Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Content note: This story contains graphic sexual content.

Novelette | 7,890 words

At least you wait until after we’ve fucked to start the fight.

We’re lying wasted and slimy on my twin-sized cot, you’re curled up on the outside like you always are, leaning back against me. I’m on my side behind you, my face in between your shoulder blades, big spoon if the big spoon was like half the size, grateful as always that Kuiper General Relay only spins at quarter-g.

We’re at my place, of course. We’re always at my place, no matter how shitty I am at housekeeping.

You don’t like being touched after you’ve come, but you put up with it because I’m going to do it anyway. I trace my finger along your spine, silently counting your vertebrae, then along your ass to your inner thigh.

I do this every time, just like you fuck me the same way every time. We’ve probably fucked a hundred times, or even a thousand. It’s not like we haven’t tried everything. We have tried everything—at least, everything that you’re up for. We’ve even tried the weird shit you can only do in quarter-g. That’s the point. You know exactly what I like; I know exactly what you like. So we fuck the same way every time, because why not? At least it saves the conversation.

Right where your thigh turns round, just past your balls, that little peak of flesh, I push in on the skin of your inner thigh, feeling the resistance of your fat and muscle underneath, watching the curve of your smooth, golden skin as it warps around my finger. Delicate. Beautiful. Perf—

You pull away suddenly. I flinch back, but you’re already rolling over; you’re already shouting. “You’re thinking of her, aren’t you? I cannot fucking believe it. You’re fucking me but you’re thinking of her.”

I can smell your breath, a little sour. I love the smell of your breath.

I don’t say anything. What the fuck am I supposed to say? That I can’t not think of her, that she’s literally everywhere, all the time because she is the idea of where and time? I’m not going to argue philosophy of science this soon after sex.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

You want to start a fight. Of course you do. I just want to cuddle and kiss and fucking relax after twelve hours of economically critical, life-and-death tensor calculus. But you’d never say that sort of shit unless you wanted to start a fight.

“She’s not even real,” I mumble, which is not technically—look it’s complicated.

“That’s the point!” you shout, standing up out of the cot so fast that you float a little bit in the light gravity. “That’s the whole fucking point! She doesn’t even exist! I’m getting cucked by the fucking fabric of space and time.”

Your cock is bouncing against your balls and it’s still just a little bit hard and it’s right level with my face and I just want more than anything to reach out and cup your balls and suck it back to life. I don’t care that it’s just been in me; that just makes it hotter. I can imagine the musty meat-and-salt flavor of it, the gentle texture, the feeling of you uncurling against my tongue.

I don’t want to fight with you. I just want to fuck you, to be fucked by you, and hold each other until we fall asleep and pretend that we’re together because we love each other and not because we’re the only two gays on the station.

(It’s not that I don’t love you. I do love you. It’s just I don’t love you because of who you are or how you look or anything like that. I love you because it’s impossible to have sex with the same man a thousand times and not love him at least a little bit.)

You can’t feel it, and I can’t sense it, but there is the tiniest amount of gravitational attraction between the tip of your semi-hard dick and the tip of my tongue as I hold it against my teeth. I’m trying not to think about it; I’m trying not to give in to either your fight or your dick; but even if I’m not thinking about it, it’s there.

“See?” You gesture wildly. “This always happens. I call you out on something and you just shut down.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble on pure instinct. I don’t make eye contact. I just really, really, really don’t want to fight with you.

“Jesus fuck stop apologizing like I’m about to hit you. You’re sorry? Okay! You’re sorry for what?”

I shake my head a little. I look up at you from bed. “I just don’t wanna fight.” I can hear the edge of my voice breaking. Damn it.

“Oh so now I’m the bad guy? You’re the one having an emotional affair with—whatever weird tulpa shit you’ve got going on in that whacked-out brain of yours.”

Emotional affair!? Seriously? Last week I was too clingy and you didn’t want to “put labels on things” and now you’re telling me that you care about emotional affairs. I don’t care that you hate me, but could you at least give me the dignity of keeping your story straight?

I don’t respond, so you just keep right on talking. “This shit. This shit is exactly why no one wants to date bisexuals,” you declare, and immediately look like you regret it.

I should probably just let that slide, but on the other hand, fuck you. You always get what you want from me; if you want a fight, I’ll give you one. But it won’t be pretty.

“Oh, is that what we’re doing? Dating?”

Your face is a grand tour of argument emotions—surprise fading to anger and then resentment and then frustration. You don’t say anything, just sputter a bit. It feels good, to win the fight, and then it feels awful, to be the sort of person who feels good about winning a fight with his boyfriend.

