I am running. On the run. Again. My lungs are two loaves of agony in my heaving chest, screaming curses at me with every gasp of air. My legs pump me forward even though they are full of lead and liquefied packing peanuts.

Faster, Val.

My toes and the balls of my feet fight for purchase on the moss-covered, uneven ground.

Run!

My heart is pounding in my head so hard that my skull seems to be pulsing like the Yellowstone volcano, and boy, I won’t be surprised if I slip on this slippery goddamn ground and hit my head and my brain spills out like hot lava.

Or maybe, realistically, something like… porridge. Really warm porridge, the kind that burns your tongue if you don’t gently blow it before putting it in your mouth. Gotta be modest, you see?

Because that’s what happens to your brain when you have several consecutive weeks of mindbogglingly good sex three to four times a day. Your cerebral matter turns to mush, you get struck dumb by the cock, and then you end up running.

For entertainment purposes. Like a crazy person.

Through a bloody forest.

Without shoes. Or pants. Or panties. But with a large, animated penis lodged inside my vaginal channel, which should be the most ludicrous aspect of the whole picture, if it weren’t for the backdrop of me – Valerie Magdalena Greene – … running.

Not from a fire or anything. Just for fun. Not my fun. Someone else’s.

(It’ll be worth it in the end, promise.)

(Yahh. Unless I die of cardiac arrest before then.)

(They’d never let you die, Val.)

(… can’t… think… must… breathe. Keep breathing. Whooo…haaa… whooo… haaa…)

There’s a crashing noise in the underbrush directly to my right and I suppress a reflexive frightened shriek and swerve left, or as left as I can with all the trees in the way. There’s a narrow path – there are actually many paths crisscrossing the grove – that opens up to my left just at that moment and I immediately follow it because it makes the godawful running a fraction easier. The number of leaves that smack me in the face is marginally lower and the ground is almost even.

It occurs to me that this was part of some strategy just as a dark, large and solid arm snakes around my middle from behind me, killing my momentum abruptly, and I literally swoosh through the air in a (probably graceless) half-circle like a character in a Street Fighter game before I’m hammered flat onto the forest floor. I can practically hear the “Finish her!... FA-TA-LI-TYY!” echoing in my ears.

(Or was that Mortal Kombat?)

(I should ask Bane and Rune whether we can get an Xbox and start the day by running in a video game instead.)

To be fair, it doesn’t hurt. Much. They’d indeed never let me die, but no one said they’d treat me with kid gloves. They also know by now that I, in spite of my being a fragile, delicate and overall weak ass human, can take it, and exactly how much.

(And that you like it.)

(Yeah, but no one asked you, so.)

In any case, I hit the spongy ground with an “Ouff!” and a breathless curse and take a split second to lie, stunned, on my belly. 

Rediscovering my breath, I try to writhe away, flail my arms to maybe get a hold of the stem of some sturdy vegetation to help me get back up, but to no avail. A hard, hot body pins me down, a hand presses me down on the side and the base of my skull, thereby blocking any head movement and also, conveniently, rubbing my face in the dirt. I sputter.

Personally, I think Bane likes doing that for old time’s sake. The first time I met the guy, I ended up with a mouth full of carpet while he fucked me. Ever since then, he apparently gets off on grinding my face into the floor and hearing my muffled grunts of frustration.

I think it’s Bane’s version of foreplay.

“Too slow, little human,” he chuckles into my ear.

That, and the shit-talking.

(Maybe it’s also because he knows you kinda like it.)

(Yeah, thanks for that insightful commentary.)

Seconds later, I’m hauled over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried to the place I’ve started calling “the bedroom” even though it’s not a room and there are no beds. It’s a small, enclosed area in the heart of the forest protected from dripping dew and falling leaves by a couple of sun sails, laid out with springy, smooth mats made of some type of dried grass, dimpled with seven-foot long, shallow ditches in which the Dryth occasionally rest.

They don’t really sleep as such. Dryth doze, sometimes, like cats. The only one who sleeps like a goddamn log is me because my two guys fuck me to noodly-limbed, even-my-pinky-toes-are-sore, sweat-drenched, jelly-brained-what’s-my-name-again-and-why-am-I-dripping-everywhere exhaustion (and sometimes a bit farther than that) every single day and night.

Woe. Woe is me.

Thing is, they also only let me sleep once they are completely done with me, and then only let me sleep as long as they can be patient. Once it overcomes them again, they shake me awake and sometimes they tell me to run just so they can have fun catching me.

I mean, it’s honestly nice to be wanted with that sort of intensity and insistency, even though I guess it’s not terribly girl power of me to admit it.

I’m living the dream right now, though. It’s stranger than I pictured it in my brain as a teenager, but it’s the dream alright.

While on Earth, I’ve come to realize that the truly fictitious element of all romance novels isn’t the 6-foot-tall-stupid-hot-straight-and-inexplicably-single guy falling for the wallflower girl who’s 10 pounds away from her ideal weight among having other issues, nor the unlikely series of coincidences that brings them together and leads to their unlikely yet inevitable H.E.A.

No, it’s the part where one person is certain about loving and wanting one other person and is uncompromising in their pursuit (and also manages to not be a creepy stalker while they’re at it).

In real life, people are lukewarm and wishy-washy with themselves and one another, especially when compared to my alien boys here. Depressing, I know.

So I really don’t care much if Earthians would tell me that my boys are obsessive, overbearing and controlling, and that I should not indulge and encourage them or whatever. Earth is far, far away.

And to their credit, they did let me put on my boob strap this time before they chased me into the woods. They’re learning.

But man, I wish they’d let me get my eight hours just once, and dial it down with the bloody cardio.

A wave of frustration, fuelled by the leftover adrenaline from the wild chase, has me banging my fists against Bane’s lower back. (Where his kidneys would be if he had any, which I don’t know he has. But just on the suspicion that there might be kidneys, I drum a little more viciously, accompanied by a couple of creative curses.)

