Bebe (25 page)

Hardly daring to move, Bebe lifted her head, twisting back to stare in surprise at Tral’s sleeping face. Relief flooded her on a heady wave of barely suppressed gasps and tears. She stopped herself just shy of reaching up to pet and stroke his wonderful face. She covered her mouth instead, muffling any accidental noises she might make. It hadn’t been a dream after all. He had come for her and she now back where she belonged. Caressing his features with her eyes, she studied him in the semi-darkness before another soft gasp made her turn her head back the other way to watch the occupants of the other bed.

“Oh!” Pani gasped, arching her back as she rose up into the dawning daylight. She threw her long hair back from her face, her fingers sweeping through the cascading tumble of red and grey-mottled strands flowing down her back, the dangling tips bouncing against the swells of her buttocks as she rode upon her barely glimpsed partner. Her urgency was increasing; the slow fluidity of her graceful movements becoming tight and jerky as she reached one hand back and beneath her rocking buttocks to cup and stroke her lover.

A slow bloom of heat unfurled in the pit of Bebe’s stomach, becoming a nameless, throbbing want as she watched the older woman move, her full breasts bouncing, her stomach tensing, rippling as her muscles clenched in the grips of a long, shivering spasm. The steady rocking of her motions faltered and her gasps turned ragged, tinged with hints of deep, seemingly pain-filled moans an instant before that hand clapped quickly over her mouth. In one smooth motion, Pani was rolled onto her back, and a man Bebe had never seen rose to cover her. His large hand muffling her cries, he quickened the slow rocking pace Pani had set, his hips pumping in tightly controlled, jolting thrusts that rocked the entire bed. Were it set any closer to the wall, the headboard would have knocked loudly against it and likely woken even her soundly-sleeping Tral. But instead, all Bebe heard were the slight, high squeaks of Pani’s enjoyment and a slick slapping sound that increased with the vigor of his swiftly rocking motions.

That languid heat blooming deep down inside her was growing, spreading, developing into a dim pulsing sensation that had Bebe struggling to even her breathing. Her toes curled, and she felt a sharp tense jolt seize her when Pani cried out, the sound strangled and not so quiet after all, despite her lover’s muffling hand. He stiffened above her, managing only a handful of thrusts more before, barely stifling his own soft grunt, he wilted slowly over her. Removing his hand from her panting mouth, he kissed her hungry lips.

Bebe caught a brief sideways glimpse as the man pulled himself from between Pani’s slick thighs. The sight of him, so large and slick and still half erect, made that wanting ache between Bebe’s own legs tighten all over again. She squeezed her knees together, willing the strange sensation to diminish.

“Thank you,” Tral muttered, not quite under his breath. He tightened his grip on Bebe, nestling her closer to him. “Next time, move me to a station with two separate bedrooms.”

“I’ll send you a stretch kit,” the other male said, completely unapologetic.

“No thank you.”

“Don’t rebuke it unless you’ve tried it.”

“Some things should never be tried.”

“Night-night, Tral,” Pani interrupted with a throaty laugh, her arms and legs twining around her lover and pulling him back into her sensual embrace. She began to kiss and nip along the line of his chin. “Night-night.”

“Oh, for the love of...” Tral muttered into the back of Bebe’s hair. “We’re trying to sleep.”

Pani’s throaty giggles sparked another round of slow kisses, and as Bach willingly allowed himself to be drawn into her hungry embrace, with a grunt of surrender, Tral threw back his and Bebe’s blankets and rolled out of bed.

He pulled Bebe up with him. “Come on. Obviously, you’re not sleeping through this anymore than I am.”

Pulling on his trousers and a simple white, long-sleeved shirt, he gathered her into his arms and carried her out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him to give the lovers privacy.

“Horny, perverted bastard,” he muttered under his breath, carrying her down a short hall to the main room.

Bebe could count on one hand the number of times that she had been carried like this, perched upon his hip with her legs straddling his waist as if she were once more young and small. Compared to Tral, she supposed she was still small, but the intimate pressure against her pubis was stroking that nameless pulsing heat and making her intensely uncomfortable. That discomfort increased dramatically when they reached the kitchen table and he set her down again. Bebe shouted, her whole body lurching in pain the instant her feet brushed the floor. Tral grabbed her up against almost instantly and re-deposited her sitting down on one of the chairs instead.

