“Would you prefer the hard ground?” Thuliak said, grabbing me by the waist.
I thought about it. Would I rather have these silky soft sheets all around me, refreshingly cool, at first, but soon they’d warm up with our body heat, and it would be like we were fucking on a soft, warm cloud. Or I could do it his way, and I’d be on my back—I was going to be on my back, right?--my spine would be pressing into the cold, hard floor. Thuliak would get on top of me. I’d get pressed harder into the floor—
“I think I like the bed.”
“Are you sure it’s not a tool of patriarchal control?” he asked.
“Maybe it is,” I said, “but I’m not laying down on the floor. You might not want to ‘get soft,’ but I don’t want to get hard.”
He slid onto the bed until he was up next to me, his muscular thighs pressed up against mine as he looked down at me. His teal eyes were burning hot with lust as they ran up and down my body, finally settling on my eyes. “Yes, I like you as you are, Airlock. I like your softness.”
“Eve,” I whispered, hoping he might stop calling me Airlock. “Why did Tschenkar want to be Second? What did that mean?”
He placed his hand on my belly, and he slid it down just a few centimeters. It was enough for my imagination to start running wild again, and I had to rub my thighs together to try to contain myself. It barely worked.
“You want to talk about that now?” he asked.
“I mean,” I said, “I’m trying to understand what this means. All of this. It’s hard to enjoy myself if I have no idea what’s going to happen to me. I understand so little of what is happening, Thuliak, I need some grounding.”
His fingers slid ever so slowly down, and then his middle finger slid slightly ahead of the others, until it slid right onto the hair between my legs, but he stopped there. “I think you have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen.” He pressed the middle finger into my soft, sensitive flesh for emphasis.
“I mean big picture,” I said, barely managing to get the words out because my throat felt so tight and dry.
“Normally we’d have landed already,” Thuliak said. “My pack would disperse out into your world. As First, we would go out into your society and choose the best breeding partners among your females. Only when we had all formed full triumvirates, and the needs of my pack were met, would the Second be permitted to land.”
“You picked the first woman you saw,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Why?”
“I didn’t need to see any others to know,” he said. “I know when I want something, and when I want something, I get it. That’s what it means to be a scion.”
“Surely you can’t always get what you want.” I wanted it to sound like a statement, but it came out as a question.
“I’m careful to only want the things that matter most.”
“You could have,” I say, looking around for a window, but finding none. “You could have landed. Waited until your broadcast tainted everyone, then you could have landed and taken your pick. Of anyone on Eden.”
“You ended my search early, Airlock. You made things much easier for me.”
“But how could you know? After just one…”
I realized then that I’d felt the same thing. I’d been willing to abandon everything for this one man, before I’d even laid eyes on any other.
I’d seen other Khetar now too—on the bridge—but it was Thuliak I wanted.
His finger slid down and touched me where I was craving to be touched. The thought of any other man was wiped clear from my mind the moment his finger touched me there. I gasped and threw my head back.
“I’ve barely touched you,” he said.
“What is this? Third base? Fourth?”
“I believe there are only four bases in total. The fourth is called “home plate.”
“I thought there were five.”
“No,” he said, “they are shaped like a diamond. Four corners.”
“So third base then?”
“Not quite,” he said, “but we’re on the way there. Relax, little human.”