Title: That Fairness Thing (Young Men's Fancies #1)
Author: Jane (jat_sapphire)
Contact: jat_sapphire@femail.org
Series: pre-TOS
Rating: [NC-17]
Codes: K/RuthSummary: Kirk's adventures, junior year at Starfleet Academy. Includes the little blonde lab technician he "almost married." First in "Young Men's Fancies" series.
Archive: Yes, please. Keep headings and disclaimers and what-not.
Disclaimer: Star Trek and most of the characters here are Paramount's. I invented a few cadets in the background, and some academics, and a whole lot of stuff for them to do. I don't make money at this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Young Men's Fancies
#1: That Fairness Thing
*****
September, Jim's Senior Year
***This was the best, Jim knew. How could it get better?
"Oh, babe ... Oh, Ruth, Ruth ... yes, yes, you're so good ..."
Her legs around his waist. The sun on his back. Better than good.
When he dropped his fists and leaned forward on them, they dug into the sand under the blanket, and her heels pushed into his buttocks, urging him in. Her muscles gripped his cock as it slid in and out. Her hands rubbed up and down his arms. She said, "Yesss, yessss, there it is, yes! Now, Jim, darling! Now!" and she jerked under him, her eyes closed so tightly the lids seemed puckered. He moved his hands then, to grab her breasts where the nipples were hard as pebbles and hot, and he threw his head back to catch the breeze on his sweaty face. A cloud moved over the sun, he could tell even with his eyes closed, by the sudden shade and the way the breeze turned cold, and something about the tightening of his own skin in goosebumps set him off, and he came, his groans in counterpoint to the gulls' cries in the air. He was shaking. They both were.
He eased himself down on the blanket and she scooted over to make room for him. He pulled her over and got her head on his shoulder the way he liked it, her hair spread under his cheek, and they lay damp and chill except where their skins touched. Jim looked up into a sky even bluer than Ruth's eyes and patched with huge fluffy clouds, the kind that city kids said were like sheep. He'd seen sheep close up, but he never liked to disillusion luckier people.
She hadn't said anything yet. That was unlike her.
But maybe then he could try leading up to what he'd been planning to ask her. He'd thought of a romantic dinner, roses, the whole thing, but maybe it was better here.
"Ruth," he said, and waited.
"Mmm?"
"Ruth, you are so wonderful. That was so sweet, babe. So good. Like always."
"Mmmm. You're nice too, darling Jim."
"Do you ever ..." he began, and then lost his nerve. It had seemed like a good idea in his head, he could hear the line and it sounded romantic, and all that, but now he was actually hearing it in his own voice, for real, irrevocable, he didn't know whether he could go through with it. But he did want to. He thought. She was very still on his shoulder and he thought she might even be falling asleep. "Do you ever think, Ruth, that you'd like to ..." he paused, swallowed, couldn't think of a better line at this last minute, blurted it: "that you'd like to do that, feel that, every morning and every night for - years? Forever?"
She sat up. He couldn't see her face. "Ruth? Babe?"
"Jim, we need to talk," she said, and her sober voice told him all he needed to know.
"Oh," he said, and sat up himself. Suddenly, being naked wasn't wild and free and sexy, it was vulnerable ... and chilly. He looked around, remembered his sweatshirt was still over near the cooler. His swim trunks were right here, but they were also soaking wet. She had wrapped her arms around her breasts and drawn up her knees, her tangled hair around her shoulders - he was willing to bet she wanted something to wear too. He waited, in case she wanted to reject him right away, but she didn't say anything for the few seconds it took him to shiver and think, the hell with this.
"I'm getting my shirt," he said, standing up. "Want yours?"
"Oh, Jim," she said, and caught her breath, and something in her voice made him remember that she was actually older than he was, "Oh, Jim, what a nice guy you are!"
One 'nice' too many. "Jesus, Ruth, just answer," he said, a flash of irritation through the fog of his shock. "Is that a yes about the clothes?"
"Yes, please."
He got up and walked the ten feet or so, picked up the clothes and brought them back to the blanket, where she still sat in the same position. "Here." She pulled the loose blouse over her head and he did the same with his sweatshirt. And he put on his shorts, and she got up and slipped into the stirrup pants she'd worn to cycle down to the beach from the chemistry lab where she worked. Then they sat helplessly down on the blanket again, facing each other.