You grab your coveralls and don’t even bother to put them on. “Fuck you, Alan,” you say, not turning around, and then you’re out into the corridor. I wince. I want to say “wait” want to say “sorry” but I don’t know what you’d wait for and I sure don’t know what I’m sorry for.

It’s hard to slam the door at quarter-g. And the doors on the KGR aren’t made for slamming. But you manage a good one anyway.

Everyone says that charting cargo deliveries from Kuiper is the most demanding, brutal, boring job in the solar system. I kind of doubt it—I’d rather be doing this than cleaning the bathrooms in an Olympus prospector bar like my dad—but it sure is a waste of my physics PhD.

Once upon a time, all these deliveries could have been charted with a marginally sophisticated computer system. But then the White Sea Incident dropped 100 gigatons of nickel off the coast of Arkhangelsk and wiped the whole city off the map, and since the error could be attributed to the differences between the Newtonian and Relativistic models of gravity—because heaven forfend that Transorbital admit fault in the deaths of over a million people, erasing an entire city; sorry, I know you don’t give a shit about politics—so anyway Swiss Re stepped in and now to keep their reinsurance all Transorbital deliveries need to be plotted with both Newtonian and relativistic models. Which means better computers, but also it means qualified human operators, who can handle the tensor calculus of general relativity.

Which means me, stationed way out at the Kuiper General Relay, spending 12-12 shifts calculating tiny pathing optimizations for shipments of metals and ice and everything else, all the way to Earth, or Mars, or Ganymede, or Venus. The works. The same equations, the same formula, over and over, the relentless toll of my life ending one hour at a time. But I was too crazy for academia and too antisocial for industry so here the fuck I am. At least the pay’s good.

The greatest blessing of human psychology is eroticization. Our horny little brains just can’t help themselves. Any stimulus, no matter how boring, no matter how painful, no matter how traumatic, can become the core of a sexual fetish. So, of course, working this fucking job at the literal end of space with nothing else to do and—

What I’m trying to say is that when it started, I was thinking of you. I know how that sounds—believe me, I know how it sounds!—and I’m not trying to make an excuse or anything. It was just, on a gravity boost around Saturn, how could I not think of your hands gripping into my shoulders, sliding down with the slickness of our sweat? On a precision path into the orbit of Ganymede, how could I not think of your lips around the sides of my dick, your tongue playing with the head, just the tiniest amount of teeth? Or a long, hot, expensive burn—how could that be anything but the first push of your dick into me, the whole force of your body pushing my face against the bed? Aerobraking around Jupiter’s upper atmosphere; your breath against my ear and cheek. Your fingers digging rough, aching asteroid belts into my back as you come.

It is the simplest equation my psychology can manage: the curves the planets trace into space and time; the curves our bodies trace into each other.

I don’t know when “you” turned into “her.” But somewhere along the way—I guess it was some sort of hairball of social synesthesia my subconscious coughed up, or maybe I was just desperate for stimulus, any stimulus that wasn’t another tensor curve, that is—but I started to hear her. Not voices in my head—I’m the wrong kind of crazy for that—but a voice from the orbits, the trajectories, the shape of the solar system itself.

It didn’t start with words, I think. It was just a sound to start—which, sure, call it “the music of the spheres” if that works for you. For months it was just this little sound, this resonance in the back of my head while I thought about you and that spot between your neck and shoulder and how you manage to still have muscles in quarter-g and how your mouth always tastes a little sour—and then it became singing, and then it became lyrics. That must have been it—when it became her.

“I love you,” she said, when you wouldn’t. “I love you so very very much.”

I didn’t start out—I mean. I didn’t say it back. But it was days, and weeks, and we spent every day together and. Ahw, fuck it. I don’t want to make excuses.

I told her I loved her too. Just sitting alone in my office barely big enough to sit down, surrounded by computer displays and heads-ups, charting the course for 10 megatons of gold to Earth, 180 megatons of copper to Europa, 10 gigatons of ice to Mars, just listening to her music unspooling inside my head, whispering “I love you too” under my breath like a fucking maniac.

I said it and I said it. Eventually, I believed it. And then I started having the dreams.

It’s a week after our fight and you haven’t even pinged and I just know that you hate me now and I want to talk with you—actually, no, I want to get fucked by you, I want to know that you don’t hate me, or if you do hate me that at least you’re still willing to fuck me—but Marley’s sent me one of her classic “we need to talk after your shift.” e-mails and she’s my boss so it’s not like I have a fucking choice, so here I am, guts doing flip-flops thinking about you and me and our fight and her and I have to stand here in Marley’s “office” (barely big enough for her to sit) while she’s behind the narrowest possible desk using KGR’s eight-hour ping time to cheat at Maboroshi Tower.