Bane chuckles. I can feel it in my midriff which lies across his wide shoulder.

Cocky asshole. Just you wait.

I draw in air, cup my hands around my mouth and holler, “Rune!”

Their game (of which I am, technically speaking, the gaming device) comes with an unwritten rule: Whoever manages to deliver me into the bedroom gets to fuck me first, and the other one has to watch us for a time before joining in.

Of course, this leaves the option of intercepting the other as he makes his way to the bedroom with me and stealing his prize.

It’s macho alpha male bullshit in my opinion, but who am I to deny them their fun? Lord knows the Dryth have too little entertainment in their lives as it is.

(Maybe it’s also because they know you kinda like it.)

(Look, could you not?)

They stick to their own rules like honorable sportsmen, but neither Bane nor Rune much likes to be the one who has to wait on the sidelines. They are not patient, my two Dryth.

“Rune! Over here!” I yell again, and Bane grumbles and quickens his pace considerably, and also claps a hand down on my right butt cheek – just to hold me steady and make sure I won’t fall as he weaves through the underbrush at a breakneck pace, I am certain. I swallow the yelp, not wanting to give him the satisfaction.

I’m just inhaling to get out the next call for my captor’s only natural enemy when there’s a shout from the side and we topple to the floor, hit. I am half-caught (by Bane, I think) and rolled almost gently, getting away with little scrapes and a mild case of vertigo as I lie, spread-eagled, on the tatami for a second, looking up at the dark blue sails that are quickly becoming so familiar. Huh, I must’ve been close to the bedroom the entire time.

Judging by the sounds of flesh hitting muscles and bones and low snarls, Bane and Rune have collided with all the gentleness of two football players at the Superbowl. Just without the clothes or the padding, or the referee, or the general sense of sportsmanship, and adding some serious teeth and bony protrusions and several stones more muscle mass… On second thought, it’s not a good simile at all. Forget I mentioned football players.

Precautionarily, I scramble out of the way in order to give the boys a bit more space to lock horns and find myself crouching behind the flat rock at the one side of the bedroom, peeking over it to see who’s winning.

It’s honestly hard to tell for a bit. When wet and in the aforementioned shade, both Rune and Bane are almost the same shiny dark gray, and they are both wet and dirty from their run through the forest right now. Also, there’s two additional limbs – their prehensile tails – in the mix and their inhumanly shaped torsos and their hips and hip sockets allow for a wider range of movement than a human male could ever have. It all makes it difficult for me to figure out exactly what and whose what I’m looking at at any given point in time.

Think Cirque du Soleil, just more savage, with even more muscle mass and without the flesh-colored panty hose, and add a dash of two indistinguishable CGI robots fighting in close-up in one of those terrible Transformers movies. There, that’s a good simile, I think.

Bane and Rune extreme-graeco-roman-dryth-wrestle it out for a bit, grunting and snarling at one another, and I consider, for just a second, running away to keep the game going.

But then I consider for another second and come to the conclusion that that would mean more running, and that that’s something we’re going to avoid at almost all cost.

So I sit back on my haunches, pluck a bit of moist greenery from a nearby branch and wipe my face and torso and my boob strap, quite worn around the edges after all the tossing about and manhandling, clean (or cleaner) with its dew, and watch them.

Rapt.

I mean, from a purely technical, pragmatic standpoint, what the two males are doing is real pretty to look at. They are both clearly grappling champions and their movements are sleek and sinuous while still packing a massive punch. They also know each other really well. They’re making poetry in motion, together.

From a non-technical, non-pragmatic standpoint… excuse me, but I’m starting to drool a little.

You know, I was never a fan of wrestling before. I may or may not have been an idiot before, I think.

Then again, the WWE doesn’t hold a candle to this. Not even if the WWE dudes were as gloriously naked and nakedly glorious as Bane and Rune are.

And they are hands (and tails and all other appendages) on. Intensely. Not even remotely no homo.

Ohh man, I’m into that. A lot.

It’s not like the two of them ever shy away from one another when I am wedged between them like the lucky bitch I am. There is always plenty of touching and grazing involved, and I’m pretty certain that two guys can, uh, feel each other when they double-team a woman (even if they’re not as generously endowed and in possession of an independently mobile penile unit as the Dryth are). Far as I can tell, Bane and Rune never had a single problem with that.

Until now, however, I have never seen them together from a distance. I was always smack-dab in the middle, always mostly cross-eyed with animalistic lust, never able to appreciate them from afar, and how yummy it looks when they’re locked together like that, all shimmery dark skin and rippling muscles and legs and tails all knotted up together, with Rune on top and Bane underneath him…

Fuck, is it me or is it getting hot in here? I fan my face with the leaf I had just cleaned myself with.

Now kiss, I think and giggle, and the giggle gets stuck in my throat when they do.

Holy. Mother. Mary. And Jo.

It’s a very… Dryth-y kiss – more sensitive, less blunted people might rather call it a “mutual oral mauling”, and a couple others may think they’re just trying to eat each other’s faces – but it’s a kiss, alright. There’s tongues tangling and thrusting and teeth nipping and gasps for breath and dominance and fuuuck me.

Both guys break the kiss and immediately swing their gazes towards me at the same millisecond and I guess I may have moaned those last two words out loud. Oops.

We look at each other for a beat, both pairs of Dryth eyes shimmery with luminescence – curiously, Bane’s eyes have taken a red-orange color that’s more usual for Rune, and Rune’s looking at me through bright brassy yellow irises that I’ve only seen on Bane so far. I’ll wonder about that later, when I’ll be able to string two thoughts together without getting distracted by the pulse pounding between my legs.

“Ah… continue?” I suggest, feeling myself going red in the face for no good reason. I thought I’d lost my last shred of modesty about two years ago in my previous shit show of a job at a brothel at the end of the universe. I’d thought myself embarrassment-proof. I mean, I’m sitting here with a goddamn Dryth spike lodged in my vagina, feeling sort of empty because I’m getting used to having two in there, for Christ’s sakes.