"It wouldn't be fair to you," she said at last, pushing a loose lock of golden hair behind one ear.
Now there was a sentence that was nothing but trouble. Jim was getting to hate it when people told him they wanted to be fair to him. He wasn't too thrilled about the times he felt he had to be fair to other people, either. Was this going to go on his whole life long, he wondered? This fairness thing got in the way of some great sex.
"You're not in love with me anyway," she went on after a pause.
"How do you know? How would anyone know but me? I think I am."
"You think you are, Jim darling?" She sounded sad about it.
"Look. Ruth. I was asking you to think about marrying me. I'm not going to do that if I don't love you."
"You've never said so."
"I just did!" How unfair could a girl get? He realized his hands were clenched, and relaxed them, trying to stop glaring, trying not to lose his temper.
"Anyway there's another reason," she said. "About me." She took a deep breath. "I keep thinking about Gary, and that's not fair to you."
"Gary? Gary Mitchell?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know you knew Gary."
"I knew him before I met you." She looked to the side, toward the ocean, blushing.
He assumed there'd been an affair and wondered how long it had lasted - or how they'd met - since this was only the summer break after Gary's freshman year. He thought of saying, 'so you started fucking me because you couldn't fuck Gary? What if I said that made two of us?'
But he had known a few girls who'd gone nova when Jim mentioned liking guys too. And anyway it wouldn't have been true about Gary. Not - not lately.
*****
Previous October, Jim's Junior Year
***Midshipman-Lieutenant Jim Kirk, instructor for Section 5 of Ethics and the Decision-Making Process, looked down at the paper he was reading with a mixture of anger, dismay, embarrassment, and half-denied amusement.
He closed it and looked again at the title page. "How the Other Half Lives: Ethics in Short-Term Interpersonal Relationships," read the title, and lower on the page was "Ens. G. Mitchell," with the date and course number. It was a paper about picking up sex partners in bars, written in the form of instructions, based on the assumption that the reader had never had sex, much less picked anyone up, and needed all the concepts explained. It was accompanied by a hyperflow-chart on a padd for further clarity. Jim's name was never used; the reader was never directly addressed. It filled the requirements of a paper describing a common process and its ethical components - well, the ethics really weren't particularly strong.
Especially the part about deliberately trying to get under the instructor's skin. That was a bad ethical move - a bad practical move.
But Jim couldn't think of a single comment he could write on the paper without feeling like he had walked right into Mitchell's little practical-joke world. He could tell him that it was foolish to irritate the instructor - thereby admitting irritation. He could make a few marginal notes pointing out flaws in the techniques - now that was mature. He could - he could go find Mitchell and shake him until his teeth rattled. That was a satisfying image and he dwelt on it for a little while, until he found himself thinking a little too much about the way Gary's - Mitchell's - shoulders would feel and how he'd look ....
Damn. Mitchell was too damn attractive.
And hadn't he been playing on it? He'd flirted with Jim in an understated way from the first day of class. Brought him article clippings and complimented his haircut and leaned over the desk ... Jim had regarded him with a steady cold gaze and responded as little as possible. And Gary - Mitchell - had scaled back until he only flashed that too-charming smile once or twice a week.
That had been a victory. But then Jim found he missed the smile.
Now, he put "How the Other Half Lives" aside and picked up Ensign Harper's paper on the ethics of buying a used flitter, but found himself on page three with no real idea what the thesis had been. He put Harper's paper down and stood up, stretched his arms and shoulders, and then went to get a fresh cup of coffee. Then he tried again. This time he caught himself drifting on page two.
How the hell was he supposed to grade Mitchell's paper? Why was Mitchell making it so hard for Jim to grade him fairly? Jim sighed. It wasn't like Mitchell couldn't do the work of the course perfectly well, if he'd just stop spending his energy subverting the course requirements and simply do them.
Jim went for a run and listened to some music and did some of his own homework, and then went back to the papers and graded most of them, but didn't look at Mitchell's again that night. The next day, he dropped in on Ben Finney, a former instructor and now a friend. He started out just visiting, but soon he found himself pouring out the story of the paper he couldn't grade - though he left out the part about flirting in class, and was conscious that he was making the whole story harder to understand, but ... well, he just couldn't tell Ben about it. It felt like betraying Mitchell, somehow, which was weird and worrisome, but he still couldn't.