“Hold on,” she says as soon as I walk in, brain-fried from twelve straight hours of tensor calculus. She doesn’t look up, and I can hear her phone make the chime of another 12+1 pull. “I’m pulling for an 8★ Elegia.”

My eyes feel like a burst of static. I sigh and lean back against the wall and close them. It helps, but not much.

“Oh!” over the 8★ pull chime—have I mentioned that I resent the fact that I recognize each and every fucking chime from Maboroshi Tower? I do—and then “damn it!” because, I don’t know, it was Constantina or Mabel or one of the other hundreds of interchangeable doe-eyed sorcerer girls. *click* as she resets the phone.

I sigh again. Marley doesn’t seem to hear me. Another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (7★), another—

I should say something. If I don’t—(5★); reset—I’ll be here for hours with scratchy eyeballs and numb feet and my boyfr—(6★); reset—with you still mad at me.

I open my eyes. “Did you have something you wanted”—(7★); reset—“to talk about?”

Marley looks up at me for the first time since I walked in. “Just a minute,” she says. “I’m busy.”

“Marley, I’m so fried I can barely stand. I’m begging you just tell me what’s going on so I can go back to my room and sleep.” Of course by “go back to my room” I mean “find you somewhere” and by “sleep” I mean “get absolutely demolished by your dick” but Marley doesn’t need to know that. Or really, honestly, she already knows, but I don’t have to tell her.

She narrows her eyes. “If I don’t catch this Elegia, it’s going to cost me a thousand frost gems.”

I squeeze my eyes shut again and sigh.

“Fine!” she says, restarting the phone again. “Honestly, Alan, you are such a drama queen.”

“Please just tell me.”

“You want to know? Fine: You’ve been underperforming. You used to clear nine, even ten charts a shift. This week, you’re down to six. This can’t keep happening; we’re getting a backlog.”

Underperforming! “What the hell? Are you kidding me? Did you see that double-gravity assist around Neptune today? Beautiful! I saved you five thousand tons of fuel. And you’re fucking welcome for that, by the way.”

“I don’t give a shit how beautiful your gravity assists are! We’re a shipping relay, not a fucking art collective. Management wants raw numbers, Alan. And you’re not pulling your weight.”

The thing is that she’s right, kind of. I have been underperforming this week, or actually, I’ve been underperforming ever since our fight. Because now whenever I’m working and I think about her I feel guilty about you and then I start thinking about if I’m cheating on you and it throws off my whole eroticization, the whole thing that makes my job even the tiniest bit bearable. So then I freeze her out, and now she’s freezing me out, not even talking to me, not even singing. Of course our work suffers.

Frankly, the only reason I’m clearing six charts a shift, even without the eroticization, is that I’m really fucking good at general relativity.

So Marley’s right. But. She’s also completely full of shit, because fucking Vance—my counterpart, the other half of my 12-12 shifts, a real meathead-type out of Princeton—can barely clear three charts a shift, and half the time I have to fix them for him. Vance, who wouldn’t know a reduced tensor solution if I shoved it up his ass. Vance, who uses the fuzzy logic system every single time.

Vance, who’s fucking Marley, so he can get away with anything.

The only blessing of working 12-12s is never having to talk to him.

If I were in a better frame of mind—if I hadn’t just spent the last twelve hours feeling angry and guilty and anxious and heartbroken while working the hardest mathematical calculations ever devised by humanity—I would have just swallowed it. Lord knows I’d done it plenty in the past. But I’m fucking exhausted physically and mentally and especially emotionally so I just say “This is bullshit.”

Marley stares at me. She doesn’t say anything. I really should take that as a warning, but of course I just keep talking.

“I’m not pulling my weight? Vance couldn’t clear six charts if he had help from Albert Einstein and all God’s angels. I’ve been dragging his ass for years. Six charts a shift is more than my fair share. So don’t tell me that I’m not pulling my weight! Take that jackass’s dick out of your mouth for a moment and tell him to do his actual job.”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. I don’t actually begrudge them fucking. Sure, technically it’s sexual harassment or whatever. But what else are they going to do, way the fuck out in the Kuiper Belt? I’m just tired of the special treatment.

Marley keeps staring. Her face is turning a really unpleasant shade of red.

