Now he felt within him a force that seemed capable of triumphing over his sense and his intellect—what he felt for Mina.
If Mina asked him for Old Celox, he would give it to her.
“We have to find a way,” he said, not finishing the thought aloud. There was no need. Voso knew his mind without him speaking it. They had to find a way to make Mina want to stay.
Mozok kissed her on the head and let the sensation travel through him. It blocked out his thoughts temporarily, and he stared at the clearing sky, trying to think of a way to accomplish the pure opposite of what he had set out to do.
CHAPTER16
Clawing through layers of deep sleep, Mina’s consciousness came back to her slowly, and then, suddenly, as she realized that the warm, strong bodies of her two lovers were not near her for the first time in many, many hours. She felt out for them before opening her eyes, because the exhaustion that had settled in her body was so complete that she didn’t want to even lift an eyelid.
But they were gone. She opened her eyes to verify this and looked around at the room she had barely noticed when they had first brought her to it. Her eyes settled on a calming aquarium full of sea creatures, and she sensed that the room, which she had spent so many hours in without thinking of it, was Mozok’s room. She sat up and thought of calling out to them but found a note and a tray at the foot of the bed.
Please eat, the note read. The tray was piled high with exotic fruits that Mina did not recognize, and what seemed to be a type of bread. She reached for them and began trying them all, finding herself so hungry and thirsty that she couldn’t stop herself, even when she had the brief worry that some of them might be toxic to her. She dismissed the concern as she bit into sweet and juicy fruits of bizarre flavors that she might not have enjoyed under any other circumstances. She downed a very cold jug of water and then also a carafe of some kind of juice, which she was grateful tasted mostly like lemonade.
She held the note between her fingertips and smiled, biting into a piece of warm bread. “Oh my God,” she said, her mouth full of the delicious, roll-shaped bread. It had the consistency of a very fine baked good, like a croissant, but somehow even better. She ate three and was still hungry.
As her thirst and hunger were sated, she began to reflect on what had transpired among them over the past—what would it have been? Several days? Week? She didn’t know. Time had flowed without her being aware of it. There were only segments of unknown length, punctuated by the almost excruciating highs of her climaxes.
Between her legs, a pleasing soreness pervaded. When she thought about it, though, it didn’t make her want to rest. It only made her long for the two of them to return, to take her again, to be enveloped in their embrace.
She knew it was madness. It went against everything she had taught herself to believe, about relationships, about men, about what she wanted. She had sworn, after her now brother-in-law had betrayed her, that she would never trust another male again. Let alone an alien, or better stated, two. How could she be feeling what she was feeling for a species so distant from her own? How could she trust them?
And yet, in much the same way that Mozok described his feelings for her, it did not feel like a decision or a thought. It felt like a biological imperative that she could not evade or push out of her mind. It felt right, and even if she had learned not to trust anyone, perhaps this could be different.
After a while, she began to wonder where they were and got curious about her surroundings. She was sore and tired, but she had also lain in bed for a very long time, she could tell by the way her muscles craved a stroll.
“Mozok?” she called out. “Voso?”
There was no answer, so she climbed out of the bed and looked at the aquarium while she stretched. She wished that they had given her a note telling her what they were doing, but she supposed she could wander around and find them if she needed to.
She strolled through Mozok’s suite of rooms, admiring his aquariums. A sea creature that seemed almost as playful as a puppy followed her and seemed to be smiling through the glass. When she stopped to look at it, it stopped as well, and when she lifted a hand, the creature did as well. She laughed and played with it for a while, having a hard time leaving it behind. “I’ll come back,” she told it, but it still looked as sad as a dog with whom you’d stopped playing fetch.
Mozok had an enormous pool in his suite of rooms, even larger than hers. She looked into it and dipped a toe. But it was unfathomably deep—perhaps twenty feet, and the sides seemed to be made of glass, with sea creatures swimming in the tanks. She sat down on the side with her feet in the water, but found herself too frightened to jump in. Perhaps some day.
She wondered what Voso’s quarters were like. It was so strange, that they could all have descended from such dissimilar lines of ancestry, and yet be so similar in so many other ways.
She shook her head. This was all so crazy that at moments it defied her ability to believe it. She half-expected to wake from a dream, and sometimes she even tested herself to see if she was dreaming by feeling the physical world around her. Even though none of this was a fantasy she would have constructed from her own imagination, it had a fantastic feel to it.
She sat for a long time, hypnotized by the fish and the warm water. Outside, the city was peaking through the hazy clouds, no longer dark and menacing.
The storm was over.
But instead of the thrill of victory that she had expected, she felt lost. She didn’t want the storm to end anymore, or to think about the very real decisions that lay before her.
In the dark, as they made love, when Voso was inside of her and unable to separate from her, she had been unable to even remember a world outside of them. In the many, many hours, perhaps days, that they had been so entangled, she had not thought once of anything but them, and pleasure, and love. She had forgotten that she was Human, that she lived on Earth, that there was a Trothplight or a storm or a real estate deal anywhere in the universe at all.
She leaned back on her hands. The last time she had felt like this—
She cut her thoughts off, not wanting to re-live the betrayal of her brother-in-law or her sister. But the pang of hurt that usually accompanied her thoughts seemed dull and harmless.
She had fought for so many years against this happening!
“Remember,” she told herself quietly. It was a habit of hers, a habit of mind she had sworn to always uphold. Remember the pain of betrayal, so that you are always armed against it.
She tried to turn this feeling on, to direct it at Voso and Mozok. But when she did, she could feel only their love, see only the expression in Voso’s eyes as he mated with her. She could only hear sincerity and protectiveness.
She closed her eyes. Perhaps there was a way for this to work? Could she live here, with them? If she lost this contract, she would likely lose her job, and if she lost the commission from this job, she would be unable to move her parents from their awful existence on Callia-14.
