“Love me,” she says impulsively.
“More than life itself,” he says, and kisses the tip of her nose.
“No, not that type of love.” Using both hands and some of the suds from her hair, she lathers the dark, sodden mat of his pubic hairs, and then moves a dench or two lower to stroke and massage him. “This type of love.”
He takes in a huge, convulsion breath in response to the fondling, every muscle from his navel to his throat straining for the split microt that it takes to suck in the lungful of air, and then he pushes her away. “No.”
To her surprise, his rejection doesn’t hurt. “You’re too tired,” she says, testing to make sure it isn’t something she has done or said.
John snorts out a surprised laugh. “God, Aeryn, I can’t imagine ever feeling too tired to play hide the salami with you. No, that’s not it.” He steps toward her and kisses her. It is a soft yet insistent touch, demanding a response from her with light, coaxing pressures and fleeting nips. It progresses to teeth and tongues, diving deeper with each foray, and then to strong arms around her shoulders and a hand sliding down her back to press against the base of her spine, holding her tight against him, assuring her that he loves her with heart and soul.
“Then why not?” she asks when he finally releases her.
He spends several microts running his hands through her hair, working out the last of the cleanser before answering. “Bay … bee,” he says with a full microt pause between the syllables. “You just hatched an egg, my love. Or don’t you remember threatening to kill me?”
“I remember all too well.”
“Then give yourself some time to heal, Aeryn. You can’t possibly be ready for this already.”
“I am more ready than you can possibly imagine.”
“The baby was big and it was trying to come into the world ass end first, kind of like how his father goes through life. You could have tears or something inside,” he says, once again stepping away from her.
“I don’t.”
He looks down at her abdomen and shakes his head, steadfastly refusing to participate. His body is working on a different agenda, however, and chooses that moment to make its wishes known. She comes close to laughing, if only because John looks so disgusted at his involuntary reaction.
“Cut that out!” he says to his anatomy, and bats at the stiffening organ. The pummeling only makes things worse; now he is fully erect and is visibly becoming harder with each passing microt. Rolling his eyes at the worsening situation, he continues to address the misbehaving portion of his body. “No means no. You’re just going to have to wait a few days. I’m tired and Aeryn just popped a kid loose, so lie down and shut up!”
It is Crichton at his worst and his best. Only John would stand before her, undeniably aroused, and carry on an argument with his own erection, acting as though a third person had just joined them in the shower. And in that moment, when John is acting most like the bizarre, often inexplicable person that he is, the need to be close to him builds to an unsustainable level. She had begun to fear that she had lost him forever. Sitting for arn after interminable arn beside his bed, sometimes closing his eyes for him because she thought that even in his catatonia he might sense the discomfort of dry stinging eyes, she had feared that she might never hear this sort of ludicrous conversation ever again. He wakes from his unsleeping coma, he smiles as though nothing has happened, and within half an arn he is spouting his usual nonsense. John is back, he is undamaged, and more than anything else in the universe, she needs to feel his arms around her.
She steps close, pursuing him into the hot spray of the shower. “I used the medical scanner to check for any sign of injuries. I’m fine. Superior breeding.”
“Genetic modifications,” he counters, backing away.
“Different words, same concept. You have seen it for yourself, John. I heal quickly and without complications.”
John runs out of room to retreat in a matter of steps. He backs into the corner, jolts to a halt, and stands there looking uncertain, water sheeting over him, hair plastered against his skull, the clear rivulets tracing their way down his chest to his groin and then falling free. She wants to caress his balls in the same manner that the water streams over them, arcing over the rounded surfaces, lightly embracing their contours, tickling her way loose at the bottom the same way the water does, if for no other reason than to watch what her touch does to him.
Need doesn’t begin to describe the ravenous feeling that develops inside her at the thought. Her body begs for presence rather than friction, simple union rather than physical effort.
“You know how to be gentle. I know you do,” she says, kissing the base of his throat. “John, I need you to make love to me.” She rarely uses his phrase for recreating. This time it seems like the only description appropriate to what she must have. Cuddling will not be enough. She desires a far more intimate joining. The horrors are over, peace has been entrusted to the Eidelons and their reawakened abilities, and the time has finally come for Aeryn Sun and John Crichton to be together.
She watches him swing between wanting to do what he thinks is right and wanting to do what she asks, the silently conducted argument reflected in his expression and the signals being given off by his body. “It won’t hurt me,” she says after his internal battle goes on for too long.
When John takes her chin in both hands and kisses her, she knows she has won. He tastes clean with the lingering hints of sweetness that comes from Moya’s water treatment filters, underlain by the faintest suggestion of bitterness that seems to appear whenever he has been under stress. The flavors of John Crichton are like their lives: the more pleasant tastes forever emphasized by the ones that come from danger and grief.
