Chase had just pulled the last of his clothes off, running his hand slowly on the inside of Iri’s right thigh when the sound of glass breaking caught his attention. He noticed movement at the windowed door, which caused him to pull his pants back up.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Chase heard as he turned his attention towards the window, noticing what looked like hopping.
It took him a few moments to realize who it was that was standing in the pale light outside.
“Hi,” he heard her voice and say we wave. “I’m Belle Starr?”
Chase got up and came around the bed to the door, noticing Iri trying hard to control her breathing from the actions they had taken, using her right hand to cover herself with the coat. Chase opened the door, Belle giving off a sheepishly smile.
“What..?”
Chase looked down and noticed what appeared to be a broken bottle, and blood slowly poring from Belle’s foot. He picked Belle up, taking her over to the foot of the bed and sitting her down. He proceeded to the bathroom, getting a couple of wash cloths, partly soaking one with water. Chase had her foot his hand as she laid on the bed next to Iri, cleaning the wound and and pulling a large piece of glass the size of a shot glass out of her foot. It hadn’t gone deep, but Chase applied pressure for a few minutes to stop the bleeding.
“What were you doing out there?” Chase asked as he tended to her wound. “Spying on me?”
“Nonono,” she said. “It’s nothing like that, I swear! I heard moaning coming from your room. I thought someone was kidnapping you again.”
“Again?” Iri asked, looking at Chase with confusion.
“Long story,” Chase replied.
“Anyway, I thought that you were in trouble, and I grabbed the closest thing I could, and came over to save you. I didn’t expect to find you, and… and…”
Belle was looking over at Iri, as if trying to find the right words.
“Her,” she finally found it. “Chase, I swear, I wouldn’t have interrupted if I had known…”
Chase held his hand up, to stop her, the wet cloth partly hanging from his hand. The bleeding had stopped, allowing Chase the chance to clean the wound. She winched in pain, almost yanking her foot from his grasp.
“Just relax, Belle,” Chase told her.
He understood that it wasn’t intentional, that she didn’t intend to cut in as some sort of means of jealousy or pervertedness. Belle remained silent for a moment, waiting as Chase completed the cleaning of her injury. She seemed a bit nervous being in the room. He would have felt the same thing if he had walked in on her in the middle of the same act with another man or woman. Belle had looked down at Chase and inadvertently followed her look down towards his pants. She then looked back up, blushing and covering her forehead. He figured she realized that she had witnessed him naked and had accidentally admired his body, only to realize he was watching her. Iri retrieved the baggie of hand-rolled cigarettes, retrieving on and lit it. She took a drag from it, offering it to Belle. Belle seemed confused by the offering of the cigarette and shook her head no to it. Iri took another drag, looking up at the ceiling as the smoke exited her lungs on her exhale.
“Look, I, ah…” he heard Belle say. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Iri Seweul,” Iri replied.
“Miss Sewuel,” Belle began. “I assure you I didn’t intend for interrupting the two of you.”
Iri looked at Belle a moment, propping herself up on her right elbow to face her. Iri looked at the foot in Chase’s hand, following up until the leg disappeared behind a T-shirt too big for Belle, a yellow smiley face on it. Her eyes kept scanning until they went over Belle’s breasts as they were hidden underneath the shirt until she met Belle’s eyes once more.
“It’s okay,” Chase heard Iri say after a prolonged silence.
He took his brief moment to look at the two, noticing Iri running her finger along Belle’s left forearm. He also noticed that Iri, whose one arm was occupied with propping her up and the other teasing Belle’s arm, had allowed the coat she was using to cover herself to drop, exposing one of her breasts. Chase had used the dry cloth to wrap around Belle’s foot, making sure it was snug enough to keep from slipping off. He took the cigarette from Iri’s hand, taking a drag off of it himself.
“Give me a minute Belle,” Chase told her. “I’ll get you back to your room.”
Chase grabbed his shoes and headed towards the bathroom, the cigarette still hanging from his lips as he walked. He sat the shoes on the counter and closed the door. He proceeded to wring out the blood on the wet cloth, and then hung it from the bar used for the shower curtain. He turned on the faucet, taking the cigarette from his mouth and running it under the tap to put it out.
If most embarrassing moments were a sport, Chase thought. What happened definitely would take the first prize.