"Let's see the paper," said Ben, "and I'll see what I can tell you. I can at least say what I'd give it."
"That would be a help," Jim told him. And he even had the paper with him - all of them, so he could do the rest of the grades at lunch and hand them back.
While Ben read, Jim watched; various expressions chased across Ben's craggy face, and once he gave a snort of laughter, and another time he frowned. Jim was almost as anxious as if he had written the paper.
"Hmm," Ben said at last, and closed the paper again, and straightened the fastener, and looked out the window, almost as if he were anxious.
"He can write pretty well, can't he?" Ben asked, eyes apparently on the tree outside.
"Yes, when he pleases. And he's a natural leader in the class: everyone listens when he bothers to talk. Not all that often. And - well, I don't feel comfortable grading him down when I'm not sure he doesn't get it, and I'm too mad to give a high grade. That's why I need advice."
"It is an inappropriate topic," Ben said. "He sounds like a prankster. I'd hate to have served under someone like that on a starship."
Jim bit the inside of his cheek. Ben had never in fact served on a starship, and in an unwary moment he'd told Jim so. The funny thing was that Ben still talked as though he was an experienced line officer. But what was really making Jim feel like laughing was the phrase "serving under." Like "served under glass"? Like "servicing"? Oh, sure, Ben servicing under Gary - what an image. Jim set his jaw hard and thought about something else, that tree Ben had been looking at, until the desire to laugh right in Ben's face subsided.
And then he abruptly stopped being amused, because Ben said, "Frankly, I can't give an entirely unbiased opinion. I've been hearing about this Gary Mitchell, and ... well, it hasn't been all that good." Ben looked out the window again. "He is talented, but I can't help thinking that there are types we just shouldn't admit to the Academy."
This was not the first time Jim had heard Ben express similar views, but he was much angrier about it this time, when it wasn't some faceless 'type.' He swallowed hard, as if his anger were a physical object he was holding down, and said evenly, "Are you saying you'd grade this paper on the basis of whether you think Gary ... Mitchell is an asset to Starfleet in general?"
"No," said Ben, sounding as if he meant 'maybe,' "no. But I do think that you need to focus on the big picture. Here's another angle. Why do you think people like us are instructors here? Especially, why do you think a junior like yourself is teaching?"
Jim had never thought about it much. He shrugged. "Because there are eight sections of Ethics?"
"They could hire someone. It's a learning experience for you too. A command experience. Oh, I know a classroom isn't much like a landing party or a starship. But some of the same things come up. Prioritizing. Group dynamics. Giving performance feedback. And in this case, coping when someone under your command is resistant to orders or misunderstands them or simply acts inappropriately. So, Jim, how do you attain your objective of teaching ethics to Mitchell without Mitchell's full cooperation?"
"Good question." And it was. That's what made Ben a good teacher aside from all this shit about who was and who wasn't 'Starfleet material.' "And, if he were -" damned if Jim was going to say 'serving under me' - "my officer, someone I was commanding, how would I get him to stop withholding cooperation?"
"Another good question." Ben nodded.
Jim thought for a moment, long enough to realize he needed to really think about this, by himself, and then grinned at Ben. "Thanks for the questions," he said. "Now I have to figure out some answers."
"I'm sure you will," said Ben. "Let me know what happens?" and Jim said he would.
"Make an appointment," he wrote on Mitchell's paper, a routine note. Usually it meant, 'I'm flunking this paper and I'll tell you why;' occasionally, 'I'm going to tell you to do this again.' He still wasn't absolutely sure which he meant by it when he returned the paper to Mitchell and, after class, under Mitchell's unabashed stare, worked out a date and time they could meet in Jim's "office" - more a carrel, really.
That night he met Ruth for the first time. It was years later that he found out the two events were connected. At the time he couldn't have imagined such a thing.
Jim was only at the lecture by chance. He rarely went to hear guest speakers, and when he did, they were nearly always Starfleet captains or Science officers who gave presentations on new alien races or Federation members. But this speaker was a protege of John Gill's, and Jim wanted to hear Gill's introduction, and he had thought the speaker himself might be interesting. The talk was called, "Machiavelli, Socrates, and Starfleet," and in fact it was deadly. And very sparsely attended, so without really planning to, Jim found himself seated in a prominent spot, and afterward Gill beckoned him down and introduced him. Jim immediately forgot the speaker's name and had an embarrassing time holding up his end of the conversation until the speaker was distracted by a blonde girl who had hung around to ask a few questions.
