Pryan

They were married for 5.869 days. That’s roughly sixteen years on Earth. Wanna know how she know’s that? It's displayed in a LED panel on the top side of the cockpit. It was the same length of time as their trip. 

They got hitched in the First Omnitheist Temple Of Saint Klaatu, back in Titan. High School sweethearts, known each other their whole lives. Everybody knew: Juan and Prisha were inseparable.  When they finished their studies they decided they didn’t want to hustle at the Moons. So they decided to try life at Glycion 33-d. A little planet circling a red dwarf that is .44 the mass of Earth and a fifth of it's size. The molecular structure of the soil was the same of sucrose: The planet was literally made of sugar. The catch? It was 9 light years away.

The Commonwealth was incentivizing settlers to move there. Even helping cover some costs. This exodus was informally called The Sugar Rush. Juan got a small cruiser, called Plato 4969, an old beat down ship. The Commonwealth recommended people to go as couples, for personal leisure. 

Even though the intimacy between them was boundless, they only had their first time once they were on their way. For no specific reason, they were just caught up building their own lives together. So, when they finally got to it, it had to be special. The ship was on cruise control, their contraceptive chips were up and running (having kids in space was a whole mess), and Juan even put on some Apipa-Kun. She was a Xiilian blue wave singer that Prisha adored. (Think of it as Sade, but her voice made you tipsy). The moment was magical, plus, they were horny as two unsupervised teenagers.

For the first hundreds of days they started doing it like rabbits. Even though they knew everything about each other, they felt as if they had discovered a new layer of their partners to uncover. It was fascinating. Eventually, the novelty wore off. So they turned off the ship’s gravity generator and went at it again in zero G. Same shit. If not to say it made it even trickier. 

One day, she started feeling as if he wasn’t entertained as he used to, that’s when she tried butt stuff. Her exact description of the experience was this: “meh”. But he loved it! So they went back to copulating as they used to. For some time. Then she had the grand idea of trying stuff in his butt. He objected to it fervorously, but he agreed with that they were running out of things to do sex wise. So he agreed, but it wasn’t quite what they were expecting.

They tried everything: roleplay, bondage, 69, 69 in zero G (surprisingly better), fisting, massage, food stuff, feet stuff, drugs, tantric, role reversal, cnc and some tabu alien stuff… but there was no way to beat it: she was bored as hell! 

That day, after they woke up they had their customary coitus, it wasn’t even a proper fuck. It was a coreography, no passion or improvisation whatsoever. They just went through the motions, quite literally. He came, she half came and they carried over with their duties. 

She went to the ship’s pantry looking for her cookies, but she couldn’t find it anywhere. She hit up the intercom:

“Hey!”

“Hey.” He was at the cockpit reviewing flight data.

“Did you eat my Klypsies?”

“No.”

“Well, they are gone.”

“I didn’t take it.”

She sighed in frustration through the intercom, her breathing revealed how mad she was.

“Anyway, it’s just another item to add to the list.”

“Okay.”

Right, the list! In lengthy trips like that you couldn’t do in just one streak. I mean, you could, if you didn’t care for the the living beings. You had to make pit stops. Restock supplies, check the engines, stretch your legs, breathe unrecycled air, look at some different faces, most of them not human. It’s been 500 days since they last been to one, so they had a long list. 

The last market they’ve been was nice. It had some stuff, but certainly not everything. But the Yon Keoh was different. It was massive. The saying: “If you couldn't find it in Yon Keoh it hasn’t been invented yet.“ was wrong. There was a bunch of stuff in Yon Keoh that hadn’t been invented yet. You couldn’t, however, bring 'em back to your reality without getting into a whole bunch of trouble. It was a melting pot for all different kinds of species. Crowded, noisy, messy, and uncomfortably close to a black hole. 

She went back to the kitchen and he was already there, printing their meal while siting on the counter drinking condensed coffee smoke. She sat there and they remained silent. She kept thinking of something to say, but nothing came to mind. There was nothing new, nothing he didn’t already know. They ran out of things to say. The problem they had in bed infected other aspects of their lives. They got as close as they could, then started to drift apart.

“Do you remember that time we skipped school to go to the methane refinery and——“

“Yes."

“Oh."

“You had told me that before.”

“Thought I didn’t."

Ok, at least he made an effort. She could tell he was bored too. Though he would never say that to her face. They ate without saying another word. He was a stranger, a stranger she knew all too well.

They finished their meals and went back to his duties. Prisha was checking supplies while Juan was doing a checkup in all of the equipment to see if they needed to buy spare parts. Soon enough he called her in the intercom:

“You there?”

“Yes."