I flinch first. “I’m sor—” I start to mumble, but then I stop myself. I hear you say “Sorry for what?” and you know what? You’re right. What the hell is she going to do? Fire me? Good luck finding another general relativist in the next decade, let alone one willing to take up slack for her crew-cut boyfriend. So I stop. Everything I said was true. I’ve got nothing to apologize for.

Marley opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “Fine. Alan, you’re clearly over-stressed. Go take a break. But I expect a full apology by your next shift.”

I exhale through pursed lips. “Fine.” I turn and punch the button for the door.

“And get those numbers up!” she yells after me, but I’m already down the hall.

I don’t go and find you. To be honest, I’m too exhausted for sex, and it’s not like we ever talk about our feelings. I just go home and sleep.

And dream.

I am having an erotic dream about space-time. Again.

I’m lying down—it’s a dream, I’m in bed, of course I’m lying down—and at once I’m lying down in the solar system itself, my feet just past the sun and my elbow crooked on the Kuiper belt—but also I’m just floating in the void, adrift on the currents of gravity.

She’s there—she’s everywhere but also here and her, a body and curves and the shape of a woman and hands, her strong, soft hands, embracing me from behind, drifting across my chest, I can feel my skin pulling up, out, towards her, her breath against my ear. “Hello, lover,” she whispers, pitching her voice low.

I lean back into her, relaxing myself into her body, into the feeling of falling. Did you know that if you fall in a dream, you wake up? Not me. Not anymore. Now I just get hard.

“Why are you a woman?” I ask, as she traces a finger down my chest, between my pecs, lingering over my solar plexus. I can feel my skin and blood vessels contorting towards her, the very shape of space. It hurts—fuck it hurts!—but it hurts so good.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, smiling.

“I mean…I like men.”

Her hand drifts downward, pulling the air out of my lungs, nauseating my stomach—she cups my belly, hand nestled just below my navel, possessive, just low enough that I can feel the pull on the tip of my cock. “Not just men,” she says.

“Yeah,” fuck it’s hard to speak, her hand is right there she’s right there “but I like men and old Laura Dern movies. That’s not really bisexua—” She reaches down, gently brushing past the head of my penis, and I momentarily lose the power of speech.

“You like men and old Laura Dern movies and me.” She grabs my cock and squeezes it—it feels like it’s pulling itself inward, like she’s inside of me—to punctuate each word. “How could you not? You spend all day trying to fuck me in Just. The. Right. Way.”

I close my eyes and shudder and try not to come embarrassingly quickly.

She laughs. I can feel her rippling laugh, her chest against my back, pulling against me. “Are you trying not to come? Oh, baby, you don’t have to worry about that with me.”

I open my mouth, but all that comes out are gasps.

I can feel her other hand inside me, pulling at my prostate from behind. “I could be a man,” she whispers. “But I’m not. Because I want your babies.”

Fuck! That does it.

I wake up in a pool of my own cum.

The next shift, I don’t apologize and Marley doesn’t bring it up. And I still haven’t talked to you.

But I can hear her again. I can hear her singing, some new tune: some new way to say “I love you;” some new way to say “I missed you.”

I love you too. I missed you too.

I don’t feel guilty. I just feel loved.

That shift, we chart fifteen paths. And every one is perfect.

I’m expecting that like all the other times we’ve fought—all the other times you’ve given me the silent treatment—that you’re going to show up in the middle of my sleep shift for a booty call.

But you don’t. You show up for my dinner. In the cafeteria, where everyone can see us. You just bound up and plop a tray across from me and take a big bite of your frankie and you’re wearing one of your dumb Cormorant Walleyes T-shirts—you cannot make me care about professional handball, you simply cannot—and you’re chewing and making expectant eye contact at me and I have absolutely no idea what to say or do because you’ve never done anything like this before.

So I just sort of stare at you chewing which is incredibly awkward for both of us.

“What?” I finally ask, when you’re done chewing.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’”

I mean “You haven’t talked to me in two weeks and now you’re just showing up to join me at dinner? You’ve literally never done that once. What’s different?” but I can’t actually say that—or, I could actually say that, honestly I want to actually say that, but it would absolutely start a fight again and fuck that. You’re not worth it.

So I just say “I dunno” and look down at the hard plastic table between us. Which is of course exactly the sort of thing you hate, and fuck I can feel myself flushing with embarrassment, so I add “I haven’t seen you in a while” as if we don’t both already know that.

I hate this. I hate this feeling, I hate these conversations, I hate how I always get caught up in my own head. I even hate you, but not nearly as much as I hate myself.

