Chapter 22
22
“What do you have in store for Garran and Kasa tomorrow night?” Freddie asked as we walked together from the breakfast buffet on deck seven back to the staff room for morning meeting.
I felt like a new woman after sleeping straight through the rest of the night. Waking up to a well-dressed Freddie at my door with a cup of coffee in one hand and two more anti-nox tabs in the other didn’t hurt either.
“He’s taking Kasa to dinner, then they’re going to the masquerave in the small ballroom on deck five. So I’m thinking stealth. We could pretend to be working the party, listen in through his VC, provide pointers.”
“Or,” he interjected, and I raised a brow. “Just hear me out. It’s a costume party, correct? Why don’t we dress up, pretend to attend the masquerave ourselves?”
I slowed to a stop. “Have you ever even been to a rave?”
“No.” He shrugged. “But they’ve always sounded fun. Flashing lights, loud music, hot.” His brows waggled. “Sweaty. ”
Smashing my grin into a tight line, I said, “I’ll think about it. But it’s still work.” I pointed a finger into his chest. “Only work.”
He raised his hands, innocent as a schoolboy. “Of course it’s only work. What else could it be?” And there was a twinkle in his eye when he said, “What a dirty mind you have, Sunastara” under his breath.
Morning meeting went as well as expected. Rax and Morgath—both looking as haggard as I felt—reported that they’d tripled the security mechs assigned to Sonia and her family, as well as installed an outrageous number of Vcams not only around her suite but all around the ship. How they got the credits approved for the enhanced security was beyond me, and with their current state of general grumpiness, I wasn’t about to ask.
Tig still hadn’t found the source of the breaches, but she’d narrowed her suspected targets down to Ulaperia, Vorp, or Gorbulon-7. So at least she only had to search on this side of the wormhole now, even if that search still included three entire planets.
Only two weeks remained before the ship reached Portis and the senator disembarked, one of which would be spent entertaining Kravaxians. It would be a miracle if we made it through without incident.
Elanie hadn’t attended the meeting, which was odd. She hadn’t answered any of my comms either. So when her voice popped into my head right as Freddie and I were about to part ways for the day, I grabbed his hand and held him still.
Sunny? Where are you? Elanie’s distress clanged between my ears .
Outside the staff room. Why? Where the devils are you?
Deck thirty-six. Something’s wrong up here. Something is seriously, seriously wrong.
“What is it?” Freddie asked with a frown.
“I’m not sure. Elanie says something’s happening up on thirty-six.”
I need more information, I commed. What exactly is wrong?
Everyone is… They’re all… Why? She made a gagging noise. Just get up here, please.
I clicked off. “Well, whatever it is, it’s enough to make Elanie gag. I guess I’m going up to deck thirty-six. Care to join me?”
Squeezing my fingers, he said, “If whatever’s going on up there is bad enough to gross out a bionic, you bet your ass I’m coming.”
As soon as the elevator dinged, it rolled through the doors, shoving me back—a thick, raw tension like a planet-sized harp string seconds away from springing free from.
“What in hells is that?” I shook my head, trying to clear out the warm, silky fog sinking over me.
Before Freddie could answer, Elanie raced down the hall, sliding between us to take our place in the elevator. Pale, almost green, she looked from Freddie to me, then said, “I quit,” while the doors slid closed.
“She can’t quit,” I said, frowning at the elevator. “Can she?”
Freddie only shrugged, then he asked, “Is it hot up here?” When he squeezed the back of his neck, that round vein popped across his wrist. “I feel hot.”
“It might be a little”—I swallowed, overcome by a need to not only trace that vein, but to lick it too—“hot.”
Music floated through the air, enthralling, atmospheric, impossibly dreamy as we walked down the hall, passing lingerie shops, strip clubs, the entrance to the live sex show on this extremely racy deck. All empty. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Freddie bent down to pick something up from the floor, pulling my attention to his gorgeous butt. Stars , it was spectacular. So round and firm. While I considered what it might feel like to bite it, he turned toward me, his lips as red as cherries, his eyes dark and smoldering. A pink thong dangled from his finger. “I think someone’s lost their underwear.” Dropping the thong back to the floor, he blinked. “Something’s happening to me. I feel”—he tugged on his collar—“strange.”
Tearing my eyes from his throat, his chin, his lips, I looked past him down the hallway. He was right. Because he was always right. He was right and delicious, and I needed to kiss every single inch of his entire body?—
“Sunny?”
Rolling my neck, I said, “Me too. I mean, I’m strange too.” I undid the top button of my blouse. “And my clothes feel too tight.”
“Speaking of clothes.” Freddie pointed at the light fixtures along the wall, the paintings and digpics serving as hooks for discarded shirts, pants, bras, and underwear, even a pair of Argosian coveralls. “What in the worlds is going on up here?”
