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Because of the generally privileged place Rocky and I occupy in Eridian society, we tend to be privy to the latest new technologies, even when they have nothing to do with the problem of keeping me alive.
This is, of course, pretty awesome. But also sometimes pretty funny. It seems like every few months or so, some very important scientist has perfected something like… a new, ultra-efficient Astrophage-powered fishing vessel. And has decided that it is absolutely imperative it receive a mark of approval from the World’s Best Engineer and his pet human. So, sometimes they pack me into my golf cart (this is what I call my portable terrarium, complete with a full life-support system, easily-drivable all-terrain treads, and big antennas of floodlights to illuminate my surroundings) and ship me off to some nearby scientific institution.
Today, we’re off to see a friend of a friend of Adrian’s—a scientist who I gave the English name Alan thanks to her work with computer systems. (Yes, I said “her.” Soon after I arrived on the planet, a couple of the linguists, intrigued by English third-person pronouns, ran a wide-ranging survey of what the team and their friends wanted me to call them. I insisted they could all stay gender-neutral in my language just fine, but a bunch of them seemed excited about it, so who am I to judge?)
Alan is also an expert in what I’ve decided to call Eridian “hologram” technology. This is an offshoot of “monitor” technology—the textured screens that come along with pretty much every Eridian machine. Monitors work by raising and lowering a field of tiny pegs to create a three-dimensional surface. Basically a more complex version of that one Earth toy where you press your hand into a bunch of pins to make an impression or mold. Like a human screen, though, the one big limitation is that the display must have a flat backing. With this technology, you can’t recreate a 3D object in full 360 degrees.
That’s where holograms come in.
“Whoaaaa,” I say out loud, pressing my face to the side of my golf cart. Alan stands next to a clear xenonite tank a few meters high, in the middle of which hovers a smooth grey sphere. As she manipulates the control panel, the sphere contorts into an oval, then to a cube, then to a polyhedron I don’t know the name of.
“Impressive!” cries Rocky beside me. “♫♩♫♫♪ xenonite, right? Does it use electrical signals to animate the shape from inside?”
“Yes, exactly,” Alan says. She presses a few more buttons—the shape splits in two, then seamlessly reforms. “Many clumps of controller circuits surrounded by a ♫♩♫♫♪ membrane. This allows for very precise articulation.”
I sit back down at the wheel of the cart and pull out the integrated Eridian language synthesizer keyboard. “How precise can the ♫♩♫♫♪ get?”
I have no idea what to call that xenonite variety in English. I still barely understand how any of the stuff even works. This type, though, is known for being especially stretchy and malleable on a microscopic level. It’s what the rods in all the fanciest monitors are made of—it can change its sound absorption with just a little electrical manipulation, allowing for the most realistic “picture” possible to Eridian ears.
“As precise as monitor rods,” Alan confirms. “Engineer Rocky, can I use you to demonstrate?”
She leads Rocky into an adjacent tank. Whatever material composes the walls of this one, it’s completely opaque to me.
“What should I do?” asks Rocky. If he’s still audible from in there, he can probably see me just fine.
“Stand in the center. I’ll calibrate it.”
The sphere suddenly snaps into the exact shape of Rocky.
Rocky, inside the tank, makes an excited trill and a sort of thumping noise that must be a leap. At least, judging by what the hologram is doing, I figure it’s a leap. It’s copying his movement, then! The textures are basically flawless, but it’s not a perfect recreation of Rocky: instead of his normal brown, it’s the mottled grey color of the rubber xenonite. (That’s what I’ve just now decided to call it.)
“Cool cool cool.” Rocky races around the tank, throwing up jazz hands, waving, all sorts of frenetic gestures. “A moving Rocky statue. Amazing!!”
“Doctor Grace, how do you see it?”
“Exactly like Rocky,” I play, “but no color. Amazing!”
Alan laughs. “Yes, makes sense. So you can also tell it’s not really Rocky.”
“What lets you guys know it’s fake?”
“It’s like a statue,” Rocky says. “Nothing inside.”
I always forget that Eridians can see through each other’s carapaces.
“Okay.” Alan steps over to the second tank and starts adjusting something around the door. “Rocky, come out now. One more demonstration.”
The door opens, and Rocky jumps out. The hologram wobbles back into a sphere shape.
“That’s incredible,” I tell him. “Hey, didn’t we see a hologram before? There was that demonstration we went to last year where one of the engineers had an interactive schematic of the Hail Mary up?”
“Yes, same technology. But way less complicated.”
“I thought it was pretty complicated! It was huge!”
“Huge, yes. Not animated like this one. It’s more complicated if you have to make material bend like this!”
Behind us, Alan has hooked a large pipe up to the door of the second, opaque tank and seems to be alternatively blasting it with air and then sucking all the air out again. Maybe it needs to be really clean to work well?
“Doctor Grace,” she calls as she pulls away the tube. “Come drive over here.”
Wait. Wait a second.
I pull my golf cart up alongside the second tank. Sure enough, Alan hauls another tube over and, with the help of Rocky, attaches it both to the door of the tank and the airlock of the golf cart. No way. No way!!
“Really?” I play, fingers hovering over my airlock controls.
“Really!”
I open the airlock. The air from my life support system blasts out with a roar, filling the vacuum of the tank. The door inside is Eridian-sized—to get in, I have to crawl on my hands and knees.
The space is dark and chilly. It smells of ammonia, though I’m used to that by now. Pulling out my trusty pocket flashlight (I never leave home without one!), I survey the walls: translucent orangeish xenonite, behind which is embedded a grid of Eridian sensors.
Alan gives the air a few more moments to circulate, then closes the door.
Some instinct ingrained in me from scifi movies expects the room to suddenly light up, or start whirring with machinery, or something like that. But nothing happens. All I can see is the dull orange walls.
Then I hear both Alan and Rocky exclaim.
“Perfect!” crows Rocky. “Yes yes, that’s Grace!”
“It created your head fur very well,” Alan observes. “I was doubtful. But it appears exactly the same to me. Does it seem right?”
“Uh, you’re asking me?” I say.
“Rocky, what is Grace saying?”
Rocky titters. “He can’t see through that type of xenonite. Can’t see your beautiful sculpture.”
“No problem. Like this, I can capture memory in the material. He can see it when he comes out.”
Sure enough, once they let me back into my golf cart, there’s a Ryland Grace statue in the middle of the first tank. Wow. Yeah, it’s pretty perfect. The hair, the fabric… it’s like I was dipped in grey tie-dye and left out to dry. The only detail that strikes me as off is that my glasses aren’t transparent. Not like Eridians would care about that, though.
Rocky is pressed up close to the tank, scrutinizing the hologram.
“Correct texture,” he says, very seriously. “Even for Grace’s weirder textures.” Then he scampers around the edge to the door. “Can I go in?”
“Yes, no problem. You can open it yourself. The projector tank isn’t as complex as the sensor tank.”
Rocky unbolts the door and jumps inside. He pads up to statue-Grace and takes ahold of one of its pant legs. The material deforms just like real fabric.
“Whoa,” I say.
“It takes on the fabric’s properties!” Gleefully, Rocky bats the sleeve back and forth. “Amazing material simulation!”
He reaches up and pulls down the hologram’s pants.
“Rocky!! Oh my god! Dude!”