“Are you sure?” he asks in a hoarse whisper.
“Yes.” She says it with all the emotional backing she can muster. It comes out differently than she intends. Instead of a vow of her certainty, it emerges on a deep-throated growl of physical desire.
Her expression must have transmitted her own surprise, because John looks shocked for a microt, then grins widely and pulls her close. Holding on to her for some extra balance, he stretches to his full height and peers out into his cell, checking on something. When he looks back, it is with the light of impending intimacy in his eyes. “The tadpole is sound asleep. We’ll have to be quiet.”
“You’re the one who always yells,” she says.
“You do all the screaming,” he counters.
“I have never screamed.”
“Wail, then. Or shriek.” John leans in close, his lips brushing against her ear, and begins a whisper-quiet, falsetto, “oh, oh, oh, oh” mockery of a woman in the throes of an impending orgasm.
She counters with guttural grunts and the deepest pitched groans she can muster, stringing them out four or five times longer than anything she has ever heard coming from John.
He laughs, his body quivering out its humor against hers. “Okay, so maybe neither one of us is articulate when we get excited. Let’s see how we do with being quiet.”
Deciding that the steady smash of water against biomechanoid walls might cover the small, unavoidable noises and sooth a sleeping baby, they leave the water running and explore their way into a new, nearly effortless form of lovemaking. Penetration becomes a tenuous exploration, a gradual process with several retreats and a fast desperate search of the waste alcove for a tube of lubricant, a concession to her recent childbirth and the lack of foreplay.
She takes the tube out his hands and smears the gel on for him, taking her time, spreading it much further than is needed. She gets to explore his mivonks as she wanted, applying gentle pressure, playing with the slick, bouncing masses until John throws his head back and reaches for a wall to steady himself. Arousal thoroughly ensured, she returns to his cock. He is harder than she has ever felt him. She doesn’t know why and doesn’t care. All that matters is that he is physically excited in a way she has rarely seen, and she is the person who can make him this way. The feel of his rigid flesh in her hands arouses her even further, her body ramping up to a new level of tension, so she takes her time, deliberately doing her best to goad two bodies closer to a sexual frenzy with each pass of her hand. From base to tip she strokes him, pulling firmly, trying to judge when she has him on the brink of a climax. He won’t be able to drive into her as vigorously as usual. If John is teetering on an orgasm when they begin, perhaps this won’t be about her sexual gratification alone.
“That’s good, Aeryn,” he says at last. “That’s … that’s … that’s enough.” His stomach muscles are quivering, driving the words out in a jerking parody of speech, and a moment later the tendons in the fronts of his hips spring into tautened relief. It means he’s fighting his own body, trying to deny the response that it desires. She continues until his jaw drops and his eyes start to roll up in his head, which is John’s signal that he has reached the crystalline moment when he is no longer in control of his own responses. She stops and watches with pleasure as he slowly spirals back to the mundane surroundings of the shower.
“No fun for you if you kill me,” he eventually says on a long sigh.
“Ready?” she asks.
“You’ve got me a couple of light years past ready, Aeryn.”
“Easy,” she breathes into his ear. “Slowly.”
John lifts her with both hands, and carefully burrows in, stopping often for her approval. She wraps her legs around his waist, ignoring a twinge in her thigh, and concentrates on relaxing an entirely different set of muscles than the ones involved in hanging on to John and staying upright.
“Push,” John whispers, nuzzling the side of her neck. “Inside. Push against me.”
Defying reason, it helps. It rearranges the muscles from tension to resilient strength, and magnifies the sense of fullness. She nearly comes right then and there, if only because it is John who suggested it, and John who is holding her, and John who is being so caring and gentle.
“Oh … by Cholak,” she gasps and holds on tight to his shoulders until the moment eases. A quiet pang deep inside, a raw burning sensation that passes after a microt, tissues that were too recently stretched let out a mild complaint about being used this way so soon, and then her hips came to rest against his pelvis. Deep inside, the tip of his cock is resting against the most exquisitely sensitive portion of her entire body, and for the second time in a matter of microts her entire body begins to vibrate, begging for the extra bit of provocation that will generate an orgasm. She gabbles something, a plea to a god perhaps, and then John laughs into her shoulder. The deep rumble of his voice draws her back, returning her to the reality of the shower, the hot spray bouncing off their shoulders, and the wall rubbing against her back.
He frees a hand long enough to stroke a sodden lock of hair away from her cheek, and then stares into her eyes. “Okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” she sighs. “Better than okay.”