Rune gives a low snarl and starts crawling forward, right towards me, all lupine grace and intensity, glowing eyes fixed on me, and I get a small chill in the back of my neck. His eyes are too bright, the color’s still wrong, and while Dryth aren’t very expressive, especially Rune’s face is not normally so… hard. There’s a harsh set around his mouth, a tightness of muscles in his cheeks that I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s like he turned wild. I can see his erection pointing right at me like a spear.

I can’t examine it any further, though, because Bane grabs his fellow male mid-crawl from below, and immediately, they’re wrestling again, rolling and writhing around and growling low. They’re both going for the jugular this time. I see Rune sink his dagger teeth into Bane’s upper arm. Not a love bite, that. Blood wells forth. I shiver a little.

I guess I sometimes need little reminders that these guys are dangerous. Vicious, sometimes. Volatile. That they’re not human – even though they treat me well enough – and without human inhibitions.

Bane, despite being just an inch or two smaller and not quite as wide in the shoulders, somehow manages to roll Rune onto his belly and lies on top of him, pinning him flat onto the ground just like he did me just a couple of minutes before. He even puts his hand into Rune’s neck, too, his other hand gripping one of his arms and pressing it on his back.

Unlike wimpy old me, Rune has big muscles cording his neck and shoulders and upper back, though, so he fights the hold, bucking like a rodeo horse. His tail comes up and winds around Bane’s throat, boa constrictor style.

Bane somehow ignores this, leans in and bites Rune’s ear.

I blink. What the heck.

He’s… actually biting the shell of Rune’s left ear, adorning black piercings and all.

Rune makes a strangled noise like I’ve never heard any Dryth make before, almost like a desperate shout, and suddenly goes soft underneath Bane. The fray-ended tail of his unwinds from where it was looped around Bane’s neck and falls to the side, twitching gently on the floor. His other limbs stop fighting, too. His fists uncurl and open up. His eyes close.

Surrender. Like a switch has been flicked. Just like that.

It’s amazing to see. I didn’t know that a Dryth could physically do that. Submit. Yield and become soft. I had always thought that something in their DNA or their upbringing (or possibly both) made it impossible to them, hence their fearsome reputation across the universe.

I can hear them both breathing hard even from a couple of feet away. Rune’s eyelids flutter open and I can see their color is back to its normal honey-and-sunset shade, maybe a bit darker. His tail thumps the ground rhythmically. He twists his upper body just a bit and manages to free his right arm from where it was stuck against Bane’s body, then lifts his hand and reaches up to put it against Bane’s shoulder. Not to push him away or fight him off, just for the contact.

And suddenly, they’re both rocking together, with Bane rubbing against Rune, between his thighs because those noises I’ve heard both of them make before plenty of times. Rune gets the bedroom eyes I always see when I’m giving him head, a sleepy, contented expression, and lifts his hips in sinuous counterpoint to Bane’s movements.

Good Lord. My boys are so hot and so beautiful. I literally sigh wistfully, feeling just a little spark of pride in the mix because I like to think that it was me who introduced them to this type of beauty. Who taught them about giving and taking pleasure, taking one’s time. Enjoying it and oneself.

Bane speeds up, apparently nibbling Rune’s ear the entire time. I wonder why the hell I never had that idea. I may have nibbled every other square inch of each of their bodies – I suspect they secretly think it’s adorable when I attack them with my puny human teeth – but not Rune’s ears, even though they were one of the first things that I noticed about him since Bane noticeably doesn’t have any, and neither did any of the other (five) Dryth I had personally encountered up until that point (so far as I can remember anyway).

Once upon a time I also thought that Rune had hair where Bane had none but I have since learnt that the strip of growth streaking his skull is more like the comb of a chicken or some kind of anemone. It’s spongy and sentient, it puffs up a little and changes its hue when he’s agitated (or has some sort of Dryth emotion anyway), and it’s definitely an erogenous zone (or whatever the equivalent of that is for the Dryth).

Right now, it’s practically waving at me, the tips turning a deep, glossy shade of blue-black, and my fingertips are itching to stroke and caress and pull it and rub my palm all over it and I’m already there, I’ve already got up and come out from behind my useless hiding spot and padded over to them.

The lure is just too strong and I am weak for these two.

Both Rune and Bane start purring loudly when I comb my fingers across Rune’s skull and scratch the base of that strip with my fingernails, and then moan low because Bane speeds up yet again. Rune’s tail swishes across the tatami floor in time.

I get flat on the floor, arrange myself and then fit my mouth, upside down and a little awkwardly, against Rune’s just because I feel I need to right now. He tastes like blood from having bitten Bane in the arm earlier, but also like sweet fruit he must have eaten from the trees, and like hot male. Like him. I moan into the kiss and pull him closer, nibble and lick and nip, sucking down his shout of relief once it comes over him. Bane follows promptly, finally letting go of Rune’s ear which is oozing a little bit of blood, his eyes back to their normal coloring as well even though his pupils are so dilated they only leave a golden-yellow corona.

For a time, we lie there in our disjointed little heap, just breathing. I slide my hand from Rune’s head down his neck, to his shoulder, along his arm, his hand and fingers and over to Bane’s shoulder as far as I can reach, and then back. They are both warm to the touch and slick with sweat and forest mist and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about licking them clean right now.

Eventually, Bane gets off his – I’ve always thought of them as ‘friends’, but after this I think I might need a new word – and goes to fetch the cloth from the water bucket which I once put there into the “corner” of the “bedroom”.

The bucket’s just a matter of practicality. There’s lots of sweating and expelling of other bodily fluids going on in this room, and I’m usually not physically able to take a hike all the way to the washing unit (which is inconveniently located all the way up next to the bridge) on account of having had all of my muscle strength, my sense of balance and my proprioception fucked out of me shortly before. But I still like to freshen up every once in a while, hence the convenient little bucket.