But it is pretty amazing that the sensors were able to get the fabric that right. And to see through it to the layers beneath, while the machine apparently couldn’t render anything underneath Rocky’s carapace. My hologram’s boxers and bare legs are likewise perfectly accurate. Rocky pinches its calf, and the skin gives as well in just the right way.
“Squishy squishy squishy human,” Rocky sings, and I’m suddenly overcome with emotion.
“Rocky, is that… is that the first time you’ve touched me?”
“No!” He taps the scar on my hologram’s right arm; he’s only barely tall enough to reach it. “Even with a physical reminder, your memory is still that shit?”
“No, I know that!! I mean—you know—with the intent to feel what it feels like.”
“I felt what it feels like after Adrian. Even with the pain, I remember distinctly.” He touches the hologram’s hand, slotting his fingers into the idle curl of my own. “This feels exactly the same. But less cold.”
I guess I touched him too when I moved him back into the airlock. I barely remember it now—all drowned out by the blast of ammonia that had nearly killed me.
I sit back down.
“What about the inside?” I play. “Can you see inside my hologram better than you can see inside Rocky’s?”
“Better, because your carapace is not so dense,” Alan says, “but not perfect.”
“Interesting!”
“Very interesting,” Rocky says, a bit distractedly. He’s been repeatedly pulling down on the hem of my hologram’s shirt and watching it bounce back up. The elastic quality of my clothes is slightly different from that of Eridian fabric. Seeing him play with it reminds me warmly of the tape measure, all those years ago.
“Alan? If you need test subjects, I think we definitely need to test this thing more.”
“Yes yes. Of course.”
“Sorry, do you have a name for this technology? Super-hologram?”
She laughs. “My name for it is ♩♩♪♫♪♫♪♩.” That translates to something like full-3D-electronic-projection. Boring.
“Okay,” I say aloud. “I’m calling it a holodeck.”
Paramount can’t sue me for that. I’m sixteen lightyears away.
We go back to Alan’s lab twice more. Once so I can test the life support on her new holodeck prototypes. Once so I can try out a setup she’s calling a “combined-purpose holodeck,” or, after my suggestion, a “mirror-holodeck.” This is clearly the future of the technology: sensor tank and projector tank have been combined, resulting in a situation where I step inside the room… and my hologram steps in from the other side.
“Wow!” I cry, hi-fiving my mirror self. He mimics me perfectly. It feels exactly like human skin, down to the bumps and pores, just colder. “For some people this would be the best day of their life.”
Alan, who has been speedily picking up English, shifts her feet in confusion. “It’s cool, yes! But is there a deeper meaning here?”
“It’s a joke about human reproduction,” Rocky says. “It’s not funny. Don’t laugh.”
The next time I see Alan, she’s at the airlock of my biodome with a team of engineers, all in xenonite pressure suits.
Rocky and I had barely discussed this. After Alan’s first demonstration, we’d agreed it would be amazing if a device like that let us hang out with seemingly no barrier between us. After the invention of the mirror-holodeck, the conversation had been more along the lines of: so, we’re setting up two of them, connected, one in the biodome and one outside, right? Should we call the engineers about it right now? Or should we give Alan more time to perfect the tech?
We’d ended up waiting. Better safe than sorry. And that gave me a lot of time to… think about it. In detail.
Okay, fantasize is a better word.
So, Rocky and I had fooled around together a bit on the Hail Mary during the journey to Erid. Like… sexually. That’s all fine and dandy. It had been fun! Scientific! Educational! A bonding activity! And honestly, once I’d gotten over myself, I figured that this wasn’t too weird a thing to do with your bestie. I mean, who gives a crap about operating according to human relationship rules when you’re this far away from anyone else who would give a crap?
It’s just a bit odd to square that with the current reality. At one point I’d told Rocky that if technology ever made it possible, he’s the one person in the universe I’d definitely be interested in having sex with. I said that when I never thought it would be an option, but—well, now it is. And (terrifyingly?) my feelings on the subject haven’t changed.
So there’s a real anticipation in the air. Is this what bona fide attraction feels like? I’m honestly not sure. Maybe it’s just curiosity. That’s a plenty strong emotion regardless. I’m going to be the first human ever to have sex with an alien! I’m making history! Who wouldn’t be excited?
Or maybe it’s just that good old-fashioned human urge, uncoupled from any particulars of relationship: I want to touch Rocky.
And after a few more months of waiting, here it is. Alan’s beautiful invention, just for us!
One holodeck goes in the basement of my house. I’m not completely sure where Rocky’s is, but I think it’s in one of the quieter areas of the monitoring station beyond the dome. Not that the activity level matters much. The rooms are completely soundproof anyway.
When the Eridians had built my house, they’d made the basement a whole lot bigger than it needed to be with the idea that they wouldn’t have to dig out more rock if I wanted more rooms. Since then, I’ve had them make me a laundry room, a couple storage rooms, and a tiny home movie theater, with a projector I’d had to build myself. The holodeck fits snugly into the extra space, about the size of my (already pretty small) bedroom. I sit on the huge beanbags in the movie theater and watch the engineers come and go, lugging in the walls with their embedded sensor grids, the projectors that control the holograms’ electronic movement, the control panel, the lighting, and finally, the clumps of rubber xenonite that will soon become my best friend. I notice, with a little fluttering in my chest, that this version of the hologram device uses brown rather than grey xenonite.
And then it’s just time to turn it on. I do jazz-hands at Alan, step into the plain little room, and close the door.
There’s a control panel in here too. I press the button to open the comms link.
“Rocky! You there?”
“Grace!!” he squeals. Wow, he sounds like he’s in the room. Eridian speaker systems are really good. “Yes, I am here! Turn it on!”
I flip the switch.
Rocky dang near bowls me over.
“Grace!!!” He’s clawing at my pant legs, wrapping one arm around my calves, butting the top of his carapace against my thigh. “You’re here!!”
I can’t speak. I crouch down and place a hand just behind his radiator, pulling him in closer. With the brown of the new hologram medium, it’s hard to forget that this isn’t really Rocky—Rocky with a few spots dulled over, but Rocky all the same. Rocky in my atmosphere. Touching me. Hugging me!
Then he grabs at my hand, and the force with which his claws snap around the meat of my thumb is so legitimately and bone-crunchingly painful that I actually shriek and jump away. I sink down against the wall, clutching my hand.
“Grace!” Rocky hovers over me, standing above my knees, not touching. “No, no… how badly did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” I say through my teeth. Then I laugh. My thumb is tender, but not broken, and once the worst aftershocks have subsided I feel lightheaded. Rocky’s just so eager!
Tentatively, he pokes my wrist. “Humans are so fragile. I don’t want to hurt you. Show me how to touch you without hurting you?”
I smile and hold out my uninjured hand, palm up. He presses his three fingertips into the center of it, then lifts them away, then presses them in again.
“Soft,” he says.
“Yep!”
His hand travels up my arm, almost to the scar. He closes his fingers around the flesh just above my wrist—loose, barely a touch.
“I’ll increase the pressure, then you tell me when it hurts.”
“Yes,” I say. “Very scientific.”
He holds me and squeezes. It feels—god, it feels good. Yeah, he’s the exact texture of a rock. Nothing particularly revolutionary about that. But just being touched at all, and so intentionally… that’s pretty neat.
