Alien Nation #3 - Body and Soul (5 page)

Once upon a time, Sikes would have been brought to a screeching halt by this apparent non sequitur. But he had long since become accustomed to the concept that the Newcomers were structured radically different from humans. That their points of sensitivity did not always match up.

And so, unfazed, Sikes took Cathy gently by the arm and lightly ran his lips across the inside of her elbow.

He wasn’t precisely sure what he expected, but what he got completely surpassed whatever might have occurred to him. Cathy gasped, and her back arched, lifting her buttocks off the couch. Sikes thought,
Wow. When these people are sensitive, they’re really sensitive.

It was incredible. With the other women Sikes had known, it had always been something of a guessing game. Rarely did any of them know so precisely what it was that turned them on. But Cathy not only knew, she was completely wired in to her entire system. And Sikes was about to be an electrician.

His kisses moved slowly up her arm. He was moving into uncertain territory, so just to play it safe, he kept massaging the crook of her arm with his thumb. It had the desired effect. Sikes didn’t know whether Cathy was aware of what his mouth was doing or not. Ultimately it didn’t matter, because he knew that he was savoring the taste of her, and she was certainly enjoying herself.

All because of the crook of her arm.

Boy, one case of tennis elbow for these women and it’s good-bye, sex life,
he thought, as his mouth moved over the smoothness of her shoulder.

He saw the spots that trailed down over the nape of her neck. For a long while, he had secretly wondered about the texture of the Newcomer spots. Whether they felt different from the nonspotted portions of the skin, whether they were in any way distinguishable.

His lips moved over the uppermost spots on her neck.

He wasn’t at all prepared for what happened. If he’d thought that Cathy had reacted strongly to his kissing her elbow, that was nothing compared to what happened when his lips brushed her spots.

She let out a shriek of ecstasy so loud that it nearly deafened him. Her body twitched and writhed spasmodically, and from the way her eyes rolled up in her head, he thought she was going to pass out.

He drew back, a bit intimidated by the intensity of the reaction. My God, that had been just a light kiss. He had a feeling that if he’d sucked on the things, it might have blown the top of her skull off.

It was as if what she felt, in addition to filling her with euphoria, had also been the equivalent of a bucket of cold water. Her eyes cleared momentarily, and she placed a hand against his chest. “We . . . we can’t . . .”

He couldn’t believe it. He was so pumped up he was ready to chew the furniture. He had been woefully wrong earlier—clearly she was hot for him. He knew that he was for her. All of his repressed desire, his fascination, his (admit it now) curiosity, were bubbling over. He had been responsive to what she wanted. So responsive that he thought this creature from the stars was liable to go nova any moment. He wanted to say,
What the hell do you want from me?
but he got as far as “Wha—?”

She placed a hand lightly over his mouth. He wasn’t sure whether it was to stop him from talking, or to stop him from kissing her, or just to keep his face at a distance. The passion in her eyes indicated that if his face got close enough to hers, she might tear it off with her teeth. “We’re going too far,” she said.

She spoke with the air of a guide in those adventure movies where the hero has ventured into the sacred stronghold of some ancient race, and all sorts of booby traps were about to spring if another step was taken. Indiana Sikes, daredevil explorer. Part of him wanted to laugh, and say,
Quick! You throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip!

But another part of him was taking matters very seriously and demanded immediate attention. “Cathy, we’re consenting adults,” he said, trying as much as he could to sound reasonable.

She looked at him with incredulity, as if he had missed a point so obvious that a child would have picked up on it. “It’s not that. It’s . . . it’s dangerous. Physically dangerous.”

Now it really was all he could do not to laugh. She was worried that he was going to hurt her! He refrained from saying the clichéd “I’ll be gentle,” and instead rested a hand on her shoulder. “Cathy . . .” he began, trying to sound as considerate as possible.

She slid across the couch, away from him and up. She sat balanced against the arm of the sofa, placing her hand flutteringly against her breast and trying to send her breathing rate back to a normal level. “A Tenctonese woman,” she managed to say, “if she’s not in sync with her mate . . . she could cause him serious injury.”

