Kerris #2
I found shelter as the light began to fade.
A hollow vertebra, the opening narrow enough that I could wedge myself into a defensive position if something tried to come in.
The interior was maybe eight feet in diameter, curved ceiling peaking at about six feet. Protected from wind. Hidden from sight.
Before I settled in, I carved my mark into the entrance. Three horizontal lines. Proof I'd chosen this shelter through assessment rather than desperation.
Then I stripped off my pants.
They were unwearable. The fabric was soaked through with arousal, stiff in places where it had started to dry, still wet in others. The seam had been torture all day, dragging across my clit with every step, keeping me in a constant state of low-grade stimulation that I couldn't escape.
My underwear was worse. Translucent with wetness, clinging to flesh that had changed shape over the course of a single day. I peeled it off and looked at what the tonic had done to me.
I was disgusting. I was desperate. I was so empty it hurt.
I lay back on the curved bone floor and slid my hand between my legs.
The first touch made me gasp. My clit was so sensitive that even gentle pressure sent sparks through my entire body. I circled it carefully, the way I knew I liked, building sensation that climbed toward something.
My other hand found my breast through my shirt. My nipple was a hard point against my palm, and when I pinched it, the sting traveled straight to my cunt. I pinched harder. Rolled it between my fingers while my other hand worked my clit.
The pleasure built. Climbing. Spiraling upward toward release.
I pushed two fingers inside myself. The walls clenched around them immediately, desperate for something to grip. I was so wet my fingers slid in without resistance, and I curled them, searching for the spot that usually made me shatter. Found it. Pressed. Rubbed.
Yes. There. Right there.
Build. Build. Build.
Peak.
Nothing.
The orgasm stalled. Right at the edge, right where I should have tumbled over, my body just... stopped. The pleasure crested and then receded like a wave that couldn't quite reach the shore. I was left gasping, shaking, more desperate than before.
I tried again. Faster this time, more pressure on my clit, fingers pumping inside me. I could hear the wet sounds, obscene in the quiet of the bone chamber, the slick evidence of how badly I needed this. Could feel how close I was, how desperate, how much my body wanted to come.
Build. Peak. Stall. Nothing.
"Come on," I whispered to myself. "Come on, come on, come on."
My hips were rocking now, grinding against my own hand, trying to create more friction.
I added a third finger, stretched myself wider, felt the burn of it and welcomed the sensation.
My other hand abandoned my breast and found my clit, rubbing in tight circles while I fucked myself with three fingers.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. My body knew the difference between my own touch and whatever that thing on the ridge could give me, and it refused to accept the substitution.
Build. Peak. Stall. Nothing.
Twenty minutes. My wrist cramped. My fingers pruned with my own arousal. I ground my palm against my clit until it was almost pain, until the pleasure blurred into something sharper, harsher.
Still nothing. My body recognized my own touch as wrong. Wrong texture. Wrong temperature. Wrong pressure. I could get myself to the edge, but I couldn't fall over it. The tonic had reprogrammed my nervous system to need something specific. Someone specific.
I pulled my hand away and screamed.
The sound echoed off the curved walls, bouncing back at me, proof of how alone I was. My pussy clenched in punishment for the false promise, violent spasms that made my whole belly cramp. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. Not sadness. Rage. Pure, impotent rage at my own traitorous body.
The tonic wanted something specific. Someone specific. The thing on the ridge with the ivory armor and the patient stillness.
I curled onto my side and pressed my thighs together, trying to ease the ache that wouldn't stop. The bone floor was cool against my bare skin. My arousal was pooling beneath me, leaving a wet patch that I'd have to sleep in.
In the darkness outside my shelter, something moved.
I went rigid.
The sound was faint but distinct: grinding, like stone against stone. Or bone against bone. It came from somewhere to the north, maybe a hundred yards away. Then another sound, heavier, like something massive being dragged or shifted.
He was out there. Building something in the dark.