“Sorry.” He dropped to one knee to lift and look at the bottoms of each foot in turn. “Yeah, you’ve done yourself a real...”

A funny look tumbling across his features, Tral paused mid-word and sniffed the air. He looked at her feet again. Leaning down, he cautiously sniffed at her foot, his brow turning quizzical. He looked around, hesitantly bending to smell the air around her knees, and then at his own hands. Ducking his head, he looked pointedly between her legs, and Bebe jumped when he reached between them to touch her with the tips of two fingers. They came away wet. He stared at her in no small surprise, then stood up, looking down at himself and, in particular, at the wet spot she had left on the hip of his trousers.

Heat rose to stain her face as he sniffed that spot too.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, mildly. “I was right; you are in heat!”

Bebe closed her legs, holding in the uncomfortable ache his strangely impersonal touch had intensified.

Tral stood there a moment longer, staring at the dampness on the tips of his fingers, his thumb passing back and forth through the moisture while his expression grew stranger and stranger. Finally, he looked at her.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, taking a giant step backwards. Snapping around, he quickly walked away from her, storming all the way to the kitchen sink where he rapidly and thoroughly washed his hands. “Don’t think about it, don’t imagine it, and definitely don’t act upon it. She’s not a woman, regardless of what she looks like, and you’re
not
that desperate! Yet.”

He shut the water off, started the coffee maker, and then stood there at the sink for a long time before, reluctantly, his gaze slid sideways at her again. Bebe wilted in on herself, unsure how to interpret that look and horribly, horribly embarrassed.

“You’re out of your mind,” he muttered at himself, and continued muttering long after the coffee ceased to percolate. He shook his head, alternately staring outside and rewashing his hands until, by now humiliated beyond bearing and not at all sure what had just happened, Bebe slipped from her chair. The pain collapsed her straight to her knees. She couldn’t walk and so she crawled, back down the hallway until she found the bathroom. Hauling herself up at the sink, she took the pain as her punishment and quickly, tearfully scrubbed herself clean. She washed and washed, but the unrequited throbbing refused to go away.

She touched herself, rubbing hesitantly, but that only made it worse. Struggling not to cry, she scrubbed herself again and then gasping and choking on groans the whole way, made herself limp back out to the kitchen.

She must really have disgusted him. Tral was still standing at the window, ignoring the cooling coffee completely. He didn’t even notice that she was trying to walk, though she slowly, agonizingly limped into the kitchen behind him. Hoping to redeem herself, she poured him a cup and very quietly placed it on the counter not far from his hand. She waited, tapping her fingers anxiously, but he never looked down. Not at her; not even at the coffee.

He couldn’t stand to look at her. She had disgusted him that much. Devastated and unable to bear the scalding agony chewing through her feet, Bebe slid down against the cupboards onto her hands and knees and crawled away. She found her chair through a watery sheen of tears and dragged herself back onto it.

Still standing at the sink, Tral was once more studying his hand, slowly stroking his fingers together as if still coated in her slick oils.

The throbbing between her thighs had been completely overwhelmed by the punishing pain of trying to walk, but the humiliation remained. She covered her face with her hands, unable to bear it when he raised his fingers to his nose and slowly breathed in, smelling them. Wishing she could disappear entirely, she didn’t move again until Pani and Bach emerged from the bedroom for the bathroom. The door closed, and a moment later, the shower turned on.

Tral glanced back in that direction and stared for a time at the kitchen wall blocking his view. Suddenly noticing the coffee on the counter beside him, he looked from it to the coffeemaker, and then turned to look out at her. His brows quirked closer together as he stared. He looked at the coffee cup again, and then left the kitchen to fetch his medical kit from the top of a nearby box. Opening it on the table, he filled a syringe with a tiny amount of clear liquid. When he swabbed her upper arm, she couldn’t even bring herself to protest. By the time he’d packed his kit away and returned to the kitchen to pick up his coffee cup, the pain in her feet had become a distant sensation. Unfortunately, the brush of his hands against her skin made the throbbing between her thighs return full force.