I try not to ogle Bane as he crouches by the bucket and wrings out the little towel, but it’s impossible not to. First off, tail notwithstanding, the guy has a mighty fine butt which flexes in a delightsome manner when he crouches.

And also, post-ejaculation, Dryth cocks that don’t get detached for insemination purposes go soft for a short while – which means that the cartilaginous “ribs” that circle the length of the shaft (the ones that make me go ‘whooo!’ with every thrust) loosen up. Those ribs apparently work a little like a corset, so when they loosen, the organ gets bigger and longer and bulbous toward the tip.

God, it’s so… dangly and goofy-looking. I can’t look away. It’s got a pinkish hue, which I didn’t know was possible for slate-gray skin to have.

As Bane turns around, he catches me staring at his junk (again. It’s a habit by now). If he had eyebrows, I’m pretty sure he’d lift one right then. I lift both of mine, and my chin as well, in a challenge.

Bane’s tail tip swishes in a quick little circle.

That’s the Dryth way of showing amusement.

At least I hope it is, given that he’s doing that a lot in my presence.

Bane wordlessly cleans up between Rune’s legs, washes and wrings out the cleaning rag, then comes over to me and motions for me to get into a reclined sitting position. He then frees me from my wilted-looking little boob strap – I don’t bother to argue, the thing isn’t exactly doing much in terms of lifting any more anyway, and being clothed up top makes me feel strangely more naked down below – and commences to wipe me down from my face to my chest.

I don’t argue about this, either, even though it does remind me a little of the time when grown-ups would spit on handkerchiefs and rub at some dirt on my face with them. Grandma Georgia was the worst offender in this truly obnoxious practice.

Bane cleans my cheeks, my chin, my neck and my shoulders, and then both of my breasts, even though there’s a cleaner stripe across them where the brittle leather had sat, and suddenly it doesn’t remind me of Grandma Georgia at all any more.

And then he goes a little lower.

I let my knees fall open almost automatically.

Yep, I’m a happy slutty slut being happy and slutty.

And a little lower still, cleaning me up so gently and surely it makes me swoon and then shiver in delight when the spike inside of me responds to the stimulation.

Bane moves forward and kneels between my spread legs, his entire attention on maneuvering the cloth around my pussy. Boy oh boy, he’s a very thorough Dryth indeed. Wonderful service, 10/10 would let myself get smacked onto the floor again!

Rune pushes in behind me, and I sink back and shamelessly snuggle up to him with a shivery sigh, lifting my arms around his head so I can resume stroking his non-hair. Before long, his arms come around me and his hands cup my breasts, the pads of his thumbs tend to my nipples, already pebbled from the cool air and the dampness left by Bane’s cleaning efforts, and his mouth finds my ear.

Dryth can be accused of many things, but ‘being talkative’ isn’t one of them. That’s because Dryth brains, I have come to understand these past weeks, work pretty much like the universe’s most intelligent chess computer. Even the most benign-seeming move may take hours to weigh, calculate, evaluate and re-evaluate because of the literal millions and billions of possibilities such a move creates down the line.

Thing is, I’m more of a chutes and ladders kinda girl. My approach to verbal communication is a lot more… spontaneous.

(And mostly inane.)

(… rude.)

Luckily, both of my travelling companions/alien abductors/gracious service providers have proven quite teachable in this regard. Bane only takes half a minute to respond to my questions now (as opposed to a full minute, so that’s progress! I guess he has come to the realization that I’m much too unorganized and erratic to have any type of endgame) and Rune even initiates conversation on occasion.

And also, Rune is practically killing it with dirty talk. Seriously, he’s minimalist and not very creative – I think Drythish isn’t exactly the language of love, so Rune doesn’t seem to have too much to work with – but he gets the job done nonetheless and hits all of my sweet spots on the way there.

“I could smell your cunt while you watched us,” he tells me. “Did you touch yourself behind that little rock, Va-l’ree?”

I shiver a bit, and not just because of his warm breath tickling my ear canal. They only say my full name (or adorably attempt to do so) when they mean business.

“I didn’t,” I insist, panting only a little. The spike is doing the come-hither-motion inside of me and it makes my eyes roll back in my head, unable to think about exactly why the fuck I, in fact, didn’t touch myself behind that rock. I guess I was just too (pleasantly) shocked by what I was seeing.
 
“Good,” he purrs. “That cunt is ours to touch.”

Remember when I told you that I find it nice to be wanted so intensely even though it’s caveman bullshit? Yeah, sorry, not sorry, I am way into this. I whimper because fuck.

“Don’t close your eyes,” Rune gently commands me when my eyelids droop from the sensation of having all of my favorite places caressed all at once. “Watch him tend to our cunt.”

And watch I do. I see the cloth whispering up and down between my legs, the dampness making my pubic hair stick, darkened and slick, to my mound. I feel the drops of water tickling the insides of my butt cheeks as they drip onto the floor. Up and down, up and down Bane’s hand goes, along the ticklish, soft part of my inner thighs, my sensitive hip creases, along my seam, tracing my puffy lips like a cool, slightly rough tongue. I twitch my pelvis up and down – whether to increase or decrease the friction, I’m not even sure. It feels good and then too good and then it’s not enough, all within a second. I bite my lip when Bane’s free hand comes to rest on my right thigh, squishing me to the floor hold me still.

“He is cleaning it, but it keeps getting dirty,” Rune states, faking mild surprise about this state of affairs – playfulness suits him so well! – and I know that he knows because he can smell the drops of fluid I’m weeping from between my lips. “Bad little cunt.”

