CHAPTER 17
I’m up and standing beside the bed.
Hannah huffs a sleepy laugh. “Julie?” she calls, voice reedy.
“What?” Julie growls from the other side of the wall.
“Can we change your alarm?” Hannah asks. “Jonoh is having some sort of reaction to it.”
“Like… what?” Julie asks, still sounding gruff, but curious now.
“Some sort of military training, if I had to guess.” Hannah places a tentative hand on my arm. “Jonoh? You awake?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“All the way awake?” she asks. “Because you’re standing weird.”
Her words register in my brain and my eyes move over to her. When they do, autonomy floods over me and my body relaxes, my wings rising, shaking out, then reclamping to my back. I readjust my stance until my posture eases to a more natural one.
“There you go,” Hannah says.
“How did your cat get in my room?” Julie demands.
I stumble and my wings knock something off of the stand next to Hannah’s bed.
Twisting, I catch it. It’s the lamp again. The one Hannah purchased for a non-inflated price.
Hannah is giving me a slightly worried smile. “You know, let’s just move it.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Jonoh, it’s fine. It’s just a lamp, it can move.”
“EXPLAIN YOUR CAT,” Julie says through the wall. “HOW DID SHE GET IN MY ROOM?”
“I purred you to sleep by accident and found you on the floor so I placed you in your bed and fed your fish, and I must have let Saphkarra in behind me,” I blurt out.
Hannah is staring at me. “Jonoh…” she says slowly, staring at me. And frowning. She’s frowning very hard.
“I’m sorry!” I turn to the wall. “And I’m sorry, Julie! I didn’t mean to purr! It wasn”t intentional in the least—I didn’t know it was reaching you too until I heard you thump to the floor!”
Hannah’s bedroom door is yanked open. Julie stands in the doorway, her mane in disarray. Saphkarra strolls past her into Hannah’s room, presumably to see to her elimination and feeding and watering needs.
Julie glares at me hotter than Rakhii fire. It”s figuratively just as blistering. “Tell me if you touched me.”
“I picked you up from the floor and arranged you in your bed!” I confess. Technically I”ve now confessed it twice, as I already confessed to this.
She stares at me with unforgiving eyes. “Tell me if you did anything else to me.”
“I didn’t!” I vow.
Julie exhales. The line of her shoulders lowers. She eyes me.
My gaze darts to Hannah.
She’s staring at me, and I can’t read her expression.
“I’m sorry, I panicked, I’m sorry,” I plead with her.
Face perhaps distressed, Hannah walks forward and opens her arms—and closes them around me. In a hug. My mate is hugging me.
Instantly I experience a sexual reaction. My already semi-turgid member becomes fully erect so swiftly that I become lightheaded.
Hannah freezes against me, incapable of being benighted about the engorged length of early morning stiffness that’s grown several inches longer, thicker, and harder against her stomach.
I experience a dangerously strong urge to thrust my hips against her. I must move some infinitesimal, nearly imperceptible amount, because the heated ridge of my eager member grazes the underside of one of Hannah”s breasts.
My wings, excited at her proximity and seeming interest in us, flare around her, nearly clasping her.
I rip away from her. I trip backward, reaching out for my wings and catching them in my hands to manually force them closed. “Sorry!”
“Oh for—get a room!” Julie huffs, and her stomping footsteps indicate that she”s storming away.
Sending me a warm look that I can”t interpret, Hannah asks me sweetly, “Mind if I take the washroom first? I”ll be quick, and then you can… take care of your morning needs.”
I nod mutely.
***
Our day is much the same as the previous, with the exception of not witnessing Rakhii offspring and female abductions on our walk to work. Which is an improvement.
Mick hugs Hannah in enthusiastic greeting, and he”s very proprietary as he does this, leading me to believe that this is a morning routine for the pair of them.
Once she has shown him priority, Hannah turns back to me and gives me a parting hug.
I try not to note that it isn’t as excessively lengthy or desperate like Mick’s hug.
I fail.
Without so much as a wing slap, I have been defeated. It’s clear that Hannah has a place in one of the chambers of her single heart that is solely for Mick.
Not me.
And I suppose, if I must be charitable, this is fair. It’s outrageous of me to desire being first mate when the first mate”s place has already been established so firmly. Feeling resigned, I accept my status in Hannah’s mate hierarchy.
(Although it takes me the length of the rest of my glum trudge behind Julie as I walk to my new place of employment to come to these terms.)
Once at work, I find that my new coworkers avoid me due to my breach of gifting etiquette yesterday. I am unsure how to earn their trust after committing a solecism such as this.
Later that evening, I reunite with Hannah and she is excited to show me a television program called Mork and Mindy.
It’s a televised story about a male alien who arrives on Earth and meets a female he is attracted to.
Even Julie seems to be anticipating my reaction to it, and soon, I’m exclaiming, “This is preposterous!”
Even so, I find myself laughing at the human male’s antics as he portrays an alien.