With her holding on to his shoulders, he walks them to a spot where she can hang on to the chest-high partition, taking some of the strain off his tired body. John is no less battered than she is. In some respects, he gave birth to something far more traumatizing than a child, and then he eagerly sucked the life back out of his creation at a cost to him that only he knows for sure. It has sapped him of endurance. This needs to be quick.
“Put one foot down,” he says. “Turn a little.” His hands guide and steady her through the awkward transition. When they’re finished, she is half turned away from him with one leg still in place against his waist and supported by his forearm, and his pelvis is rubbing hard against hers, putting wondrous pressure against all the right nerves, inside and out. Almost as crucial, with one foot on the floor, this becomes less a case of acrobatics and more like two lovers stealing a moment in a secluded niche of a wall.
It becomes a slow ballet of smaller movements, of light touches and pressure carefully applied rather than lunges and heavy friction. It becomes the cool wash of air on her back and the warm streams of water surging against her breasts; of John nudging against her, exploring until he finds the right angle so his pelvis will drive against the fast swelling bundle of nerves that can generate the most intense orgasms, and then massaging her inside and out with an easy, full-body rocking. It becomes the touch of his lips on her breast, one hand holding the back of her neck so he can kiss her with more energy, and the hypnotic, gently applied rhythms that beg for her body to respond.
Her world devolves into the rasp of his beard against the side of her neck when he leans down to kiss her beneath the ear, and the sound of his breathing somehow coming across more clearly than the steady hiss of the shower. It is a matter of hands and lips and the gentle nudge of his balls against her crotch, of the almost excessive bursts of pleasure whenever he manages to hit the exact right place inside, and of wet hair, slick bodies, and warmth. Her entire body starts to fizz, synapses demanding an immediate, out of control discharge of energy, and internal muscles begin to clench and unclench around the thickened, pleasurable thrusting.
“More,” she asks, whispering into his ear.
“Easy,” he says, always tender, always thinking of her.
His free hand goes to her breast, though, massaging one and then the other in time with the rocking of his hips, and that is more than enough. The tension compounds, raising the hair on the nape of her neck and setting her entire body to bucking and trembling, seeking the last little bit of provocation it needs. Help arrives in the form of his nose. It nudges her head up and back so he can first kiss her throat and then work his way around to the side until he is under her ear. For a moment it feels as though every bit of her body is being touched by him at once, insistent, loving. The first, nearly painful spikes of her orgasm begin to fire outward from the center of her body, collecting energy in preparation for total involvement. Only it isn’t quite enough, and she hangs there, suspended between a need that borders on agonizing and the first suggestions of an all-encompassing ecstasy.
“Please, John,” she gasps into his ear. “Harder. Now.”
John does as she asks, pausing for an instant at the end of each deep, firm penetration, and at last she goes up and over the edge. The shower disappears from around her, replaced by a thought-shattering pulse of pure, vibrating ecstasy that blossoms outward until even her fingers and toes are alight with pleasure and her hair feels like it is standing on end. She hears a quiet, groaning “Oh God!” close to her ear, is aware that he is pushing against her with more vigor and urgency, and then a second wave of delight hits her and there is little left except the fact that her body has snatched up every last bit of her awareness and is transforming it into wildly spasming muscles, involuntary cries, and a wondrous melting sensation that suggests her innards are turning to over-warmed jelly. It weakens her knees so she has to hang on to John’s shoulders, which only serves to make the final trembling frissons of her orgasm sweeter still. In the midst of her orgasm, there is scarcely enough consciousness left to take note of the quiet chuckling grumbles coming from John, but enough remains that she knows when he trembles for an instant, and then tenses and stops moving, every bit of his body save one organ going into temporary rigor when he comes.
It is over too soon. Two sets of muscles begin to unwind, tension floats away like fog breaking up on a breeze, and they slowly relax into each others arms, reentering a reality where the hot water continues to sheet over their shoulders and swirl about their feet. She sighs out the last bit of sexual energy and leans into his chest. “Nice,” she whispers into the water streaming across his skin.
John lets out an extended sigh, slowly lowers her second foot to the floor, and then ducks his head to kiss the droplets away from the corners of her eyebrows. “Pilot’s gonna be pissed about the water usage,” he says eventually.
“He needs to get used to it. I doubt this is the last time this will happen.”
He laughs, sounding more relaxed and happier than she has heard him in a very long time, and kisses her one more time. “All done?”
She smiles back, doing her best to look mischievous. It is not an easy thing to manage because what she really feels is languorous and sated. “For today.”
“It may have to do for a while. That one,” a jerk of his head in the direction of the bed indicates that he means the baby, “is probably going to keep us both hopping from here on in. We were lucky to get this much time to ourselves.”
