When it was done, Shirley complimented me on my focus.
I nodded.
“Are you ready for what’s next?” she asked.
“Physicality,” I said.
We walked down the hall. I watched, hoping and dreading that Valka would come out of her session in Medical, that we would be face to face again. She didn’t. Shirley opened a door. I went in. Shirley and I were alone.
“Yesterday, I gave you a tour of the female body,” she said, stripping off her clothes. “Now it’s your turn to explore. I want you to touch every part of me and pay attention to how I react. It’s not necessary that you give me an orgasm today, though I certainly wouldn’t complain if you did.”
She lay down in the middle of the bed, legs slightly parted.
The sight didn’t look inviting at first, but a little beat of curiosity pulsed behind my breastbone. This would be a welcome distraction. Maybe if I did this, really pushed through and put myself into it, I could forget about Valka, at least for a time. I crawled onto the bed and knelt by her side. She offered me her hand. I pushed away the thought that Valka would be doing something very similar with Masters, right then. I closed my eyes and focused, putting the rogue thought out of my head. If she didn’t want me, then fine. I didn’t want her.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
I took Shirley’s hand between mine. I brought it up to my face. She smelled faintly of the cleanser we all used, but there was something unique about her scent, as well. I held her hand lightly in mine while I ran the other hand up her arm, feeling the firm muscles under her skin.
“Your arms were the first part of you I noticed,” I said.
She gave me an amused half-smile. “Really.”
“No lie.”
She flinched a little as my hand moved closer to her armpit.
“And ticklish too,” she said.
I could feel the ache inside me dissipate a little. Her shoulders were firm and strong.
“You don’t have to go in any particular order,” she said. “Explore anywhere and in any way you like. Just pay attention; you’re learning not just about my body, but about the way it reacts to your touch.”
Another deep breath. My fingers moved slowly to her neck, up to her jawline, and around her ear. I drew some of her soft hair between my fingers. From there, I trailed my fingers down to her breasts. I cupped one in my hand, squeezed and stroked, alternating between looking at what I was doing and looking at her face for a reaction.
“You can be a little rougher,” she said. “They’re not going to break.”
I squeezed harder, exploring the pliable flesh, how it would move and stretch. Her nipples poked out from the round surface, begging for attention. I gave it to them, first stroking, then twirling, finally squeezing and pinching.
Shirley cooed contentedly.
I didn’t want to merely make her contented, I realized. I wanted to see her orgasm. Even though it wasn’t the aim of the lesson, I wanted to do it anyways. A secret, irrational part of my subconscious told me it would serve Valka right if Shirley was the first to orgasm by my hand. Another part wanted to see Shirley’s face thrown into the same twisted luxury that I had shown her previously.
“I haven’t had an orgasm since I was on the ship,” she said. “It shouldn’t be hard for me to have one. Go ahead. Give it a try.”
I moved, seeking out the tender flesh below. She widened her legs a bit, and I shifted my position to make the reach easier. She was wet. I drew my fingers up to get the scent and taste of her. It wasn’t unpleasant, nor was it particularly pleasant, but I did notice the Shirley-ness that I had sensed before.
Watching her face carefully, I moved my fingers among her folds, trying various combinations of rhythm and pressure. She didn’t speak, but let her face and breathing speak for her. When I did something too rough, she flinched. I learned early on to be gentle. If I didn’t find something good to touch, she pouted a little and looked up at me expectantly. Touching her clitoris directly was too much, she had said, so I kept my attention nearby, but not too close. Tapping and rubbing seemed to work well, and combining those motions worked even better.
I was too nervous to get very turned on. Seeing her lying there, offering her body to me, aroused me somewhat. Touching her certainly helped. I didn’t feel too turned on to pay attention, however. I was still very much in control.
She closed her eyes and arched her back, almost offering her breasts to me. I put my other hand on her nipple, taking it between my thumb and forefinger. Little jolts of tension started running through her body—her hand, face, arm, leg—little spasms that grew and merged until her whole body was startlingly rigid.
“I’m going to . . . oh . . .” Her face contorted, lips pulled back, eyes clamped shut. “Faster,” she gasped. “You can . . . harder . . .”
I increased the pace, even though I was getting cramps in my wrist, until suddenly she grabbed my hand, mashing it into her crotch, and let out a startling hiss. She shuddered in a slowing rhythm in between gasps for air.
When it finally passed, she let go of my hand and I swallowed nervously. “Was that . . . ?”
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “It was. Congratulations, Challers. You just gave your first orgasm.”
Valka and Masters got to the mess hall before us, and were already sitting and eating when Shirley and I arrived. After I got my dinner tray, I walked toward her, until she gave me a tight-lipped look.
I had told myself that she had been using me, but I was wrong. I didn’t see contempt there, or disdain. She didn’t look good. She had been crying. Her eyes were still red, and she was sniffling. She picked at her food. The same emotions that I spent the afternoon wrestling with were roiling inside her, as well.
I left my tray at a different table and started to walk in their direction, but Shirley put her hand on my shoulder. “Maybe you should give it a little time, Challers.”
I patted her hand. “No, I need to talk to her. I have to try.”
When I got there, Masters gave me a warning look and shook his head slightly, but I ignored him. “Valka. I never meant to hurt you. You know that, right?”
She gave me the tight-lipped look again.