“Okay,” I tell him, and he stops immediately. “No, that’s just—it’s not bad yet, but it’s getting there. Don’t stop. I just wanted to let you know when it starts feeling like real pressure, you know.”
He shakes my arm. “Uncomfortable?”
“No, but be careful.”
“Understood.”
He continues his tourniquet grip until I inhale and say, “Okay, there. Stop.”
Rocky releases me. “And do other parts of your body have the same tolerance of pressure?”
“No, not exactly. Like—” I slot two of my fingers between his claws, basking in the feeling of him holding me. “Feel that. They’re bonier, yeah? There isn’t as much fat to protect the bone. So squeezing hard here is more dangerous because you could snap it.”
“Yes. I feel it.” He squeezes, a bit hard but not intolerably so. I think this is him being consciously gentle, actually. “Understood. Where else is dangerous?”
“Throat,” I say, touching it to show exactly where I mean. “Everywhere here, just—honestly, don’t bother touching it. It’s so easy to get a human to stop breathing.”
He shifts his feet. “I know,” he says in a lower octave, the nuances of the verb indicating personal experience.
Yeah. He knows. No need to dwell on it. “Also, eyes. Don’t touch my eyes either. They’re really delicate.”
Rocky’s hand reaches towards my face. I flinch instinctively, but he only taps my temple. “Yes yes. Wouldn’t want to touch your eyes anyway. So slimy. Humans have so many slimy bits.”
I laugh. “Still don’t want to get human slime on you? I thought you’d grow out of that!”
“Not ‘on me,’ since I’m a hologram here! But it still feels gross.”
Being mostly made of inorganic matter, Eridians don’t have a sense of touch in the same way humans do. Even so, they can definitely feel textures. A physical connection to an object just enhances how their echolocation perceives it.
Rocky pokes at my temple again. Just for the sake of touching me, I think—another hand has started rubbing up and down my arm hair, and it feels like a current of humming electricity. “Everywhere else I can touch, then?”
“Oh yeah. Last dangerous area—uh, the testicles. That’s another ‘just don’t’ situation.”
“Sensitive?”
“Yeah, in a bad way. Few things worse than getting kneed in the balls.”
“Understood,” laughs Rocky. He shuffles even farther forward. I realize (with a bit of an embarrassing rush) that two of his legs are planted nearly parallel to my hips. “Can I touch you now?”
“You really want to touch me, huh!”
“Yes yes yes! I’m so curious! Great opportunity!”
I spread my arms. I wonder if the hologram on his end will convey the quickness of my heartbeat. “Okay, buddy. I’m all yours.”
Rocky makes a squeal of delight, splays one of his hands, and thrusts it up under my shirt.
I squirm underneath him. “Oh my god, Rocky!” I yelp. His claws aren’t sharp, but they dig into me, rough and… unpleasant? No, not quite. There’s a sensitivity, of course—an instinct that tells me I will chafe open my tender flesh if I keep this up—but that’s also kind of awesome. Much better than being treated as feeble. Not that the Eridians have been doing that, now that I’m relatively healthy! Just—
Yeah, there isn’t any other way to say it. I really wanted to be touched.
“Very soft.” Rocky presses two hands into my belly. So firm, so purposeful. It makes my head spin. “And sensitive!”
“Y-yeah, you kinda went right for the neck, there, buddy.”
“Not the neck. You said no throat.”
“It’s a saying!”
Experimentally, I place both hands on the lower half of his carapace. He’s a bit smoother here—sandstone is the comparison that comes to mind, but it’s been forever since I felt an Earth rock. He vibrates pleasantly with all the little noises he makes. This guy is just the best.
“Rocky, how should I touch you?”
“However you want. I don’t have sensitive or dangerous places like you! So, anything is good.”
He’s entirely rucked up my shirt now and is pressing at my nipple with one of his fingertips. I let out a shaky breath, feeling his voice flow through me.
“Do you… like it?” I ask.
“Yes yes yes! It’s not physically pleasurable, like for humans. But it’s pleasant.”
It’s crazy to think that Rocky wouldn’t be like this if he hadn’t met me. Touch doesn’t carry the same sense of social comfort or intimacy for Eridians. But a few years into our journey to Erid he’d began to demand hugs in his ball, and now… well, now here we are.
I scrape my fingernails up and down his shell a bit. Then stop, because that’s a great way to tear them.
“Just watch out you don’t pinch me with your joints.”
“Yes yes. I remember pinch points.”
He’s sort of cradling me now, two arms wrapped loosely around my waist, one hand sneaking up into my hair. I take off my glasses, set them down on the floor at arm’s length, grab Rocky, and just kind of pull him into me. Even this 400-pound creature lets himself be moved like this, lets me smoosh my face into his carapace. I wish the hologram would transmit what he smells like. You know, other than just ammonia. I bet he smells organic in all sorts of new and weird ways.
“Rockyyy,” I sing at him, half-muffled. “Hi…”
“Hello, Grace,” he hums, amused. I feel it in my whole body.
I kiss him just below the radiator, just because I can.
“Ewwww. Ewww.” Rocky shakes his carapace as if to dislodge me. “Why do you put your gross human mouth on me? You are so disgusting…”
I kiss him again. I kind of want to lick him, but I feel like that would be 1. too unpleasant for me, and 2. crossing a line.
“Disgusting,” he chides, settling in closer.
“Not disgusting. It’s a human way of showing affection. I’ve literally shown you so many movies about it.”
“Human affection is gross. Don’t need it.”
“Uh-huh,” I say in between more little pecks.
He shoves his radiator up into my face. I giggle and kiss him there too, running my fingers along the lines of his vents. All of this is so surreal. It’s not even like the novelty of the situation is getting to me—I feel like that wore off pretty quick, not just because I’ve hugged him before in his pressure suit, but because this is the way it feels like it’s meant to be, you know?
“Grace,” says Rocky. He pokes at my chest again. “You should take off your clothes.”
I sit up very quickly. O-kay. Yeah, even if the sensors can’t pick up all my bodily functions, there’s no way Rocky couldn’t feel that heartrate spike.
“Wow, uh, that’s one way to escalate!”
“Escalate? It’s just easier to touch without clothes in the way.”
I can hear the teasing lilt in his voice loud and clear. I swallow, remembering the last time we were in a position like this—Rocky nearly on top of me, watching me intently. Years and years ago, now. Because Rocky is Rocky, he’ll remember it all very well.
“Okay, well, get off me first. I’m not sitting butt naked on a floor like this.”
Rocky obliges, and I rocket to my feet, grab my glasses, and slide the door open. Alan and the rest of the crew are nowhere to be seen. That’s good. Not like I thought they’d been waiting all this time, but… I’m just glad to be alone. I deposit my glasses on a side table and haul the two beanbags from the theater into the holodeck.
“Do these show up on your end?” I ask.
“Yes. More holograms.” He bounces down onto one. “So fun!”
I stuff the last beanbag into the room and close the door behind me. Then I look at Rocky. Despite the cool stream of air from the life support system, the room still feels sweltering.
“You’re horny,” Rocky observes. “Very quick.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, dude. I haven’t touched a single person in, like—” I don’t want to make the calculation right now. “A while, okay?”
“Yes, I understand human physiology. You’re stalling!” he chitters. “Take off your clothes!”
