“I can survive in vacuum for several minutes,” he said.
What? Was he not wearing a suit? A human would pass out in just a few seconds without a suit. How was he talking if there was no air to carry his voice?
“Can you hear me?” I asked.
“Yes, human,” he said. “I speak from my mind into your machines.”
Oh. And he heard me from the mic in my visor into his mind. So he had neural implants? Was that was his real voice sounded like then, or did he change it to make me feel small and helpless? I had so many questions, but I was even more afraid to ask them to him than I was to ask High Command.
“It will take me two or three minutes to open the door,” I said, “but I can get the airlock to start pressurizing and filling with air in about a minute, is that—”
“Yes,” he said, “do this.”
I went to work, still not looking at him, but I had to open my eyes again to see the panel and my tools. The screws were still all the way up, so all I had to do was hit a few switches, and soon the pump started filling the airlock back with air from within the ship.
“Is that working for you?” I asked.
“Yes, human.”
“It will take a few minutes to reach equilibrium. I can’t open the inner door until then. Once I do, you’ll speak to Emissary Eve, our representative from High Command who has authority to speak on behalf of Eden.”
This was much more than I’d intended to say to the alien, but it seemed wrong and unwelcoming to stand there like an idiot with my eyes closed and not speaking while we stood silently together waiting for the airlock to finish pressurizing.
“Until then,” his voice boomed, “you will speak to me.”
He said it with such absolute authority that I found myself nodding, and then my eyes opened.
It hurt a lot more than looking at the sun, because it was just like Emissary Eve had said: I saw very suddenly that something central to being a woman had beenmissingnot just from my life, but even from my imagination.
Alien or not, I knew it at once when I looked at him, that this was a man. This was what I could never hope to unsee. Even if I tore my eyes away right now, I’dneverforget.
He had dark teal skin, but it was the kind of dark color you’d see on expensive wood or stone, the kind where it could look like a lot of different colors depending on the way the light hit it, and there was a lot of depth and subtle variations in the texture and hue.
Hard. He was hard. That’s the next thing that struck me. I’d known fiercely strong women all my life. All of my moms were strong, and I’d met many woman like Weapons Sojourner or Chief Athena who were not just mentally strong, but physically. I’d never in my life had thought of any of those women as “soft,” but one look at this alien man and I knew just how soft women truly were. Even the strongest woman I could think of couldn’t be called hard next to a man like this.
Beneath that dark teal skin was muscle. Muscle like I’d never seen before. Even hisshoulderswere packed with muscle. Nature had not only found a way to fit way more than twice as much muscle as any woman could ever carry onto this man’s body, but it had done it in a way that was absolutely breathtaking and beautiful and—more than anything else—terrifying. It was like Goddess had sculpted something just as deadly as it was aesthetically pleasing and perfectly crafted.
Terrifyingly beautiful. Captivating. How long had I been staring now? How could shoulders look so good? And his arms,Goddess,his arms! The biceps were bulging with muscles, but it was the forearms that made it impossible to breathe. Veins bulged from the powerful forearms, which were thicker than my own biceps—much thicker even than Weapon Sojourner’s.
My eyes slid over to his torso—he was shirtless—and his shape was totally different than a woman’s. I’d taken for granted the way women’s waists tapered in, and the way our hips then flared out from the narrow waist. I couldn’t have imagined it could be any other way, but the alien man was much more straight, and his curves came from even more muscles packed in across his torso. Just near his hips were large, bulging muscles, and his stomach was covered in muscles shaped like rows of squares in a grid pattern, two muscles wide and three high, totalling in six which went all the way down to…
He was naked. Completely and utterly naked. I noticed it when my eyes moved across his stomach, over those bulging grid-like muscles, to a big, curving muscle—he had one on each side of his hips—that tapered down in a v-shape, all the way down to…
The dick. The alien dick. The man’s dick. The plug. The thing that was missing from me. The thing that I now understood could fit inside me.
It was an even darker teal than the rest of his body, almost black like ebony, and ithungbetween his legs. It was much larger than I’d imagined, hanging nearly halfway down his legs to his knees. It was veiny like his forearms, long veins ran down its generous length, and then his body moved.
He took a step toward me as my eyes locked onto his dick. Had I blinked since looking at him? How long had it been? I was entranced. I was outside time. It could have been two or three seconds. It could have been more than ten. I truly didn’t know. If I checked the pressure guage I’d know how long it had been, but I couldn’t tear my eyes off of that big, beautiful teal dick.
As he walked forward, his dick swayed. From the way it moved, I could tell it wasn’t just long, but thick and heavy. It moved like a massive object would. It didn’t wag around like a dog’s tale, instead, his muscular thigh pressed into it when he stepped forward, and then when he stopped walking, the dick fell back down, but it swung back and forth slowly between his legs, like a heavy pendulum would.
“You’ve never seen a man before,” he said.
I looked up. I had to. I couldn’t look down or close my eyes—that was no longer possible—but using all of my willpower I tore my eyes from the swaying dick, and then I met his eyes.
They were a deep teal, but still brighter and more striking than any human eyes. His eyes weren’t smaller than a woman’s, but the bones around them were harder. The brows especially looked different, more solid and protruding, making his eyes seem set deeper in his head than a woman’s eyes would be. It made him look less exposed, less vulnerable than a woman.
If the rest of him was harder, it was his face where the difference was all the more striking. His jaw was like a square or rectangle. It matched with the square shape of his torso, and the overall effect it had was undeniable.