I held the egg in my hand and wondered where I should put it for safe keeping?

 

Fantastic Mars
6. Dreams of Mars

by Erin Halfelven

“You make it sound like I don’t have free will,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think that. No one made you run out in front of those bandits and distract them. You thought that up yourself.”

“Uh-not exactly,” I admitted. “I didn’t know I was going to do it until I was already moving.”

We both smiled. In our games, my characters were famous for sudden impulses that turned out either very good or disastrously bad. But they kept the games interesting. Now though? When this was—maybe?—real life? Maybe not so good.

We stood there for a long moment. I still had my eyes closed, but I could sense him staring at the top of my head, we were standing that close together. Plus it was dark, and he really couldn’t see anything either.

“Maybe I’m just an NPC?” I said finally. A non-player character, part of the scenery.

He shook his head again. “C’mon, Puss. You know better than that.”

I shivered though I was not at all cold, despite being naked in a giant-scale pile of stone. The heat inside me had not gone away. I was more than warm. I opened my eyes and started to bring my hands back in front of me. He didn’t give me an order not to so I put my hands back on his chest.

He sighed, his chest moving under my touch. “You see why this is a problem?”

“Uh, huh,” I said. “But does it have to be?”

“I don’t see how not,” he said.

My turn to sigh. I knew something almost no one else in the world knew. Seejay, or John Bostwick in real life, had been molested as a child. More or less held captive by a relative and made to do some pretty awful stuff. He had escaped, but his values and judgment had been forever altered.

It was complicated by the deep relationship he’d had with his captor. Coercion and bondage had a seductive appeal to him, as a consequence. In a twisted way, it made sense, but it left him exquisitely sensitive to this situation.

He had power over me if what we both thought was happening were true. But that power could tempt him into becoming a monster, and he feared that more than anything in the world. Something in him had died when he was a child, and he still felt that emptiness and struggled to fill it. His marriage had failed because of his past.

“We can work this out,” I said. “In fact, I need you to work with me on this.”

“Um,” he said. “I can’t believe you look so fine, smell so good, and… I only have to reach out to make you mine.”

I nodded, leaning against him so he could feel it.

Outside, the Martian night had closed down completely, and clouds obscured the bright, thin light of the stars. It was too dark even for my alien night vision. Seejay’s arm around me felt like safety, a kind of certainty.

He adjusted his position a bit, pulling me closer and breathing into my hair. He sighed before he spoke. “But, Puss. I’m afraid of what I might do to you. I’d rather not even go down that road at all.”

“Is that why you arranged this private room, luxury suite?” I asked, trying to sound like the sassy girlfriend in a romcom.

He laughed.

“I need you,” I said. “And not just for what you’re thinking. I need you for the very thing you’re afraid of.” I nuzzled against him, my breasts moving on the cloth of his shirt, my nipples getting stiff.

“You’re making this hard,” he said. “To coin a phrase.”

I giggled. Seejay always could deliver such jokes in a tone as dry as expensive gin.

“I’m not, I’m not kidding. If I have to do what anyone tells me….”

“Maybe it’s just us, our gaming group?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve taken over the life of some rich guy’s toy. A rich wizard, probably. That’s why those banditos were after me. There’s a reward for my butt, tail and all.” A chilling thought, but I still didn’t feel cold. Instead, I felt safe and warm in Seejay’s arms.

“Christ.” Not something he said much when Hote was around, but he knew it didn’t really offend me. “You’ve got an Enemy.” He meant in game terms. An Enemy was someone who recurred in the game, pursuing you for some reason. Having one gave you more points to spend on building your character.

“Yup,” I said. “That’s what it looks like. And I think I may be Valuable Property.” Which was another game thing. I probably had tons of points for buying Spells and Stats and Advantages.

I went on. “You remember how Artie casually mentioned that in some of the Martian colonies, the places settled by humans from Earth, that Red Martians and sometimes Green Martians were kept as slaves? And that because of a lack of women from Earth, a lot of the Red Martian women were…. 'Concubines' is the word used in the Bible. Slave wives.”

He grunted, meaning that he did remember.

“This is a real world, however much it resembles that game. Maybe somehow, Artie was mentally connected to this world, and maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs and others before Artie….” I didn’t know where I was going with that, so I dropped it.

“I guess what I mean is that real-world people can be a lot nastier than fictional ones. Would anyone have believed in gas warfare, the Holocaust or atomic bombs in fiction before they actually happened? It could be very bad out there.” I didn’t mean to shiver as punctuation to what I was saying, but I did it. I tried to snuggle, wanting to feel warm inside again.

He sighed, pulling me close, not pushing me away anymore.

“We have to protect you,” he said. “We have to get outside your Enemy’s reach. Uh—.” In game terms that would be “buying off a disadvantage.” I would have to earn points to do so by adventuring, risking my life in the game. Otherwise, any enemy I simply outran would be replaced in the game with a new one. Would the world continue to behave like a game world?

“One of the best ways to protect me is to use your power to order me around,” I said.

“You must be smarter than me cause I don’t get that,” he said.

“You have to tell me that I can’t do what anybody else says without getting approval from you.”

He let out a big breath. We both thought about it. “That’s not quite right.” He swallowed, my fingers were on his chin, and I could feel it. “We’ll have to work on it,” he said.

“And you’ll have to give me such an order every day, cause these things wore off. I was able to bring my hands back in front of me after only a few seconds.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “Puss,” he said, “who knew Mars had fifty shades of red?”

We laughed together, softly, then we made love standing up, and it was wonderful.