If she had received that announcement from someone else just two arns ago, it would have filled her with a sense of dread. Now, with John awake, alert, undamaged, and tossing her a towel before grabbing one for himself, it sounds like a particularly enjoyable field strategy exercise. The challenge will be to steal time for themselves in between answering the strident demands for attention from their son. It sounds like fun.
A thought occurs to her about what has just transpired in the shower. “Honeymoon,” she says quietly.
John looks up from drying his legs. “What did you say?”
“That honeymoon custom you told me about where a new husband and wife go off by themselves for several solar days and frell like crazy -- we just had ours, didn’t we?”
He wraps the towel securely around his waist and comes over to hug her. “People usually go on their honeymoon before they have kids. Since I can’t see us parking the tadpole somewhere for six or seven solar days--”
“Over my dead body.”
“My point exactly,” John continues agreeably. “So we’ll have to take our honeymoon in pieces. A frell here, a quick boff there. It may take a --” The rest of his answer is interrupted by several quiet hiccupping cries of distress and then a rising wail coming from the bed. “Story of our lives. Never enough time.”
“Maybe this is the new story of our lives. Plenty of time and none of it spent on each other.” The wails are fast turning to screams of unhappiness. She fumbles with the towel, trying to get it wrapped around her so she doesn’t have to go out there naked.
“I’ll get him,” John says, and heads into the cell at a run.
The odd queasy feeling washes over her again, and then intensifies when John reappears with the baby cradled against his chest. He has his head bent low, murmuring more of his nonsensical assurances, and the look on his face can’t be described as anything less than blissful. She begins to understand that it isn’t just love that makes her feel this way; it is much more than that. It is love and security and the certainty that the cycles that lie ahead won’t be spent alone. She has a new family now, one that is more precious to her than anything or anyone she has ever known in her life, and her future isn’t such a frightening void any longer.
Something happens then. It is as though a thick, opaque shell encasing her body cracks open and she emerges into the warmth of never before felt sunlight. Her soul relaxes from the rigid stance at parade-rest that she has been maintaining for over four cycles, and the last of the insecurities that came with a new way of life fall away. She hangs on to the strengths, casts away the useless, hindering vestiges of Peacekeeper Officer Aeryn Sun, and at last, she become something more: a mother, and wife to John Crichton in the same manner that he is husband to Aeryn Sun.
“That’s not going to do you much good, Junior. Those spigots don’t do anything,” John is saying to the baby, who is searching vainly for a meal. “Mom’s the one with the double-barrel cappuccino bar. We gotta go see Mom about requisitioning some rations for you.”
Grinning with delight over his own silliness, John looks up at her and every bit of his attention shifts from the baby to her in a split microt. He is at her side immediately, one arm around her shoulders and his cheek resting against her head almost before she realizes he is moving. “Aeryn? What’s the matter?”
She wipes away tears that she hadn’t realized had gotten loose, smiles, and leans against him, reveling in his warmth and proximity. “Nothing. Everything is wonderful.”
“Is this the hormone thing, or are you just upset because you didn’t get to shoot as many Charrids as you would have liked while you were in labor?” He gives her a small squeeze and then devotes both arms to hanging on to the squirming, squawling bundle that is demanding to be fed.
“The second,” she says, knowing he won’t take it seriously. She leads the way toward the bed.
“How about I get you one of those sonic ascendancy cannons for our anniversary and you can blow a bunch of asteroids into gravel to make up for it?”
“That would be a start.” She barely knows what she is saying at this point. Clever repartee falls victim to astonishment.
When she first stepped from the waste alcove into the main portion of the cell, she had not been surprised to find that John had closed the doors and dropped the curtains into place. But he has done far more than that. He has taken care of everything in the short time it took her to finish drying off. The cushions on the bed have been rearranged, there is a thick, furry thermal cover waiting to keep the two of them warm, and he has grabbed several clean clothes to wipe up the inevitable wet burps and messy slobbers.
In the end, they wind up on the floor, a comfortable threesome curled up with lots of cushions for strategic padding and support. John is sitting behind her with his back against the foot of the bed, in turn providing a backrest for her and watching over her shoulder while she nurses the baby. She is warm, rested, sated, enveloped by her husband’s arms and legs, and her son is in her arms, sucking greedily at her breast in an act that is as ancient and natural as the universe itself. And for the second time in less than a quarter arn, tears threaten for no other reason than pure, unflawed happiness. She leans against John, blinks hard, and fights them back. Because Crichtons don’t cry … often … or for very long.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
As always ... thank you for reading. Scapers are the best!
KernilCrash
Purveyor of Hallucinations
Author
