Juan interpreted.
“Yes,” I responded, and Juan repeated it in their language.
They sloughed off their boots, pulled off their shirts, and stepped out of their pants. The tall one was already hard. He placed his hand on my leg, ran it up my thigh, then spoke in a low voice.
“Is this okay?” Juan translated.
“Yes,” I responded.
The tall Gannitan reached under my dress with both his hands and slid my underwear down my legs. I pulled my dress up over my head and, looking the tall Gannitan in the eyes, I dropped the bundle of cloth on the floor beside the bed.
He grabbed my waist with one hand while the other slid a finger into me, back and forth, back and forth. So slowly it was infuriating. I bucked my hips into his hand for more purchase.
His fingers were shorter and fatter than human fingers, meatier, softer. Comparatively, human fingers feel skeletal. Ironically, every time I’ve been fingered by a human since has felt like being prodded by an alien.
He pulled his finger out, then grabbed his cock and pushed it into me, so fast that it made me gasp, but his earnestness was contagious. I wanted it as fast as he’d give it to me. I want to be used. I could feel my face burning red at the thought. I didn’t usually see sex that way and the women’s lib class I took in university reminded me I wasn’t supposed to think of it that way. But that was really what this was, at the core of it, wasn’t it? Even if I liked it, I was being used, used for these Gannitans’ pleasure. And besides that, this was a job, and—like any other job—my employer was using me for something. In this case I was being used to build rapport with a new culture. A noble use, I suppose.
The tall Gannitan started thrusting fast right away, his belly slapping against my legs. He gripped onto my hips and I bunched up the bedspread in my fists. Just as I was getting close, he pulled out. That’s one thing I’ll never get used to. The way Gannitans like to tease their lovers. I can never just get an easy O with them.
Not even five seconds after the tall Gannitan pulled out, the shorter one was putting his cock inside me. This one stared into my eyes, unblinkingly. At first it was unnerving. I felt like an object under scrutiny, especially since his eyes were a piercing orange color unlike his companion’s green ones. But then he leaned down and pressed the space between his tusks to my forehead, and I felt seen instead of watched, warmed instead of burnt by his fiery eyes, connected to him beyond the barriers of language. I reached up and wrapped my arms around his back.
“He said he wants you to run your hands up and down his side,” Juan said. I was so focused on the eyes in front of me that I hadn’t even noticed the Gannitan saying anything. It was hard for me to distinguish their foreign language from their grunting and moaning. I wished we could do this without speaking, without having a nonparticipating observer there repeating bedroom talk in a monotone devoid of sensuality. I wondered if they’d trained him to speak like that when translating, or if the Gannitans just didn’t have as much inflection in their language.
I looked over to Juan. His uniform couldn’t camouflage his erection. I locked eyes with him and smiled as I ran my hands up and down the raised bumps on the Gannitan’s sides. The Gannitan groaned loudly and fucked me harder. Then he pulled out and the other one came at me again. This happened five or six times. They would fuck me just long enough for me to start getting close, then they would stop and switch. Toward the end I could feel that they were getting close too. Their sweaty palms left prints on my sides, their cocks twitched inside me, pressing up for a torturously miniscule moment against that sweet spot.
“Please just let me come,” I said.
“Um, hold on a second, I need to think how to translate that . . .” Juan paused before continuing. I had a sudden urge to laugh. I hadn’t even meant to say it, but was that not one of the common phrases taught in Gannitan Language 101? I feel like it should be, because anyone who bottoms for a pair of Gannitans will surely think it.
The skinny Gannitan grunted in response to Juan’s translation and kept going. I wrapped my legs around him to make sure he didn’t go anywhere. He grabbed my hips and pumped even harder. It would have been too much if I wasn’t already so close. He was partially lifting me off the bed, his grip on my hips so tight I couldn’t move them to his rhythm. Normally, I like to be able to thrust with my partner, but the way he took control was freeing. It allowed me to just lie back and hold on to him for the ride. I couldn’t keep my eyes open and locked to his anymore as I felt my whole body tighten around his. He kept going as I came and writhed against him. I felt his cock spasm inside me as he slowed down. When he pulled out, I was wet and sticky with his come. Then the tall Gannitan grabbed my legs and placed them on his broad shoulders. For a moment he was unmoving inside me. He hummed and closed his eyes, riding the aftershocks of my orgasm still pulsing around his cock. Then he thrust hard into me a few times before groaning loudly and saying something.
“Thank you,” Juan translated as the Gannitan pulled his cock out of me.
The two Gannitans got dressed slowly and lazily before leaving, pausing to talk between themselves. Juan said they were talking about what to get for dinner. The skinny one wanted to try shawarma.
“Looks like you’re having a hard time there,” I said to Juan as the door closed behind the Gannitans. I hadn’t gotten dressed. I was wearing nothing but the lacy red bra the Gannitans hadn’t removed.
“Sorry,” he said, covering his crotch with his hands.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You just watched a hot girl get fucked. Your dick doesn’t know I’m a superior officer. I take it as a compliment, really.”
He let his hands fall back to his sides.
I got up and walked over to him. The Gannitans’ come ran down my leg.
He had a strong jawline and deep brown eyes. He’d recently been on vacation somewhere warm; his skin was bronzed and glowing. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.
I took his hand and placed it on my breast. He swallowed, leaned forward, and touched his forehead to mine. His breathing was shaky. I had no intention of having sex with the translator when I’d asked for one to be there, but now I really wanted to.
I reached back and undid the clasp on my bra. His hand was now the only thing holding it to me. He moved his hand and let the bra fall to the floor at our feet.
I pulled him back toward the bed, let myself fall backward into it. He stood over me, unzipped his pants. He looked away from my face, at my crotch where the Gannitans’ sky-blue come was oozing out of me as he pulled his cock out and pumped it a few times with his hand.
“Turn around,” he said.
I flipped over.
“Let me know if I’m being too rough,” he said.
“I will,” I affirmed.
He slid his cock into me, thrusting slowly at first, not putting all of it in. He ran his fingers across my back, then his nails. He dug them in. He went deeper into me. The way his nails were running up and down my back tickled a bit, electrifying all the nerves in my body.
“Mm,” I said.
“Yeah, you can take it, can’t you?” He grabbed my arms, held them down.
“I can take it all,” I said.
He was going all the way in with every thrust now, speeding up.
I could feel my pussy getting tighter around his cock. This surprised me because I’d never come more than once during sex. But I’d also never been fucked by more than one person at a time, and never turned someone on so much that even the risk of losing their career couldn’t keep them from wanting me. I would be lying if I said the risk didn’t turn me on, that this had to be fast and furtive for the possibility that that door could swing open and we’d be caught.