“Got busy in machining,” you say, as if that justifies not even an e-mail, not even a fucking ping, as if we both didn’t know that you were punishing me because I won an argument for once.

I spread my hands on the table. I hate my hands—somehow both rough with biopsy scars and still too soft, too flabby, working some desk job my family would never understand even if they were talking to me. Which they aren’t. “Yeah, well, whatever.” I look up and you’re still making your eye contact. “I missed you.”

You smile, you reach across the table and squeeze my hand. “I missed you too.” You pull your hand back, but you don’t stop smiling. God your teeth are so fucking perfect.

Marley and Vance come in disheveled—they clearly just finished fucking—and can’t stop looking at each other. They notice us—they must have, there’s only room for six people in the entire cafeteria—but they pretend that they haven’t, or at least they’re too busy making doe eyes at each other and giggling. Which is fine by me. Better than fine, really. Any day I don’t have to talk to Vance is a good day.

It’s dumb, I shouldn’t care, but seeing them together—they actually like each other, or at least they’re doing a pretty good impression of it. I want to say that I wish it could be like that with us. I want to talk about when it was good. But it was never good. We’ve always fought mean; we’ve always hated each other, at least a little. The only reason we’re together—the only reason we have anything to do with each other, at all—is that we’re the only two queers on KGR.

But it’s always been bad. And since I started loving you it’s only been worse.

Still, though, I reach out and run my hand down your arm. You pull away and shoot me a look.

Yeah, sure, whatever. I pick up my tray and toss it into the recycler—I try to make it angry, but quarter-g makes everything slow and floaty and it doesn’t connect with anything louder than a soft click. “See you tonight,” I say, and storm off before you can answer.

It’s not fair of me. But, also, I’m not wrong. You absolutely show up for a booty call in the middle of my sleep shift.

It’s been a couple of weeks. At least we’re fucking again. We still haven’t really talked, but we never really talked anyway, so that’s fine. And, let’s be honest, if we talked it’d probably just make things worse.

But that’s all changing today, because Shervin is coming back for drop-off and resupply.

Shervin’s a great guy, weird prospector type, real relaxed, real friendly, easy smile, just the kind of guy you want to chill with. I don’t even know if he’s gay or just one of those guys who isn’t picky, but it doesn’t matter. I kind of love you, and you probably don’t love me, but we both fucking love Shervin—we both love fucking Shervin.

I don’t know why it’s different. I can’t imagine you do either. But we just work better when he’s here. Like, for him, we can pretend that we actually give a shit about each other.

Anyway we’re waiting for him at airlock four and I reach out to hold your hand and you bat it away and then there’s the airlock hiss and here’s Shervin, just like we remembered, a touch more white than black in his beard now, a little thinner than he was last time, but he comes bounding out of the airlock with a big grin on his face—“It’s my boys,” he says, almost a shout in the narrow corridor, which would be corny if anyone else said it but this is Shervin so it just makes my heart do a flip-flop. He reaches out and ruffles my hair, then pulls you down to kiss you, holds me by the back of my head and kisses me.

His mouth tastes sour and his tongue is soft, and my nose is full of the smell—somehow it’s best when he’s just off his ship and he’s still got his prospector beard (it’s not pleasant, but God!)—recycled water and old skin and coveralls he hasn’t changed in a month. It always gets me going.

Don’t judge me! You know you love it too.

“Hey now,” he says. “Let’s get some grub and you can catch me up on all the news of civilization.”

“Actually,” you say, as if it just occurred to you, “could we talk, Sherv?”

“Oh sure. What’s up?”

You make eye contact with me and—you fuck!—you smile.

“I just have some things I want to talk about privately.”

“Sure thing.” Shervin smiles at me. “Catch you later, little guy?”

(Shervin is the only person in the solar system who can get away with calling me “little guy.”)

“Sure,” I say, like a complete sucker.

You’re in your room “talking” for the next four hours. My shift is starting and I’m just stewing in my room about it. I know it’s your only chance to get fucked—though I’d top you, too, you know, if you’d just ask. But, no, apparently I “don’t have the right vibe.” Fuck you, man. My dick’s good enough for the fabric of spacetime but you want someone at least five-ten? Your fucking loss.

So yeah it’s your chance to get fucked but it’s also my only chance to spend time with someone who doesn’t treat me like absolute garbage. The seconds tick into minutes and my shift is coming up. Fuck me if I’m going to go knock on your door—the door to the room you won’t even let me into: apparently the triskelions you keep in an unsanctioned tank are “sensitive to loud noises” and “astonishingly venomous.” Shervin can be in there just fine, though; apparently it’s just my noises that they’re sensitive to. Anyway I’m about to go knocking on your door in the middle of whatever-the-fuck just to simp for positive attention.