“We are approaching the QC-37b, so if you wanna come and observe the singularity…“

“Thank you"

Spacetime is not a evenly stretched sheet of fabric. In some places it had wrinkles, in others, say, close do a immensely powerful source of gravity, it had tears. And in one of those tears you could easily fit a pocket dimension, that's where the market took place. 

She went to the cockpit to see that immensely disturbing ball of void sucking all the light from it’s vicinities. She wasn’t really in the mood, but looking at a black hole is something you only get to do once in your lifetime. So she didn’t want to miss the opportunity. In the ergoshere stood a metal cube grid, that was the entrance. They placed the market there because travelers used to slingshot themselves out of blackholes.

“Yon Keoh control unit requesting control navigation of vessel 4969-WV named “Plato4969”. “

"Granted."

The grid of one of the shapes of the cube wayned away and they got in.

Things inside a pocket dimensions are weird, the dimensions get cramped. That’s why you had to cease control of your vessel to get in. The control unit did the parking, they just had to do the shopping. They meet up in the exit hacth. He divided the list in two and gave her her part in a small display. 

“All set?”

“Yeah."

“Remember, we are close to a black hole so—“

“I'll try to be fast.”

His list was over twenty items long, hers had only three. He still did the little things. He still cared. Outside, patterns of psychedelia flooded all the space around them. Colors they’ve never seen oozing from every direction. It felt like the inside of a lava lamp. You couldn’t even see the floor, just walk towards the Yon Keoh and you’ll be fine.

Inside the Yon Keoh reality was normal. I mean, “Normal”. The market was set like a bazar, with streets filled with booths. The place was a giant cube, with other cubes expanding of every surface. Everytime you thought you hit a dead end, there was another street just as crowded as the one you were before. The place was packed.

They set to reconvene after one hour at the ship. She took care of her list then went on window shopping. There was a cat-like man (she didn’t know that race) selling tusks from what he claimed was his big game hunts. A Ornoxian preparing magmaberries and an old Amayan female offering something called a "gurlop". Prisha didn’t know if that was something you’d buy or something you would do.

She kept going through more and more obscure places till she found what she was looking for: a sex shop. This one wasn’t a booth, it was a proper store, with a run down front. A neon sign made  out a circle in parenthesis, the interplanetarily aknowleged symbol of sexual or intimate pleasure activities.

Inside there was something that resembled a big wet ball of fur buying a floating upside down lollipop. Surprisingly enough, the man behind the counter was human. He had long dark hair pulled back and wore a tropical shirt. He was less sleazy than what she’d expected, that somehow made him look out of place. While the furball was paying she browsed around. There was a shelf full of vibrators. They had it for all kinds of species: different shapes and sizes, things that floated, things that talked, and more than a few things with spikes.

“Sugar Rusher?”

The salesman asked her, the furball was gone.

“How did you know?”

“It's not common to see humans around here.”

She kept looking around.

“If you want, in the back I have some sex robots.”

“Not interested.”

“I have all kinds of it, both genres, different species, fairly unused.”

“I'm married.”

“You know the fourth law of asimov: ‘it's not cheating if it is beeping.’”

“I'll pass.”

“Alright then.”

She timidly aproached the counter:

“But hey, I was looking for something to spice things up with my husband. Do you have anything that could help me? I mean, besides sex robots.”

“Let’s see. Usually I’d show you some half ass shit, you’d threaten to walk out then I’d show you the  behind the counter things. So let’s just skip to it.”

He looked behind the counter, she could hear the noise of things moving.

“I got a bootleg of a Meeple orgy, top level stuff.”

“Maybe something that woldn’t get me arrested.”

“The Emanuelle 2000 has just arrived.” He said putting that tiara with a heart on the counter.

“Hmm, not sure VR would fix our problem.”

“I have this!” He held up a squared flask with a purple liquid sizzling inside of it. Prisha got hypnotized by it. “You rub it in your body and it mutates it momentarily. It would be like being with someone else.”

She gabbed the flask and took a closer look at it.

“Where does it come from?”

“Well, it was extracted from Versaken gonads.”

“Fuck you! I’m not bathing myself in alien jizz!”

“Okay! Okay! My final shot, I have this.”

“A Kaliopus bud?”

It floated in a transparent box over the counter. It had the subtle oval shape of a unbloomed hibiscus, it’s colors ranged from orange to red. The Kaliopus was a people that got extinct shortly after the humans joined the Commonwealth. They weren’t very social, not even between themselves, so their numbers dwindled. Multiple efforts by interspecies organizations offered to help the Kalians fight back oblivion, but they didn’t seem to mind. When they first visit the former Kalian home planet, they found that it was filled with this flowerbuds sprouting from the floor. 

“I didn’t know it had sexual purposes.”

“Oh, it has many uses.”

“How do I go about it?”

