Chapter Nineteen

The White Castle With Rosy Windows

The castle turned out to be empty. Not finding corpses was a relief. The best thing Jenna and Sardius found was a supply of food supplements. It was just pills and water, but Sardius assured Jenna that was the normal thing people ate in space. Hauling fresh food was just too much of a pain.

Jenna took the pills and swallowed the water.

It was then that Jenna thought Sardius would go back to the control panel and start working on contacting someone. He did no such thing.

“Jenna,” he said, taking the empty water glass from her hand. “Can I escort you to bed?”

She was tired. She felt helpless. They were on a moon and the gravity was light, but it gave Jenna a feeling of weightlessness like she was dead rather than making her feel carefree.

“We’re not going to die?” she asked him softly and a little like nothing could ever matter.

He shook his head that no, they were not going to die. “But if we were,” Sardius said persuasively, “I wouldn’t want to die without making love to you.”

He scooped her off the floor and carried her like a princess to the largest bedroom. If that bedroom belonged to the owner of the house, if it was a special place, Sardius clearly did not care. He set her down on the bedspread and helped her remove her shoes. He dropped them by the side of the bed with a clunk.

She perked up when he started taking off his suit coat.

Jenna’s wedding night was taking place in a place she never imagined she’d go. It was especially crazy because she was already in a place she thought she’d never go when she was living on Octavia Prime. Now she was on a moon she’d never heard of in the Xypher Zone, under the Crying Sun. It was a place where a human wasn’t supposed to survive. And this was the place where she and Sardius could finally be together.

There was no orbital security team that could possibly leak footage. There was no camera pointed at her bed or personal assistant in her ear.

In a place like the Xypher Zone, she and Sardius could finally have the privacy they needed.

He started undoing the buttons on his shirt and Jenna saw her first glimpse of the scars that were there. They looked like bruises in lines like purple gashes down the lengths of his torso.

“Are you going to tell me how that happened?” she asked, getting on her knees on the bed and inching toward him.

“I would tell you if I could remember exactly, but a lot happened at once when I was dropped off on Don Leo’s ship. It may have even been something simple like the strap they used to hold me down while they cut off my leg.” He finished undoing the last button and dropped his shirt like a dirty tissue he no longer needed to concern himself with. He looked into her eyes with his blue ones and then he said softly, “Is this the kind of lover you are? The kind who wants to hear about my pain and troubles before we can make love, so you can make all that disappear?”

Jenna shrugged. “I don’t have to be that kind of woman if you want something different. I’ve never done this before. I’m just trying to learn who you are under everything and what you want.”

“Hmm,” he hummed. “Today might be a good day to play the sympathetic nurse. I know I won’t always appreciate it, but I know I will in about thirty seconds.”

When he took off his boots, it was a sight Jenna might not have handled so well if he hadn’t warmed her up with the sympathetic nurse comment. Her lips parted in sympathy as she saw all he was missing. He still had ankles and heels, but most of the rest of his feet were gone.

“Why didn’t you get new feet when you got a new leg?” Jenna asked him.

“I don’t need them. I lost my feet one time when I was alone being a little arsonist. I had set a bomb and I got my feet caught in the heavy metal automatic doors meant to protect me. I was lucky not to lose my ankles, but I was alone and I worked it out. I made my first set of utility boots myself, alone on a ship. After I made a few models, I actually found that it was more practical not to have feet. I’m not as ashamed of this abnormality as I was of my face. If I had been truly ashamed, I would have had the cosmetic surgeon who did my face work on my feet too, but I didn’t want it. I have had a lot of opportunities to have them fixed and I have always refused. Does it bother you to see them?” he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. “No. I just feel like I have no wild stories to offer you in exchange. I didn’t do anything reckless, or brave, or anything to warrant how much attention I’m given universe-wide.”

He chuckled. “You didn’t do anything? I keep telling you that you told two hundred and twelve loser men who hit on you to get lost. It’s very impressive. It’s really wonderful to know that no matter what happens, you won’t give in just because someone puts a little pressure on you. And I’m glad that we didn’t have mirror-image experiences. I want the kind of girly glitz you toss on things,” he put his head in her lap. “The whole world you live in is much less stressful than the one I left. Even right now. It is unbelievable that we ended up here for our first night.”

“I know, but it’s sort of wonderful too, isn’t it?” she asked playfully, scrunching her nose and stroking the side of his face.

He looked up at her, his blue eyes darker and deeper than before. His mouth was relaxed. The knot in his throat bobbed and Jenna felt a thrill of excitement course through her.

