Page 29 of Tempted by Celestial Bodies

resonant drives

Erin Fulmer

resonant drives

In the vastand lightless interstellar void, time ceased to hold real meaning for the traveler eons ago.

He does not fear death, because death cannot touch him. He does not fear age, because he is ageless. He does not fear pain, because he’s already survived the worst pain he can imagine.

But he survived. He’s still here. He has eternity to wait. And he fears eternity most of all.

He could wait forever, and what he waits for—craves—requires—might never come again.

He may never findher. Never feel her. Never free himself from this empty, echoing expanse, an endless shrine to everything he lost. He may never fully live again.

He’s alone in the dark, the way his kind was never meant to be alone. Without a pilot, without his mate, he’s lost and will stay lost.

In the deep void, he waits, still, silent, searching. He stretches his senses and his will across vast distances, to every far-off star within his reach, but finds only a hundred, a thousand, a million barren planets.

One in a million times, hope flares, quickly extinguished when he scans rock after rock seeded with simple life, single cells, nothing to sate him. Again and again, the life he finds strives only to fade away. The failures stay with him like they’re his own. Maybe they are. If only he hadn’t let her go, if she had stayed, they could have tended this little corner of the galaxy until it overflowed with life.

Then, against all odds, something changes. How did this small blue jewel bound to a yellow star escape his notice? How did he miss its flowering, closer than he’d ever guessed, almost in his own orbit?

No matter. Because he couldn’t have missed the call that draws him now.

Find me. Take me. Claim me. Fill me.

The tether snaps into place, a sudden, tangible gravity that shivers across his iridescent shell, exposed as always to the relentless, enveloping cold of the void. It cracks him open and unfolds him, lighting up long-dormant pathways in his neural net, echoing in abandoned corridors of the vessel which contains his multitudes.

She’s mortal. Unfamiliar. Human. And yet…

Come for me.

It’s her. He knows her. Needs her. Has to have her.

His by fate, by right, she’s the one he’s been waiting for. She’ll give him everything. Take him everywhere. And in return, she’ll have all the pleasure he can wring from her, forever.

He has his heading, and there’s no power in the universe that can stop him from claiming her.

His core ignites. He shudders. Rumbles. Roars.

I’m coming.

* * *

Kat Hayworth shouldn’t beawake at 2 a.m. But she can’t put her book downnow.She’s just getting to the good part.

Her long workdays at the lab don’t leave much room for letting off steam. Not safely, at least. Experimental fusion drives aren’t quite rocket science, but theycouldbe, someday. Kat wants to be around to see that day.

For now, she’s a first-year postdoc fellow in a large cohort, the lowest rung on a mercilessly competitive ladder. The real rocket scientists get paid for genius, not kindness. The other postdocs are no more than frenemies on a good day.

That’s where smutty literature comes in clutch. When the cruelly hot antihero corners the protagonist on the page, she can trust they’ll eventually have their happy ending, or at least a lot of lovingly described orgasms.

Her male colleagues might be able to find exoplanets or split the atom, but the mechanics of the clit still escape them. By contrast, the love interest in her latest book has aphrodisiac venom, a vibrating cock, an inhuman devotion to feminine pleasure,andis wildly, obsessively in love with his ordinary human mate.

And now he has her at his mercy, bound and begging for release.

Kat props her e-book reader against the pillow and lies back. Shewillhave a crick in her neck tomorrow morning. Her free hand wanders down to tweak a nipple tenting the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Biting her lip, she turns the page and slips her fingers under the waistband of her panties. Scanning the page with frenzied eyes, mouth dry, she chases her own release.

---