So, Jim thought, someone had actually been listening. Gill said something to her, and she cast down her eyes and smiled, bringing out two charming dimples and showing off her long eyelashes. Someone really attractive had been listening.
It wasn't hard for Jim to get back into the conversation, and Gill said genially after a few minutes, "Jasper and I have to be getting along to this terribly boring party of mine, full of aging professors. Care to come along, either of you, and inject some youth and energy into it?"
Jim glanced sidelong at the girl - Ruth - and found her glancing at him too. "I'd like that, Professor Gill, thanks," he said.
"Oh, yes, how lovely," came her soft voice, like an echo.
They went with Jasper Whatever-his-name-was and Professor Gill to the party, which was up in Berkeley. The aircar belonged to Gill, who drove it himself, and Jasper Whosis sat in the front passenger seat while Jim and Ruth shared the back, flirting with their eyes but saying little. The car was full of shadows as they flew over the Bay Bridge, its lights and their running lights flashing across the waves below. Then later, Jim pointed out to Ruth where the pale tracings of roads wound up the steep hills between necklaces of light. A harsh warm wind beat against the sides of the car, occasionally pulling it to one side or the other, but Jim knew from other rides that Gill was a good driver, and he tried not to be disturbed by the jolts of the air currents. After all, the right sort of jolt left Ruth almost in his lap once. And she didn't move away very far.
Gill talked about the landscape too. "The real reason to invent private aircars. I remember riding in surface vehicles up those roads ... at this time of day, or when the weather was bad, it was a nightmare. Now I think you said you'd never been to Berkeley, Jasper? Not even to see the campus? Why ever not?"
"And you, do you know Berkeley?" Jim asked Ruth.
"I was a student there," she said, "but now I work at the SerChemo labs. I just go to a lecture or so around town to remember when I - " she chuckled - "when I spent my time thinking."
He wanted to know her age but wasn't sure how to ask. "It can't have been that long ago," he tried.
"No, or I'd be over it, wouldn't I?" was all she said.
He couldn't tell whether she was actually avoiding the implied question, or if she assumed he was older than he looked, or if it didn't matter to her, or if she was just plain not attracted to him. But he didn't think it was that. He helped her out of the car when they arrived at Gill's house - the carpad had a steep incline and he had noticed that she was wearing high heels - and she left her hand in his almost all the way to the house.
He'd been to a couple of parties here before, and after they took off their coats and greeted Gill's wife, Jim took Ruth to the room Gill called his observation lounge, where the back wall was glass and a pair of sliding doors led on to a porch that overlooked what seemed to be half a mountain. Gill, or perhaps his wife, had found a reconditioned string of electric lights in pale flowery colors, and they hung across the porch. If the night were warmer, the guest bar might have been out there, but in this wind that would have been absurd. As it was, the lights swung so violently Jim didn't know how long they'd last.
Gill had been exaggerating about the guests all being old. Besides Jim and Ruth, there were several graduate students, who all seemed to have bought their fashionable clothes in the same place, or perhaps all History and Philosophy majors had the same favorite colors: long tunics and narrow leggings in red and navy blue predominated. Even their haircuts were similar, which Jim expected on the Academy grounds but found disconcerting in civilian surroundings. He turned gratefully to Ruth with her long blonde hair and her simple, pale jumpsuit cut close to her body. But she was talking to Jasper again.
He mingled a little, and the graduate students were all right - he'd met a few of them before - but he kept returning to Ruth. At one point she asked him to find her a soft drink, as she had never made it out of the observation lounge and didn't know where the guest bar was. When he got back, she was listening kindly to the oldest man there, an Emeritus professor whose hearing enhancers were never adjusted quite right, so he tended to talk on and on since he couldn't hear anyone else properly anyway. Jim handed her the drink, feeling that he had somehow inherited all the chores of being her date without any of the pleasures. The old man, Dr. Karpathy, went on talking about why Earth's Stoics and Vulcan Surakians were actually not significantly similar, despite the mistaken arguments of some of his colleagues. He began to summarize the greater part of what must have been a lengthy book on the subject, or perhaps it only seemed long because of Karpathy's running commentary on its various fallacies.
