Terran Times 18 - Emerald Envisage (49 page)

Clancy didn’t seem to be plunging any longer. He didn’t seem to be retreating either. But of course he was. He felt the shifting slip-slide of every one of those movements. “My God!” Nearly a shriek of mortal agony, the words tore up from the bottom of his soul. And upon them, quite possibly
because
of them, Gaelle clenched tighter.

Buried, lost, pounding, he was trapped. As he’d never been trapped before, as surely and absolutely as if he’d been snared by a saber-toothed steel man-trap designed expressly to negate any…every…best attempt to escape.

She held him motionless. In some kind of sinister, magical force field not of his desiring. She left him no place to go. Nothing to do but endure as she coaxed from his failing body everything he tried still, pathetically, to hoard.

Clancy felt a hard pulse inside his prick, inside his balls. He felt a stirring, a heat, a rising that hardened as it began and hardened as it progressed. He felt a sudden, aggressive need to
fill
Gaelle. A need that would not be stopped. In the very next instant, before the rising hardening even
began
to finish, a long and scalding jet of substance burst from him. Into her.

Gaelle cried out. It was the kind of mindless shriek of which every man dreamed…a shriek of unqualified victory at possessing and conflicting joy at being possessed in the same instant. A cry of absolute fulfillment and mingled into it, mingled through all the other vicarious, victorious elements of it, the soft murmur of words.

Her
words.

At first they made no sense. At first they were a silvery blur amidst Gaelle-induced green twilight. But gradually they began to sort themselves into meaningful sentences and thoughts. Or at least into the concepts that lay behind those sentences and thoughts.

“It has been my pleasure,” she murmured in silken-sultry, suddenly sated tones.

“No.” Clancy’s body pulsed. Furiously. Releasing quantities he hadn’t realized it was possible to release.

“It has been my privilege.” Inexorable, she moved within the greatly weakened circle of his legs. Doing for herself what he had lost ability to do. Swaying and thrusting, she drove herself onto him in rhythmic repetition. As she drew from him the very last of what he had to offer, she seemed to
fade
. Not as if she was ready to collapse beside him, satisfied and softly ready to sleep.

This was more of a faint flickering. A loss of resolution in a poorly filmed home movie. A very
ominous
one. “No!” he insisted.

And she returned to the full warmth and strength of solid reality.

Clancy’s gut clenched. He reached the end of his endurance. His capability. And from the growing dread that what she’d said earlier might actually be true, came a suspicion. A growing and looming one that she hadn’t been completely honest with him. She hadn’t told him the whole story.

“Is there something else?” Clancy’s voice shook. “Is there something you should…” His body defeated him when he tried to ask her that last, most important question of all. The inevitable came to pass, and he thrust furiously. Pumping out his last hoarded store of essence, he depleted himself, his body jerking hard upon the expulsion of that very last.

The bursting heat of his orgasm reflected in Gaelle’s smoky-green gaze. Her eyes opened wide, emerald-shadowed and more lovely than any eyes he’d been privileged to see. Yearning fluttered there, fluttered all too briefly before she regained her composure and her impassive facade.

Something closed down in her expression. And when she softened again, it wasn’t in any of the ways she’d softened before. Any of the ways a woman normally softened with her completion. Not the softening of eagerly accepting readiness, this was unmistakably a softening of parting. Of her growing increasingly insubstantial, even as Clancy tried like anything to hold on to her.

Gaelle stirred. Like heavy, ethereal smoke, she stirred. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“No!” He closed his arms tighter. Closed his legs. Closed them all impossibly tight, around what more and more seemed a fading memory.

Gaelle sighed. She shivered.

His arms flexed again and this time they closed in upon nothing but themselves as she vanished utterly. Leaving behind only sparkling residue. A softly hissing cloud of dancing emerald motes. “No!” His voice seemed terribly weak. It seemed to come from far, far away. From another place and maybe even another time.

It’s too late.

Limp, weak from his recent, nearly catastrophic release, decimated and desiccated by the length and the vigor of it, Clancy collapsed to his face upon his now-shifting hammock. He collapsed completely. With nothing there to stop him, nothing but strangely scented air and a swirl of diamond-emerald flecks rising up to engulf him, he swore he felt a passing of unseen hands across his thirsting flesh. Then the world went gray-dark around him.

Clancy fell. He felt himself begin to fall, but never felt the end of it…never felt the impact at the end of the fall. He had closed his eyes. Now he opened them. He lay on something hard. Something cold and hard with harsh light glaring down upon him, hurting his head. Making him wince.

“Jeez, mister.” It was a female voice, dropping down from somewhere inside that light. Female, young and not Gaelle’s.

An angel?

Somehow, he didn’t think so. Somehow he thought he’d used up his allotment of miraculous encounters with otherworldly creatures. For today, anyway. His prick ached. Like sin. It stung, burned, prickled. Felt withered and ancient beyond hope. It felt
used
.

“You all right?” the voice asked.

“He went down like a tonna bricks,” a growly-raspy voice, this time male, replied. “Just grabbed at the ice cream, mumbled something that sounded like some alien language from another planet and went right on down.”

“But…” Clancy was confused. “Gaelle?”

“Gay elves?” The female sounded confused. “What the heck does he mean by that? Gay
elves
?”

Clancy tried to sit up. But she…he thought it was she…held him down.

“You need to take it easy, big fellah,” she said. “I think you took yourself one pretty smart smack to the head there.”

“Smack?” The word made sense. The world spun sickeningly when Clancy moved so he decided to stay right where he was. Right as he was. His vision cleared a little though, and he realized that was the aisle of the Emerald Aisles supermarket half a mile from his apartment.