I can’t help chuckling at that – he said it so sincerely, so full of gravity, it’s just funny – but the sound dies in my throat when Rune tweaks my nipples a bit harder as a punishment and squeezes my tits together in his big, dark hands. In turn, I dig my the fingernails of one hand deep into his non-hair and lower the other until I encounter the shell of his ear, jingling with piercings as it is, and slide the pad of my thumb around the side.

Rune stills for a moment, then gives a little groan and gently closes his lips around the shell of my ear, returning the favor by suckling and nibbling me there with the utmost care.

With Rune’s lips against my earlobe, his hands on my tits, and Bane’s fingers and attention between my legs, surrounded by male scent and warmth and sounds, I feel like I’m fucking melting. I writhe in Rune’s arms and under Bane’s ministrations.

Bane’s hand leaves my thigh and clamps around my chin and lower jaw, forcing me to look forward again, into his eyes.

“He told you to watch me,” he growls, forcing my chin down until my eyes point towards the area between my thighs again, and casually also pushes his thumb into my mouth all the way to the knuckle.

Roughly filling my mouth with something, anything, is another one of those things Bane likes to do often. It probably reminds him of the first blowjob he ever got (or rather took). If his physical reaction is anything to go by – his cock is stirring, gradually pulling back up into its familiar ram’s horn shape – I’d say it’s a good memory.

That makes two of us.

I don’t know how many minutes or hours pass in which I’m just floating in ecstasy, teased and caressed and touched all over in that possessive manner that makes my stomach feel all fluttery, while Rune alternately nibbles on and mutters few but perfect words into my ear. I’m in actual tears by the time Bane shows mercy and fits his hips to mine, sliding his long-ready cock into my weeping core. It would be a tight fit even if there wasn’t already a spike in there but Bane somehow makes it work, rocking my inner muscles into submission and then expanding inside of me until there’s literally a bulge on my lower abdomen, like in ridiculous hentai movies.

When I start wailing like a banshee, he feeds his index and middle finger into my mouth – the Dryth version of a pacifier, I guess. I don’t wail so much as moan after that (too busy gagging and choking) and I come hard enough to black out (twice) before he announces that he’s going to stake me again.

It’s not like he’s really giving me a choice, but I nod nonetheless through snot and tears.

“Good girl,” Rune compliments me and rapidly flicks my nipples with his fingertips exactly right, and my entire lower body is vibrating with some sort of endlessly extended orgasm by the time I feel the second spike settle deep into my channel.

I always mean to watch and see exactly what’s happening to a Dryth guy, anatomy-wise, when he stakes someone. Is there a hole? Is it bloody or anything? Or just a smooth crater? Or is the next spike already coming in, like a second tooth when the baby tooth falls out late? I’m really curious, but every time one of my boys plugs me up, I’m too distracted and my brain is… well.

Hot porridge.

I believe they’re doing that on purpose.

I also believe I don’t mind too much.
 

After a brief, much-needed and well-deserved nap, I find myself all alone in the bedroom.

Post-coital snuggling is, unsurprisingly, also not part of Dryth culture. Hell, coitus in that sense is not part of Dryth culture. I figured I should introduce them bit by bit - boiling a frog and all that – and let it slide so far. Not much longer, though.

As soon as I find my legs again, I manage to get out of “bed”, schlep myself through the forest – limping and walking just a bit bow-legged because of the new, lively passenger in my nether chute – and towards the nearest exit hatch.

As far as I can tell, this space ship is basically tubular, with two smaller tubes nestled inside like a babushka doll. The space between the first and second tube is where trees of the indoor forest grow, for maximum effective surface usage and maximum insulation and a couple other clever, sciency reasons my ignorant, physics-averse human brain can’t think of. The innermost shell holds the engines and all that mechanical stuff that keeps us afloat in space and keeps the lights on. The middle shell, the one sandwiched between the forest and the engine, is where the control rooms and mundane stuff like supply closets and pantries full of deep-frost freezers stacked with foodstuffs are located.

That, and the washing unit I mentioned before, which is basically a very niftily designed bathroom and, right now, my destination. My crazy post-run-post-sex hair, the dirty soles of my feet, my still-throbbing pussy and I need a long soak in the bath.

When I get there, I slip inside and switch the lights on. I only notice Bane standing in the shower when I pull the door shut behind me, and it makes me jump. Holy crap, why does he have to take his shower in the pitch dark?

We look at one another for a long moment, him with his hand hovering over the console that starts the shower spray, me with my hand still on the door latch.

“Uh, hello,” I begin, remembering my manners and pointedly not checking out his middle bits right now even though the curiosity is killing me. Some manners are tenacious. “Sorry for interrupting. You didn’t lock the door, so I thought this was unoccupied.”

He blinks.

I blink.

Sigh. Intercultural communication is hard sometimes.

“I can leave if you want,” I offer. “Or you can shower and I can bathe?” I add a smirk because that’s exactly the same suggestion he made when we first met. I like to think that he demanded we wash up separately because he’d absolutely have jumped my bones otherwise like some sort of wild beast before anyone would’ve had the chance to get clean.

He shakes his head. “No bathing,” he says.

“Okay,” I reply and try not to be weirdly disappointed.

(He just literally spent hours touching, cleaning and fucking you. Give the man some breathing room.)

(Also, the cleaning unit is not exactly large. The bathtub would take some of his shower space. It’s not practical.)

(And doesn’t he deserve some privacy?)  

I know, I know. I do know all this.

I flick the door latch and the hydraulics hiss quietly.
 
“I’ll wait outs-“

“No,” he barks, and adds, “You have a shower,” and then, “We have the same shower.”

I stand there a little dumbstruck for a moment, then find my tongue. “O--kay. Alright. Yeah, that’ll… that would work, too. The shower is big enough and I’m, you know, comparatively-“

“Ree,” he only says, cutting me off, and presses the button on the console. Immediately a heavy rainfall of steaming water shrouds his big body in misty white and gray.

I hurry to step into the unit with him and pull the faux-glass door shut so the rest of the unit doesn’t get sprayed.