Fortunately, one of Karpathy's oddities was that he seldom looked directly at the person he was lecturing, and Jim leaned over and said into Ruth's ear, "You're taking what Professor Gill said too seriously," and then moved back just in time as the old man's head swung around and he actually asked a question. "Oh, yes, I do agree," said Jim blandly, resisting the temptation to say 'cock-a-doodle-doo' or something to see whether Karpathy would notice. Not a very nice thought.
"What do you mean?" Ruth asked him when Karpathy had turned his face away again.
"Look around. It's not really our sole responsibility to be the youthful lives of the party." He tried his best you-know-you-want-what-I-want grin and said, "We could even leave, and I bet the party would keep rolling along just fine."
"And - oh, yes, Professor - and how did you plan to get back to town?"
"Leave that to me," he said, "I've met a lot of the people here, there must be somebody ... yes, I see her now. Excuse me," and Jim wasn't in the mood to wait; he reached out and tapped Karpathy on the arm. "Professor, I'm taking my girl away now, you're just too fascinating," and maybe the old man could read lips or something after all, because he grinned.
"Lovely couple," he said. "Have a good evening."
And Jim swept Ruth off with his arm around her waist as if they were dancing, and she began to laugh helplessly.
"Oh," she said, "oh, you're not much like I thought."
"Well, you haven't had much time to think yet, have you?"
"Neither have you, and you just called me 'my girl.'"
Jim stopped; the rest of the room seemed to stop too, as he looked into her uplifted eyes, as wide as the sky. "We'll ... have to talk more about that," he said slowly.
"Yes," she said. "Jim." Her gravity and sweetness rang in him like a bell.
After a few more moments he could finally look away, and spotted Lillian Martin again, still standing glumly near, but not in, a group of animated graduate students, holding a plate of refreshments but not eating them. He took Ruth to her and turned her away from the group with a hand on her shoulder. "Lillian, how are you?"
She looked at him under level brows. "Just great, Jim. Just WONderful. The time of my life, I'm having here."
"How is Zelda?"
"Debating something I can't follow. Go ahead and join them, you can probably get it."
"Please. We just got away from Karpathy. Lil, this is Ruth. Ruth, my friend Lillian, who has gotten me through a few of these parties before."
"Why do you come here if you don't like it?" asked Ruth, which was sensible enough.
"I like Gill," said Jim.
"I like Zelda," said Lillian. "My girlfriend. Right there, in red and blue."
"Black hair," Jim added helpfully. "You know, the long tail there down her back, with the beads on the end?"
"The taller one?" asked Ruth doubtfully.
"With the nose ring. She's doing this 1990s thing. They all are." Lillian sighed.
"Could be worse," Jim said, and waited for her to look. "Could be 1890s." She didn't react right away, so he added, "Corsets? You know? Petticoats?"
"I'm thinking," said Lillian dreamily. He shoved her and she laughed. "I'm sorry," she said to Ruth, "but Jim and I have known each other for a long time, and we just turn into ten-year-olds when we're together."
Ruth said politely, "It's charming."
"So," Jim asked Lillian, "when will Zel be ready to leave, you think?"
"About three a.m., at a guess." Lillian was joking, but she sounded more forlorn than amused. Jim reflected that he never had liked Zelda. But "Don't start," Lillian warned him now, so he didn't.
"Did you drive up together?" he asked instead.
"No, actually, we arranged to meet here."
"Lil," he said, leaning in a little, "what if we just ... Ran Away?" The drama in his voice was for humor, but he knew she realized he meant the suggestion seriously.
"Lillian and Jim run away together?" she asked, smiling.
"And Ruth," Jim said, reaching for her. She was just looking back and forth between the other two as they spoke.
"Ah, I see," Lillian said. "Ruth and Jim run away together with Lillian as the chauffeur."
Well, he had sort of thought that - of getting a ride from her, anyway. Now he would have been ashamed of himself, except that her eyes were twinkling. "Let's find another party. Hell, let's find an ant farm or an aquarium. Grass to watch growing."
"Too wet, don't you think?" asked Ruth, and he checked, but thought she was joking.
"Let me at least try to get Zel to come," said Lillian.
"I'll get our coats," said Jim, and Lillian cast him a grateful look. She never had gotten used to the Gills' transcloset.