Barely hearing my voice over the blood drumming in my ears, I said, “I don’t know. But stay close to me.” And he did, closing the distance between us, the heat from his body warming my already scalding skin.
Each step forward felt like fighting the tide, an undertow of need and desire swirling around me, pulling me back toward him.
“Sunny. This is… I’m not…” His voice came out strained, hoarse, stirring the tiny hairs on my neck.
“I know,” I told him. “I know. Just keep walking.” But when we reached the end of the hallway where it opened into the galleria, I gasped. “Good gods.”
Tangled on the floor, sprawled over chairs and couches, half-submerged in the fountain, hundreds of guests writhed in a naked, moaning, multi-species free-for-all.
Freddie’s hands curled around my arms, and I vanished into the sensation, nothing else in the worlds existing but the indentation of his fingertips on my skin. Until he said, “What the fuck are they doing?” and I burst suddenly into manic, giddy laughter. He did too. And as we stood there, watching, laughing, I thought, oh no .
Somehow, the hysteria broke through the incessant onrush of mindless, endless wanting long enough for a single coherent thought to override my short-circuiting brain. I knew what this was. I’d felt this way before. Wanted like this. Needed like this.
Scanning the galleria, I hissed a curse. This was bad. This was really, really bad. “It’s the pleasure pods,” I said, pointing to the bank of kidney-shaped capsules along a far wall. They were all open, all active, with bright-red light spilling from each one like wine from a glass. “They’re malfunctioning.” I fanned my neck as a bead of sweat seared a path down my spine. “All of them.”
“That’s not good.” Freddie yanked his tie loose. “We need to tell somebody, right? ”
“Yes, definitely. We should tell someone because—” Because what? Because something , I was sure. But my thoughts kept slipping, floating away from me like startled moon jellies. I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the scene before me, by the hormones pumping through my bloodstream, the pleasure pods hacking my hypothalamus, pushing my pleasure centers into overdrive.
“Are you okay?” Freddie asked, his chest pressing up against my back, his breath skimming over my neck.
“I don’t think so,” I said on a rushed exhale. And when he touched me again, his fingertips ghosting up my arms, my head lolled back to rest against his shoulder.
The tip of his nose slid along the curve of my neck, and I reached back, grasping his hip, scrabbling for purchase as the universe tilted, swirled, sanity dancing away from me, all but vanishing as he dropped his lips to my ear and whispered, “Phoebe.”
Spinning around in his arms, I wrapped my fingers around his tie and yanked his lips to mine. I thought the kiss would give me some relief from the deep, driving desire animating my arms and my fingers and my lips. But I couldn’t kiss him enough. Couldn’t be kissed enough. There was no enough.
He pulled away, that same unrelenting not-enoughness blazing in his eyes. In the space he’d put between us, I stared up at him, pleading, begging him for something. For anything. Maybe for everything. And then he offered it to me, pointing his chin over my shoulder, his chest heaving, his pupils blown. “I think there’s a utility closet?—”
“Gods, yes.” Pulling him by the tie still clutched between my fingers, I accessed the security lock for the closet in my VC, and we barreled through the door.
I grabbed at his coat, his shirt, his tie, tearing them off in a blur of soft fabric and expensive tailoring. When he pushed me up against a shelf, I laughed. Then I moaned when his teeth sank into my shoulder, the bite just shy of painful.
Dropping to his knees, he nosed under my blouse to kiss my belly while his deft fingers undid my button, unzipped my zipper, pulled my pants down over my hips. My panties joined the rest of our clothes in a heap in the corner.
I let him ease my legs apart, his hands gliding from my ankles to my calves as his lips skimmed along the ultra-sensitive skin of my inner thigh. When his mouth reached my swollen, pulsing, neurochemically aroused core, he only had to slide his tongue over me once, and I tumbled, gasping as waves of pleasure crashed over me again and again, refusing to let me come up for air.
“I’m sorry,” he said against my thigh. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I wanted to be patient. I wanted to wait until it was right. But, stars save me , I need?—”
Grabbing a fistful of his hair, I pulled on him until his eyes met mine. “If you’re not inside me in five seconds?—”
It only took him three.
Standing, unzipping his pants, stroking his rigid length while I hooked my thigh over his hip, he drove into me, and I drowned in mindless, scorching, neuro-hacked bliss. A sea of sensation surged and receded, ecstasy thrumming through every cell in my body in time with his hips. It was magnificent. He was magnificent. It was so much more, so much deeper, so much fuller and sweeter and thicker and harder than anything I’d ever experienced before. I never wanted it to end. And after my third orgasm and his second, in a brief moment of lucidity, I realized that it might never end. And that would be bad. Probably .
“Our guests,” I slurred, my head hanging over his shoulder, my brain struggling to function. “We need help.”
