A Beast For The Eyes: A Steamy Shifter Romance (A Ravenswood Romance Book 2) (42 page)

All at once, the rippling of energy within the phallic form subsided, and the energy form resolved itself back to flesh and blood and stood before Olivia as a naked man again. This time, however, there was a very startling difference. She gasped and raised a hand to her mouth to stifle another yelp like the sound she had made when the alien first appeared out of the MRI.

Olivia found herself now faced with a being who was Levi Adams--but not Levi Adams. And Clive Shea--but not Clive Shea. And Bruce Foster--but not Bruce Foster. He was all of them, and yet none of them. The body was unmistakably Clive's, fully developed as a man in his mid-to-late thirties. The hair was Levi's blond hair turned a shade darker. The eyes were absolutely Levi's, and she saw both Levi and Clive in the excruciatingly handsome face. The hair dusting the forearms, legs, and chest was Bruce's body hair. She remembered seeing him at the swimming pool at a faculty party; Bruce's body was haired exactly that way. And the long, thick member suspended under the dark bush of pubic hair at his crotch was what Clive had thrust deep inside Olivia three times a night for so many nights. What now faced Olivia looked as if some cosmic chef had thrown the DNA of Clive, Levi, and Bruce into a blender and whipped them together. It was all that Olivia could do to breathe a dazzled and inarticulate, "Oooh..."

"Is this form now acceptable for intercourse?" the being asked in a voice that mixed the voices of Levi and Bruce.

"You're beautiful," said Olivia. "You're... You're... I don't even know what to call you. Do you have a name?"

The being contemplated her question. "Name: a word that identifies a thing. Proper name: A name that identifies an individual human. I have no name. Do you wish to select one for me?"

Olivia ruffled her hair with her fingers, almost wanting to laugh. This was almost like dealing with a child. The being knew everything that she knew and far, far more--but he still knew so little. He could process all the information of a lifetime, but had no personal context in which to frame any of it. She considered for a moment, searching her own memory for some name that held some significance for her, since she was the alien's only context for his entire existence on Earth. Perhaps there was some name that meant something to her... In a moment she had it. She looked up at him and said, "Lowell."

The alien rolled his eyes, thinking, searching for an association. He fixed his eyes back on her with a light of understanding and said, "Lowell. For Percival Lowell, astronomer, who interpreted the shadows on the surface of your neighboring planet Mars as a vast system of canals constructed by an advanced civilization and popularized the idea of 'Martians'. Until Mars was found to be lifeless, the word 'Martian' was a synonym for 'alien,' also popularized by the story of
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells. You have whimsically associated me with Martians because I am extraterrestrial."

Now Olivia did permit herself a smile and just the tiniest laugh. "Yes. I was making a metaphor."

"Very well," the being said. "My name shall be Lowell."

"I'm happy to meet you, Lowell," said Olivia, strangely more at ease than she had felt since the moment that the creature--whom she now no longer saw as a "creature"--first appeared in her lab.

"Olivia," said Lowell, "I have observed in your memory that a human male at times offers a female a gift prior to initiating sexual relations. I should thus like to offer you a gift."

Olivia's eyebrows arched. Just the sight of Lowell, naked and ready for her, was an ample gift in and of itself. What more--besides the experience of sex with a being from the stars who was only just experiencing human physicality--could he offer her in the way of a gift? "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I should like to offer you your dearest desire, other than a physical union with this body. Let me show you where I came from and some of what I have seen...out there."

Olivia's jaw dropped. Her mind went into a spin of pure wonder. Could Lowell actually do such a thing? Could he somehow actually take her out to where he had been, out to where he came from? What he was offering her was the dream of every astronomer who had ever lived. She gulped. A heat of excitement surpassing even sexual desire rose up inside her, filling her like the erection of a lover. "You can do that?" she asked, half-whispering. "How...how can you do that?”

"I can communicate a portion of my own memory to you...if you will touch me." Lowell held out his hand. "Please accept my gift, Olivia. First you will know something of my mind. Then I will give you intercourse with this body. Will you have me in this way?"

Olivia settled into a zone of strangely calm wonderment. She sensed she could trust him, but just to be sure... "My own form won't change?" she asked.

