Jude removed his fingers from Al’s hair and began to rub his back.
“That is my ship,” Al said, surprised when his voice came out small.
“Yeah,” Jude agreed sadly.
The two of them looked at the pictures in silence. They were blurry. If Al didn’t already know what his own ship looked like, and the location of where he had crashed, it would have been difficult to prove that it was indeed a spacecraft they were taking away.
But it was, without a doubt, his ship, and they were, most definitely, taking it away. The pictures showed the progression of them tearing apart the remains of his ship and hauling it off somewhere, just as Jude had warned him would happen the night they met. The last picture showed the crater in the desert sand, abandoned and empty.
“They took it,” Al whispered.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Jude pressed his lips to Al’s shoulder. He could feel the pressure through his thin shirt. “How do you feel? Are you all right?”
Al considered the question. His ship hadn’t been salvageable, not really, and Jude had told him to expect this outcome. Still, it was jarring to see the reality of it.
“It was not a good ship,” Al said. “It was old and bad, like your car, but still, it wasmine, and I felt love for it.” He clicked his tongue. “I think that perhaps I feel sadness at the loss, even though I should not. It was broken and I was not going to be able to make it be fixed.”
“Sadness doesn’t have to be logical. You can be sad just because it sucks.”
A strange burning sensation Al had never felt before pricked at the corners of his eyes, but it went away once he blinked a few times in rapid succession. He shifted around on the bed so that he and Jude were face to face.
“It makes sense that you’re sad,” Jude continued, speaking soothingly and stroking Al’s cheek with his thumb. The light contact wasn’t enough to flood Al with Jude’s emotions, but he felt sparks of it like a small shock from an electrical charge. It did not feel unpleasant. “Even if you couldn’t have fixed it, it’s still got to feel a little like being stranded more permanently. You poor thing, you must be homesick.”
Al shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I do not feel homesickness, Jude. Maybe without you I would feel this way, but you are here with me. My family, my planet… they are important to me, yet these things do not always make me feel happiness. But you make me feel happiness all the time. I feel gratitude for that. Of all the humans, I feel very much luck that it was you who found me, Jude. I do not know what I would have done if it had not been you.”
Jude’s cheeks went red, and his shyness was so strong that Al could feel it even with a simple brush of Jude’s thumb on his cheek.
“I’m glad it was me, too,” he said with a kind smile. “You’re a pain in my ass, but I gotta admit, I’ve gotten pretty fond of you—even if you talk to cats in French and refuse to take off your lanyard.” He gave Al’s lanyard a gentle tug to punctuate his point.
Al smiled back. “Have daytime unconsciousness, Jude,” he said. “Do not feel worry for me.”
“We’ll figure everything out. You know that, right? I won’t make you do any of this alone.”
“I know this.”
And Al meant it. It was one thing of which he had no doubt.
Jude, placated by his honesty, nodded, then yawned. He snuggled in closer to Al, and Al wrapped his arms around him the way he knew he liked. Jude went unconscious a short increment of time later, his body too fatigued from nurturing their children to remain awake any longer.
But Al remained awake, watching the rise and fall of Jude’s chest.
The feeling of sadness remained, just a little, but Al hardly noticed, because in that increment of time, with Jude there in his arms, it was completely overshadowed by the feeling of love.
9
Jude
Jude whimpered into the crook of Al’s neck as Al stroked his cock with his strong yet surprisingly soft hand. They were face to face in the too-hot bed, both stripped nude in lieu of pajamas, as had become habit. Jude’s head was still fogged with sleep, and he bucked helplessly into Al’s fist, mind too clouded and body too horny for him to feel any shame about how needy he was being. Although, to be honest, he doubted he’d be any better even if he were wide awake. These days, whenever Al so much as breathed the suggestion of sex in Jude’s direction, he was gone. Just goodbye, no longer in this zip code, all sense and reason blasted out of him into outer space. Even at his most alert, one look from Al was all it took for Jude to lose himself completely to heady, uncontrollable lust.
And who could blame him?
Sex with Al was sex on steroids. Jude had never come so hard or been so aroused. And it wasn’t just that Al had a body sculpted from the material made in Jude’s wettest dreams—it was the way Al touched him, and how attentive he was to Jude’s needs. Sure, being an almost illegal level of hot helped, but at the core, what made sex with Al so great was Al—not the man he was pretending to be.
Case in point, the hand job he was giving Jude was so good, it should have been criminal.
With other partners, hand jobs tended to be reserved for quickies when running late to class, or as Band-Aids for disappointing sex. Jude was all too familiar with guys who achieved post-nut clarity, realized, “Oh, shit, you didn’t come yet, did you, babe?” and followed it up with a few half-hearted tugs at his dick that were clearly being performed out of begrudging obligation alone.