So instead I stew and wait and my shift comes up which I’m absolutely sure you knew.

On shift, I chart Shervin’s shipments—cobalt to Mars, iron to Europa, a good haul—and I chart his course back into the Kuipers. An eighteen month expedition. Eighteen months. Fucking hell.

“Ooh, you’ve got a temper today,” she says, and giggles. I can’t tell if she’s just being flirty or if she’s laughing at me, which of course only makes me angrier. I want to shove her down and fuck her hard, but any time I try to push, I just fall forward into her, because she isn’t really there, she’s everywhere, and gravity doesn’t have a push anyway. She’s the only force in the universe that only goes one direction.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” But I can’t tell whether she’s just going to make fun of me or not. When I don’t say anything, she wraps her arms around me from the side. “Or we could just fuck it out.”

I can feel her closeness pulling my ribcage in every direction of out. I clench my fists.

“What is it you want, baby? I’m here for you.” She reaches down to cup my balls. My dick pulls back, towards her hand, but I can feel the blood rushing into it all the same. “Are you wishing you had some super-massive dick so you could fuck a hole into me?”

Fuck. Yes. That.

“Oh, baby,” she shifts her body—her space—and suddenly I’m lying down, and she’s on top of me, with my dick in her hands, guiding it into her. She smells like frog eggs and ionizing radiation. “I already love the dick you have.” She drops herself down suddenly, all the way to the root.

She doesn’t feel slick inside. She feels smooth and soft and pulling me apart in every direction. She rocks her hips up, then again, and again, and again.

“Give it to me,” she whispers. “I want it so bad. Please. Please.”

I’m gasping. “Fuck. Fuck.”

She starts to whimper and it’s a 2:3 resonance, then a 4:7, then every orbital at once, the entire music of the spheres, from every direction, from all of space. I feel her trembling, gravitational waves rippling out from our fucking, and there’s no stopping me after that.

She screams. I scream. We come together.

“I put in for a transfer,” you say, after I step into the shower cubby to wash off all our sweat and your cum and everything else.

I stare at you. The water is beading into weird blobs and I’m wasting my allotment. “What?”

“I put in for a transfer. I just—I thought you should know.”

Fuck.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you at least wait until I’ve washed your cum out before you drop that shit on me?”

You put up your hands as if I’m the bad guy. “I don’t want to fight about this. You know I hate KGR. There was an opening, and I took it.”

“Fuck. Can I at least finish the shower?”

“Don’t look at me.”

So after I shower and towel off I go and sit on my chair in half a towel and you’re still on my cot looking golden and amazing—that perfect Europan skin, so smooth, so soft, so unlike my pockmarked Martian mess of moles and sun-damage and biopsy scars, even when I’m mad at you I can’t hate that fucking skin—your cock soft, your face concerned.

“So where are you headed? Titan fuel depot?”

“Patrocles Resupply Center. The Jupiter Trojans.” Fuck you. I know it’s in the Jupiter Trojans. Fuck you. That’s so fucking far away.

I want to say “what about me?” I want to beg you to stay. But—fuck. I do love you, even though I shouldn’t. I do love you, but not enough to say it.

I should say something, though. “How long have you known?”

You look completely innocent when you say “a month or two.”

So the entire time that you were throwing jealous fits and picking fights and you knew—you fucking knew!—that you were abandoning me. That must have been what you were talking with Shervin about.

I put my head in my hands, with my palms on my eyeballs. “I cannot deal with this right now.”

“Hey.” You stand up and put your hand on top of my head. Your voice is tender, like you’re worried. You’re doing such a good job of pretending to care about me.

I push your hand away. “I cannot deal with you right now.”

“I’m worried about you,” you say. “Please at least tell someone—a doctor!—about your hallucinations.”

“Oh please. I’m not going to pretend that your jealousy is some kind of compassion—”

“Alan, that’s not—Look. Either you’re hallucinating her or you’re not. If you are, then you might be having a psychotic break. If you’re not, then—” you take a deep breath, like the entire concept of having to entertain this proposition is beneath you—“then you’re clearly being manipulated.”

“Oh you’re one to fucking talk about manipulation.”

“Alan! I am worried about you!”

“Not worried enough to tell me that you were transferring to fucking Patrocles.”