As Chase took a moment to process the embarrassing moment, Iri scooted closer to Belle on the bed. Belle noticed this, looking into the Indogene’s indigo eyes.
“You’re really quite beautiful, for a human,” she told Belle, a small smile forming on her face.
Before Belle could give any response, Iri leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. The Indogene’s hand snaked it’s way up underneath the T-shirt, cupping and lightly squeezing the human female’s right breast. Belle certainly seemed surprised by this event, almost frozen in shock. Iri pulled her hand back out and broke the kiss, looking into Belle’s eyes.
“I can see why he would have ‘ungentleman-like thoughts’ of you,” Iri cooed at her. “The next time you’re outside the door, come inside… Another set of hands never hurt anyone.”
Belle’s eyes were wide, her mouth moving up and down as if trying to find words to speak. At that moment, Chase came out of the bathroom with his shoes on. He came over, getting his arms underneath Belle. Belle put an arm around his neck as he lifted her up and headed towards the door. When he got out to the balcony, he kicked away the broken glass, the pieces falling off over the edge to make sure no one else stepped on it.
Chase placed Belle in her bed, reaching over to turn the light on so he could see. He pulled her covers over her, so to keep her warm.
“You may want Alfred to heal you while you sleep,” Chase told her. “That way you’re foot would be back to normal by morning.”
Belle silently stared at Chase a moment.
“Your Indogene friend kissed me, and felt me up while you were in the bathroom,” Belle finally blurted out. “I think she also offered a three-way. What kind of sex freak is she?”
Chase chuckled, taking a seat on the bed next to her.
“It’s not the real her behind the wheel,” Chase told Belle. “Right now, she’s a slave to her desire. It’s quite common with Indogenes from what she told me a while back. Essentially, the desire for sex is like the Mister Hyde to the normal Indogene personality’s Doctor Jekyll, though it’s Doctor Jekyll who initiates it. There’s a slight change in the personality that differs from the other. I mean, most Indogenes from the Vontanis system are mostly emotionally suppressed. That’s why most of them appear grumpy or lack concern for the emotions of another.”
Belle was silent again.
“What is it?” Chase asked.
“I, uh,” she cleared her throat. “I didn’t think you were into Indogenes. To be honest, I think you’re the second person I know whose been… You know.”
He nodded.
“She told me that you had ‘ungentleman-like thoughts’ about me. Why didn’t you tell me this?”
It was now Chase being the one quiet for a moment.
“I didn’t think it was appropriate, or more importantly, fair to you,” he admitted. “It’s really difficult to explain.”
They were both silent a moment, the quiet air thick enough to cut through with a charge blade.
“How do you know her?” Belle broke the silence. “I mean, I can’t just picture you with an Indogene. A Castithan, definitely. An Irathient, maybe.”
Chase turned away from her, facing towards the windows to the room. He ran through his memory of as long as he knew Belle, and couldn’t remember ever bringing up his past to her.
It’s time she knew, Chase told her. It’s better now than never.
He took in a deep breath and blew it out, trying to steady his nerves. He turned back to face her.
“When I was twenty-seven, I was a Cowboy,” he began his tale. “I had been on the job with the others since I was nineteen. I faced many dangers, looked death straight in the face, gave it a kick to the jimmy and gave it the finger.”
Belle chuckled at the thought.
“My mother had died long before the event that came, leaving the only family I had was my father. He was the one who created the Cowboys, made a deal with the E-Reps and gave the town once called Pensacola a second chance at life as Freedom. He was my father at home, my boss at work. We had our typical days where things would go smooth, other days where we’d just were at each others throats. But he was always there.”
He took another deep breath in and blew it out, the pressure of everything building up.
“At twenty-seven, I never thought I would ever lose my father. If you had asked, ‘ would have said, ‘That old geezer? He’d die in his sleep long before this world would ever kill him.’ But fate tends to play the cruelest of jokes on people. We had just completed another Historical Salvage run, finding an old hardware store, I think it was an Ace Hardware, about five miles west and seven miles south of Lar’s Abyss. There was several items that were still useable, still in the box tools, fittings, pipes, wood… The kind of stuff needed to build the town. We had just finished up loading everything up, calling it for the day when we heard a woman’s scream from further in the woods from where we were, followed by the sound of Hellbugs shrieking. My father ordered the others to stay with the rollers and protect the finds while he and I headed out to investigate.”
