Page 12

Annora

I’m going to kill us both. It’s a miracle I haven’t crashed already. It’s so hot in here I’m suffocating, and I can barely keep my eyes open. Mostly, though, the problem is that I didn’t get much sleep last night. Like none.

I stayed up after our fabulous flirting session terminated as swiftly as someone stepping off a cliff. Bang. There wasn’t a lot of sleeping that occurred after that. I was too busy chastising myself for allowing myself to have any feelings for him at all.

“Can you drive?” I ask stiffly. We’ve barely said ten words to each other today. Whatever switch flipped in his mind last night—the switch that turned from the shameless flirting position to the securely off position—has not been turned back on today.

“Yes.”

Oh yeah. The warm, cuddly “ I could do those things” Draalian must have been abducted by aliens, because he’s not been around all day.

After we stop and switch places, I spend an inordinate amount of time pouring over my wrist comm and the nav system. We’re about to cross districts.

“Sooo, I was looking for a safe, hidden, back way to travel from the Hyacinth district to the Trillium district, but there’s no way around this. You’re sure we have to keep traveling northwest?”

“Yes.”

Monosyllable man. Hmmm, sexy. Not.

“The Trillium district has stepped up their border patrol for some incomprehensible reason. Everything I’m reading on the Internet says they’re searching every vehicle.”

“Is there going to be a problem? You seemed pleased with my forged papers.”

“Yeah. Not that I’ve ever seen forged papers before, or legit papers for that matter. Only aliens need them. As long as they weren’t printed on an old cereal box, they would have looked legit to me. But it’s not just the papers. I assume my mom put out an APB on us.”

“APB?”

“All points bulletin. The No Shame van with the naked man on it? The big, blue Draalian? You’re going to be hard to miss.”

“They’re going to kill me?” he asks, his eyes wide. He’s afraid for the first time since I met him.

“Absolutely not. I’ve told you you’re not the one who’s going to be in trouble here. They’ll put you in one of the dormitories, offer you the Earth female of your choice, or give you a ride back to Draal if you’d like.”

“But they won’t let me find Zoriss,” he says, his tone sad and resigned, his gaze avoiding mine.

“Doubt it.”

“You’d better drive,” he says. After we change places, he asks, “What would a search be like?”

“I seldom leave the city. I’ve never crossed districts before. I have no ide—” Blue and red lights flash up ahead. “Shit. A checkpoint. I’m so sorry Zorn, I . . .”

He hits the button that closes the shade on the skylight and slides off his seat as I hover to a complete stop and ease to the pavement.

I gaze out the window, my mind searching at warp speed trying to come up with anything other than the lamest excuse as to why I’m eight hundred miles from home with a black-market Draalian in a hover-van emblazoned with a naked man.

I have no mental bandwidth to pay attention to what the big, blue reptilian is doing in the back of the van.

“Out of the vehicle,” one of the guards orders. She’s wearing a khaki military uniform.

As I slide out of my seat, I surreptitiously glance into the dark interior of the van. Can Draalians dematerialize? I don’t see him.

“Come with me, ma’am. We need your permission to conduct a search.”

Great. What would happen if I refused? I have a feeling I know, and the answer would include an all-expense-paid tour of the inside of the local jail.

I stand at the rear of the van as two of the three guards open the doors and peer in with laser flashlights illuminating every nook and cranny. My insides are quaking at what they’ll do when they find him.

There’s the Jason 23, naked as a jaybird, ‘just-fucked’ hair, and left leg missing, which was the reason for the return.

Lying next to him, almost as if they were performing sixty-nine, is the Eric C-12. I always thought this model looked particularly lifelike. Both are Earth males with larger than lifelike cocks hard and at the ready.

Jackknifed behind Eric’s head is a third model I’ve never seen before. No Shame’s newest offering, the Draalian Doubleheader. He’s completely nude, lying on his side with his head almost in the C-12’s ass. Good thing Draal’s don’t have noses or it would be up Eric’s butt.

His head is at an odd angle, his eyes look dead just like his buddies Eric and Jason, and he’s showing off not one but two enormous erect cocks.

“Really? This is what you do for a living?” one of the guards, a petite blond, asks, breathless. “Tell me how to get a job like this.”