“It’s just—all you do is work and have sex with me and I think it’s messing with your head. I don’t know what you’re going to—I mean, fuck, Alan, you don’t even have any hobbies.”

The fucking hobbies again. Just one more thing I’m failing at, one more thing that the Martian scholarship kid can’t hack. Of all the things—I never understood it. We didn’t have hobbies when I was a kid. We had jobs and we fucking hated them.

But I don’t want to say any of that—that hurts too much to say. So instead I say “you know, you used to like how much I love to fuck!”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

I look up and stand up and my towel drifts to the floor. I don’t care, though; I’m fucking pissed. “Not fair! Not fair! What the fuck are you going to do about it? Complain to Marley?”

“Please just promise me—I don’t want you to—”

I shove you onto the cot. “Just stop pretending that you care about me. Let’s just admit that the only reason we’re fucking is that I’m a convenient hole and you’re the third-best dick in ten AU.”

I’m so mad at you that my mouth tastes like metal. It’s one thing to use me for sex, it’s one thing to treat me like crap, it’s one thing to threaten me with doctors, but that fucking condescension.

“Fucking hell, Alan,” you shout. You shove me back and I fall over the chair. I look up from the ground, vision red, a dull pain in my head. I can’t tell if there’s blood on my face and I don’t care.

You’re hard again. I grab at your dick and I don’t know if I want to fuck it or tear it the fuck off.

“Is that how you want it?” you shout. “Fine!”

Sex is so much better without the pretense that we give a shit about each other.

It’s four days until you leave and I’m walking to my shift when you grab me in the corridor and shove me against the plastic and aluminum wall and try to fuck my throat with your tongue. You haven’t been shaving and your halfway beard is sharp against my cheeks.

Fuck it. I can be late to my shift—if I even have a choice in the matter. I reach out blindly and grab hold of your shirt, tugging and pulling at it.

“Get your fucking pants off,” you say, while you fumble with your fly.

I get my fucking pants off.

You grab me by the thighs and push me up against the wall again, my thighs all the way up against my shoulders, and your breath is peppermint and a little bit of plaque and warm against my face, and I feel your cock pushing, pushing against my ass. You push once, then again, and I try to relax, but there’s too much friction. You pull back—holding me up with one hand across my legs—spit on your hand, rub it on your dick and try again.

You push, and again, and your head goes in slowly—“Ow!”—but you’re not about to stop for my sake, and then your head pops in and there’s that familiar and perfect feeling. It still fucking hurts, but goddamn. Every muscle in my body tightens at once.

It’s hard to concentrate on anything except getting fucked, but I try to remember this feeling, pushed up awkwardly against the wall, my legs bent over, the fear of “what if someone sees us” and the courage of “so what if someone sees us,” the force of each thrust rolling through my whole body, your breath getting uneven, the little grunts you don’t even know you’re making, the air getting pushed out of my lungs.

I want to hold on to this moment, once you’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fights or the put-downs or the jealousy. But this? I’m going to miss this so much.

You’re going faster, and then faster, and I stop being able to think about anything at all.

Just after you’ve come, while you’re panting so hard your tongue is hanging out and my whole body feels warm and your dick is growing soft inside me—I have some moment of weakness and I reach out and gently touch your cheek. You pull back, and I lean forward, lowering my left leg for balance, reaching towards you. I start to cup your cheek, but you grab my hand—a sharp, hard pain.

“Don’t fucking touch me” you say, and shove me, pushing my cheek back against the wall. Fuck, though. That does it for me. I’m already hard again, and I can feel your warmth, hear your breathing getting ragged, I know it’s working for you too.

Fuck it. I can be even later for my shift. If I even have a choice in the matter.

By the time we’re finally down I’m almost an hour late and we both have bruises and I don’t give a shit about any of it.

The night before you leave, I see her again.

There’s nothing coy about her this time, no slow manifestation, no subtle teasing. She’s next to me in my bed, and I’m holding her—falling into her relentless curvature. I realize, holding her, that she has shifted the path of my whole life, of my mind and fate and sexuality, bending it all to this moment, this place. To her.

I realize that I don’t care. I love her.

“Are you ready?” she asks. “Tonight’s the night.”

It’s hard to keep my thoughts straight when she’s talking. “What?”

She begins to run her hands along my face, puckering my cheeks out. “You don’t remember, lover?” Her hands are around my chest now, pulling at my nipples “I wasn’t just saying it to get you going.” One hand is still against my belly, the other reaching further down. “I really.” And now it’s on my dick, pulling it out in every direction. “Really.” And she’s cupping my balls, pulling them out, and it aches, and she has one finger back, pulling against my prostate. “Want.” And she’s pulling me towards her, into her, on top of her. “Your. Babies.”