"No," answered Lowell. "Only the information of my memory will enter you...until we lie together in your bed. Then I shall enter you physically."

Taking deep breaths, preparing herself, Olivia reached out to Lowell. "All right," she said. "I accept your gift."

Smiling at her acceptance, Lowell stepped forward and clasped Olivia's hand. For a moment there was only the sensation of palms pressed together, the encirclement of his strong but gentle fingers, his flesh transformed from energy against her flesh, and the warmth that it brought. Then, something like a jolt of electricity raced though Olivia's body. She gasped, spasmed, tossed back her head...

...and then she was no longer in her apartment.

Olivia could feel neither her own body nor Lowell's. She was floating and flying with no physical sensation at all. And all around her, everywhere, were stars. She was surrounded with stars of every description: red dwarfs, white dwarfs, yellow stars like the Sun. Supergiants in red, giants of blue and white. Stars in binary pairs, stars in clusters. Huge stars wheeling in orbit of black holes, with gouts of plasma curling massively off of them and disappearing, swallowed up in the singularities that the holes clutched inside them. Pulsars, rotating and flashing in the quickest, most steady rhythm in the universe. She swooped through a panoply of stellar bodies until something loomed into view, something as bright as a star, but different: a planet orbiting a binary system. It was a world made up entirely of crystal, with a vascular system of lights throbbing beneath its surface like the veins, arteries, and bloodstream of a living body. From off the surface of the planet of crystal came points of living light, rising and and whirling into space like the down blown from a dandelion. And Olivia sensed Lowell's recognition of these forms. This was his planet. These were members of his species. They were a dandelion down of energy, flying off of a planet that was a colossal, sparkling, spinning jewel in space. Lowell was showing Olivia his home.

Her thought-form followed the glittering down of energy forms flying out from their home planet, and went back out into space with them. They escorted her to other planets across a vast swath of the galaxy. They showed her mighty planets of gas where life forms made of carbon and phosphorus, resembling the limbs and branches of trees, glowed and strobed to each other like bioluminescent fishes talking with light in the deep ocean. They took her to a liquid planet where enormous schools of creatures that resembled glowing eels were chased, herded, and gobbled up by creatures that were like manta rays the size of cruise ships with tails like immense sea serpents. She saw a metallic planet with hundreds of satellites. She saw clusters of stars, each one held in its own gigantic cage of solar panels, and swarms of satellites swirling around the encaged stars like the cloud of electrons around an atomic nucleus, and recognized these places as the civilizations of beings vastly older than humanity, who knew things that might not dawn on the human mind for thousands of years.

Olivia saw only the tiniest particle of the tiniest drop of the ocean of the universe, but it was enough to satisfy her need to know the cosmos for as long as she lived. She drank it all in, and slowly her mind became a haze of awareness of how truly immense and how truly marvelous the universe was. She was overtaken with bliss, and her mind was filled with what she could only describe as the perfection of knowledge. She seemed to float that way forever. She did not know how long it was before she opened her eyes--her physical eyes--again and found herself back in her apartment, sitting in her chair, holding hands with the naked Lowell, still standing beautiful before her.

Keeping her hand in his, Olivia rose from where she was sitting and a smile like that of a Buddha spread upon her face. Lowell smiled back. They needed no words. All that they needed now was their feelings. She sensed that Lowell had traveled inside her being as she had traveled inside his. From commingling with her mind and her memories, Lowell had thus learned the expression of human love through human sex. His smile was the preamble of his ultimate offering to her. She accepted this offer as she had accepted the other, and let him pull her to him and into a kiss.

