Page 23 of Smart@ss Cyborg

I groan, feeling a measure of relief flood to the area.

“Pressure points,” she murmurs, fingers working down my neck, digging into knots of muscle.

Too soon, she drops her hands away.

“Noooo,” I protest, nearly pushed to weep like a human.

“Hang on,” she says. She tentatively gives the blade of my shoulder a squeeze. “I’m going to get a salve. Sit sideways in the chair so I can have access to all of your back.”

When she returns and her salve-coated hands meet my back muscles, I make a broken, beaten groan. It sounds pained, and I am in pain—but somehow her touch is giving me relief too. “Yesssss.”

Carefully Becky makes circles with her knuckles, her fingers, her hands. She kneads, presses, and digs into me until I’m panting and sweat breaks out on my brow.

“You’re really tight here,” she tells me, grimacing and offering sympathy that my brain reacts favorably to. I absorb it, enjoying how it makes me feel. How it warms me, inside and out, until my stomach, and something lower, tightens even more. I don’t know how to describe what this new feeling is—it’s painfully pleasant though.

Becky’s skillful, incredible hands move all over my back, then my shoulders. When she bends over my stretched-out arm, I catch a whiff of her scent—and my neck arches, my nostrils flaring and pulling inmore of her smell. It is also… pleasant. She smells like our meal, and a strange, warm odor. Feminine musk, I suppose this is.

However, I have a concern. “It seems I’m experiencing tightness in a new area,” I share, and glance down to my lap. “And it’s growing concerningly rigidified.”

“Growing?” she asks—and she rips her hands away from her ministrations and retreats a step.

I glance at her, surprised. “What’s the matter?”

She watches me, eyes oddly wary. I watch the activity lighting up her skull, confused as to what this reaction is. “Nothing. A shower might help work out your muscle stiffness later. For now, food’s getting cold. We should eat.”

With a grunt, I draw my arm back to my side, and turn my attention to my food. “Yes. And thank you for the meal. Also for the massage. I’m mighty grateful.”

Carefully, slowly, she seats herself and from the side of her eyes, observes me almost cagily.

She’s still acting strange when we bed down together, but at my hisses and low snarling as I lower myself into the bed, for some reason she relaxes.

Before I bedded down, I struggled with my clothes, stripping my body in order to partake in a shower. Once cleaned, I dragged on Joel’s boxers, which was as much fussing with movements as I cared to stand. My efforts were rewarded: I’m relieved not to have to suffer the stench of my sweat and musk. I’m also relieved that the hot water somewhat eased my muscle soreness. Enough that I don’t audibly roar in pain.

However, my movements in this bed as I attempt to get comfortable on my aching back continue to telegraph my overtaxed state. And for some reason, my agony as I work through this pain-filled process sees Becky relaxing even further.

As I lie beside her, too mired in suffering to make sense of her mind’s activity, she burrows into her side of the bed, and drifts to sleep.

The next morning, I wake with my face in Becky’s pillow. Like our previous morning, she’s left the bed, and while I ponder how I ended up on her side of our arranged sleeping quadrants, my forehead is tightly furrowed and my whole body is tense.

I hurt everywhere—but concerningly I seem to be experiencing a hematoma or edema in my genital region. Gritting my teeth, I roll to my back, grip the blankets, and raise them until I can see my undergarment.

It’s tented.

With dread, I grit my teeth and stretch my arm out and hook my thumb in the waistband of my garment and draw it down and over my uncomfortable front to reveal the cause of my pain. My pissing organ is so stiff, it bobs with my heartbeat, and as I watch it, it fills with more blood until it’s standing straight up.

“What the hell?” I ask no one, flummoxed. Yonderin don’t experience erections; those base responses are saved for species who struggle with primitive breeding drives.

I wonder if the extreme physical labor I underwent the day previous damaged blood vessels somehow. Muscle tissues feel swollen everywhere—perhaps my reaction is due to injury.

In order to rise up and force my body into a sitting position without screaming, I have to bite down savagely on my lip.Everythingon me feels like it’s burning and at the breaking point.

I manage to clamber to my feet and shuffle to the siphon room. Yesterday, following Becky’s direction, I dragged in a mostly-clean horse trough for the purpose of self-soaking. It had seemed like too much work to finish cleaning it yesterday evening so I forwent using it, but I see that Becky was kind enough to finish cleaning it and has even left it partially filled with water this morning. I use the bucket she’s placed inside it to transfer hot water into it, then I ease myself into the long but narrow water-holding source.

I’d be frustrated at the limitations of the trough—this feels absolutely nothing like floating in the ocean I know and love—but I’m too grateful, because the heat from the water is helping to loosen and ease the innumerable screeching flares of agony happening in my tormented muscle tissues.

Eventually the spontaneous sexual-seeming response in my pissing organ eases, which is a relief. But my breeding sac aches terribly, which makes my mood an irritable one.

I forego breakfast, not wanting to spoil Becky’s morning with my strangely aggressive, out-of-sorts mood. In the barn, I consume the entirety of the edible contents of my saddlebag, and my temper worsens when I find that I despise all of the packaged options.

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