"Mine's the same," she said. "Zelda's is a navy velvet cape."
Jim hoped the closet wasn't full of them.
Lillian had a whole comic riff on the possible contents of the Gills' transcloset and why they had a storage system usually reserved for costume collections, but when Ruth asked Jim, he just said, "I guess they entertain a lot," which was true enough.
The console for guest retrieval was near the front door, and Jim asked Ruth for the best search terms. "Hm, try the color," she said, "quilted silk." He put in 'pink' and didn't get it, and then she said "Peach," and that did it.
He typed in 'black leather' next, for Lillian. It wasn't really animal skin, of course, but the simulation was so close that the closet wouldn't be able to tell. For a wonder, there were two leather garments - hmm, more in the main collection, the screen said. Maybe there was more truth to Lillian's jokes than he'd thought. He typed in 'pewter' for the studs and chains and 'red silk' for the lining and slashed sleeves, and got the right one. "Oh, my," said Ruth when it appeared on the rack.
Jim grinned. The jacket was a relic of Lillian's brief flirtation with the neoleather life, which she admitted later had in her case been much more about fashion than sex. "She says it's sturdy," he said now to Ruth.
Jim's own jacket was an easy find, since he was the only Starfleet cadet at this particular party. But he'd been right to be apprehensive about Zelda's cloak, and they were still hopelessly looking at visual displays when Lillian appeared. Alone, and wet, as if a drink had been poured over her. The cloak question could be shelved, Jim thought.
"Let's get out of here," said Lillian, stone-faced. "The Gills know."
They piled into Lillian's little flitter and careened off down the hill, sticking near to the ground to avoid the wind and near the road to find their way. Ruth, in the back, reached forward and clutched Jim's shoulder, digging her nails in whenever Lil swooped around a loop in the road or jumped a ridge.
"Lil," said Jim after a minute or two, "would you like to talk about it or would you rather - " he gasped as they took a turn and Ruth, he swore, drew blood, " - just slalom?"
Lillian made a strangled, whooping sort of sound, and he said, "Lil, Lillian, set it down, please, Lil, please don’t drive and cry at the same time," and Ruth dug her nails in again. Lillian dropped to the side of the road and killed the engine, and dropped her head against her fists clenched on the controls.
"I'm sorry - " she gasped, "I'm sorry ... I n-, I nev- ... never cry ...."
"Lil, I don't care. Cry all you want now," Jim said, pulling her nearer hand away from the altitude lever and holding it. It was true he'd never seen her do this. He chafed her hand between both of his and she sobbed, her face turned away. He rubbed her shoulder too.
Eventually she said, "I'm sorry" again.
"Zelda's going to be sorry if I ever catch her," Jim said. He waited a little longer and then asked, "Should I drive?"
"Let me," Ruth suggested, "and then you two can talk."
Lillian sat unresponsive, shoulders still heaving.
"Or don't talk," Jim said.
Lil nodded. They all got out of the flitter and changed places, Jim and Lillian in back and Ruth in front. They lifted off a lot more smoothly. Ruth was quite a good driver.
"I've still got a shoulder for you," Jim told Lillian, "my BFG."
"OFG," she gulped, "Stud." It was an old abbreviated joke from their subspace squirt-message days. She let him hold her then and sniffled into his chest.
"Where are we going?" Ruth said at last, when they were back in the city and she had picked up the altitude to stay out of the way of ground traffic.
"Your place," said Lillian. Now she was sitting up and could speak almost normally. "I'm OK, but I don't ... want to find another party."
"You're going to tell Cleo, right?" Jim insisted. "Promise me." Cleo was Lillian's room-mate, also a lesbian, and why Cleo and Lil weren't a couple was one of the mysteries of life as far as Jim was concerned. Cleo would make sure Lillian was all right, or as close as possible.
"OK. I promise."
They pulled up in front of a 22nd-century rebuilt rowhouse with a light-stripped exoskeleton, and again they all got out of the flitter. Both women seemed embarrassed; Jim didn't know why. He was the one being dropped off he-had-no-idea-where, but both Ruth and Lillian seemed to be assuming he'd stay, and he certainly had nothing against the idea if he knew Lillian was going to take decent care of herself. He gave her another hug and pinched her cheek gently. "My best friend-girl," he said.
