The lotion in question had a very mild, faintly sweet scent, not so much fruity as caramel. I pulled my damp hair forward out of the way and perched on the edge of the other bed; she sat behind me, poured lotion into her hands from the bottle and transferred half to the other hand, and id both hands on my back.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like having their back rubbed, although I suppose in theory such people exist. I certainly do, whether it’s a massage to work on the perpetually-tight muscles or just to apply sunscreen or lotion.
I was quite sure it had never felt like this.
Then again, I couldn’t normally feel the currents of the air, let alone the water, against my skin, telling me about walls and motion and open windows. Touch just somehow ramped that up. I swear I could track every finger, every flex of her hands, the path of the lotion, and feel it soaking into my skin in the wake of her unhurried attentions. She slid one hand under the top of my sarong to make sure she got lotion along the back of my waist, and ventured around my sides past midline, maybe just so nothing was missed.
“Nathan? You’ve gone very quiet.” As she said it, she was running one hand slowly up the length of my spine.
“I... what?” It was a struggle to reorient on something other than pure sensation and remember what words are.
“Maybe I should stop?” That hand went around the back of my neck from either side, avoiding my hair.
“Um... no?”
Wait, was that amusement?
That was too abstract to hold onto.
“Hm. Well, tell me if you want me to.” She cupped both hands around one of my arms and worked her way down to my fingertips, taking her time to make sure the lotion was spread properly.
She had to pause before the other one, so she could get more lotion, and I managed to almost capture something like coherent thought. There was definitely something in her voice...
“What’s so funny?”
“What would be funny?”
“Wait... you know aquians. You know what that feels like.” I twisted around to face her.
She giggled, and that certainly looked like mischief making her turquoise eyes crinkle at the corners, but she did her best to act innocent. “Would I take advantage of the fact that touch is a strong sensation even for other aquians, let alone one who’s new to this?”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Move your hair.” Automatically, I obeyed.
With a grin, she id both lotion-slippery hands on my shoulders and slid them down over my chest and belly. “It’s lucky for you that I know that, and that you have a girlfriend.”
Wait, aquians could potentially be either sex... did that mean I was missing something?
I gnced down.
Well, my chest was still ft, but that was really not much comfort considering what else I could feel.
How the hell did aquians get sexually aroused when they had both sets of hardware in potential but not in current fact?
That was a very physical sensation, but it confused me, centred somewhere in my lower pelvis. It felt, well, good, but then, arousal generally does. It also felt like something was contracting and flexing in an extremely odd way, like a very localized and very intense version of swapping to and from having a tail. There was nothing going on that I could see, but that didn’t mean Serru couldn’t either identify or predict something.
I just wasn’t quite sure how to handle it right now. I was long past getting embarrassed by involuntary hardons in high school, and generally considered myself sufficiently mature and open-minded to simply recognize arousal and move on if it wasn’t appropriate, but this was, to say the least, not a situation I had any precedent for.
Serru ughed. “Here, give me your other arm, so I can get the rest of this off my hands, and you can finish for yourself. I shouldn’t be teasing you. I’m sorry.” Whatever was left, she rubbed absently into her own forearms, before she leaned forward to give me a kiss.
She probably meant it to be quick, just affection and apology.
I snaked a hand around the back of her neck and held her for a longer, deeper one. She tasted like the fruit she’d had at our st stop.
She also didn’t hesitate for even a heartbeat in returning it with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm.
“There’s a thing I didn’t bother to bring up about me and Grace,” I told her when I let go. “It’s usually easier not to.”
“Yes?” I saw no indication that she was at all fazed by that kiss; she was still smiling.
“Our work schedules are so bad that sometimes we don’t see each other in person for weeks. She’s off when I’m at work, or one or both of us is too exhausted to even make it to the other’s home. So we agreed that if anything fun happens with someone else, that’s fine and not a problem, as long as we’re both honest about it.”
“That sounds unexpectedly forthright and mutually compassionate, considering everything you’ve said about your world. But then, this is you and someone you value that highly.”
“Not everyone is actually drowning in assumptions and expectations. Just most.”
“Hm. Then perhaps you should consider whether, at a time when we are not waiting for friends to arrive at any moment, you would like a friend to help you explore being an aquian in female phase. For the moment, you might want to focus on lotion for the rest of you.” She kissed the end of my nose and got up, moving back to the other bed where at least part of the contents of her bag were spread out.
Well. That did help me get a grip on myself, at least in the immediate sense. What the long-term implications might be remained to be seen, but this wasn’t really the ideal moment.
I finished the lotion on the rest of me, tucking my wrapped sarong up out of the way to reach everything—and there was a suggestion in the normally-smooth region between my legs of a valley or crease along much of the length, which seemed like confirmation that on some level, I’d started to respond to the whole situation as an intimate one. Sexual? Well, maybe. It can be hard to untangle intimate from sexual, attraction from arousal, a crush from genuine feelings. I cared very deeply about Serru and trusted her, and had reason to believe she felt much the same. I hadn’t exactly been blind to the fact that she was sexy as hell, it just hadn’t really ever been relevant.
Possibly it was?