He licked his chapped lips and swallowed a lump forming in his throat. Belle just sat silently, looking at him.
“We went over the hill and a little ways down to find an Indogene woman, her clothes ragged and covered in dried silver blood, on the ground and crawling away from a Hellbug Warrior. She had been running and twisted her ankle, which was why she was crawling. The Warrior was accompanied by a few Skitterlings. My Dad ordered me to focus on the Skitterlings and to protect the woman, while he took on the Warrior. I did a good job at keeping the Indogene safe, while picking off a few of the Skitterlings that turned towards my Dad as he took out the Warrior. It was a cakewalk to him. I thought I had gotten all of the Skitterlings, until another one came up behind him.”
Chase tried to keep from crying, taking a few more deep breathes and blowing them out.
“I told him to watch out, but he was reloading his rifle. I raised mine, took aim and pulled the trigger. But the rifle was jammed. One of the previous rounds I fired, the shell casing didn’t clear the breach. I tried to pull it out so I could save him, but the Skitterling… it… he….”
The lump returned to his throat. He could feel the weight on his soul as he wiped away tears before they could fully form.
“I finally got the shell out of the breach, cocked the gun and fired at the Skitterling chewing on my father. It tried to crawl away, but I charged at it, firing round after round into it. And after I ran out of rounds, I began to bash that jekkin’ bug into the ground with the butt of the rifle, over and over and over again until there was nothing left but a black sludge pile with bits and pieces that were barely recognizable as Hellbug. The others found us, with me holding what was left of my father in my arms.”
Belle pulled her legs up and hugged them, tears forming in her eyes from the story told thus far. He cleared his throat again, and continued on.
“So, to answer your question, I met Iri Seweul the day my father died. And that was the day I left Freedom, Alabama behind me, trying to get as far away as I could with only the clothes on my back, my ’71 Challenger, my scrip chip, my rifle and the ghost of my father on my shoulders. Since I was heading north, Iri asked if I could drop her off at the University of Alabama along the way. At the time, there was a big problem with raiders about twenty miles past the fifteen that surrounds the area of Freedom. We had to take alternate routes, which resulted in a couple of days passing by. We found this speck on the map of a town, no more than three buildings that we had to stop at. The spring down here in Alabama, it’s a pain. Five days go by, perfectly sunny, nice and warm, the kind of weather to have a picnic on every day. And then out of nowhere, one day, it snows anywhere between three to five feet deep, and then the following day the snow would melt, you’d end up waiting a couple of days for the mud to dry up enough so that your roller doesn’t get stuck.”
Chase ran his hand through his hair, about to get to a difficult admission.
“We had originally rented a room at the hotel with two beds. But the heater wasn’t working well enough to keep us warm. I mean, it and the thick covers kept us from freezing to death, but it wasn’t enough to keep us comfortable in individual beds. So, we huddled up together to keep warm. Iri was shivering so much, the side of her head was against my cheek, causing it to rub with skin on skin contact.”
Belle shifted a bit to make herself a bit more comfortable.
“Next thing I knew, I found her kissing me and her hand around Little Chase. And before I knew it, we… Uh… You know. She was the first alien of the Votans I ever went the full way with. Before that, I had several human girlfriends, and even made out with a Irathient woman who was slightly older than I was. However, Iri was my first Votan, as well as my first and only Indogene. After that first night, we knew it was a mistake and told ourselves that we would put it behind us and just continue on our trek. But the snow was too thick to drive the roller on. So, with nothing else to do, we essentially repeated that mistake. Quite a few times over a two day period.”
This made Belle chuckle.
“In that short time, she taught me about Indogene sexuality, everything from what turns them on to how courtship was back on their home world. Unlike humans or any of the other Votans, who all pretty much have sex in almost the same way, for Indogenes, it’s physical touch that is their fornication.”
“So, that’s what you were doing?” Belle asked. “The rubbing and the kissing on her back. That’s how they-“
“Yeah,” Chase nodded. “It’s also why you’d never see an Indogene in a T-shirt, shorts and a pair of sandals. The most sensitive part for stimulation is the earlobes. Iri told me that it was like ‘having the most intense pleasure, and increasing its power by three’.”
Belle couldn’t help but laugh, Chase figuring she must have seen him running his tongue along the earlobe during the action. She had a toothy smile that faded to a small one.