“Why can’t you do it?”
Why did I say that.
“Human clothes are also more fragile than Eridian clothes. I could rip them. I wouldn’t, but there’s risk.”
Fair point. I pull off my clothes quickly, like I’m changing in the morning, then throw them out the door so the holodeck doesn’t have to bother rendering them. I’ve done this thousands of times in front of Rocky, but now there isn’t a divider between us—he’s just perched on a beanbag, observing me with his full attention—
“Sit,” he says, and I sit. The fact that Eridian has an actual conjugation for the imperative always makes it sound a little more commanding than in English. I idly think that beanbag is a weird texture to feel on your naked butt.
Then Rocky clambers directly on top of me, and I stop thinking about that very quickly. The sensation of his hard, prodding feet is way more acute when naked. At least he’s taking pains to distribute his weight so it never rests fully on any point of my body. I take hold of his carapace again, like an anchor.
“Funny that humans wear clothes,” he says idly, tapping my collarbone. “You are so cold already. You should be able to withstand more cold.”
“Funny that Eridians wear clothes!” Well, he isn’t right now, but the point stands. “You wouldn’t think you’d need to get any warmer.”
“It’s good to be warm. Humans should learn from this.” His hands are idly stroking down my torso again. “When humans cuddle naked, they get warmth from each other, right? I wish this hologram had more warmth.”
“Oh yes, I’d love to share my very warm 37 Celsius.”
He waves this thought away. “The technology should be able to translate to something warm for Eridians. Also it should pick up your heartbeat better. Let’s give Alan this feedback.”
“So you can hear my heartbeat like this,” I groan.
“Hard not to! It’s very loud and fast.” He pokes the center of my chest. “It isn’t so bad to not see everything happening inside you. The important biological processes come through.”
One of his back hands lands gently on my hardening dick, and I stifle a yell.
“Yes? Good or bad—too much pressure?”
“Not bad, but—oh my god, Rocky.” I want to cover my face with my hands, but I’m not about to let go of him. I just loll my head back instead. “You’re insatiable.”
“I’m insatiable?” He looms a little closer over my face, forcibly bringing himself back into my field of vision. Then, to really emphasize it, grabs my chin and tilts it back down so I can see the rest of my body. The bright holodeck lights catch in the sweaty sheen of my skin. “I don’t feel arousal. I am in it for the love of the game.”
Okay, yeah, I remember teaching him that saying. He says it in a way that’s very foreign to native Eridian grammar; it makes me laugh.
“I think you love the game more than I do.”
“You don’t want to be touched?” He teases another hand down my erection. The thing is, it doesn’t even feel good—it’s rough rock against one of the most sensitive parts of my body—it’s just the thought of it that’s wild enough to turn me on further. Human arousal is so stupid.
“No, I do, just, uh—maybe not there, sorry; it doesn’t work with your hands.”
He considers this. “I can touch anywhere else, right?”
“I guess I did say that—”
Rocky sticks two fingers in my mouth.
This is inarguably worse.
Who wants a rock in their mouth? No one, no matter how horny they are. His fingers scrape against my teeth in a really really horrible way that I don’t think is causing any damage but I don’t want to risk it. I spit him out, face burning. What the hell, Rocky? Who was it who was talking about disgusting human mouths not five minutes ago?
I come to the realization that this guy does not need to experience sexual attraction to be an absolute freak.
“You are so weird,” I tell him.
“Yes yes,” he hums happily. “You don’t want me to do that? Even though you’re getting horny about it?”
“Oh my god,” I choke out. “No, it’s just the teeth, Rocky, you can’t be knocking around the teeth—”
He pulls my jaw open with one hand and reaches in again with another. Carefully, at least. I have no earthly clue what to do, so I lick him. The rubber xenonite doesn’t taste like anything. He presses down on the flat of my tongue and I feel something swoop in my chest.
“Human tongues are weird. It’s the only organ in your body like this. Very unique.”
I want to ask him about his newfound human slime tolerance, but find I can’t speak. Obviously. Which is… frustrating. Just frustrating, nothing else. I make a sort of gargled moan.
“Oh! I can feel your voice much better here! Do that again?”
I whine. A bit of saliva runs out of the corner of my mouth.
“Gross,” Rocky says immediately, and pulls his finger out.
I double forward, coughing. My head spins.
“Grace! You are not hurt?”
“What happened to gross human mouths, dude?”
“Gross is interesting. And it makes you horny.”
As evidenced by the… now multiple times Rocky has requested I jerk off in front of him, he finds it very entertaining when I get horny.
“Okay, you’re not wrong—”
“I know I’m not wrong. I feel you.” He pokes not my erection, but my thigh right next to my erection. Somehow that makes my muscles tense even more.
“But maybe if—” I lower my voice. Despite everything, I can’t help being embarrassed. “If we’re going to have sex, let’s try more normal sex?”
“And normal sex is what?” Rocky deadpans.
“So, for human men—”
“Yes?”
“Usually—definitely not always, but what’s common, is—”
“I’m listening very hard.” This is a sentence that makes absolutely no sense in Eridian, but he’s picked it up regardless. I snort.
“Okay, what—what—what I mean to say…” He’s paddling his fingers up and down my pec now, super light. It’s more than a little distracting. “Usually it’s most pleasurable to have some sort of hole…”
“And where is Rocky’s hole,” Rocky says.
“This is an explanation. Not a suggestion.”
“Good good good. Do not put your appendage inside me or I will crush it within my carapace and digest it.”
I shiver. “Point taken.”
“Good,” says Rocky, pleased. “I don’t want to digest your appendage.”
“Thanks. Glad we’re on the same page.”
“Also you don’t need a hole. You are just not creative enough.”
“Fair enough. So tell me all your ideas then, smart guy.”
“Maybe this,” says Rocky, and then reaches one finger down to caress my ass.
It’s not surprising, but I still suck in a little involuntary breath. Yeah, that’s… that’s the most obvious way to take it. Not something I’ve ever tried. Not something I’ve ever wanted to try til now. Not something I even think will work—Rocky’s fingertip is just on the edge of too rough, even now—but god, as Rocky rubs his finger around in little delicate circles, I just want to entertain it for a moment. I can feel the tension acutely in my pelvic region, muscles jumping alongside Rocky’s touch.
“Good?” he hums.
“Let’s—let’s try it. Or—wait.” I sit up. “Sorry, one sec.”
Rocky steps off of me. I run out of the room to grab my secret lube stash from the theater, then run back and plop right back down, heart racing from more than just the sudden exercise.
Rocky reclaims his place on my chest—even closer this time, brushing the bottom of his torso against my belly. Two hands roam my shoulders, prodding and squeezing, like he wants to touch all of me and isn’t sure where to start. A third hand grabs the lube bottle and pops it open.
“This liquid again. Gross.”
“But necessary!”
“But necessary,” concedes Rocky. He pauses his exploration of my chest to anchor his front two hands on the beanbag, then, with two of his back ones, just straight-up hoists my hips into the air.
I yelp, instinctively clutching Rocky. Blood rushes to my head and to my dick. I silently add “getting manhandled by Rocky” to the list of things that really get me going. This whole wacky turn in my life sure seems to be adding to that list in ways I’d never anticipated.
“Horny!” Rocky observes.
“Yeah. Ohh my god, dude.”