“Who?” He pulled back, his eyes heavy lidded, his lips wet and parted. “Who could help?”
Right. If anyone else came up here, they’d suffer this same fate. Well, maybe not this exact fate. This fate belonged to us, only us, until the end of time. Taking his face between my hands, I kissed him, brushing my tongue over his, feeling him swell again inside me. My legs trembled, and I clung to him as he pulled out, moved us to the floor, hauling me into his lap. Lowering myself onto him again, I ran my hands through his hair, each strand uniquely silky as it slid through my fingers. “Were we talking about something?”
“Help,” he said, drawing a single finger down the center of my spine. “We need to get help.”
“Elanie. She hasn’t upgraded yet. She’s immune. She was able to”—I groaned as he grasped my hips, sliding me up and down his shaft—“walk away.”
“Can you comm her?” he asked, slowing his pace, giving me a chance to try.
Even so, accessing my VC was like sifting through wet sand. Elanie, I commed. Help. It’s the pleasure pods. You’re our only hope.
Are you kidding me? she snapped back. Why can’t you fix it? I can’t come back up there.
Too…hard. I would have laughed at the phrasing if he hadn’t swiped his tongue up my throat. Please hurry.
Ugh, fine. Give me five minutes.
I would have given her forever, longer than forever, to the point when time no longer existed and we were nothing but stardust. But our guests, they needed us. Thank you, Elanie. Thank you.
It wasn’t quite like a switch flipping, the moment she deactivated the pods. It was softer, slower. It was the quiet calm after the storm, waves receding into the ocean. It was waking up from the most wonderful dream, wishing you could fall asleep again so it wouldn’t end.
Sitting in his lap with his hands cradling my ass and sweat dripping between my breasts, I wheezed, “Holy hells.”
With a breathy laugh, his shoulders shaking under my palms, he leaned back, looking me over. “Are you all right?” His eyes were glossy, his cheeks flushed, his hair sticking to his forehead in sweaty little strands.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to walk tomorrow,” I said, smiling at his red cheeks and his messy hair and his dazed, sated expression. “But I’m fine.” That was a lie. In truth, I was so much better than fine that the word itself was a dull, gray speck in a technicolor universe.
Blinking away the last wild remnants of lust from his eyes, he asked, “How long have we been in here?”
I accessed the time. “Ninety-seven minutes.”
“That long?”
Brushing his damp hair back from his forehead, I asked, “Have you ever been in a pleasure pod before?”
“No. They’ve always intimidated me,” he said. “For good reason, apparently.”
I traced his crooked smile with the pad of my thumb. “You don’t experience time when you’re in a pod. Or hunger or thirst. Or if your hair is on fire, for that matter. The only thing you experience is the pleasure.”
With the word hovering between us, we seemed to realize at the same time that he was still inside me. Sliding his hands over my hips, he started to raise me up, and I squeezed my legs around him. “Wait,” I said. “Not yet. ”
Relaxing, slinging his arms low around my waist, he said, “Okay.”
After what we’d just done—and how many times we’d done it—some might call it ridiculous, the nerves tightening my throat. We’d just shared ninety-seven minutes of intense, carnal, worlds-shattering ecstasy. I was still breathless from it, my bones heavy, muscles loose, skin as warm as an afternoon lying under real sunlight. But it wasn’t enough. I still wanted him, more than I should, more than Sunny should. But even though the pods no longer drove me near to madness, the push was still there, the buzz, the hunger. Later, when I wondered what had gotten into me, I could blame it on that.
“Stay with me,” I whispered into his ear.
He was silent, his chest rising and falling like the tide. And I closed my eyes, bracing for the sting of rejection. But there was no sting, only his fingers sliding up my sides, his hand cupping my breast and bringing my nipple to his lips, sucking it into his mouth. I moaned when his tongue swirled over my stiff peak, in pleasure, in relief. Maybe both.
He spun me around, laying me down, pulling a towel over from one of the shelves to slide under my head. I was sore, my muscles aching, but it didn’t matter. The sight of him propped above me, gazing down at me, his lips curving into a soft, unguarded smile…nothing else mattered.
“How did this happen?” I asked him, running my fingertip over the crooked line of his nose. “Did you break it?”
“Aye.” His voice was quiet, soothing as he notched himself at my entrance. “I was twelve. A boy in my class had chased a girl during recess. She hadn’t liked it, so I’d told him to stop. He broke my nose, I kicked him in the shin, and that was that. ”
“Did he leave her alone?” I asked, cupping his cheek while he slid into me again.
His smile grew as he started to move his hips. “He did.”
“Did she thank you?”
“Aye, Molly McDay. My first kiss.”
Snaking my fingers around his neck, I said, “Lucky lass.” Then I pulled his mouth to mine, losing myself in him while he lost himself in me. This time, of our own free wills.