“So, are you, uh…” Belle cleared her throat again. “Are you in love with her?”
Chase’s jaw clinched while he thought for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he responded. “I was hoping to get the chance to ask her before we left. But before I knew it, we’re getting it on like we had years ago. I will admit, I did feel something for her after I dropped her off at the University those years ago, and I still do. I don’t know if its love or lust. I don’t know if it was that feeling that kept me from seeking out the company of another woman in the same way or not. I’m hoping to find out the answer before we go to Florida. I mean, I have hope we’ll make it back. But in case I somehow don’t, I don’t want to leave this world without that answer.”
Belle wiped away the tears from her eyes.
“I’m really sorry for ruining your makeup sex,” she told him with a chuckle.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chase told her as he got up. “You get some sleep, okay?”
Chase kissed Belle on the forehead, much like how his mother did with him when he was younger, before he switched off the light and headed for the door.
“Hey Chase,” he heard Belle’s voice in the darkness, causing him to turn back towards her direction. “If you two are going to continue on with it, could you make sure to keep it down?”
Chase laughed.
“We’ll try,” Chase told her. “Good night, Belle.”
He pulled the door to, heading back over to the doorway to his room. He stepped in from the balcony, noticing Iri sitting on the bed. She already had her coat and gloves back on, pulling on one of her knee high boots. She had a distant look in her eyes as she did so.
“What’s going on?” Chase asked her.
“I heard what you told Belle,” Iri told him. “I think I should go.”
Chase walked over to in front of her. She had completed putting her first boot on, holding from progressing further due to Chase being in the way. He looked at her, confusion in her eyes. He knew that her regular personality, not the one driven by desire that she had wiling succumb to earlier, was back in place.
“Please, step back,” Iri spoke sternly.
“Was those nights years ago only about sex?” Chase asked her.
Iri proceeded with getting the second one on, despite Chase being in her way.
“The first one was an accident, remember?” she told him. “Impulse that lead to screwing. I didn’t have much control over it.”
“What about the other nights?”
She finally got the second one on, remaining silent.
“Iri? What about those other nights?”
Her bottom lip curled up as she sat quite once again. She proceeded to get up and brush by Chase, heading towards the door. Chase quickly moved past her, getting to the door just as she tried to open it. Chase pushed it shut, planting his foot against it well enough that he knew it wouldn’t be able to budge.
“Do you love me or is it just lust?” Chase asked.
She tried to pull the door open, but Chase kept his weight on his foot.
“Iri, tell me.”
“What do you want me to say?!” her voice boomed loudly enough to shake his soul. “Eight years, Chase. EIGHT years, and now you admit you feel the same as I do? Why couldn’t you have come to that realization before dropping me off at the University?”
She turned away from him, crossing her arms across her chest and moving back over towards the bed. She spun around, piercing him with hatred in her eyes. She began to pace back and forth, keeping her eyes on him.
“You humans,” she said. “You’re all the same. You think only about yourselves and never give anyone else consideration. And you show up, out of the blue, making me feel for you again and I give into you without a second thought of it. And then I find out you’ve been carrying a flame for me this whole time? Jekkin’ banggo jemilo! Gashika shtako fazwago!”
Chase changed forward, grabbing ahold of her and throwing her onto the bed. Before she had the chance to move, Chase straddled her and pinned her down by her wrists. Fear was in her eyes as she looked at him. He kept still, hoping he wasn’t hurting her. The fear eventually changed to pain and sadness, a look he was familiar with from looking in the mirror every day.
“I’m sorry,” she said with a whimper. “I’m just scared. I don’t want to lose you again.”
Chase let go of her wrists, dismounting her and taking a seat on the bed. She sat up, looking at him, taking in deep breathes as she looked at him. Her lower lip trembled as she finally said it.
“I love you, Chase,” she told him as her voice quivered.
Chase pulled her into his arms as he held her gently and she held onto him tightly. She buried her face into his shoulder, taking in a deep of his smell into her. He slowly ran his forehead along the side of her head as he brought his head around to her face, her breathing becoming deep from the stimulation. They kissed, their arms still wrapped around each other. She slowly relaxed her grip as she laid back on the bed. She slowly unzipped the coat, opening it to expose her hexagonal skin to Chase once more.
“Please… Put your hands on me again,” she told him.
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