This is wrong. This feels wrong. I don’t know how, but it feels different than before. Before, we were out in the fabric of space, fucking across the whole solar system. Now we’re in my bed, the same bed that we—and you’re leaving tomorrow and you hate her. You hate this. I should be thinking about you.

Before, it was so obviously a dream. But now I’m really not sure that I’m asleep.

“I…I shouldn’t—I mean we—” I try to say but with her beneath me, with her looking up at me, with those black eyes the color of space. No. I should tell her “no.” But it’s just so hard to say it.

“Shhh…” she sets her finger on my lips, and every geodesic of my timeline converges into her. She reaches both hands to my hips and shudders as she pulls me into her.

“This is happening,” she says, her voice low, like this is a seduction and not—“You don’t have a choice. You never really did. So you might as well enjoy it.” She pulls me into her again, to punctuate her point.

I feel like I’m being pulled apart from every direction. I don’t—I want to wake up. But I don’t want this to end.

Fuck it. I flex my hips and push into her again. She shudders all around me. “Yes!” she says. “Give it to me. Give me your babies.”

She moves her hands around to my abdomen, and then into my abdomen, and it hurts but it feels good, it feels full. It feels like being fucked from all sides at once. I’m inside her and she’s inside me, pulling my guts outward, hollowing me out, reshaping my insides even as I push into her.

“What—” I manage to pant out. “What are you doing?”

She pushes upward once, then again, and on the second try sets her lips against my ear, which is bending around from both ends towards whatever she’s about to say. “I’m making a womb,” she whispers, “for all our children.”

My guts are churning against her hands and I feel like I’m going to throw up but also. Fuck me. I didn’t realize I liked it, but I do. My whole body starts to shake.

“Why?—” I manage.

“It was always going to be you,” she continues. “Our children need to grow. They need to gestate. They need a body. They need your body. Where would I even carry them? I don’t have a body. Not really. Not like you. In the end, I’m only the relational context between massive objects.”

I can’t think. I should have come already, but somehow as she’s been fucking up my belly she’s been stretching the space and time around her, so that even though I feel like I’m about to come, even though I’m moving faster and faster, also there are hours passing between each motion, years even, and my dick is sticking straight into her but its path is bent around inside of her, into a full orbit, so at the end of her vagina is the space she made—no, the womb—no, my womb—no. Not my womb. Her womb, that she dug into my body.

She’s nowhere and she’s everywhere and I’m fucking her and I’m fucking me and I can feel my own blood lubricating my dick and she’s got her lips on my ear and she says “It’s always been you, Alan. Since the beginning. All the way to the end. I’ve always loved you.”

“I—” breath—“you.”

“Come for me,” she says, and it lasts for 15 billion years.

I don’t go see you when your shuttle leaves. I could pretend that it’s spite, or not wanting to say goodbye, or some other bullshit, but let’s be real: I probably would have. It’s just that I have to work my shift.

While I’m charting out your shuttle’s course I have a flash—just a flash—of “you can’t leave,” of “I won’t let you leave,” of “I could crash that asshole’s ship right into Neptune and it would be perfectly explicable error and no one would be the wiser.” I’d never do it, of course. Particularly not anymore.

I set your launch vector, a deep burn naturally—with human cargo you can’t take your time. I chart you a path around Saturn (enjoy the rings!), winging by Triton, all the way to a perfect synch at 617 Patrocles. I barely even need to do the tensor calculations, but I do them anyway. I do it for you—for whatever we had that wasn’t love—and I do it for her and with her, because I know she loves it.

But most especially I do it for—well.

I’m sitting in the hard plastic chair in my office and I’m triple-checking your numbers on the terminal and my hand strays down to my abdomen. I can’t feel anything different yet—it was only last night, after all, they won’t have even implanted yet. But I imagine the bump I’ll be able to feel in a few months. I imagine their heartbeats, their kicks. I imagine what they might be, when they come out.

So most especially, I do it for them. Because, even though their mother loves them very much, I’ll be the one who has to care for them. I don’t know if they’d survive in the inner solar system, tangled up in all those orbits. We’ll need to stay in this place. So I need to stay in this job.

We were a wonderful, awful distraction for each other. But that’s all it really was. You know it; I know it. You’re moving on, out into the mess of curved space and the rest of the solar system. And I’m moving on too, into whatever our children will be.

I don’t hate you. I’m not sad. Not really, anyway. This was always how it was going to end.

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