It was interesting that he had been curious about what kind of lover Jenna would be. She wasn’t curious about him. She knew exactly how he would treat her. He would handle her exactly the way his tone of voice suggested.

She slid the pads of her fingers against his collarbone. “If you’re so turned on by bones grinding against each other, I’m surprised you find me sexy at all. Aren’t I too soft for you?”

He swallowed. His mouth seemed dry. “I… I have something I should confess to you.”

“Oh?”

“I lied.”

“I suspected as much,” she quipped.

He chuckled and continued, “I lied when I said I couldn’t see you very well when you were undressing when I first started working for you and you thought I was a tiny octopus in your ear. I was watching your security feed the first time you undressed. I could not believe there wasn’t a filter or something to protect you from my view. If there had been anyone other than Octavians managing your feed, they would have fixed it for you. Hell, even I could have fixed something up for you to hide that sort of thing.”

“But you didn’t,” Jenna pointed out.

“No. I didn’t. And I built up this elaborate lie saying I couldn’t see you well and that I didn’t view you in a sexy way when you undressed. I hope you can understand. I was in prison and it was the absolute happiest thing that happened to me while I was there—the icing on the toadstool, if you will. I couldn’t let you issue a command for me to make a program that would blur you for any security personnel who were watching you. Favel merely asked me if I had secured the feed. So, I told him I had because it was true. No one was going to get footage of you changing… Except me. You were such a good sport about it too when you found out I was a man instead of an octopus.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Jenna sighed. “So you got all hot and bothered watching me change?”

“Your body is what Bonemen women want to look like. Women bonemen don’t really have breasts the way you do. They try to make it look like they do with surgery or stuffing, but our women have hard bodies.”

Jenna knew what he was talking about. He had an eight-pack without clenching. That was just the way his bones were arranged. It was interesting that their attraction worked both ways.

“So, Jenna, it’s not just that bones grinding on bones turns me on. It’s also because it’s your bones. Your bones that aren’t on the surface, but deep inside you, like your heart. It’s your softness and your hardness, like a diamond you can embrace.”

Jenna felt warm under his praise.

“You’re not mad?” he tried to reaffirm.

She chuckled. “That you lied? No. I didn’t really believe you at the time. At least, I could do that one thing. Whipping my dress over my head is easy. Right now, I’m silently lamenting that I’m so new at this. I feel so much pressure to be a good lover when I’m so clueless. I don’t even know how to touch you or how to get things started. I can tell I’m making you work too hard to help me relax, besides all the work you did to figure out my force field, but this is really my first time at any of this.”

“Okay. I understand,” he said gently. “I can make this easy for you.”

“How can you do that?”

“I’ll blindfold you.”

“You have something like that on you?”

“Anyone can make a blindfold out of anything.” His head swiveled as he looked around the room. “There’s a thing I can use right there.”

Jenna looked where he pointed and saw a thick fabric tie that was used to hold the curtains back. He retrieved it and went to tie it over her eyes.

“You’re not going to tie my hands, are you?” she asked in alarm.

“No, but I imagine you’ll want to keep your hands down this first time. Just think you’re getting a massage and it’ll all work out.”

“You’re that good at this?” she asked with a snide expression.

“I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to please you. Trust me.” The look in his eyes should have been muddy, the hazel eyes she was familiar with, but instead, they were clear blue. Instead of stars that shone through guck, she felt like she could see his thoughts. And if she couldn’t trust Sardius, she couldn’t trust anyone.

She let him tie the blindfold around her eyes.

Then the fun began.

***

Jenna woke later. She was naked between the sheets. The light in the room was the same as when Sardius covered her eyes with the blindfold, and the same light as when she closed her eyes to go to sleep. She touched her belly. She touched her throat.

Abruptly, she sat up in alarm.

They hadn’t done a thing to stop her from getting pregnant.

She stopped herself from gasping by covering her mouth.

Sardius noticed her movement and turned onto his side. His hair was more messy than it was when they merely slept beside each other, but otherwise, he had a gorgeous smile plastered to his face. “Is something the matter?”

Jenna twitched, twiddled her fingers in the air, and made a few sounds that had nothing to do with words.

“What’s the matter?” he tried a second time, sitting up in bed to match her.

“P….g…t…” she managed.

He bent his ear and moved toward her. “I didn’t catch that. Come again.”

“Preg…nt…” she stuttered, biting her fingers and turning away from him.

“Huh. It sounds like you’re trying to say the word pregnant, but you can’t possibly be saying that word, so would you mind trying again?”