Of all the first kisses in human experience, surely none was ever as wondrous as the moment that Olivia's lips at last met Lowell's. In that first press of his lips she felt the awakening passion of a young boy, the ardor of an experienced man claiming his desire, and the tenderness of a lover giving his life to his love. Somehow, in some intuitive way, he truly had become Clive, Levi, and Bruce--Olivia's fantasy and her reality--all at once. She gave herself into the kiss and enwrapped Lowell's fantastically beautiful nakedness with her arms, playing her hands up and down the body that he had created just for her, taking in the perfection of his flesh and muscle and the texture of the hair that covered them so lightly and so sensuously. Lowell deepened the kiss and she felt his being open itself up to her with the rolling of his tongue into her mouth. He leaned her backwards almost into a dip, and after a dizzying moment of kissing that way, he bought her back upright again. Very reluctantly, Lowell broke the kiss, but kept his face close to hers, penetrating her eyes with his until she turned her eyes downward to what strained between his legs. It was as long and luscious as Clive's had ever been, and a bead of man-honey had welled up at the tip. Olivia reached down to touch Lowell's glans, and she felt a little jolt leap suddenly from there and pass through his body. "Oh!" Lowell breathed in reaction to her touch at his sensitive place. He watched her lift her fingertips to her mouth and touch them with the tip of her tongue, lightly tasting the male nectar that she had collected. He smiled at the pleasure on her face. "I want to taste yours," he whispered. "Take me to your bed."

Olivia took Lowell by the hand and wanted to giggle like a girl at what he had asked her.
Take me to your bed
. It sounded like a variation of the cliche of old science fiction stories, the alien landing on Earth and demanding, "Take me to your leader." But no fictional alien had ever come to Earth looking like this, or offering what Lowell offered, which Olivia was now so ready to receive. She led him from the living room into the adjoining bedroom to complete this first contact, this initial exchange between worlds.

They stood by the bed and Lowell, his erection sweetly aching, watched Olivia undress. When at last she slipped off her bra and panties and was as fully exposed as Lowell, something like the first ignition of a star flared up inside him. A joy that Olivia had never seen on a man's face lit his features. She reached out to him, and with a young boy's eagerness and a man's surety, he gathered her up in his arms, captured her mouth with his again, and kissed her with the hunger of a billion years. He kissed her again and again, his heart beating like the flash and strobe of a pulsar, and ran his hands up and down her soft female curves, caressing and stroking and groping, exploring her buttocks and her breasts, sifting her pubic hair, feeling the wet and tingling lips of her womanhood. The bedroom was filled with the sounds of their moans of unfettered desire as their hands rustled and played up and down each other's body and her wetness slicked his fingers, until they fell onto the bed.

Lowell and Olivia rolled back and forth on the bed. Lowell's mind was a mad whirl of all the sex that Clive had ever given to Olivia and all the hours they had spent, kissing and rolling and feeling and tasting, and all the times that Clive had topped her, madly humping, thrusting and penetrating and coming. Into this feeling he brought all the wonder of discovery at he now felt at this first experience of joining with a human, and communicated it all directly into Olivia's body with every touch and every kiss. Lowell wanted to know it all, to do it all, and he made Olivia feel that he wanted it
now.

He spread her out on the bed and pinned her there, groaning and hearing her groan back. He kissed and sucked at her neck, making her squirm with delight, and then moved his attention down to her breasts, which he kneaded and fondled breathlessly. She turned to star fire at his touch, a fire only partly quenched when he brought his mouth to her nipple and sucked it as he had done her neck. Olivia squealed at the way he hardened her nipple with his lips and his tongue, then turned to the other nipple and repeated the process. He then kissed his way down her abdomen and lingered at her nipple with his tongue, until plunging further below to nuzzle her pubis with his nose and lick at it, rustling his tongue over her hairs. And then he dropped still further to what spread and glistened beneath the hairs. The joy of discovery rose inside Lowell still more as he parted Olivia's petals and studied her sex, taking in the glistening of her wetness that he could not deny himself a second more. He put his mouth to her moist and dewy flower and sucked it, drinking her in and relishing her slippery softness. Olivia writhed and her back arched at the rapturous feeling of Lowell eating her out. He played at her with his tongue as if he had spent his billions of years doing that alone. The pleasure was beyond compare, even more so when he brought his tongue to the pulpy bud of her ecstasy and rained licks upon it, turning her senses to a meteor shower of bliss. He brought her to the moment when her pleasure would burst like a meteor strike upon the Earth--and then, as if sensing where she was, he removed his tongue from her bud and tenderly kissed the lips of her opening. Olivia felt as if she were floating among the clouds, wondering where he would take her next.