That took Sikes aback. She was trying to tell him that
she
was afraid of hurting
him?

It was nonsense, of course. He went to the gym three days a week. He jogged. He lifted weights. He wasn’t exactly Hercules, but he wasn’t any ninety-pound weakling. He wondered if she was really concerned about hurting him, which seemed ridiculous, or whether she was, in fact, simply nervous about the thought of doing it with a human male.

Yeah. That was probably it. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he tried to think of how to proceed, and was thankful that he’d shaved. It had been the right move. The sheer masculinity of the facial hair might have been too much for her.

Go for the easy answer, he reasoned. She just wants reassurance.

“So we’ll get in sync,” he said easily.

He started towards her. She didn’t move away, but she clearly wasn’t encouraging him. “There are stages,” she said, starting to adopt that same slightly pedantic tone that George sometimes used. “You need to learn how to approach me. How to hum. You need training . . .”

“Training?”
He couldn’t believe it. This was going too far. Now both of his male prides, the one above his belt and below, were swelling. “Hey, Cathy, if there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s training. What’re they going to do, give me a condom with little wheels on it? Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

Cathy turned away from him, clearly ready to get up. But Sikes was too quick, darting across the couch and nuzzling the back of her neck.

Cathy practically melted. Not literally, but damned close. Her verbal protests had been a desperate gambit because her body had been screaming for release. And now, with Matthew right there again, with his tongue gently stroking her spots, she had absolutely no resistance left. She gave in to him, her body going limp against his, supple and pliable. Her breath was coming faster and faster.

He eased her back down onto the couch. She didn’t even seem completely aware that he was there anymore, so caught up in the sensations of her body was she. He grabbed the remote off the coffee table, aimed it, and turned off the television. The cheerleader and the football player vanished.

“Matthew . . .” she murmured, but whether it was from desire or from warning, he couldn’t tell. He also didn’t care, fully confident that he would be able to handle whatever happened.

She lay back, her hands grasping at him. She pulled at his flannel shirt, and he started to unbutton it. She, however, didn’t wait, and ripped it open. There was the sound of several little plastic buttons flying off their threads and landing at various points throughout her apartment.

“I never liked this shirt anyway,” he gasped.

She ran her hands over his chest, pulling on the chest hair with such force that he wanted to cry out. But he bit down on his lower lip, determined not to let her think for a moment that she was hurting him. Hell, he’d been hurt before. He had the scratches on his back to prove it. But it had been a delicious kind of hurt, the kind that gives you pleasure when you think about it.

Her dress had ridden up to her waist. Her legs, incredibly muscular, were working their way up his arms, towards his neck. She was groaning, whispering his name amidst other words that had no meaning to him.

Her buttocks slid across the couch, bringing her back up against the arm of the sofa, pushing her to a half-raised position. Both the crook of her arm and the spots on her back were within range of him. As her toes tickled his earlobes, Sikes wet the tips of his fingers for heightened sensation, and rubbed one hand into the inside of her elbow while, at the same time, stroking her spots with the other.

Cathy shrieked.

So did Sikes, although not for the same reason.

For Cathy, it was because every nerve ending in her body was erupting simultaneously.

For Sikes, it was because Cathy’s legs had clamped around his neck with the power and pressure of a vise. His head snapped forward and to the side, and something inside wrenched.

His shriek was truncated, however, as Cathy, writhing in spasms of delight, twisted at her waist. Like a wrestler, she sent Sikes hurtling off the couch and crashing into the floor.

Sikes, moaning, tried to get up to his knees, which was his latest, and last, mistake. Cathy, still in the throes of passion, snapped a foot around and tagged Sikes solidly in the jaw.

Police brutality
flashed through his mind as he fell backwards. He lay there in the darkness, stiff and unmoving—partly because he was unable to move, but mostly because he was afraid to.

He moaned in quiet pain as Cathy’s far louder and enthusiastic whimperings trailed off. It took about five minutes.