I took a deep breath and leaned down. “Valka, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, but whatever it was . . .”
“Just go away,” she snapped. “I don’t want to see you.”
Masters shook his head when I opened my mouth. “You better go.”
I returned to my table. Shirley gave me a look of sympathy.
“It happens sometimes,” she said. “Couples come here, and the relationship just can’t take the strain of adjusting.”
I watched Valka. “She’ll change her mind.”
Masters said something, glanced over at me, then gave Valka a reassuring pat.
“Eat, Challers,” said Shirley. “Come on.”
My appetite wasn’t as strong as usual and none of the food seemed to have any flavor. Even the chocolate tasted bitter. A cramp took hold in my stomach and twisted my guts from one end to the other. Each mouthful had to be choked down past a throat tight with misery. By the time I was done, I felt like I had been in a fight.
Shirley finished first and had a private word with Masters. He nodded. She came back and sat down across from me. “We’re going to adjust the schedule a bit. We’re going to take our classes a couple hours earlier.”
I glanced over at Valka. She was getting a similar talk from Masters.
“Valka’s going to be a couple hours later, then?”
She nodded. “It’s for the best, at least right now, don’t you think?”
Valka and I had been drifting apart, I realized, from the moment we arrived on the station. This separation had been inevitable. Still, it felt like a dagger through my chest to have it end like this, so quickly. Had we ever really been in love? It seemed unlikely.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s best this way.”
We took our trays to the recycler and returned to our room. Somehow, the thrill I had gotten from studying math with Shirley the day before was gone. We studied until Shirley called us off. I cleaned up, changed uniforms, and went to bed early. The day had left me emotionally and physically exhausted, and I fell asleep as soon as I lay down.
I woke up before Shirley. I stumbled to the fresher and splashed some water on my face, trying to dispel formless anxieties, the shadowy remains of a nightmare. Still a bit fuzzy with sleep, I took out my little bag of personal effects and found my holo viewer.
I turned it on, and my mother’s face appeared over its projector. Her voice sounded thin in the darkness. “Challers, I can’t tell you how proud I am that you were able to get into the Scouts. You’re going to go and do many amazing things. Through it all, though, I want you to know that I love you, and I will never stop thinking about you.” A ghostly holographic tear appeared in her eye. “Good luck, Challers.”
My father’s face appeared next, but I shut it off before it could make me any more homesick than I already was. I wanted to wake Shirley up right then, tell her to take me back home, but I knew it was a stupid idea. I swallowed back more tears.
I slid my tablet out of its pouch onto the table by the door. A flat black wafer fell out onto the desk.
The wafer the strange secretive girl had given me.
I put it into the reader slot on my holo. The projector came on and played soft music. A floating, semi-transparent head sang a lullaby. Her delicate face, framed with gossamer curls, seemed full of love and warmth, but it wasn’t the round face of the woman who had approached me.
“Watch the neck,” she had said. What did that mean?
The singing woman wore jewelry of some kind, almost too low to be in the frame. I looked closer.
Tiny letters, inscribed into the beads of her necklace, spelled out words.
MEET US NO KEEPERS O2 DECK GRAPE VINES OLD ROBOT 1 HOUR AFTER LIGHTS OUT
Some kind of secret society? A conspiracy? I shut the holo off and yanked out the wafer. I didn’t want to get involved in anything that would jeopardize my position. Too much was at stake.
Or was it? What was the worst they could do? Send me home? Yeah, there’d be some danger, but the station would only be overpop by one. It wouldn’t be fun, but I could survive it.
I turned on my tablet and checked the station chronometer. Lights out in the oxygen deck coincided more or less with my own sleep schedule. Shirley, clearly, slept heavily. She hadn’t even budged when I crawled out of bed.
I could do this.
The day passed all too slowly, as any day would that was steeped in such anticipation. Shirley took Valka’s place in the morning Physicality class, putting me through a grueling routine that put my troubles out of my head. Astronavigation was the only one that caught my attention, really, and only because I found myself doing better at it than I could’ve imagined. The headaches were a thing of the past.
During the last Physicality session of the day, my lesson covered the stages of arousal—specifically, mine—in what rapidly became excruciating detail.
“The goal is to become completely familiar with each stage, what it feels like to approach the borders of that stage, and what it takes to keep from crossing it.” She said this while slowly stroking my erect phallus as I lay on my back in the middle of the classroom bed.
“It’s just the two of us,” I said. “We could do this in our quarters.”
“Now Challers,” she scolded, “class is class and bed is bed. There’s a difference. Now then, if you are trying to hold yourself back from orgasm, you may be tempted to think about something else besides what is going on, but that’s not helpful for a Scout. You need to be in the moment and aware of what your body is doing, and in control of it.”
My breathing quickened and I could feel my balls clenching. I was close.
“Try to hold off your orgasm. Maintain your consciousness in the moment, and hold onto it for as long as you can. You have my permission, but delay it as long as you can.”
I understood what she was saying on a rational level, but I had no idea how to put it into practice. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Just try, Challers. Just hold that moment, just before you orgasm, and maintain it in stillness.”
She spoke softly and her words faded into the background. My world shrank down to her hand, my cock, and the air shuddering in and out of my lungs. Soon, too soon, I felt the wave crest, and I fell down the far side. I groaned in ecstasy and felt warm splatters of cum land on my abdomen.