Once inside, the shower doesn’t really seem so big any more at all, or maybe it’s just Bane taking up all the space with his presence. Good grief, I’ve been with them for weeks now, having phenomenal sex with them multiple times a day, and still I feel sort of giggly and nervous right now because we’re not usually this close.

It’s a different type of close.

His yellow eyes gleam at me through the steam, its intensity only slightly softened by all the water vapor.

It takes about four seconds before the silence and the closeness get awkward.

“Would you like me to, uhmm, wash you?” I grab the sponge from its little bowl on the shower rack. It’s a little bit like a loofah, but natural and, as many things are in space, alive and sentient. Some sort of plant, I think, that soaps itself up. Smells nice, too. “I can do your back if you do mine?”

After several long moments, he turns around, giving me his endlessly broad back in answer.

I happily proceed to scrub his back from the base of his neck to his left and right shoulders, down his spine and to his sides, all the way down to his gorgeous backside, taking some extra care with the base of his tail which is the only part of him that’s moving through the entire procedure. Its tip his trailing patterns through the water that’s accumulating around our feet.

“You are allowed to breathe, you know,” I remind him with a little laugh, and put my hand on his hip. “Turn around. Gonna do the rest of you, too.”

He throws me a look over his shoulder which I can’t interpret, but eventually does turn around to face me again. I keep my gaze strictly above his waistline – not that that’s a hardship, really – and proceed to swish the soapy sponge across his pectorals, using my free hand to feel and trace the unfamiliar ridges and valleys of his upper torso with some fascination.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Dryth anatomy these past weeks, but whenever I was close enough to actually touch them, it was usually just to hold on to something for dear life in the throes of passion. I never had the time to properly explore.

Dryth have a partial exoskeleton going on in their upper bodies. Most fascinatingly, it’s not entirely symmetrical, like a human skeleton basically is. Lord knows exactly what the purpose of that may be. Biology class taught me that bipeds ideally have their weight distributed evenly on the two feet and are therefore ideally axisymmetrical along their length.

Then again, Dryth aren’t exactly bipeds in the sense of being two-footed. Their two legs end in two foot-like structures each. They have a front foot and a back-and-sides foot, with toes that end in claws. It’s pretty wild.

I paint big soapy circles onto his chest, reaching farther and farther down with each revolution, until I skim his groin where his penis had been, and will be again soon. In the muted light, all I see is a whole lot of shadow, and before I can skim my free palm over it, Bane catches my wrist quite abruptly.

“I’m sorry,” I hush out. “Does it hurt? Is that spot tender, or…?”

Gotta admit, the curiosity is verging hard into ‘morbid’ right now if I think about it. I feel like Doubting Thomas who wanted to poke around Jesus’ open nail holes with his unwashed fingers.

Bane shakes his head ‘no’ and says nothing for a good, long while. He also doesn’t let go of my wrist, though, so I know the cogs behind his forehead are still whirring.

“I am not Dryth,” he eventually says, and when he sees me frown in utter confusion, flicks his bright eyes downwards, along his own body. “I am not Dryth at present.”

Understanding dawns. ‘Dryth’ is the name the universe is using for their entire species, but for the Dryth themselves, it just means “male”. Their females are called Drahta.

The penis is, apparently, the literal “manhood” for a Dryth, as well, just as it is for humans (for the most part anyway).

And Bane thinks not having a cock makes him less than. 

That’s both sad and also almost funny. Like this specimen of male perfection could ever be diminished by such trivial stuff as temporarily absent bits. Hell, even permanently absent bits wouldn’t make a dent in his utter maleness.

“I met ‘Dryth’ at the table, at the bar,” I remind him. “At least one of them put his slimy hands on me and wanted to eat me alive right there, clothes and all. Without even having claimed me before. Without a proper challenge.”

Bane snorts, angry on my behalf and for being reminded of the inappropriate behavior of his fellow Dryth that day. The eating part as such wasn’t really the problem for him – it’s the lack of proper etiquette that made him mad. Which is why the other guy quickly lost the hand with which he was grabbing me.

I step closer to him and tilt my head up, giving his mouth a long, meaningful, pointed glance, while I drop my loofah to the floor and slide my soapy hand gently but surely down his flank.

“If you ask me, you are more than ‘Dryth’,” I say. “You are not them, not even close. You are Bane. You have been more than Dryth to me, always.”

He’s stopped breathing again, I notice with a little glee. It’s good to know that I can take his breath away as much as he takes mine on a regular basis.

He hasn’t moved to interrupt my hand’s slow journey towards his middle, so I take that as a go-ahead, and my fingers reach the spot where his “manhood” will re-grow in due time. There’s…

Well. Uhm. That was unexpected.

This feels… really familiar.

Turns out when he said ‘I am not a man right now’ he was also being quite literal in the anatomical sense.

There’s a strange clicking sound in his throat and his breath, thankfully resumed before he could pass out, stutters out from between his lips and tingles against mine, that’s how close we suddenly are. His tail wraps around my left calf like he needs some support. The fingers that are still clamped around my wrist tighten a little in warning.

“Tender?” I ask him, pulling my fingers off what I can only describe as… a… vagina.

There’s a vertical gash formed by puffy folds of skin around a teardrop-shaped indentation and a hole (from which in due time his new penis will grow, I’m sure), so… it does feel a lot like a pussy. I’m sure it’d look like one, too, but no way in hell am I going to avert my eyes from his face right now.

Man, Dryth are such a fascinating bunch. The strength, speed and agility, coupled with their high-performance brains, the wonky exoskeleton, the super-flexible hip sockets, the weird feet, the glowy eyes that change color and the groovy pupils, the detachable, sentient, autonomously functional penis with the testes fused to the base and the ribs along the side, the tail that can also do some wicked things, the frilly, super-powered tongue, the non-hair and the (apparently) magic ears…

(It’s almost like they’re from another planet, Val!)

