Anxiety rushed through me, and I stuck my hand out to the side, blindly reaching into the empty air.
Warmth touched my palm, wrapping around it, and I looked over to the side to see that Masak had extended a filament from the wall.
He was holding my hand, gently squeezing it.
I took a deep breath, counting with my inhale, then held it for the same count, and slowly exhaled, letting my panicked rush of feelings be soothed by touch and oxygen pulling deep down into my belly, stroking away the tension of my overactive mind'srambling. As I calmed down, I fully took in what I was looking at, pairing it with the things that Masak had said to me.
"Is that you?" I asked. "I thought you were the ship."
"I am the ship," he replied, his voice coming from over where the body lay prone on a slight upward angle, so its head was up higher than its legs. "My kind forms shells around us with our neurofilaments. When my species advanced to spaceflight, making our shells into ships was a very natural transition. There are some of us who inhabit planets, of course, but outer space offers the unique opportunity that we don't have to limit our expansion like we do planetside. I can build out my shell as large as I like."
"But you have a bipedal body?" I asked, trying to understand.
"Yes, my core," he replied. "But my consciousness is in every part of me. If the worst happened, and my bipedal body was severed from my neurofilaments, my consciousness would remain in both. I am able to control and power bots that way as well, though severed neurofilaments have a limited amount of time they can survive separated from my core."
He was explaining a lot to me that he didn't have to. If I were his enemy, I could use the knowledge against him. He gave me his trust just as I had given him mine when I crawled into the full grasp of his control, not knowing for certain if his words and actions would find clean alignment.
I walked over to his core, as he put it, still gripping the neurofilament that held my hand. It moved with me, following me as I stood next to the slumbering man on the table, watching his breath rise and fall in his chest. He was beautiful in an ethereal way, chiseled, the strong lines of his face tight around his bone structure. His eyes remained closed, his breath steady, the picture-perfect image of a fairytale elf prince under the weight of a sleeping spell.
But he wasn't sleeping. He was there, in the room, holding my hand, talking to me.
"What does shell locked mean?" I asked.
"It's something that happens to males of my species after we go through adolescence," he said. "Our energy focuses on growing our shell as large as possible, and we become unable to manipulate our core. I can maintain myself. I keep my core clean, fit, and taken care of, but as I am shell locked, I can't get up and walk around anymore. It's not a permanent state. It only lasts until the first mating. Being shell locked is a rather vulnerable state, and it has been used against members of my species in the past."
Wait, was he saying that he was a virgin?
I didn't ask him about how being shell locked could be used against him. Right now, I didn't want to lean into his fears by asking him to express them. He had made it clear that inviting me here, in showing me himself, was something special. He trusted me to be in here with him, even though it was a risk to him in some way. He was willing to take that risk because he had seen so much of who I used to be, laid out in vivid detail online. He'd seen my insecurities and emotional willingness to overcommit and decided that all of that made me trustworthy.
"Can I touch you?" I asked.
"Please," he said, the word coming out fast and hard, like he had been holding back, asking me to do just that.
I reached out and put a hand on his chest. He was warm, his muscles strong and firm under my hand. I slid my palm down, over the defined ridges of his abdominals, down to the smooth hairless skin where a happy trail would be on a man who had hair instead of an alien who had neurologically connected tendrils that he could manipulate at will. As my hand dipped lower, his lips parted, and he let out a soft moan that came from his body, not the room around me.
"Can you feel this?" I asked, pressing my fingernails into his skin and dragging them lightly to the side, enough to stimulate, not harm.
"Yes," Masak replied. "But it is like it is in a dream, far away. I can access every part of me, but this part I don't have any control over. It's asleep."
"And I can wake you up," I said.
He hadn't specifically said me. He had said that mating would end his state of being shelllocked. Maybe his kind had specific mates they had to find. Maybe there was a ceremony that was required, like a marriage. There were too many possibilities on what he could have meant, but it didn't mean that it had anything to do with me.
"Yes," he said. "If you take me into you, take my seed, it will invigorate me out of the shell lock.”
"So I can fuck you back to life with my magic cooch," I grinned. "But then what happens after?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
This was the part in the relationship where I had to keep my mouth shut to keep the guy interested. Instead of saying what I wanted, I needed to tiptoe around what he wanted, to carefully piece together the story of his needs and figure out where mine fit into them. I had done it so many times, keeping my fears and wants shut in for the sake of the relationship, until they eventually burst out, spilling all over the place and ending things once and for all.
But I wasn't in my twenties anymore.
And I wasn't interested in jumping up on some raw meat without knowing exactly where this was going.
Bluntness was a skill that required practice to master, not just the act of it, but facing down the fear that putting everything on the table from the start would end it all before it even began.
"Do I go back to Earth with my own little alien baby, and you fly off to go enjoy your newfound freedom? Am I a momentary fascination for you, a woman you've been able to research enough to know she isn't a threat so that you can get your rocks off and go?" I asked, letting the fears come out. I couldn't just let them out. I needed to let out the hopes as well. "Because I'll have you know that I'm not looking for a seed donor. I came on this cruise because I want a partner, and if I'm going to go all in with you from day one, I want to know that you're going to be around to hold our family together."