“No shit.” A dark-skinned beauty pipes up from behind her, her laser light lovingly playing over all that naked skin, especially of the blue, scaled variety. “We get to stand out here in the cold pulling over law-abiding citizens and you get to . . . what is it you do with these guys all day?”

“Oh, you know . . . inventory.” I shrug.

“Looks like you only need to be able to count to two. You know…” She flashes her light on Eric’s penis and says, “One.” Then flashes her light on Jason’s penis, “One.” And then the Draalian model. “One.” Her flashlight moves, then, “Two. I bet you get a lot of job satisfaction.”

I briefly consider offering each of them their own sexbot to keep them warm over long winter nights in the future, but there would probably be squabbling back at the office, and I think whoever wound up with the Newt model might spill the beans to her superiors that he’s alive and fully functional.

“I do. Job satisfaction is my middle name. I’ve got a lot of miles to travel. Anything else you ladies need?” I’m so full of phony smiles I feel like my cheeks will crack.

“You’re free to go.”

“Have a nice night officers,” I call as I open my door.

“Keep on counting,” the blond replies. “I think two is my new favorite number.”

I climb in, start the vehicle and hover up as smoothly as I’ve ever done. Double-checking the speed limit, I safely fly two miles under the limit until the little crossing station is no longer on any of my screens.

“I think it’s safe. Want to sit up front?” I ask into the quiet gloom of the backseat.

“Give me a moment,” he calls, his voice strained. A minute later he asks, “Could you play some music?”

That’s odd.

“What kind of music?” We’ve been listening to all kinds of music over the last few days, and he’s developed some preferences. I even ordered some Draalian stuff for him that he said he liked. Most of it had a deep, pounding bass beat I found fascinating.

“Draalian drums. Loud.”

I may not be the smartest woman on the planet, but my feeble brain finally puts two and two together.

He had a hard-on back there. Well, not one hard-on but two. Those women were right—two’s a very good number. Is he going to lie in the darkness back there and . . . take care of himself?

An almost-electric jolt sears through my body at the thought. My very cooperative brain provides me with a catalog of pictures of what that would look like even as my more logical brain distractedly wonders if he does it one-handed or two.

“Zorn?” Now what? Am I really going to ask to join him? Before I have a long internal debate complete with facts and figures and a pie chart of all the possible reasons this is a terrible idea, I blurt, “Want some company?”

Silence. Shit. I’m such an ass. The poor guy just wanted to live his life on Draal, fight alongside his platoon, have a psychic connection with his brother, and use his ‘small and portable’ sex toy on deployments.

Now here he is hiding on the cold, dark floor in the back of his abductor’s van being deprived of the ability to masturbate in peace.

“I’m sorry. Please strike that from your mind. That was an awful—”

“Yes.”

I playback his answer in my mind. Was that a ‘yes’ to my observation that my request was awful or a ‘yes’ to ‘want some company’? Replaying it again I try to discern the nuances of his voice. It was a bit strained, wasn’t it? Sharp?

“Yesss,” he repeats quietly. The extra hiss sounds so sexy my thighs clench in desire.

Now what have I gotten myself into? Does he think I just asked him to have sex? Did I just offer to have sex? Do I even want to have sex?

He put himself out there with his ‘yesss’. I need to show up.

I pull over and park, hit the button to re-open the shade on the skylight, then slip between the seats and enter the dark cocoon of the van’s cargo area.

Moonlight streams in through the glass roof.

He’s sitting up stark naked in the back corner, Eric and Jason lying at his feet.

It’s like a tableau out of the world’s strangest movie.

“Can I . . .?” I run out of fuel, so I lick my lips and start again. “Can I watch?” The last word came out as a squeak but was definitely intelligible.

“Watch what?” he asks, his voice an unusual combination of a sexy husk and the all-business captain in the planetary army who got an earful of admonitions about consent during the entire trip from Draal to Earth.

My mouth is dry and my core is wet as I gather my nerve, then blurt, “I’d like to watch you . . . take care of yourself.”

He kicks Jason and Eric to the other back corner of the van indicating as long as he’s going to do this, he wants to have center stage. Then he spears me with a look so piercing it’s as if he’s looking right into my soul.

There’s something about the deep blue of his eyes, reflecting the scant moonlight drifting in from the roof that makes my nipples tingle.

I back against the metal wall that separates the front compartment from the rear cabin, and slide against it until I’m sitting.

We’re as far apart as two people can be in this small, enclosed space.