I’m so relaxed by the end of the evening that when Hannah and I are in her bed, I don’t purr her to sleep.
On my third morning on Earth, I wake up to a curious musical chime. I slowly open my eyes. “What is that?” I ask.
“Success,” Hannah mumbles, and I look over to find her smiling sleepily at me. She points to the wall we share with Julie’s room. “You didn’t revert to your military alien programming when you heard this one.”
The chiming continues softly. It pauses, then begins again. And again.
“It must not be enough to wake Julie up,” Hannah observes, rolling over and moving off the bed.
I inhale deeply, taking her warm scent into my lungs. As she pads to the bathing and cleansing unit, I enjoy a brief vision of catching her by her mane and dragging her back to bed and making her relieve the ache in my groin.
These are the musings of a savage that will shame me just as soon as I’m fully awake, I’m sure. But until then, I enjoy every moment in my imagination.
When Hannah exits her bathing and cleansing unit, showered and dressed in a robe, I stiffly make my way past her and enter the cleansing unit where I turn on the water’s spray, clasp myself with my wings, take myself in hand, and grimly masturbate to a montage of the things I long to do with Hannah.
It doesn”t take much effort to reach culmination. What I wouldn’t have done to have had Hannah when I was living at the rookery in the academy. During the Gryfala Pleasuring course, bathing sessions naturally extended and the cleansing units’ drains would become clogged with the accumulated wing powder—and bodily secretions—of entire rookeries of sexually frustrated males being instructed on how to best operate the anatomy of a Gryfala to bring her maximum pleasure.
The holograms were cold stand-ins for real females. I have my mate here, a wall away—
I’ve flung the shower’s death wings curtain back and taken two sopping steps from the tub when I come back to myself. I can’t attack Hannah and drag her onto my phallus.
I suck in a deep breath, lungs working hard. And… I catch… an incredible scent…
Following my nose to a woven rushwork basket, I find Hannah’s night clothes on top of the items that need washing. And one of those items is her panties.
I have them in my fist before I can tell myself not to steal them. I have them pressed against my nose where I inhale them over the small-voiced protests happening somewhere far, far in the back of my mind. I rub them across my cheek, my stubble catching along the smooth, soft fabric that smells like Hannah’s sex.
And then I have them wrapped around my phallus.
I manage to get back inside the cleansing unit. The elastomer of Hannah’s panties offers interesting constriction points as I yank and drag them back and forth over the glans and shaft of my penis. Every time they squeeze over my frenulum, I shudder.
When I’ve finished spending, I aggressively scrub my wing powder from my person—I hugged myself at culmination—and thoroughly rinse my washcloth to ensure that no wing dust clings to the fibers.
Drawing back the death wings curtain though, I find the bathing and cleansing unit is an absolute mess. Care of my maddened dash to capture Hannah before I fortuitously fell upon her intimate wear, water puddles containing wing powder dust pool all over the flooring, with some splatter along the walls and the items on the walls.
“Crite!” I curse, and use my towel and a stack of wash clothes to swipe and mop over every surface to be found in every increment of the room.
Once I have performed damage control and none of my wing powder contaminates the area any longer, I dress quickly from the items still folded neatly in my bag. Then I gather all the sodden cloths and towel and Hannah’s panties and stuff them into the rushwork basket, then haul it into my arms.
I leave the bathing and cleansing unit and wander out of Hannah’s room. I find Hannah in front of Julie’s door.
“Could you please show me how to operate your world’s washing… What’s the matter?” I ask.
She gestures at Julie’s room. “The alarm is still going off. She’s not waking up. So I need to be the one to wake her up and if I do that…” She grimaces. “She’s not nice in the mornings.”
“Allow me,” I volunteer. “I am adept at navigating situations where individuals express unreasonable ire.” I set down the rushwork basket.
“You’re so brave,” Hannah says. “Here, while you face the dragon, the least I can do is get the laundry started—”
“NO!” I shout.
Startled, Hannah steps back.
I slap my hand over my face. “My apologies!” I exclaim from behind my fingers.
“What the… I’M UP LATE!” comes an angry roar from inside Julie’s room.
“Let’s go,” Hannah whispers, closing her hand around my wrist and yanking me away from Julie’s door. “This is going to take a little more than navigating ire. We need to get out of the kill zone.”
I snatch up the rim of the rushwork basket with my other hand and hurriedly follow behind her. While Julie rampages around the rookery getting ready for the day in a rush, Hannah instructs me on how to operate the clothes washing machine and dryer unit.
I find that Hannah prepared us simple packeted breakfasts called oatmeal—a type of hulled, steamed, and flattened seed from a plentiful cultivated alien grass—but withheld making the females’ necessary coffees because she desired me to barista for them with my ‘magic skills.’
Glowing with her praise, I make custom coffees in rapid time as the females shower, we finish readying for work, we leave for our respective employment establishments, and hours later, we return to our shared dwelling, unwind in front of entertainment brimming with questionable values, and this becomes our daily routine… until everything goes wrong.