His hand was cold.
Freezing
cold. Squinting, having to work very, very hard to keep his equilibrium, Clancy turned his head to look. His hand lay upon a half-gallon container of pistachio ice cream that hadn’t melted yet. Hadn’t started to seep around the seams of the carton. As if it hadn’t even
started
to melt.

“Gaelle. Green. Woman. Freezer…” He couldn’t say much more. Couldn’t make much more sense. He
did
hurt as if he’d taken a pretty hard smack to the head. And his back. And especially his
groin
.
Hurt.

“Lissen, mister. We got an ambulance on the way so you need to just lie back and…”

“No ambulance.” Clancy tried again to sit up and this time there was no need for anybody to hold him down. Woozy as hell, feeling like a man who’d just completed a five-day bender with no thought for tomorrow, he fell back all by himself. Like he was about to faint all over again.

Faint?

His mind rejected the notion. He was not a fainter. Had never been a fainter and would not, by God in His heaven, become one now.

It wasn’t
manly
.

Then he had to reject another urge. Had to really fight to reject the most unholy urge to lift a hand to his groin. To massage away the arid agony burning there. Insisting he
hadn’t
fainted. Insisting he’d…

Pistachio ice cream?

“
Joyce
!”
Shit
. His head
really
hurt, now. It hurt way worse than his groin when he thought about the way
Joyce
was going to pitch a hissy to be remembered in the annals of historic hissies if he ruined her goddamned green-themed picnic.

For a minute he hovered on the edge of panic. But then…

Gaelle.

She seemed to be there. Inside his mind. Something…it had to be her…whispered across his thoughts. Something shimmering-sparkling and oddly magical. Oddly soothing.

Gaelle!

He felt her touch. Swore he felt it. What the hell did he care about
Joyce
?
Joyce
was a pain in the ass. She always had been. A royal, Princess pain in the ass, and if he hadn’t actually realized it before, he sure did realize it now. He’d made one enormous
hell
of a mistake ever getting mixed up with the likes of
Joyce
. Let alone being damn-fool stupid enough to ask to
marry
her.

Gaelle.

Magic accompanied the silent murmur of the name. Magic that lightened his heart when he remembered everything she’d been to him in the short time they’d had to share. Lying on the floor of Emerald Aisles, listening to the chop-chop-whoooo of the ambulance siren getting closer and closer, Clancy wondered if she’d ever been there. Or if she’d been just a figment of imagination.

He might be suffering from a brain tumor. The kind of nasty, insidious thing possessed of incalculable power to induce illusion, hallucination and fantasy so real he’d never be able to separate them from reality.

He almost believed it. Because believing would make remembering so much easier. It would make all the rest of his life without her so much easier. And yet…

If Gaelle had been a figment, an apparition conjured up out of the depths of a stressed or possibly diseased mind, how could he be so sure he would never forget her? Never forget the too-vivid touch of her hands upon him? And how could he be so dead sure certain he would never accept or desire any other woman?

No, he knew in answer to the first. He
would
never forget. Not a moment of it, not an instant. And yes, inexplicably, to the second. He would desire again. He would desire more intensely than he’d ever dreamed of desiring. Lifting an unsteady hand to hold it before his face, to shield his parched and aching eyes from the terrible light that scorched down upon him, he knew he would be absolutely free to desire. When he found The One. The Right One. The One who was meant for him.

He would know her the instant he saw her. He would recognize her. And then, with his heart leaping painfully, awkwardly into the base of his throat, his gaze focused. He took in details he’d missed before. One detail in particular.

Across the palm of his hand, seeming an inborn part of the creased
M
that made up a part of every human palm, ran a bright, narrow line. A bright thread of emerald that curved around the pad of his thumb as if it had been tattooed there by a master artist.

It hadn’t been there before, that stripe of green. He knew positively it hadn’t. Much as he knew, just as positively, it would remain there from now on, a vivid and permanent…

Marking
.
Fundamental difference…this will mark you in some way.

Gaelle’s words came to him then, Gaelle’s promise. As clearly and indisputably as if it was she who knelt over him in that moment and not a red-smocked supermarket attendant. Gaelle had made a promise to him. The line upon his palm was evidence of that. It was the gift she had given to him. She had made sure he would be all right. He would find his right one.

DEPARTMENT NINE

Jen Suits

With food gathered and plans finalized for their two-week hiking trip to the woods in the Pennsylvania Mountains, the twenty male college friends packed the six SUVs.

“There are two side-by-side cabins waiting for us,” Daniel shouted, sliding behind the wheel of the lead SUV. “Let’s go!” The loaded vehicles headed for the hills. After four hours of singing and joking, along with back-and-forth walkie-talkie chatter, they arrived at their destination, unloaded the duffel bags, food coolers and grocery sacks inside the twin cabins. Back outside, they collected firewood, built a campfire and used some of the gnarled logs as seats.

“Got a problem there?” Jim snickered.

Daniel shifted a second time. “It’s called knots where they shouldn’t be.” With a huff, he stood, kicked the makeshift seat onto its side, then sat.

“Bark can get rough, too.”

“Better rough bark than a protruding knot.”

Laughter, jokes and tales of times before filled the air until midnight.

A deep, pulsating sound interrupted their conversation. Looking up, a triangular shaped dome-light pattern in the air above the canopy caught their attention.

“Run!”

Scrambling too late, each one was caught in a ray of light and lifted, briefly blinded as the illumination from above grew brighter. Inside the hovering machination, a very large, light green, alien female took them into custody. Her wavy, burgundy hair fell around her shoulders. Hairless warts randomly dotted her face and neck. Her abnormal appearance was shocking to the men who were used to pretty college girls.