From behind the closed bathroom door, Bebe heard soft talking, which became soft laughing, and then even softer moans. Tral finished his first cup and promptly poured himself a second, then began a grudging search through the pantry cupboard and a short stack of boxes set against one wall. By the time Pani and Bach ventured fully dressed into the main room to join them, Tral had a simple breakfast of reconstituted eggs and crackers on the table and Bebe was in tears. She slid off her chair to return to the bathroom, but Tral stopped her.

“No,” he said firmly, noticing her for the first time in almost an hour. He came out of the kitchen long enough to pick her up and put her back on her chair. “Sit there and stop moving around. Your feet need the rest.”

And yet as soon as he turned and went back into the kitchen to fetch the coffee and enough cups for their guests, Bebe dropped out of her chair and limped heavily down the hall.

“Bebe, dammit!” Tral set the coffee and cups on the table and started after her. He came down the hall rolling up his shirt sleeve and dangerous look in his dark eyes. “From now on when I tell you something, you are—”

Bebe shut and locked the bathroom door before he reached it and then she hobbled to the sink to scrub herself clean again. And scrubbed and scrubbed, and cried and scrubbed some more, while Tral pounded on the door.

“She locked me out!” he said, stalking back out to the main room. “I can’t believe this. First she opens the doors, now she’s locking them! Where are my tools?”

So she was in trouble again. Already. And no matter how long or how hard she scrubbed between her legs, the wetness kept coming back and that tingling ache refused to go away. She sat in a heap on the floor, arms covering her head so she wouldn’t have to hear Tral grumbling curses and bumping against the wall as he took the door off its hinges.

“That’s the last door you ever lock against me,” he growled as he dropped his tools on the counter and picked her up. Propping one foot on the lip of the tub, he threw her across his makeshift lap and rapidly walloped her backside until the bathroom rang with her cries. When he was done, he barely gave her time to compose herself, offering her little more than a wad a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, before carting her out to the kitchen table and dropping her blazing fanny back onto her chair. “Now you sit there and don’t you move again until I tell you,” he told her sternly. “I swear, there really is nothing as bad as human behavior.”

“That depends,” his uncle said, from where he sat at the head of the table, calmly eating his breakfast.

Tral glared at him. “On?”

“On what you did to spark all that.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Tral dryly informed him. “For your information, Bebe is in heat.”

Bach stared at him for nearly a full minute before dropping his fork on his plate. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and then threw that down as well. “Come here, Pani.”

Promptly abandoning both her breakfast and her chair, Pani went to him, allowing herself to be scooped up into his arms. As Bach passed them, he paused to catch Bebe’s chin in a gentle hand, tilting her up to meet his sympathetic eyes. The pad of his thumb softly brushed a lingering tear from her cheek.

“Good luck,” he told her. “Sincerely, you’re going to need it. And you,” he half-turned to frown at Tral. Shaking his head in disgust, he stormed right past him on his way to the door. “You’re an idiot!”

* * * * *

Tral sat at his computer long after Bach bid him such fond farewell. He was at a total loss for to what to do. On the one hand, he was somewhat obligated to submit to his uncle’s whim and study the human left with him. After all, she was here, he was here, and really, what else did he have to do while the snow-level continued to rise towards the rooftop? They were trapped in here together. They might as well get something productive done.

“But on the other hand, how does one go about proving a human is sentient?” he grumbled out loud. He tapped a finger at the keyboard, but he’d long given up trying to fill out his daily reports. So far, he’d glossed over the human attack on his old station house, minimized his uncle’s involvement and turned the rescue of Bebe into the kind of grandiose battle that might hopefully be deemed worth all the tranquilizers expended. At this point, the last few days read less like his factual life and more like a work of complete fiction. It wasn’t even good fiction, but give him a long enough winter and enough revisions, he fairly sure he could whip the tale into something halfway believable.

“I might even publish it,” he mused, tapping at his keyboard with one finger. “I could have a sterling career as an author when they throw me out of this one for being a crackpot zoologist.”