“Why do we have to sleep like this?” This couldn’t possibly be the norm, even on his home planet. Could it?
“To make sure that you don’t escape in the middle of the night.”
I considered objecting further, but it was rather warm and snug having him there. Besides, I had to wonder what a suitable compromise would be. Having him tie me down so that I couldn’t get away? That sounded worse. Sure, this was a bit… unorthodox, but it wasn’t hurting anyone.
He fell asleep quickly, but I couldn’t get comfortable as easily as he did. My mind couldn’t shut off and ignore the strange sensation of someone laying on top of me. Even during sex, my partners and I usually did our thing and then went our separate ways. This was… almost like… cuddling. No physical expectations, just… closeness.
His body was warm. I could feel his muscular chest as he took deep breaths in and out, and after a moment, I noticed that our breathing had lined up. The sound of our lungs working in sync was peculiar.
I could feel his heart beating. The steady rhythm of it was soothing. His soft fur felt slightly ticklish against my legs. Not enough to be bothersome, but kind of pleasant.
His nose brushing the side of my sensitive neck stirred something inside me. I wriggled a little underneath him, trying to edge my head away. But he just shifted the same way that I did, as if subconsciously following me.
The wriggling made me now hyper-aware of my breasts. My nipples rubbed against his chest, and the peaks hardened. I sucked in a breath, liking the way it felt. Immediately, I chastised myself, trying to deny it.
You can’t possibly be getting turned on sleeping next to an alien. What is wrong with you?
I turned my eyes slightly to the side, looking down at his face. He was very handsome. If I could only see the top half, he would be the most attractive man. It was only the unexpected bottom part that threw me off and made acknowledging his good looks feel weird.
But just because he was different didn’t mean he was bad. He seemed perfectly kind.
He was a bit odd, or at least seemed to be, but it was a harmless, loveable sort of oddness. Quirky, maybe, or eccentric. And it was hard to deny that a big part of that may have been the simple fact that we came from, literally, two different planets. He didn’t act like me, but how could I expect him to? I must have seemed odd to him, as well.
Even though he called me his prisoner, I didn’t feel in danger when I was with him. He’d helped me when I was hurt and showed no intention of wanting to cause me any harm. He gave me food, shared his house, and even showed me his prized collection of books. How bad could someone be, if they went out of their way to do all that? He didn’t have to offer me any of those things.
Honestly, I couldn’t really blame him for holding me here. I didn’t think he did it to be malicious. But I was part of the team that wanted to capture him, and I had already told him about IMRA. If he let me go, how did he know that I wouldn’t just come back here with a new group of hunters? He didn’t keep me to hurt me, but to save himself. Who could find fault with that?
I was the one who put him in the difficult position of having to make this choice. If I hadn’t been here, trying to capture him, he never would have had to pick between my freedom and his. And for the first time, I started to wonder why.
Why had IMRA sent me here? He was all alone up in the mountains. Who was he hurting? I thought that the hunters were collecting aliens so that they wouldn’t hurt humans, but it was beginning to seem like I should have asked more questions.
Did they just assume any evidence of aliens was a good enough reason to take them into custody? Whether they had done anything wrong or not? In my mind, that began to sound suspiciously like a human rights violation. Athos, of course, wasn’t technically a human, but didn’t he deserve the same consideration?
I thought back and realized that I had never heard any real reports on the aliens that we captured. Our debriefings never gave details on why we had to hunt them, or what danger they posed. They never told us what happened to them next, after we handed them over.
The word ‘alien’ had always been enough justification. The implication that they didn’t belong here was enough to assume that there were valid reasons they shouldn’t be allowed to stay. We all believed that the aliens had come here with the intent to harm us, and we had to defend ourselves. But what if IMRA was wrong about that?
What were we defending ourselves from, with someone like Athos? Now that I’d met him and seen how gentle he was, it felt like all I’d known about my job was a lie.
I laid there for a while, caught up in my own thoughts. The night stretched on, and I began to realize that it was probably long past time for me to go to sleep. But I still couldn’t relax, with him so close. I trusted him, but it was such a strange feeling.
I wriggled and squirmed beneath him, trying to find a better position. But all it did was make me more aware of how our bodies were pressed together. I could feel myself sliding against his hard body, and even though I hadn’t meant to, there was soon no doubt.
I was aroused by him.
My nipples were hard and pointed, stimulated by my motions. A hot burning in my gut demanded my attention, no matter how I tried to ignore it. My pussy was wet, and I imagined how good it would feel to slide a finger inside my folds. I couldn’t, of course, with him on top of me like that, but it didn’t mean that the idea didn’t occur to me.
Stop it, I chastised myself, feeling ashamed.It’s just basic biology. If you rubbed up against a tree, you could get turned on, too. But you can’t keep thinking those thoughts. It’s weird.
I did my best to tune the dirty thoughts out, trying to convince myself that it was fine. It wasn’t like I was thinking of having sex with a centaur. It was just the way my body responded to stimulation, which coincidentally came from him. That was totally natural and normal. Right?
For a long time, I laid there, refusing to move. If I was perfectly still, I couldn’t feel anything. But that just made my brain go into overdrive, instead. It took charge and let my imagination handle it since my body couldn’t.
I wasn’t any more comfortable with that. Being turned on by a centaur was wrong, but thinking about him that way was even worse. Every time sexy thoughts tried to force their way into my brain, I immediately shut them down.
But it was like the Pink Elephant Paradox. As soon as you tell yourself not to think of a pink elephant, that’s the only thing you can think about.
As soon as I resolved to not finding anything sexual about the way we were lying together, it became impossible to ignore how sexual it was. Never in a million years had I thought I would fantasize about a centaur. But the second that I told myself I shouldn’t be, it was suddenly all-consuming.