A planet on which, I’m fairly certain, nobody would ever do what I’m doing to this Dryth right now. Nobody ever gives them blowjobs and handjobs and any other type of job. Nobody ever begs them to touch here or lick there. Nobody reaches out to them to return a favor. Nobody shares softness with them. Nobody on that bloody planet ever bloody kisses them even though they have lips to die for.

For a second, I’m completely stunned by the realization that I am truly the most privileged bitch in the galaxy because I get to be that person who does all those things.

“Does it feel good when I touch you there?” I ask him straight. I need more information.

He kisses me hard.

Now there’s an answer.

What follows is probably a little similar to the first human man drowning in physical euphoria and frantic anxiety all at once as he discovers just how bewilderingly awesome pegging feels. I literally get to hold Bane upright as he shivers and groans partially untranslatable curses in Drythish and kisses me with a growing desperation that lights a fire in my gut, stroking his tongue into my mouth in the same rhythm that I stroke him with my fingers, penetrating shallowly with every pass.

For a long, long moment, I forget all about everything and just am. In this moment. With another living, breathing being to whom I’m giving pleasure. Receiving pleasure from him, both indirectly through his spike massaging my insides and directly through the sensual delight of touching and seeing and hearing him share himself with me. It’s… beautiful.

I don’t register the moment he climaxes – I guess it happens inside of his body at this stage? – but one second to the next, my touch seems to be too much and he pulls my hand away quite roughly.

He stands there, panting hard enough to make his exoskeleton creak, now holding both of my wrists, the light in his eyes pulsing.

His look says that I just rocked his universe.

I can’t help it, I smirk at him.

“You’re welcome,” I singsong. “Now, would you kindly wash my back for me?”

I turn, sliding out of his twin grip, and spend several long moments gathering up all of my hair just to give him a moment.

There’s silence between us for a long couple of minutes as he washes my back and then even my legs all the way down to the soles of my feet, coming up again at the front and passing the sponge over every square inch of skin, all the way to the tips of my fingers.

Then, there’s exfoliating, hair-trimming and shaving, nail-clipping and nail-filing, and brushing and conditioning to be done and he even helps me with all of those without me asking. It makes me smile, just like the thought that he personally stocked this bathroom with all those girly products for my sake. He’s not verbal often, but he says a lot in his own way.

When he slides his fingers into my hair, brushing by the shells of my ears, I am reminded of Rune. Figuring that there will never be a better opportunity to ask, and never a higher likelihood of getting an answer out of tall, dark and taciturn here, I just come right out with it.

“What happened earlier? With you and Rune?”

He stops in his tracks for a second, then resumes and – predictably – doesn’t give me an answer. Yeah, didn’t think he’d come right out with it.

“You fought. Then his eyes turned your color, and yours turned his color. You were super-intense for a second. He bit you.”

I pointedly look at the black crescent of a wound on his upper arm.

“Mating frenzy,” is all he offers in terms of explanation.

I tisk. It’s like pulling teeth with this guy every time. Then again, that’s not the biggest, most interesting tooth I want right now, so I let it go.

“And then you bit his ear and he… I don’t know. Yielded? What’s… what happened?”

Bane pulls his hands from my hair and stills for a long time. Even his tail is still. Man, that’s a lot of heavy thinking right there.

“Look,” I sigh, when there’s no response of any kind forthcoming after at least two minutes, “I realize that I’m probably well into top secret Dryth stuff here. Like, under no circumstances can any other species learn that the fearsome Dryth race can be brought to heel and made into the most docile kitten by biting their ear. I get that.”

I look straight into his eyes so he knows I’m sincere when I ask, “You know I’d never voluntarily tell anyone anything I experienced with you and Rune, don’t you? Not that I’d ever get the chance… right?”

Saying that, with all its implied meanings and subtexts, is probably a little bit underhanded of me. But I really don’t want these two to let me go. I hope they won’t ever get tired of me – I know if

(when)

if they do it will probably suck, badly – but if the worse comes to worst, I need some insurance that they can’t just put me back where they found me, or into some similar place.

After Bane and Rune, I don’t think I can ever let any other man or alien touch and grope my body again. Nor do I want to.

“So anyway,” I continue, breaking eye contact. “I figure some Dryth are just different from others. Some have ears and whatever that stuff is that grows on Rune’s head, and some don’t. Now I didn’t get a good look at the other guys on that table but I don’t think any of them had ears…? I mean, there’s so many of you across the universe, there must be several different… like, races? For example, even on Earth we have black people and white people and all shades of brown and red in between, and some would even say Asians are, like, yellow-ish. And that’s just the skin. Some people are left-handed, some have freaky pale eyes and some people can roll up their tongues like so-“

“You will not tell,” he interrupts me, and I stop my rambling as his scant words sink in.

The syntax says ‘question’, but the tone of words says ‘warning’ going on ‘threat’.

But below the surface, what it really is… is a promise.

It’s the closest any of the two has ever got to verbally assuring me that they plan on keeping me around. That they won’t let me go, that they don’t want me in contact with any other alien.

Again, this probably looks awful from the outside, like some girlfriend of an obsessed boyfriend who’s locked up by him in his basement and developing Stockholm syndrome or something.

From where I stand, though, it’s the first time my life had any hint of auspiciousness since that evening I drove my Volvo home from work and came to floating through the asteroid belt on an intergalactic tow truck. Hell, even before that, my life wasn’t all that bright or exciting.

Right now, I have a place to sleep. I have plenty of food and water and hygiene, the air I breathe is clean. I occasionally have my peace.

I have two fascinating and wonderful if occasionally terrifying companions in Bane and Rune.

I don’t have a manager because my only “job” is making and keeping my two boys happy. Which makes me, technically, self-employed… and man, I should have tried that long ago.

My life is awesome and I don’t want it to change anytime soon. I’m so tired of changes.

