Page 15 of Spinning Out of Control

“Has it been hard?” he asked, running his fingers over the end again. “Adapting without your hand?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, it has. I was right-handed too. The doctors said that I’m a good candidate for a prosthetic, but they don’t want to do anything yet because my burns are still healing.”

“What is a pro… proshtic?” Teracht asked.

“A prosthetic,” I said, and he echoed the word back to me with a grateful nod. “It’s a fake hand. I know the technology has come a long way. It used to be that you’d just have a hand, or like a hook or something.”

“Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan?” Teracht asked curiously, and I nodded.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Teracht beamed. “I think you would look nice as a pirate.”

I laughed. “Well, thanks. I’d probably end up taking out my own eye if I actually had a hook for a hand though.”

“Will you eventually get a pros… prosthetic?” Teracht asked, pronouncing the word carefully and hitting the consonants in his slightly sharp way.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing down at where my forearm ended. “It would probably make some things easier.” I caught my lower lip with my teeth. A prosthetic hand was something that I could potentially hide or even use in modeling. Some of those diversity casting directors would shit themselves to get a former model with a robotic arm. But not with the burns on my face and neck. Disability had to be inspirational, overcoming hardship to become “normal” again. I wasn’t going to be “normal.” My face was always going to be scarred. Maybe it would fade a little over time, but it was deep, and I suspected my mouth and eye would start to droop badly as I got older and lost elasticity in even my healthy skin. That was not inspirational. It was not something people wanted to look at. If I was being honest, it was ugly. And people didn’t like ugly. It made them uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable.

“Caleb.” Teracht said my name in a way that pulled me from the spiral my mind had started to slide down.

“Yeah, sorry. Thinking too much.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m fine.”

Teracht gestured to the sofa. “Why don’t you lay down? I can look at your front that way.”

I nodded and moved to stretch out on the couch, tucking one of the decorative pillows under my head. Teracht hovered next to me, and I felt like Sleeping Beauty for a minute, with him gazing down like he wanted to kiss me to wake me up. But then his fingers traced down my puckered neck, brushing my chin, my Adams apple, the hollow at the base of my throat, then down between my pecs.

His fingers traced over my chest, stopping at my right nipple before brushing his fingers over it curiously. I inhaled softly, and he closed his thumb and forefinger around it, giving it a light pinch. I couldn’t stop a moan, quickly pressing my hand to my mouth to muffle it. He looked up at me. “Does that feel good?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to send a message to my dick that now was not the time to join the party.

“Female humans have nipples to nurse their young,” Teracht said thoughtfully. “But you are not female and would not produce milk. So why do you have them?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I think it’s some sort of biological holdover from conception or something. Do female atauri nurse their young?”

“Oh no,” Teracht said with a dark chuckle. “We are born with the ability to dissolve and consume the same food as adults.”

“Do you have siblings?” I asked curiously as Teracht gave my nipple an experimental tug, moving it back and forth carefully. I was losing the war with my dick and was fighting the urge now to cover it with my hand, not sure if drawing attention to it made it better or worse.

“Many,” he said. “But we are not a family unit the way you would think of a family. There is no bonding between parent and child, or between siblings.”

Teracht’s fingers moved to my other nipple, giving it a harder pinch, and I winced. “Ow.”

“Sorry,” he said, pulling back with a blush.

“It’s fine,” I said, smiling reassuringly. “Maybe just treat them like you would your spinners.”

He nodded. “I can do that.” And then his fingers were tracing down my chest and over my abs. Seven months of surgeries, hospital stays, and physical therapy had not given me much opportunity to exercise or eat really healthy the way I used to to maintain my body. I used to go to the gym frequently, and that had completely stopped. But I was determined I was not going to lose the definition of my abs that I had strived so hard to achieve in my teenage years and maintained through my twenties. I at least worked out at home, and it seemed to be paying off. Teracht’s fingers dipped into my belly button curiously. “What exactly does this do?”

“Nothing, really,” I said as his finger poked at it, though not pressing too hard. “When babies are in the womb, it’s how we’re connected to our mothers to get oxygen and food and stuff. When we’re born, the cord falls off.”

“Fascinating. I shall have to find a documentary about human fetal development,” Teracht said, circling my belly button once more with his finger before sliding it out and lower, toward the manicured patch of blond hair at the base of my dick. Despite pleading with myself to behave, it was half-hard again from Teracht playing with my nipples.

“This is sensitive as well?” Teracht asked, nodding at my cock.

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