At the end, some small bit of magic escaped me and made it even better. Something reached up from inside me and touched us both—a simultaneous orgasm that left us gasping, staggering, wiped out and wanting more. So after waiting a bit, we made love again on the improvised pillows he’d brought and the magic a second time left stars in our eyes and visions of being together for a lifetime in our hearts.

Somehow in that ecstatic moment, I knew exactly what Seejay thought and felt and I knew he could feel and think my thoughts, too.

We lay there quietly for some time, murmuring to each other.

“I never knew Martian women were so tight,” he joked.

“I never knew Earthmen were so big and hard,” I said. “Seriously, I didn’t. Not in my experience.” I giggled, thinking about it. It actually felt like he was still inside me, making for a warm and comfortable afterglow.

“Why do you call me ‘Puss’?” I asked after a long sweet silence.

“Besides the obvious reason?” he chuckled. “Because that’s what the name Hote gave you means.”

“Yonee?” I said. “In what language?”

“Sanskrit I think. It’s a New Agey kind of thing.”

“Puss as in kitty cat?”

“Uh, no. As in the part of a girl she sits on,” Seejay seemed amused.

I felt something—down there?—when he said that. Satisfaction? “Well,” I said, thinking about it. “You and I may be the only two on the planet who know that now.” I giggled.

“The scary thing though is how you got the name. There was magic working there. Or a gamesmaster playing little tricks?”

I nodded. “That’s obvious. But…. If Artie is watching us in the game, then there may be some kind of hope we can get out of here and go home again.”

“Hmm? Would you want to?”

I didn’t answer right away. I had to think about it. And that was surprising.

I had left behind a fairly rich and fulfilling life. I ran online stores for a number of niche retailers. There was enough technical stuff for my inner nerd and enough personal interaction with clients and customers to keep me from feeling like a hermit.

And there, I was male, in charge of my own life and decisions and had no one chasing me to do… whatever it was my Enemy wanted to do to me. Return me to my “owner”? That seemed likeliest.

Going back to Earth seemed so very logical but felt emotionally flat. For one thing, going to Earth would be the end of this relationship with Seejay. And more, this relationship between Yonee, an exotic alien slave woman, and Seejay, a handsome, dashing adventurer. Our game seemed based on one of the great romantic fantasies in literature.

And here we were both young with the possibility of long and interesting lives. The uncertainty of our survival, not to mention possible other fates, seemed a minor cost for a new universe of feeling and being.

Here I felt wanted and needed, and I wanted and needed someone else. I hadn’t had those things back on Earth.

My tail touched me in various places, behind a knee, under a breast, at the corner of my mouth, in that secret place that was always near my center, reminding me of its existence. And yes, back on Earth, I had not had a tail. That counted, too.

* * *

Amazingly, I fell asleep in Seejay’s arms. I woke when he stirred.

“Trike promised to start snoring if he fell asleep,” said Seejay. “I think that’s him now.”

The noise coming from the other room did sound like the snoring of a giant with tusks growing out of his face. I giggled, but my tail wrapped around Seejay’s legs and hampered him from getting up. So I kissed him extravagantly everywhere I could reach.

“Can we one more time?” I asked, putting as much pleading into my voice as I could. My secret place wanted to touch Seejay once more.

“Not right now, Puss. I need to recuperate,” he said grinning and unwinding my nether appendage from his left ankle. “Leave go,” he ordered, and my tail, just like the rest of me, obeyed.

Before I could work up a good pout, which would not have done a lot of good in the darkness, Seejay continued with the commands. “Stay here, Puss,” he said. “Get some more sleep. Wake up when I call you.”

I was out like a light.

I had a strange dream in which I wandered through a tall house set among red hills. The valleys between the highlands were an aching green, rich with growing things. The house stood on the tallest hill and was made of red stone, smooth as glass, deep as night. I looked out a window while my tail fluffed my hair around my face.

I looked down and saw that my hands had rings on my fingers and bracelets on my wrists. I could hear the jangle of multiple rings in my ears, and even my tail wore jewelry.

I wandered through the building, starting from the top. On a lower parapet, I found a huge crossbow loaded with a lightning bolt. Above a gate to a pretty courtyard a fishnet made of electric eels hung, ready to fall on an unwelcome visitor.

A banquet hall was set with only four place settings at one end and a single cup and bowl at the other. The cup held wine made of quince and melons, I don’t know how I knew that. The bowl contained nuggets that looked like raw gems, uncut and unpolished.

Stairs led down to an underlevel, basement or dungeon. In the center, guarded by hairy snakes and teeth without mouths lay the treasure of the castle: a single green egg, enormous, though it fit in my hand. It was a clear soft green but full of the smoke of burning wishes and unextinguished passions.

I held the egg in my hand and wondered where I should put it for safe keeping?

* * *

Seejay stood at the door of the room and called to me. “Puss. Puss, wake up.”

And I was awake, the dream egg fading from my hand, my tail alertly poised above my left shoulder.

Seejay sat down on the improvised pillow beside me. “Trike is still asleep, but Hote is awake to take last watch. If I’m right, it should be dawn in two or three hours.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Where were we?”

He laughed softly and gathered me into his lap. “Lovely Puss,” he said. “Yonee of the jeweled tongue.”

I giggled while he invented sillier and sillier compliments. We made love again in the darkness with the magical jolt that brought us to climax at the same time and then when it appeared that Seejay did not have enough energy to raise things up again, I proved that I knew what to do with the jewels in my tongue.

After that, we both slept, and I don’t remember any dreams I had.