"You're a sweetheart, Jim." She got into the flitter and lifted off, steadily and carefully.
Jim only turned from watching her go when Ruth said, "Come inside for a while?"
Why else was he there? "Sure. Thanks." They walked up a little staircase and stood in front of a metal door formed and colored to look almost like it had panes of frosted glass in it. Ruth got out a little keycard, narrow and pink and not shiny, like a little animal's tongue. She swiped it through the lock, a motion like licking sideways, or maybe Jim just had a dirty mind.
Inside, when the door swung shut behind them, it seemed completely dark. Disorienting. Jim just stood. "The hall-light's out," said Ruth in a near whisper, and reached out, probably meaning to take his hand, but instead she grazed his hip and the tips of her small fingers hit him like a bolt of current. He caught at the fingers and brought them to his lips.
"You," she said, sounding a little surprised, "you don't waste time - do you?"
"Too fast?" he asked, and kissed the ends of her fingers again, and then licked down to the top of her palm.
"No," she said, pulling her arm in but not away, and they were against each other and even in the dark it wasn't hard to find her mouth below his.
They kissed for some time. The darkness wrapped around them made him not completely sure how long, or what was up and down, like floating. They played shallowly with each other's mouths, licking and suckling and finding all the contours of lips and teeth and the edges of tongues. She licked his upper lip and kissed up the bridge of his nose, finding his eyelashes and nibbling them with her lips, which felt strange to him but he supposed she liked it, so he did the same to hers. That felt nicer but it was never going to be a big turn-on for him. But he found her neck, and that was much better, and she stretched it out for him and made little sounds in her throat while he fed there. He didn't think she was actually speaking. Anyway he wasn't paying attention.
Then he hit the neckline of the jumpsuit, and couldn't find how it was fastened. He began to feel around for the break in the fabric a little frantically, and she said, "OK, stop," and he slowed down but kept his hands on her body, his hard-on nudging her and his face against her skin.
"You've got an apartment?" he asked, then nibbled her neck a little.
She wriggled, but not hard, a token struggle. "A suite. Upstairs."
"Can we go there?" He stroked her hips and ran one hand up to her breast.
"Yes, come on," she said, capturing that breast-fondling hand and holding it as she turned away and moved unerringly into blackness.
"Isn't there any light?"
"Upstairs," she said again. "Here's the railing," and she put his hand onto it. This brought his arm across her body and so they paused for a while as he pulled her into him and found her breasts again and kissed her hair and ear and - she turned her head - her mouth.
She was kissing back but she also laughed, the sensation strange against his lips, and he pulled back, a little miffed. "Come on," she said, and then from the next stair up, "Have you lost the railing?"
He found it again and followed. She seemed to keep a step or so ahead, and he reached out with his free hand and brushed her hips, and she disconcerted him by laughing a little again.
"It's funny?"
"I'm so horny," she said, breathless, "and I'm not having sex on the staircase, it's too silly." She quickened her pace and so did he.
They reached the top of the stairs, and there was a light in this hallway, though not a very bright one. She went about halfway down the corridor and fiddled with the door, and rattled what sounded like a knob, and then at last they were inside. She turned on the light.
The room was full of boxes and papers and objects jumbled together on almost every surface.
"Are you moving in or moving out?" he asked.
"In," she said, and then "Come in," and he shut the door behind him as he obeyed.
Now that he looked, he couldn't see why he'd missed the opening on the jumpsuit, or perhaps she'd started that gap at the top while they were on the stairs. Now she put her hands there, at mid-chest, and simply opened the length of the thing, hands skimming down her body as she did, and under it she was naked except for panties. She wasn't strip-teasing, she was just getting out of it, and she was the most erotic thing he'd seen for a long while. Her breasts jiggled as she bent over to pull the legs down, and looking at the line over her shoulder he realized why there were so many paintings of women washing themselves and dressing and so forth. The paintings weren't a turn-on but she sure was. The little dents along her spine and her round hips and her soft arms ... She looked up.
"Are you just going to stand there?"
He stripped out of his uniform as fast as he could.
The bed was assembled and made up, in fact too made up for his taste, with several pillows and a decorative coverlet and a featherbed or a down thing, all puffy and crowded. She scattered the stuff from the surface of it, though, and when he joined her under the covers there was enough room for both of them, even with the hard-on he was swinging around by that time. Her ass as she'd climbed into bed was made for his hands, but he wasn't close enough to grab it. Later, he told himself.