Jenna whacked him with a pillow. “We didn’t do anything to stop me from getting pregnant!” she cried, turning away from him and hiding her face in her hair.

His arms were around her instantly. “Jenna, I can’t get you pregnant.”

“What?” she blurted.

He brushed her hair out of her face and turned her toward him. “I can’t get you pregnant. I thought I already explained this to you.”

“When?” she demanded.

“Ages ago. I told you when I was still in jail.”

“Refresh my memory.”

Patiently, he explained. “I told you that I couldn’t have been included in the search results of the Universal Matching Algorithm because I was a criminal and even if I wasn’t a criminal, I was too far away from you genetically to be included. They only include men you can mate with and produce offspring. We have exactly opposite skeletons. We can’t have children together without a doctor who specializes in that sort of thing. We’d need to go in and deposit your eggs and my sperm and even then, it isn’t very likely to amount to a fertilized egg. Not only that but whatever child we had together wouldn’t be able to successfully mate with anyone in the universe, not your people and not my people, without a doctor.”

Jenna scrunched up her nose. “In a way, that’s worse news than if I was pregnant right now.”

Sardius looked taken aback. “You want to have my baby?”

“You didn’t think I’d want to have your baby? I love you. I love every part of you. Why wouldn’t I want to have your baby?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “You were so nervous just now about sex presumably because you were worried about how it would change your body. And Lucy and Armen…”

Jenna rolled her eyes and flopped down on the pillows. “Yes, it wasn’t very impressive how Lucy looked when she was pregnant. I would not like to replicate her experience. The hope is that I would have an experience of my own.”

Sardius looked grim for a split second before a look of sudden playfulness crossed his features. “Well, if you want a baby and want to try bucking the odds, I’m happy to give you all the support you need. I’ll put out like no man has ever put out before. Three times a day? Four? Five? I’ll get right in there and do everything I can.”

Jenna laughed and tucked herself under his arm to rest her head on his chest. “I’m no expert, but for how well we fit together it seems like it would be totally weird if we couldn’t make a baby.’’

“Science says no,” Sardius said, his breath bubbling in his chest.

Jenna listened to him breathing and let her pregnancy concern slip away. There was nothing either of them could do at that moment one way or another. She let herself feel the heat of his body and relaxed before her eyes started moving across the room. The bedroom they were in was very ornate. There were interesting moldings at the corners of the room that moved across the wall and carried her eye toward the thick frames of pictures. They weren’t paintings. The art looked artificially generated but still beautiful. Then her eyes landed on a sideboard and on a line of books, fake flowers, and the lines of the multicolored carpet.

“Don’t you feel a little like Goldilocks in this house?” she pondered aloud.

“I already broke all the locks, so I do feel a little like Goldilocks,” he said with a grin.

“No. It’s a story from Earth about a little girl who goes into a house owned by three bears without their permission. When they find her, she is asleep in one of their beds and they are furious.”

“Do they kill her?” Sardius wanted to know.

“No, but only because she runs away.”

“That’s a good question. We should see if there is a garage nearby with a ship in it. If we can steal a ship and get back to your dimension, that should solve a lot of problems.”

“You’re not worried about the owners being angry?” she asked.

“No. We’ll send them money to replace everything we’ve stolen. We can even bring them a new ship. We can even send them extra money to thank them for saving us. It won’t be a problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Jenna, I can’t know the future. Since we got here, those are the kinds of questions you’ve been asking me. I don’t know the answer to anything. I do know that I’m less angry that the Octavians put that forcefield on you. I think it has protected you from an insane amount of radiation. I want to report back to them that their forcefield has a number of other uses rather than just chopping off tentacles.”

Jenna nodded. “Are you going to try to find us a ride off this rock?” she asked.

“Not immediately,” he said drowsily. “We haven’t had a honeymoon. If we stay here for a few days, we can get all the time together that we need.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to send a message to the jail? We could send a little message to Ixy saying that we’re fine and she should tell Favel and the people on the floating palaces that we’re alright and we’ll be back when we can. Otherwise, they should search for candidates we can crown. That way, maybe we could reach quorum when we get back.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. Not to send a distress call, but just to send a note telling everyone to keep their shorts on. I love it, but first, I have something important I need to do.” The tone of voice he used was so businesslike Jenna was stunned when he pulled her sheets off her with his teeth.

“Round two?” she asked with a dumb smile on her face.

“I bet you can drop me in the second round, even though no one has ever been able to do that,” he said with a cheesy eyebrow waggle.

Jenna stifled a giggle. “I’ll take that action.”