“Just for gravity. Here, like this.”
With multiple legs working in tandem, he re-fluffs the beanbag so that my butt is balanced lightly on the bulk of it and my head—alongside the two legs on which he’s resting all his weight—weighs down the lower, thinner part. The position isn’t great on my shoulders, but at least there’s a pillow (beanbag is a pillow, right?) under my neck and head.
“But,” Rocky continues as he dribbles cool lube directly onto my ass. Some of it drips annoyingly down my lower back.“You like it, right? You aren’t hurt?”
“It’s very, um. Exposing.”
My legs hang off the other end of the beanbag, toes tapping the floor. One of Rocky’s hands gently spreads them further apart.
“You like exposing,” he says. “You like being embarrassed. A funny Grace trait.”
“Sure is,” I mutter. Come to think of it, I wonder if Eridians would even get why this pose does feel so exposing. My instincts are based on the idea that an ass in the air is easier to see from many vantage points. But what if your species can “see” an ass just as clearly in any position?
That thought flies out of my head as soon as Rocky puts his finger on my hole again. Just touching. Honestly, I think the implications—the intimacy—of it is doing more for me than the actual feeling. Even though my hands are in a tight grip on his radiator, I still feel completely at his mercy.
“Wait,” I say suddenly when he starts to push his finger inside. “Is this stuff body-safe?”
“Rubber xenonite? It’s inert. Should not interact with your body at all.”
He goes right back to fingering me. Oh my god, I think. I’m letting Rocky finger me.
It’s… not great, physically? The roughness of his finger makes it just on the edge of painful, like… okay, there are some unsavory comparisons I am not going to think about at the moment. But the lube helps, and I’m trying my hardest to relax, and his finger is quite thin, so maybe it’s the thought that it could work that’s setting me ablaze. Taking this opportunity to be the closest we can get, to let him reach into me, feel inside me…
“Grace?” Rocky’s soft, concerned voice pulls me from my horny haze. “Leaking again. I can stop!”
Oh. My eyes are watering.
“It’s—kind of painful.”
He twists his carapace in agitation. “Not supposed to be! I’m doing as the books say! What hurts?”
Of course he read books about human sex. Of course he’d want to do research, to hurt me as little as possible. That level of care—plus the revelation that he’d clearly been planning for exactly this—touches me in ways I can’t describe. (And ways I can describe. Namely: feelings in the groin area. Lots of them.)
“Not your technique! It’s great! It’s just the texture again. Too rough for a place that sensitive.”
Slowly, Rocky pulls his finger out. A funny feeling plays in my stomach to see the sheen of lube on the hologram’s finger, to see how deep he had actually been. I feel… better. But maybe a little empty.
Rocky makes a thinking noise, tapping at my hole. “Hmm. Do you still want something in here?”
“I—maybe?”
This is where I expect Rocky to run out and produce some crazy sex toy he’d spent all night making. I don’t expect him to say:
“Could try with my ovipositor.”
“What,” I say.
…Is Rocky thinking about laying eggs in me?!
It takes him a second to respond. During which approximately one thousand thoughts run through my head, to the tune of oh no, I was right all along about aliens, and is this what that hentai stuff is all about? and why is that actually kind of hot. HOW could that be hot, dick. Please.
“It is not ever used for penetration,” Rocky says, a bit haltingly. “Feels weird.”
I have, actually, gotten to see Rocky lay eggs a couple times now, since he sometimes has to expel them like in a human menstrual cycle. So, once my rational, non-horny brain takes over… yeah, I guess I do know what Rocky’s ovipositor looks like.
Which Rocky very helpfully demonstrates for me now. A seam on the very bottom of his carapace breaks open—fortunately without all the blood and stuff that tends to come with eating—and out pokes a very short, rigid cone of sorts. In reality, I know it’s a darker color, but the hologram renders it as the same brown as the rest of him. Unfertilized Eridian eggs are a little smaller than a chicken’s, so the organ’s opening is sized accordingly, while the base is much wider. The length of it is maybe an inch or two. It’s also slightly prehensile, which tracks with its function: providing a chute from the Eridian’s body to a carefully picked place on the ground. All you have to do is stoop down, position yourself, and voilà. Egg laid safely.
I honestly had never really considered it to be anything like a penis. It just doesn’t have the right shape at all. But as Rocky steps in closer towards me, loosening his grip on my butt and dangling the bottom of himself just before my face, I think—oh. This is something more than just me opening my pants and taking out my dick. Not like that isn’t private, but this is… I don’t know. It shows a greater trust, I think.
“Can I touch it?” I ask quietly.
“Yes yes!”
The cone shape makes it awkward to get my hand around—even though it’s smaller than my palm—but I try anyway. The material bends a little, like plastic or cartilage, and Rocky shivers, and I let go instantly.
“Is it sensitive?”
“No, not at all. Same as my carapace. It isn’t organic in the same way as my internal organs.”
Dang, I really wanna know what it’s made of! My scientific mind is firing up now. I run my finger around the organ’s thin edge. Not sharp, but almost. Is it chitin? Probably not, but it’s smooth-but-bumpy in a way that reminds me of a beetle’s carapace.
Hm. There is a hole here. That almost-sharpness of the edge would not make it fun to thrust into. But…
I stick a finger up it anyway. It’s met with hard resistance about an inch in.
I feel Rocky’s laugh in my hands. “That’s a valve I open and close to time the release of eggs.”
“Can you open it?” I say stupidly.
“No!” Rocky wiggles his ovipositor out of my grasp. “Why do you want to touch my insides? Gross gross gross!”
“Well you want to touch my—you literally were just touching my insides, dude!”
“Different,” Rocky huffs. “Humans have no carapace, so inside and outside are more similar. The transition is more subtle. Eridians have clear boundaries between the inside and outside!”
“But you won’t get any of my human germs through the hologram!”
“Not the point!”
I take the organ in both my hands. Rocky lets me. His body seems so familiar to me now that I’d almost forgotten it had stuff like this just beneath the surface. I carefully slide two fingers into the opening and feel around. It feels exactly as expected, except—on the hard surface, I think I can feel the curved seam where the valve opens and closes. It makes me dizzy to think about. I understand why he won’t budge on this. But also… is this the closest I’ve ever gotten—will ever get—to the tender, organic parts of Rocky’s body?
“Can you feel this?” I ask softly.
“Yes. Strange.”
“What’s it like?”
“Like…” His hand taps over my face. “Like if I did this, maybe?”
He pushes his finger into my nostril. Not deep enough to hurt at all, but I recoil instantly, smacking him away. “Okay, whoa, I get it! Sorry, dude!”
“No no no. Maybe this is a bad analogy. Don’t stop.”
I stroke his ovipositor again, but hesitantly. “You sure it’s not too weird?”
It’s a moment before he responds. “Humans have built-in places for intimacy,” he hums. “Eridians don’t. I like making up new places.”
That tugs at something within me. Even if he’s getting something different out of it than I am, it’s still meaningful. We’ve proven that time and time again—doesn’t need to feel good to mean something.
Then Rocky says: “And sex for humans is about fun, right? And sometimes, playing pretend? Grace! I have a question.”
“Yeah?”
“Would it be more fun for you if you pretended my ovipositor was one of your reproductive appendages?”