Then, from what seemed a very great distance, he heard her say, “Maaatt?”

“Yeah.”

“Matt, are you . . .” And then she realized where he was speaking from, and also recognized the agony in his voice. He heard her sit up. “My God . . . you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine. Just . . . gotta stand up.”

The lamp quickly snapped on and there was Cathy, kneeling on the couch, having just lit the lamp. Her dress was in complete disarray. Under ordinary circumstances, Matt would have considered it singularly attractive. Instead, at the moment his main concern was trying to restore feeling to the rest of his body.

“Oh, Matt, I—”

“S’okay. Really.” He smiled through gritted teeth as he pulled himself to sitting. He tried to keep his upper body turned away from her, because he had a feeling that there was going to be a beauty of a bruise coming in fairly shortly. Also, he realized very quickly that he couldn’t turn his head. “I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.”

“Matt, let me—”

“No!”
he shouted. “I think I . . . maybe it’d be better if I . . .”

“Matt, please, I’m a doctor.”

“Bill me, then.” He stood on uncertain legs, trying not to stagger. He didn’t succeed. He lurched toward the door as if he were on the deck of a ship.

“Ohhhh, Matt.” Cathy sighed mournfully. “Please . . . I know we can be good together. If we could just . . .”

“Cathy, I hear my mother calling. Okay?”

And with that, he was out the door, leaving a perplexed Cathy sitting on the couch. She pulled her dress back into place around herself and frowned.

“His mother?”

L
ITTLE
T
ENCTON WAS
a ghetto, of course. All the cute names in the world couldn’t hide that simple fact.

It was a section of Los Angeles that had been taken over by the Newcomers. All it had taken was some government subsidized housing, moving in a few thousand Newcomers into apartment complexes that most humans didn’t want to go near. And presto: instant plummeting real estate values. Humans had taken off from the area so fast that they’d left skid marks.

Undaunted, the Newcomers had displayed that incredible capability for work, learning, and initiative that would become their hallmark and, in time, would also become the thing that humans resented the most. Some found human backers. There were landlords, stuck with property that had been going nowhere, who decided to ignore the axiom against throwing good money after bad and fronted some of the more business-wise Newcomers in their various enterprises.

It seemed the sleazier the businesses, the better they did. Strip joints, sex palaces, and the like turned an extremely tidy profit. The appeal was interracial. When the Tenctonese had traveled through space, cooped up and enslaved on the ship that eventually crashed on earth, they had lived a very rigid and insulated existence. The freedom to follow their impulses once they had arrived on earth had triggered in some the baser instincts. Sexual freedom, and the privilege of ogling Tenctonese females openly displaying their wares, was like a narcotic to many. They worked that much harder to be able to afford frequenting such places.

And there were plenty of humans turning up at such places, too. The alienness was an irresistible lure to many an Earth male. How were they like Earth females? Where were the differences? It was an enticing guessing game, and anyone could play.

As the sexual tension bubbled through Little Tencton, other businesses began opening to support it. Food stores. Laundries. Housing that ranged from being rented yearly to being rented hourly.

As time passed, Little Tencton developed an almost schizophrenic personality. During the day, it was somewhat run-down, although no more so than other parts of Los Angeles. Newcomers eked out a living where they could, some holding genuine jobs while others settled for begging in the streets. Unlike other ghettos, though, Little Tencton actually attracted a fair share of tourists. It wasn’t exactly the safest part of town, but that hint of danger just added to the appeal.

But night was when Little Tencton really came alive.

It was not a healthy sort of life. Indeed, it was the sort of thriving life that one sees when one lifts a rock.

But it was life.

It was a little after 1:00
A.M.
The streets were fairly quiet, with the silence punctured every time someone opened the entrance to a bar or strip joint. During those moments you could hear shouting and music and the sounds of raucous laughter before it was cut off by the slamming door.

A car was cruising down the street. In it was a plumbing supply salesman from out of town. It was his first time in Los Angeles, and he was curious to see Little Tencton.