She ran her hands over his skin, holding him off just a little, and he murmured an inarticulate protest.
"Oh, you are - " she said, "you are such a big, sweet, broad-shouldered -" her palms swept over them - "beautiful, unhairy - " her hands across his chest, where actually there was some hair - "muscle-y - " her fingers played across his belly, and lower, and slowed, and he groaned - "eager big, big boy!" She grasped his erection and held it, sliding her hand down to the base and up to the tip several times, and he was thrusting a little but trying to get his hands on her thighs, positioning her on her back and tickling her pubic hair, separating her, finding her wet - "Yes, please, stroke me, make love to me, yes, use your fingers, there, in my cunt!"
He hadn't thought he liked talkers before, but this was getting to him in a big way, and he really had to tense up, hold back, to do what she wanted him to. Both hands there as she stretched her legs apart, running his fingers in the rough hair and the slick juices, the backs of his hands chafing her soft thighs, and she arched her back and writhed and gabbled, "Oh, that's good, that tickles, again there, yes, oh, inside, please," but instead he teased around the edges, round and round until she was wild, bucking, down to ooohs and aahhs, and then he pushed his cock in. She was wet as a sponge, moving under him, and he held her hips, lifting them from the yielding mattress, and plunged in and pulled out, and again, and again. It felt so good. And she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him half down and arched half up so she could kiss him, deeper this time, her slim tongue moving into his mouth. He sat up more and pulled her closer and they rocked back and forth with her in his lap and his cock deep inside her. She got her legs under her enough to pull up and push down, and she took up the rhythm of his thrusts, moaning into his mouth. Her back was damp and her hair spilled over both their shoulders as they rocked back and forth. He couldn't stop, he wanted to go on but he was past the point where he could control and he tipped her down again and pushed in hard and came, and she moaned again and clamped down as if she wanted to milk his cock dry or keep it inside her even after it was soft.
He lay on her but she was still squirming under him, and he realized she hadn't gotten off. "Sorry," he said, and then, "tell me ..." amazed that she wasn't already telling him.
"Feel me," she said, "fuck me," and he couldn't do it with his cock now but he got up on one elbow rather dizzily and used his fingers instead. The wet, clingy skin inside her was amazing to touch, and she was flushed and gorgeous as she twisted and arched, trying to get the best stimulation. He had two fingers in her; he tried separating them and pressing against the sides of the passage, and she gasped, "up, up," kicking her free leg aimlessly, and so he moved them the other way, turned his hand sideways. He thought he should do something with her clitoris as well, but he was leaning on his other arm and wasn't sure how he'd do it, and anyway she seemed to be coming now, grunting, "Y's, yes, yesss," and the muscles around his fingers convulsing. He kissed her mouth while she was quiet and limp and pulled her soft body to rest against his.
"Oh," she said softly, "you are darling," and hugged him back.
They rested a little. Then she asked, "Jim?"
"What?" He was a little surprised that she wanted conversation, but given how much she'd talked while they were fucking, he probably shouldn't have been.
"What does BFG mean?"
"What are you - oh," he said, remembering he'd called Lillian that in the flitter. "What made you think of that now?"
"I don't know, I just wondered. Is it private?"
"No." He paused, sorting out the story. "OK, Lil and I go way back. And while she was on Mars and then when I was - off Earth for a while - anyway, we were friends, and I called her my 'best friend-girl,' you know, as opposed to 'girl-friend.' Abbreviated BFG, to save space in the squirt message."
"And then she said OFG," Ruth said.
"Yes, well, she used to answer 'I'm your only friend-girl, you big stud.'"
Ruth laughed a little. "You two are funny together."
"Always have been." He wasn't speaking very clearly.
"Are you going to sleep?" she asked.
"'S it OK?"
"Yes, all right, for a while." She snuggled in. "I'll drive you back to the Academy."
"Thanks."
"It's only fair." She smiled against his skin. "You got me a ride from Berkeley."
He would have chuckled, but he didn't have the energy. He wondered if they'd really get back to the Academy before morning. He didn’t want to bother. A bed like this could feel like home ... and he thought he could get used to it, if she could.
They’d see.
**end of "That Fairness Thing"**
Continued in "Rain Check"