So when he says, “You will not tell”, what I hear is You will stay with us. It makes my heart jolt, hard.

“I will not tell,” I swear to him. “Never. Not to anyone.” I will stay with you.

Bane takes my words in and eventually nods. “You will not tell,” he repeats solemnly and lifts his hands into my hair again, continuing the scalp massage/conditioning I had interrupted with my nosy question.

I feel a little knot form in my throat and try not to cry. I hadn’t even noticed that this had weighed on me, but it feels good to have it out of the way.

He takes another couple of minutes before he opens his mouth again, just as he brushes both of my ears with his fingers.

“We call them khyruna,” he says, three words in English and the last in what I assume is Drythish.

My translator chip jumps right in.

“’Crowns’,” I parrot the computer voice. “That word means ‘crowns’.”

“It is crown,” Bane confirms. “It is blood. It is power.”

I nod. Sounds just like monarchy. A crown is just an item, a round little pot someone puts on their head, but it’s also a symbol of authority and lineage.

“All Dryth are born with kyrhuna – with… ears, like him.”

Him being Rune, I suppose.

“With uhr’kideh, like him. With hraleia, like him.”

My translator doesn’t give me a translation for the first Drythish word – something that ended in ‘day’ – and translates the second one (which ended in ‘Leia’, like the princess) to ‘gift’.

When I ask Bane to clarify, he combs a finger through my hair from the middle of my forehead all the way to the back of my cranium, along the parting. “Uhr’kideh,” he repeats, and I realize it’s the name for the non-hair growing on Rune’s head.

Great. I can’t pronounce that properly. I’ll keep referring to it as ‘non-hair’, I guess.

“Hraleia is inside,” Bane continues, pointing a taloned index-finger first at the base of my throat and then at my temple. “It is hearing, but not being heard. Listening and being listened to. It is…” He goes silent.

“Complicated,” I finish for him because I have not even the faintest idea what the hell he means. Then, I remember what he just said. “Wait. All Dryth are born with all that? But… you-”

“They are removed.”

I stare at him, then get on my tiptoes and reach both of my hands up to his head, grabbing and turning it so I can take a better look. He leans down a little, indulging me.

There’s the opening to the ear canal, shaped like a bean, nestled into what I always thought of as one of his many ridges, this one vaguely C-shaped. But if I look closely, I can see that the top of that ridge is a little duller in color than the rest of him. A scar. And the top of his head is also too smooth, with the same papery texture that human skin gets when a third degree burn scars over.

I almost ask whether it hurt to do that, and who did that to him, and whether it happened voluntarily, but at the last moment I decide I don’t really want to know. I already suspect I wouldn’t like the answers anyway.

“Why are they removed?” I ask instead, my heart strangely heavy for him. Being a Dryth sounds like less and less fun the more I learn about them.

“It is a disadvantage in battle,” he says and I almost sigh and roll my eyes. Such a Dryth answer: We cut some bits off our heads because they make us vulnerable in battle. Instead of, like wearing a helmet or something, like normal people would.

Then again, a helmet isn’t very practical to start with and can be lost in battle, and remembering the drastic effect the ear bite had on Rune and the effect I have on him whenever I run my fingers through his, uh, uhr-something, I guess there’s a point? Maybe?

Life in the Wild Wild Space has definitely deadened and blunted some of my sensibilities, but mutilation is still a step too far for me. I don’t want to wrap my head around this one.

“Do many Dryth keep their ears and the… the hair-stuff?” I ask, a little bit hopefully. “Like Rune?” Maybe there’s a trend in Dryth society to outlaw this tradition?

“No,” Bane says, and pauses for a long moment. Just when I think he might open his mouth and go on explaining exactly why Rune still has his features, he just says, “Not many” and leaves it at that.

I sigh, then review all the new info he has given me.

“Wait, so… kee-roo-nah…” I mangle the word for ‘ears’ so badly that my translator doesn’t even pick it up, and I gesture at my own ears just to make sure Bane knows what I mean. “You say it means ‘crowns’, but also blood and power, so… Does that… Does that mean that Rune is, like, royalty?”

Bane doesn’t answer me, but it’s not his usual total silence. I can see the answer. It’s in the set of his shoulders. My eyes go wide.

“Oh my god, he is, isn’t he?” I continue and have a realization mid-thought. “Rune, kee-runa. It’s even in his name! The ‘rune’-part of his name, that’s not really his name but his title?”

That means I have been calling him ‘your majesty’ or something this entire time and he never even told me, that dickbag.

No verbal answer from Bane, which is an answer in its own right.

“Holy shit!” I laugh, clapping my hand over my mouth because my voice is so loud inside the confines of the bathroom. I’m suddenly somehow star-struck by the guy I’ve been fucking for weeks now even though his status really means absolutely nothing to me.  Still, decades of MTV, TMZ and Hello!Magazine consumption has conditioned me for this moment. Tee-hee, I fucked a celebrity!

(Not just you, Val!)

The realization hits me, so absurdly astounding that I can’t stop the words from spilling out of my big mouth. “Bane, you bit and fucked the king!”

“Crown prince,” Rune’s voice says behind me and I yelp, flinch and whirl around so quickly I slip on the slick bathroom floor. Bane catches me by the upper arm before I can land on my ass though.

“And he did not fuck me,” Rune continues evenly but I still spy some spark of humor in the way his tail undulates. “His aim is atrocious.”

Bane gives a very human-sounding snort at that and yanks me back onto my feet just to shove me forward and into Rune’s waiting arms.

“Ask him your questions, curious human,” Bane grumbles and leaves us alone in the bathroom, somehow managing to slam the hydraulic door behind him.

Rune’s frayed tail makes a quick little circle.
 

TBC

Hello! You’re still here! That’s a pleasant surprise, considering what you just read!
Wanna know how the story goes on?
…
Wait, you do? What, really?
You’re weird. I like you!
Next part’s coming right up. Have fun!
xo cydia