We’d never come up with a good Eridian word for penis, I think distantly. Given the way heat now flares back up across my body… maybe that’s okay!
“Uhh… in what way?”
“What would you do if you had a naked human with this anatomy on top of you?”
I try to picture it. The thing is… I don’t even think I’d like that very much. Not because I have any inherent objection to sex with penises rather than vaginas. It’s just that all that’s so far removed from Rocky that it’s uniformly unappealing to me. Which is kind of a wild thing to realize. Man, have I become an alien fetishist or something?
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I think it’s… important to me that your stuff is yours. Not a human’s.”
He trills with joy. “Very kind! But not my suggestion. I don’t mean to imagine I’m a human. I mean, what would you do to pleasure me, if I could be pleasured like you, Grace?”
There’s an intensity now to his words that seems to demand something of me. Distantly, I remember the first time I’d ever jerked off in front of him. He’d told me that he wished we could play at this together. And… yeah. That’s what this is. Playing together.
Okay. Rocky sure seems to have fun with my mouth. So, ignoring the instinctual voice that’s yelling at me for even entertaining the idea of something this weird, I pull Rocky in closer and lick a stripe up his ovipositor.
Rocky squeaks and nearly leaps out of my grasp.
“What! Grace! What!” He shuffles his legs aimlessly, stamping them up and down like he’s not sure if he wants to make a run for it.
“Bad?”
“Weird weird weird.”
“So now you don’t like my gross mouth anymore.”
“Glad you’re not really here. If this were real, it would be so so unsanitary.”
Because his ovipositor has to go back into his body. I’m sure the heat from his various systems would instantly fry my potential germs in any case, but I don’t bring that up. “Should we try something else?”
“No. Do that again.”
I laugh and pull Rocky’s organ into my mouth. At least it’s easy to get my tongue all over the inside of it. It’s a neat shape to work with. I’d been considering a sort of simulated fellatio, but this thing has some (presumable) advantages over an actual dick. Like: I can bite him.
It’s actually really fun to bite him.
“Trying to eat me?!” Despite everything, his tone is fond. “Weird human. Did you have enough of your midday meal today?” (He had refused to come up with a more concise Eridian term for “lunch.”)
I pull my mouth off him with a weirdly musical pop. How the heck do I explain mouthfeel? Should I tell him about when I was nine years old and couldn’t stop chewing on the end of the recorder they gave us for music class? “Biting things just feels good.”
“Sexually?”
“No! Just… it’s a human thing.”
“Part of food culture?”
“No. I don’t know what it is, honestly. Part of sensory stimulation needs.”
He makes a contemplative sound, then lowers himself back down to tap at my lips with his ovipositor. “Okay. Continue. But be careful.”
I don’t think my teeth could even make a dent in this thing, but point taken. I lap my tongue around the outside of the cone, then slide it deeper into my mouth. It’s not hard to fit most of it, though it stretches my lips in a way that must look obscene. That thought gets the ol’ fire going again, but not as much as the realization that… looking at it from Rocky’s perspective, this is a crazy thing for him to do.
Like, think about it. Here’s one of your reproductive organs, which, while not exactly fragile, is much less hardy than anything else on the outside of your body. And then the human wants to put it in his sharp, gross hole that pulverizes food and leads directly to his digestive organs. And the fact that Rocky just indulges me? Maybe it isn’t too different from his food-pulverizer mechanism (hands) touching my vulnerable reproductive organ (dick). But at least hand-on-dick is, for me, culturally pretty normal, even if Rocky’s hands are anything but. This thing we’re doing has no Eridian equivalent.
I’ve leaned back far enough that Rocky’s kind of straddling my mouth now, keeping himself in position just as much as I’m pulling him in. It feels strangely good to press my hands tight and steady on his torso and just feel how he moves. Another reminder that he’s a living creature, that we’re moving in tandem, that he’s choosing to do this. Not to mention—in a certain way, he’s kind of got me pinned again. Two of his back legs rest on my chest, pushing me down, and it’s not like I can raise my head in this position. In another context, that would be panic-inducing. Not like I’ve got great memories of being held down. But this is different. This pose is entirely new. And the feeling of it is kinda—
“Horny again,” Rocky coos. “You are so weird. Now it’s sexually arousing?”
I make a little noise that’s absolutely smothered by the ovipositor between my teeth. Great! Vividly, I remember Rocky telling me earlier that he can feel my voice much better when he’s in my mouth. Heat floods through me.
I reach out, blindly feeling for my erection.
Rocky’s hand stops me. He takes my wrist and snaps it gently beside my head. “No! Don’t touch. Let me find a way.”
Augh, that response just makes me ache even more! If I could speak right now I’d complain about how mean he is. I wiggle a little under him, squeezing my thighs together, pleading without words.
He tilts in towards me. It forces my chin up higher. “Oh. Understood. You like the vulnerability? Of the pose and the restraint.”
I nod quickly.
Rocky places one hand gently on my forehead. It’s so sweet that for a moment I’m consumed by the realization that he’s never done that to me before. Never done any of this, of course, but that one, for some reason, stands out.
“Sex is vulnerable,” Rocky muses. “This makes sense. But you also like to lose control? This is stranger, but I understand it too. It’s about trust.”
I nod again. It’s fun to explain these things to him, but another thing entirely to have him just pick up on that all by himself.
“Amazing. It’s amazing that you trust me like this. Thank you, Grace.” Some sweaty hair is clinging to my forehead; he sweeps it out of my eyes. “Should I try putting my ovipositor in your bottom hole?”
A giggle just manages to escape my very preoccupied mouth. It comes out as a sound that I, uh, really did not ever expect to make before this exact moment.
“Not a response,” he singsongs.
I can’t nod very well, so I give him two thumbs up. As he pulls himself up and away, I take a deep lungful of air. My head feels hazy. My limbs are all soft and pliant. When Rocky gathers up my legs and starts to gently manipulate me into a new position, I just go with it. Why not?
What happens next is that Rocky basically folds me in half. Butt in the air, knees hanging on either side of my head. Wow wow wow. It’s actually a miracle that my spine will let me do this after all it’s been through—are all those morning stretches finally coming to something? But the pose allows Rocky to position himself immediately over me and, uh… mount me?
New lube is applied. Two hands hold my torso and hips steady as he presses the tip of the ovipositor up against my hole. The way he’s wiggling it, trying to fit it in when it’s just a little too big, makes me lightheaded. The jerky, insistent movement reminds me of trying to push together two halves of some mechanism that stubbornly refuses to click.
I try to relax, but Rocky’s clear frustration is making it hard. “Try—try going slower. Like what you did with your fin—aah!” The tip of it presses in, finally. “Okay. Um. There you go.”
Rocky makes a pleased noise. He readjusts his position slightly, keeping himself stuck in me all the while. “I like this,” he decides. “Feels intimate. Like I’m going to lay eggs for a mate.”
I slap my hands over my burning face. “Yeahh. I bet the human anus would be great substrate for you and Adrian, huh.”
“No, terrible substrate. Too cold. Also, you excrete food waste from here. Humans have so many holes already; you should have a sex hole separate from your excrement hole.”
“Your choice of topics to chat about mid-sex is really inspiring, dude.”
“Human mid-sex topics are boring.”
“What’s wrong with a little ‘ooh, Grace, you’re so sexy, you feel so good’?”
