R. For monkee, who went to great lengths to get me to write a Kashyk story. This isn’t quite it.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit.
Kashyk imagines Kathryn because he will never have her.
He imagines her tastes: Her mouth tastes like hot, strong coffee and the spice they called ginger. Her skin tastes different in different places: her ears like her shampoo, a little like a caro fruit from home. Her fingers, like the orange peel in the moisturizer she uses; he kept a tube of it. Her toes taste sour, like the human sweat he learned to recognize during his inspections, or clean, like glycerine soap. The back of her left knee tastes like salt and the inside of her right thigh like smoke.
He imagines her sounds: She makes a small sound of pleasure, not quite a moan, not quite a hum. She makes sounds of anger, power, control. She speaks of mathematical formulas but he imagines her whispering his name in a darkened room, shouting his name not in anger or fear. Her hair, between his fingers, sings like the bow of one of Mahler’s violins. Her teeth clench when he walks into the room. “Exploring can sometimes be hard to resist, Inspector,” she said. He hears her voice.
He imagines her smells: She smells like the ship itself, the ship that is an extension of her—clean plastic, carpeting, confidence, plasma. She smells like stale sex after they’ve fucked for hours, but he can’t escape the feeling that sex with her would smell different than sex with a Devoran. He wonders. Her uniform smells like their replicators, lifeless, at the beginning of the day. By night it smells of her neck, her stomach, her calves. He should have confiscated one from her quarters; he would like to inhale it.
He imagines her touch: Artificial gravity has started to damage her buttocks, her thighs—on Devore this is a sign of beauty and wealth, a sign of someone who does not need to work to eat. He presses his fingers into her flesh. Her breasts are hot and heavy in his hands, her elbows fragile and sharp. Sometimes, he imagines tying her up so she has no choice but to trust him. He binds her arms and her feet together and buries his tongue in her bubbling hot sex. She burns him, she always burns him, but he comes back for more.
He imagines her sights: She is smaller than any Devoran, but also more dangerous; she stares men down from below. He imagines seeing her under the Devoran sun, her nose pink and peeling—do humans peel? She kneels before him, submissive but not, calculating. Behind her eyes, her brain clicks at maximum speed. She strips off her clothes; she reminds him of a woman from old Devoran stories, a goddess who danced for men to control them. Yet he cannot imagine her dancing. He will have to try harder.
He squeezes the tube of her moisturizer. He raises the white cream to his nose, and sniffs. He spreads it on his own cheek, and under his nose. And she is there, with him, now. His.
She was going to be his prize.
He has told no one of his failure.
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