Although honestly, I could probably also pounce on Aryennos in my felid form and get a positive reaction, if I chose to. Terenei was always up for hugs, cuddling, or otherwise non-sexual contact, which was intimate in its own wonderful casual way. I didn’t have much of a retionship with Heket and probably she was staying here when we left, which was a shame because I really liked her. Somehow, I was just collecting a growing list of people in this world I really wanted to spend time with, and even when sex might be on the table, it wasn’t a primary factor in any case.
The chance to find out what sex was like under these conditions was never going to come up again and I’d probably wonder forever if I missed out entirely, which was real and valid and I needed to think about it.
I finished, closed the bottle of lotion, and stashed it in my bag. It didn’t matter which side, since getting wet wouldn’t damage it.
Terenei tapped on the open door, then came inside. “The boys are all set. Heket’s friends rotate the cattle through three pastures to make sure they have the best grass, and ornithians don’t eat grass, so they have one of the pastures to themselves and a whole herd of felid and human and aquian children fussing over them. It’s a big household, felid twin sisters and their human brother at the heart of it along with all the usual: their children, present and past partners, friends, sometimes the other children of those partners, most of them in and out.”
“That still sounds complicated,” I said, aware of Terenei sitting behind me on the edge of the bed. It wasn’t a surprise to feel fingers run through my hair, repeatedly, and I braced myself. Heket had tried to expin what felid households were like, and it sounded to me like you could link any two felids in the entire world via very few steps using those sprawling borderless family connections. “But if it works for everyone involved, then it definitely means lots of adults for children to turn to and that seems like a good thing to me.”
“Myu?”
“Outside. The innkeeper really seems to like and understand cats. The window is set up to let her get out to the courtyard and back in easily, and the courtyard’s completely enclosed by the building. I’m sure she’s having fun.”
“Do we have pns? Heket stayed with her friend Nami, but they’re only on the outskirts of town, I imagine they’re still in communicator range.”
Serru shrugged and nodded. “Jaelis suggested that we go to the Ruby Dolphin. It’s several blocks from here, but it has the best combination of expert cooks, varied menu, creative bartender, live music, and dance floor that we’re going to get in Whalesong Landing. After the next shift arrives at the post office, Jaelis will go home to change and then meet us there.”
“That sounds like a perfect pce,” Terenei said.
“There’s one thing that might come up that needs crification, Nathan. We might have already expined but you’ve had a lot to absorb. Jaelis is currently one of Whalesong Landing’s council-members. From what I’ve picked up about your world, that won’t mean quite what you would expect. Each community has several, always an odd number, always at least three.”
“Coppersands has seven,” Terenei said. “But then, it’s not much smaller than the Shallows capital.”
Serru nodded. “I think the rgest cities have nine. At this level, it is not typically a full-time job. Anyone who is willing to volunteer and who is an adult with their address listed in that settlement is added to a list. Each year, the appropriate number of names are drawn at random from that pool. After that year, one cannot be a council-member again until the fifth year. For simple issues, anyone can go to any one of them for help. They have additional powers avaible for that purpose. For more complex issues, all or a majority are required to agree. Clerks do administrative duties as a regur job, wardens act more directly, and between them they tend to handle most of the day-to-day running of the settlement, but for some things they need the agreement of one or more council-members.”
“No voting,” I mused. “No promises to keep or break. No parties. Huh. Do they get paid?”
“Half of their average income from the previous four years, to allow them to spend half their time serving the community and still have time for family and other important things.”
“That’s per settlement? Local? Is there a higher level?”
“Each of the five great provinces has their own council, chosen the same way. One must be living in that province and there is a limited window for moving to the provincial capital for the year after being chosen. There is one council over everything, in the capital near the Axis. On those levels, it’s expected that it will take up all of your working hours, and they are paid the full average of their income for the past four years.”
“No one’s getting rich off a career in politics. You can’t even have one. Decisions are being made by people who actually know how to be part of the communities they’re making decisions for and will be affected by those same decisions. I love it. And Jaelis volunteered?”
“Always.”
“A lot of people volunteer to be on the list,” Terenei offered. “Most often people wait until after they’re settled down somewhere and feel like they’re part of a community where they’re going to stay. I haven’t, even though I love Coppersands, because I don’t know what I could cut out to make time for that. Some people are in jobs that are going to cause a problem for the whole community if they work only half the time or stop for a year, mostly in small settlements. Some people are in jobs that are just generally a problem because they travel a lot and a council-member needs to be accessible, which they aren’t if they’re a gatherer or a merchant or in a band. There can be conflicting priorities temporarily, or someone might just not be comfortable with the idea. But I suppose by default most people eventually do unless they have a reason not to.”
Serru nodded. “That doesn’t mean everyone who volunteers will be chosen. Only that one is willing. I don’t expect the subject to come up...”
“... but it’s better,” I said, “if I have at least the level of information a small child would take for granted, so I don’t say anything like questioning banks. Got it.”
“Jaelis would not be any danger to you, en is one of my closest friends, but we would need to expin yet again. Which might cause further dey.”
“I think we’ve done enough expining. Let’s just have a fun no-stress night.”