“Yes yes, Grace is very sexy,” Rocky deadpans. To make “sexy,” he’s tacked an Eridian adjective-forming chord onto the word for “sex” in a way that sounds hilariously unnatural. “You look like one of the Earth animals that rolls into balls when scared. Fear is vulnerability; vulnerability is sexy. Q.E.D.”
“Wow, you’re making me swoon. Do you think you could get a little deeper?”
Rocky makes some experimental thrusts. It is, honestly, pretty hot to watch from my weird vantage point how his whole torso bobs up and down. But the cone shape of his ovipositor makes for a bad penetration tool. Physically, I’m once more getting very little out of it, except for the pleasant smoothness of the material against my ass.
“Not much deeper,” he concludes. “If I do this, does it hurt?”
He grabs my hips and crushes in as close as he can. Yeowch! That’s a stretch! At the same time, though, I try to focus in on the feel of Rocky inside me. Like, it’s weird. There’s a part of me that’s still asking how the heck I got myself into this situation. But it’s also undeniably appealing in a psychological way that’s hard to explain. Maybe I should get him to start experimenting with xenonite dildos. Hey, speaking of which…
“You didn’t prepare any sex toys, did you? You know, like—” I grit my teeth, trying to pretend my butt isn’t smarting as Rocky makes another attempted thrust. “What am I saying. You. Ah. You know what sex toys are.”
“I haven’t made anything like that yet. For this time, I just wanted to use my body. Also!” He slowly pulls himself out of me. “You’re not saying it, but I know it hurts—”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“So, let’s do something else.”
I might have given him a mini-lecture on the concept of masochism, but… yeah, I can’t even pretend to be a masochist. The pain is not actually very fun! I breathe a sigh of relief, too, when Rocky uncrumples my body and lays me out flat on the beanbag. It takes me a moment of running through all the other sensations to realize that my back’s aching more than expected. Welp. Guess that’s the price I pay for crazy alien sex.
If you told me back on Earth that “crazy alien sex” was something I’d enthusiastically attempt in the future, I have no idea what I would’ve said.
“So fragile,” Rocky says softly. Half-teasing. I think he can sense how winded I am. “Should we stop?”
“No, no way.” I sink a little deeper into the beanbag. “I think I just have to… not move anymore.”
“Yes. Good. No more strain.”
“You could, uh.” I look a little to the left of him, at the oddly-textured wall of the holodeck. My face burns. “Make sure I don’t move. If you want.”
“More control?” Rocky hums. “Yes. I could do that.”
He plants a hand on each of my forearms. Thanks to our little squeezing experiment earlier, he knows exactly how tight to hold them—never shifting his weight on top of them, but keeping a firm grasp that I probably could not easily escape. One of his fingers idly taps my handprint scar.
“Like this?”
I nod. Then roll my head back, trying to relax so hard that all the tension and the ache drip out of my extremities. Rocky is more like a brace than a cage, here—holding me down, sure, but with the intention of stabilizing me. To that effect, he splays one of his free hands gently against my cheek. His finger catches against my upper lip, and I feel the shape of it in a way I’ve never felt before. I close my eyes. The driving want intermingles with the satisfaction I already feel. I’ll never stop wondering at how safe I feel at the touch of someone so abjectly alien.
“Very sweet,” Rocky hums. “So content.”
“Read like an open book, as always, huh?” But my voice is all smiles.
“I like how humans are like books. Very helpful. Even easier to read, too, when I can touch you so close.”
He taps my lips as I laugh.
“Benefit of being squishy, huh.”
“Yes. It’s very fun when you’re so horny.” A couple of his limbs vacate their positions to gather up the lube, but the hand on my face holds firm, stroking me. Teasing, maybe. “Are you completely full of unreleased energy now? We should try to release it.”
“Pent up,” I suggest. We’ll have to think of a better way to say that in Eridian. Later. It’s been a bit up-and-down as far as my arousal goes, but—right now, his suggestion is turning all my body’s dials back to max. “Yeah. Please. However you want to, uh, do that.”
Rocky hunkers down, bringing his torso in close to my chest. I shiver as fresh lube pours over my erection. As my arms and hips are regrabbed and held firm.
“Maybe like this?”
He presses the flat of his ovipositor against the top of my dick, sandwiching it down against my belly. The hard, plastic pressure of it is odd, but—wow, it’s the most relief I’ve had there all day! He rubs himself against me in a sort of staccato rhythm. I can tell he’s trying really hard not to scrape me with either the fine edge of the ovipositor’s hole, or with his rough carapace. Easier said than done when the lube’s making my dick slip all over my skin like an eel. Maybe a hagfish? Certainly secreting enough slime to make that comparison appropriate. Huh, have I told Rocky about hagfish?
Nope, this is no time for thoughts like that! Rocky’s figured out a better angle of approach. He grinds his organ against mine in long, slow, fluid strokes. It’s pretty intense, actually. The texture, the unyielding hardness on my tender skin… I whine a little, trying to buck up my hips to help, but Rocky pushes me back down.
“No, I will! You rest!”
Whoa. Never have I felt the vibration of Rocky’s voice thrum so clearly through my body. That feels great. I’m pretty sure I’m just about melting into a puddle right now.
“Oh, lots of leaking,” Rocky observes. He wiggles in delight. “You like this so much? Amazing. Very slutty.”
I nearly choke. Rocky had insisted not only that I teach him English swearwords, but that I help him come up with Eridian equivalents. Native Eridian vocabulary obviously has no rude words related to sex or associated shame—the majority of them are basically variants on “eat shit”—so we’d had to get creative. The word he’s using for “slutty” is a new inflection of the Eridian word for “greedy,” plus a few notes that we’ve decided connote sex.
“You’re the one who’s all over me,” I huff, as if every muscle in my body isn’t actively twitching with his onslaught of motion.
“You get more from this,” Rocky says patiently. “Better sense of touch. So, it’s for you.”
Yet again, I think about how odd this all must be for Rocky, to touch reproductive organs with another person. And still, his joy is clear. He’s so happy just to play at this with me.
“Rocky,” I gasp. “Aah—let my arms go—”
He does, and I grab his hands in mine, wrapping my fingers as tight around him as I can. Better sense of touch indeed! I feel up the jagged edges of his claws, the grooves in his carapace, pulling him closer and closer in towards me, overwhelmed by the abundance of texture. Rocky hums, a deep, pleased sound, and that sends me over the edge. I cling to him, and he clings right back, little notes singing through my body. All the day’s tension bubbles up and out of me in a burst of pleasure.
I let go of Rocky and flop back into the beanbag, letting my arms flail out beside me. Dang, since when had I been straining so hard to hold myself up?
“All okay, Grace?” Rocky trills. Wow, he’s not even berating me about getting cum splatters on his ovipositor!
“That was awesome, dude.” I pat the nearest of his legs. He’s stood up properly now, hovering just over me, one hand carefully bracing my head. “Ugh, sorry I don’t have a cloth. Want me to get one to clean you up?”
“Later. Rest a little for now!”
