He rolled against my clit again, and I let out a whimper.
"But first I'll need to search all of you," he murmured, that husky tone to his voice again. "I've heard that human women can hide weapons insi-"
"Oh, this is not about searching me, so don't even start," I gasped. "You want to fuck me, so fuck me. Put it in me."
"It would be my pleasure," he laughed, and then he slid into me, parting my flesh as he dove into the wet heat of my need, filling me up.
The size was perfect. I was filled to the brink of ecstasy as he pumped into me, thrusting his filament in and out of me like I was impaled on the finger of a space god, and all I could do was take it, take every inch of it, and let him lift me up to the next peak of my wanton existence.
I came, hard and unrelenting, my body clutching at him as I writhed in his grip, impaled upon the tendrils of his lust.
I came down from the peak, limp in his grasp, the soft slurping sound of him sliding in and out of me still, slowly, a gentle stroke to ease me down from the convulsing peak of my own pleasure.
But I wasn't satisfied.
I wanted more.
"Are you satisfied with your search?" I managed to get out, almost losing the words to the sensation of him pulling out of me.
"Yes," he replied, a note of humor in his voice. "Though I think I may need to come up with more reasons to search you again. You taste... delectable."
"You can taste me?" I asked. I was completely cocooned in the filaments now. There was space around my upper body, but my lower body was completely enveloped in them. The opening to my room was gone, replaced by a white glowing wall of the strands, as if he had sucked me into him. A horrifying thought suddenly struck me. "You aren't eating me, are you? I didn't just get swallowed by a giant alien space whale, did I?"
"Space whale?" he asked. "As I said, I am much bigger than a whale, but no, I am not eating you. I don't eat living creatures, just plants."
"Why can't I see my room then?" I asked.
"I thought you wanted to come see me," he said. There was a tentative note in his voice, almost fragile. "So I started transporting you to my center. I can return you to your room if you prefer?"
"No, I want to see you," I said. "Please take me to your center."
I really wanted to know what he looked like, even though my post-coital reaction was now terrified that I had made a mistake. Maybe I should have gone to the courtship office and gotten a breakdown on his species before hooking up with him. What if his kind travelled around the universe looking for alien women to pick up and leave? What if I were one of dozens of women he had gotten with? He said he was only interested in me, but what if he were only interested in me until he got what he wanted from me?
My hands clenched around his filaments, driven to grip him by my panicked thoughts, and he responded.
He curled up around them, wrapping them up, his filaments sliding up my wrists as he held me, squeezing gently.
My thoughts melted away with the physical touch, the pressure that soothed me.
"No one but family has come to my center before," he said. The filaments moved all around me, rippling as if they were water, and I realized that I must be moving. He was carrying me through him, like I was bobbing in an inner tube in a gentle river, so placid that I couldn't tell I was moving except for the swaying of the trees as they drifted on by. "My kind has to be very careful about that."
Even though he was a leviathan and I was a mere mortal, I could relate to that in my own way. I didn't let anyone in. I didn't tell any of the guys I had dated about how my anxious thoughts would swirl up around me, tearing apart every moment and overanalyzing it until it was ripped to shreds with the sharp edges of my fears. When I dated, I wore a mask to hide who I was. The only part of me I let show was the art I made and wore, the colors I draped myself in to help display the molten inner wild of my mind.
"Why me?" I asked.
"It helps that I know so much about you," he replied. "As much as it was inappropriate for me to go through everything, being able to see so many aspects of your life, being able to have so many details about you, has crafted a picture about who you are as a person, a picture that is vividly matched by how you show up in person. You are lovely, online and off, inside and out, and I have never before met a woman who has captured my imagination with the intrigue of what she might do should she have all the resources she could ever dream of at the tip of her fingers. I would like your permission to adore you, Beth, and every moment I spend with you has made me realize that you deserve absolute certainty. Taking you here, showing you my vulnerability, is exactly that."
His words took my breath away, but not as much as the sight that opened up in front of me.
The wriggling white wall in front of me peeled back on either side, like curtains drawn open to reveal the stage. The room in front of me was made up entirely of neurofilaments. They were the curving, rounded walls, the ceiling, the floor, holding their shape to make a large cylinder of a room, like the inside of a grain silo. In the center of the room, they lifted up from the floor to hold the reclined form of an unconscious man. The filamentswere wrapped around his legs and waist, hiding them from me, but his chest and arms were exposed, firm and muscular.
The filaments around my legs withdrew and shifted, and I found myself lifted and set down gently to standing. The floor was firm yet soft under my feet as I took a few steps forward toward the man. He had ashy black skin, and the exposed surface of his chest and arms displayed even, yet lithe muscle tone, like he was a professional swimmer rather than a heavy bodybuilder. He had pointed ears, and his hair was made up of white, thick dreadlocks.
I blinked and did a double-take, my mind adjusting as I realized that my first impression was incorrect.
They weren't dreadlocks. They were filaments.
The filaments were anchored into his head and the back of his neck, like he was trapped in a pod in the matrix, but the machines needed to access multiple parts of his brain through his skull, not just connect to the base of it. Did Masak want to do this to me? Did he want to shave my head and plug me into him, to use my brain like it was a processor, just a part of him? Was this a trap I'd fallen into with my own eagerness to get to know another being without the safety of a third party to mediate our differences? I'd made a mistake, a huge mistake.