“Well, you have to put it in your… ahem. And it turns out the uterus has the exact conditions for it to bloom. It holds onto your husband’s dick and to the wall of your uterus and stimulate them at the same time. Couples who tried it said it made them feel closer.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, supergross. But I’ll take it.”

“That would be 45,000,00 doxies”

“Shit!"

They got back on the ship and out of the pocket galaxy. After they sucessfuly slingshoted themselves out of the black hole's gravity she went over and talked to him:

“Hey, I was thinking…” she walked towards him and put her hands on his shoulder. “…Maybe today we could get together. But like we used to. Take things slow.”

He looked at her intrigued:

“Yeah, maybe we should.”

She moved her hands through his hair he held her by the waist.

“Did something happened in Yon Keoh?”

“I got us something.”

“What is it?”

“The less you know the better.”

“Can't you at least give me a hint?”

“It's a Kaliopus Bud.” 

“Shit, woman!” He said to her perplexed. “How much did it set us back?”

“The less. You know. The better.” Then she turned around and left.

“Do you know what they say about the Kalians?”

“That they didn’t reproduced. All the beings of their species were there since the beginning.”

“Right, forgot I told you that.”

“I was the one who told you that.”

When the time came, she was getting ready in the bathroom while he waited by the bed. She kept looking at her naked body, nip picking imperfections. Travelling close to the speed of light made you age slower, still, she didn’t had the body that she used to. Neither did him.

She took the hibiscus out of the protective box and slipped it into her vagina. It slided up in one gentle swoop, she hardly even felt it. He looked surprised to see that she was already naked when she walked towards him. He had dimmed the lights, set the air density to 1.4 atm, oxygen levels to 50%, and gravity to 0.75 G. Perfect conditions for love making.

She climbed on top of him, he started kissing her chest, moving towards her nipples. C’mon, J., don’t rush this. She thought. And, as if he read his mind, he went on to kiss her lips.

His kisses were warm and tender that night. He caressed her back while she hovered her pelvis on top of him. His clothes got to get out. She grabbed him by the side and he lift up his arms as if he knew what she intended. Then, she laid him back and started kissing down his body. He always felt ticklish in the pelvis region, but she knew how to kiss him there. 

She grabbed his penis from under his pants, it was warm and sturdy. She took off his pants and went on to kissing it over his underwear. She just wanted to taste a little bit of it before it was inside her, so she sucked on it. His legs muscles flexed while she did that.  

She laid in bed, it was his turn to touch her. He started of by kissing her hands, she loved when he did that. She could feel her mind fading out into a mist of arousal. He went down on her arm and into her favorite part, the lovely bones. He started kissing there and she started moaning. Worked like a charm. All the while she kept stroking his penis with her other hand.

At some point she quit stroking and pushed it downwards, close to her pelvis. It was time. She inserted his penis into her and the feeling of something being unleashed took over, but it was nothing out of the usual. They started moving together. Their movements were in total sync, like they resonated in the same frequency. 

It was great, more than great, actually. One for the books. She put his arm in his back just like he wanted, and he stroked her hair tenderly, she didn’t even knew she liked that.

When it was time to switch positions, they didn’t even had to say anything. She just hugged his body with arms and legs and he sit up. They were now sitting on top of each other, he pushed himself deeper while she tried to feel every inch of him. Her skin was sizzling, she was 16 again.

She kept moaning in her hoarse voice, a suffered grunt that only he knew it was her way of showing extreme pleasure. Even his breathing was heavier than usual:

“Holy shit, Prish, what is that?”

“Don't stop.”

They picked up the pace. It was close. They both noticed that their bodies were hovering, but made nothing of it. It didn’t matter. They were suspended in a very delicate balance, then she touched his arm and she felt his arms being touched by her.

She saw herself as a seven year old girl, back in Titan, when they first met. She felt the way he felt while looking at her. She saw them growing up together. Laughing together, misbehaving together. She lived all they had lived through his eyes. She felt his love. 

She knew everything about him. Everything that made him what he was. How he thinks, how he felt. She saw him eating her klypsies. She even felt how it was to be inside her. Their communion gave her an unprecedented sense of fulfillment. 

He came, witch in turn made her come, witch in turn made him come even harder. They could feel their beings intertwining. They literally couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. There were no boundaries between them anymore. She could feel whatever he was feeling and he could feel whatever she was feeling. She fell fainted over him, or was it him that fell over her?

“I stole your klypsies.”

“I know, it’s ok.”

34 years later, the Plato 4969 arrived in Glycion 33-d. It made headlines. Not because the two crew members were missing, not because the vessel went dark shortly after a visit to the Yon Keoh Trading Pocket. But because, for the first time in 500 years, there was sight of a Kalian.