The fatigue comes over me slowly this time. My body feels so heavy. Even as I shut my eyes, the bright spots of the holodeck lights dance blindingly across my eyelids. Ughh… I need a nap. And a bath. If only I could take Rocky into the bath with me… or into my bed, for that matter…
Wow. What I wouldn’t give to properly sleep with him. That’ll be the next holodeck experiment for sure. Or, maybe…
I slowly, painfully turn onto my side and pat the empty stretch of beanbag before me. Thank god these are so big. “Rocky? Come sit?”
He plops beside me in his regular sitting position, shifting a bit so his weight doesn’t dip the beanbag too much. One leg arches protectively over my back. I smile and sling an arm around him as well.
“You know what’s funny?” I tell him. I curl in towards him, pressing my forehead against his carapace. “I don’t think I’ve ever had sex that good in my life.”
“Hmm.” His voice rumbles pleasantly in my skull. “Maybe your human partners weren’t committed enough to your pleasure.”
“Nah, it’s more about me than them.”
I drum my fingers across his radiator, thinking how to explain this. Or—how to even conceptualize it. Is it that Rocky is simply more attractive than anyone else? That’s not it. I still have no idea how to quantify that anyway. Is it just that we love and trust each other? That I don’t have to stress about being good enough? Or just the simple fact of…
“This sounds so weird,” I say slowly, “and I think this is how humans usually work, really, but it still feels weird to say. I think what turned me on so much about all this was not just the inherently sexy situation, but that it was you in the sexy situation with me.”
Wow, what a good scientist I am. This is some seriously reflective autoethnographic fieldwork!
“I understand,” Rocky says, though with some uncertainty. “Emotional connection heightens sexual experience. Makes sense.”
“Well, yes and no. Maybe not a heightening. Just an extra flavor.”
“Yes, many new flavors. Lots changes when you can touch properly.”
“Yeah, for you too, huh? You sure got used to my gross fluids.”
He makes a gesture a bit like a shrug. “Gross fluids are a part of Grace.”
“As being rough and hard and scraping me is a part of Rocky!”
“We are both so tolerant!”
“Yeah. Just comes with the territory of being naked.”
But my mind is still half-stuck on how Rocky had parsed my confession. Shouldn’t it be strange that I’d been aroused specifically by him? Is it all just a byproduct of our deep emotional connection—even if it seems just as easy to imagine that connection without it? Is it attraction, whatever that means? I’ve seen the romantic dramas—I know what pining looks like, what desperation looks like, and this isn’t that either. Maybe me and Rocky have just skipped past all that and settled into a kind of friendship—partnership? —without any precedent in my life on Earth.
“Adrian will laugh at me when I tell them about this,” Rocky says suddenly, jogging me out of my thoughts.
Not like any of this has precedent in Rocky’s life on Erid, either. I chuckle, remembering the conversations we’d had on the topic. Adrian had been adamant that the human reproductive cycle was weird and gross, and was somewhat impressed that Rocky had any interest in participating in it. I couldn’t argue with them there.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine they’ve ever heard of an ovipositor being used in such creative ways.”
“Yes, they’ll appreciate the creativity. I’ll also tell them that Grace thinks I’m sexy. Which is an important status symbol for humans.”
“Okay, well, that’s—”
Not what I said. Is Rocky sexy? Heck if I know. Maybe he definitionally is, now. Maybe it doesn’t actually matter.
“Very important status symbol,” Rocky says, misunderstanding my protest. “We have dozens of romcoms of evidence. If Adrian doesn’t believe me, we can show them Mean Girls.”
Most of all I think I just like that he isn’t making a big deal out of this. We had sex! It was cool! Doesn’t change anything. Time to talk about movies.
“Dude, this is not what you should be getting out of Mean Girls. Why is that your example?”
“It’s a clear example of the social power of human standards of beauty.”
“I don’t know how to explain to you how much I don’t want Adrian to think—actually. Wait. If it has to be a movie. Did I ever show you the one with the fish man?”
“No! Explain?”
But this just has me thinking about bathtubs again. I extricate myself from Rocky and sit up, back burning and head swimming.
“Maybe later. I just want a hot bath. My poor joints…”
“Sorry,” Rocky says. “I should have been more careful.” Then: “Wait! Idea.”
He scampers out of the room. The rubber xenonite falls to the floor, formless again. (And still a bit cum-stained. Whoops.)
I lean my elbows on my knees and look down at myself. There are some red marks on my thighs that are sure to become bruises. Dang, why in the world had I let Rocky pull up my hips like that? Worth it, of course. But next time we’ll have to make some changes. More support… proper pillows… yeah, I can feel my problem-solving brain waking from the sex fugue, whirring through the logistics of it. I’m sure Erid’s greatest engineer will be excited to brainstorm too.
A minute later, there’s a rapping at the door of the holodeck. I shoot to my feet. Ouch. But that doesn’t stop me from hobbling over and swinging the door open.
Rocky, back to the vividness of his normal coloration, waves at me from inside his form-fitting xenonite suit.
“Oh, you can walk?” he hums. “Thought I’d have to carry you. Come on!”
He leads me up the stairs and into my modest bathroom. I follow in a bit of a daze, noticing now more strongly how the lights sparkle off the xenonite, shutting me off from an unobstructed view of his carapace. But, more importantly: I have a bathtub in my house now, and Rocky intends to make the most of it! He jumps in with a thunk and turns on the tap at full blast.
I readjust the temperature towards the hot side. “I know it’s all cold for you, but this dial does actually matter.”
“Yes yes.” Rocky stamps his feet, splashing in the collecting pool. “Coming?”
“One minute!”
I take a second to use the toilet—always pee after sex, they say, and I’m long past the point of caring if I do stuff like that in front of Rocky—then climb into the tub after him. I relax back into the water with a huge sigh. Man that’s nice. My back and shoulders and legs and ass are all thanking me profusely. And my thumb, still sore from where Rocky had pinched me. Is it weird that I’m a little excited to see that one bruise over? A reminder of first (well, second) contact, and a nicer one to think about than the existing scar.
I put my arms around Rocky and squish my cheek against the top of his carapace. Even in the chunky suit, there’s nothing that feels incomplete about his presence.
“We could’ve been having sex this whole time,” I say conversationally. “I guess I didn’t really think about it. Failure of imagination on my part. Or I just wasn’t horny enough. But it isn’t like there’s no way to do it when you’re suited up.”
“That’s true,” Rocky says. “We should try it. But also, if I’m in the suit, I don’t feel naked. Feeling naked seems important.”
I want to protest that you can totally still do the deed while clothed, but that’s not what he’s saying. It’s about the simulation of a particular experience. My experience, I realize with a start. If touch is always going to be mediated by some technology, why not favor the one in which we can be on equal footing? Of course, who knows where tech will go in the future. But even just this is amazing enough.
“It’s more vulnerable,” I agree, inadequately.
“And it’s the best way to meet you in my atmosphere.”
“Yeah. Wow.” The fantasy of a Grace who’s just a little less fragile.
“Many tweaks to make still. But I had so much fun! And hopefully we can continue to have fun with it. There are so many categories of body-related fun. Like human massage techniques or Eridian dexterity games.”
I imagine Rocky kneading into my sore muscles like pizza dough, and laugh. “Dunno if I’d want you to massage me, buddy.”
“Why not? Now I know how hard to press so it isn’t painful.”
I don’t have the heart to protest that. I sink down as deep into the water as I can go, smiling up at Rocky.
“Yeah, alright. You know what? I’ll trust you with anything.”