His scent drifted in on the night air. Calcium dust and dry earth and something warmer underneath, something that made my body recognize him before my mind could catch up.
The response was immediate and devastating.
My pussy flooded. Not just wet but gushing, enough that I felt it spreading beneath me on the bone floor.
My inner walls clenched so hard I cried out, cramping around nothing, and my hips started to move without my permission.
Rocking. Grinding against air. My body trying to present itself to a male it couldn't see but could smell, could sense, could want with an intensity that terrified me.
I bit down on my own arm to keep from making sounds. The pain helped, gave me something to focus on besides the desperate emptiness, the ache that had become its own kind of torture.
His scent was strongest right outside my shelter. He'd been here. Right here. Close enough to touch if I'd reached through the gap.
He could have come in and taken what the tonic had prepared me to give.
He didn’t.
I lay there in the dark, naked from the waist down, covered in my own arousal, and tried to understand why.
The orientation materials had described the hunters as predators.
Aggressive. Dominant. They chased, they captured, they bred.
That was the transaction. The debt got cleared the moment I stepped through the portal, and in exchange, I spent thirty days as prey for an alien male who wanted to put offspring in me.
But he wasn't chasing. He was building.
I could hear him out there, maybe fifty yards away now. The grinding of bone against bone as he shifted massive pieces into place. The occasional thud of something heavy settling into position. He was constructing something. A trap? A shelter? A maze to herd me toward him?
The engineering part of my brain wanted to understand the structure and see what he was making, how he was fitting the pieces together, what load calculations he was running in his alien head.
The rest of me just wanted to stop aching.
The restraint was somehow worse than force would have been. Force I could have fought. Force would have let me stay angry.
This patience, this certainty that I'd come to him eventually, left me nowhere to put my rage except at myself.
No.
I'd survived my parents choosing Jonah over me.
I'd survived Jonah's failure and the debt and the years of scraping to pay down something I'd never benefited from.
I'd survived the realization that family meant nothing, that blood was just biology, that no one was coming to save me because no one ever had.
I could survive this.
The sounds continued through the night. That patient grinding and shifting, bone being moved and placed and fitted together. He wasn't chasing me. He wasn't hunting, not the way the orientation materials had described. He was building something.
I didn't know what that meant. But I knew it changed the calculations.
I didn't sleep. Couldn't. Every sound from outside triggered another wave of arousal that left me gasping and grinding against the bone floor. The scent never faded, kept my body in a constant state of readiness that I couldn't switch off.
Twice I found myself on hands and knees without deciding to move, back arched, pussy exposed to empty air, presenting myself to no one. The humiliation of it burned almost as much as the need.
I tried to masturbate again around midnight. Failed again. Screamed again. Spent an hour sobbing into my folded arms while my traitorous cunt clenched and wept for something it couldn't have.
When the sky began to lighten, I was exhausted. Hollowed out. My inner thighs were raw from rubbing together. The bone beneath me was wet with fluid my body had produced through the night, a puddle of desperate wanting that served no one.
My legs shook when I tried to stand. Not just from arousal but from genuine fatigue. The tonic was consuming resources my body needed for basic function, redirecting everything toward reproduction, toward him.
But I was still here. Still thinking. Still planning.
He knew where I was. He knew what the tonic was doing to me. And he was patient enough to spend the night constructing something instead of dragging me out of my hiding spot.
That patience was worse than aggression. That was calculation.
I understood calculation.
I just didn't know yet what he was calculating toward.
I pulled on my ruined pants because being naked in hostile territory was stupid, even if the fabric against my swollen flesh was its own kind of torture. Carved another set of three lines into the bone near where I'd slept.
Proof I'd made it through the night.
Proof I could make it through another one.
Twenty-nine days left.
My pussy clenched at the thought of twenty-nine more nights like this one, and I had to brace myself against the wall until the wave passed.
One day at a time. One hour at a time. One minute at a time.
I could survive this.
I had to.