“Come in lover, I’ve been waiting for you,” Stella said, lowering the lighting.
She poured two glasses of scotch. “I’ve missed you. I’ve been sad. Sad and horny. Sex and sadness make for strange companions, don’t you think?”
George allowed her to take off his hat and coat, but remained silent.
“I don’t understand you when you’re like this, silent and glaring,” Stella said. “You’re in a funny mood.”
“Not funny ha-ha.” George sipped his drink and grimaced his approval. For an imaginary scotch, it was a very good scotch, as always.
“No.”
There was a brittle, retaliatory pause. Hips swaying, Stella sauntered to the dresser, to the large oval mirror.
“Am I getting too old for this, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do find me attractive. That’s why you come here, every other Thursday.”
He turned away from the window that peeked out into the night- the charade, the hallucination. There were crowds of people having a good time. The people seemed real. George laughed coldly. He remembered they weren’t real. He finished his drink; it didn’t taste so good now. Then he removed his tie while her reflection watched.
A playful hunger shone in her eyes. She looked at the tie he held. Often, she liked him to bind her wrists to the bed’s headrest and rope her legs wide apart. Naked, she’d writhe and plead. Her writhing would throw her body into irresistible poses, and when they fucked, she would pretend to weep, pretend to be his unwilling captive; she was made of soft glass and he could see right through her when they fucked.
“I’m here because I have no choice. I’m your prisoner.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” Stella wriggled her hips free of the petticoat. She pinched an inch or two of flesh on her waist. “I’m getting old-old and fat. Hurry and warm me up, lover.”
“I never leave this room, do I?”
“Are we doing this conversation again?” She laughed a very see-through laugh and raised her glass.
“I haven’t left this room in years,” he said, in his usual resigned way.
“Hon, you just arrived.”
“I’m not mad. I know what’s happening.”
“I’ve manipulated your mind so that you think everything is normal. But your life is controlled by powerful hallucinatory drugs administered to you by evil aliens who’ve destroyed your universe.”
“You make it sound preposterous, but that’s basically what’s happened. I’ve been held captive here for so long you’ve tamed me, like a pet dog.”
Naked, she reclined on her side, slipping a finger between the glistening lips of her sex. He watched as her thighs parted and he felt the familiar, eager stirring in his loins. He knew every inch of her nakedness. He knew every mole, blemish, every glorious crease and curve. He knew how to make her sigh with longing and scream joyfully. Knew how to hurt her too. As far as you could hurt an alien who’d assumed human form. Curiously, he found the idea of fucking a shape-changing alien easy. On the outside she looked exactly like a real woman. On the inside she felt like a real woman- the most hot-blooded, velvet-tight woman he’d ever seen naked.
“George, Let me tell you what’s really wrong with you,” she said. “You’re having a mid-life crisis.”
A crisis. He laughed at that. Yeah, crisis. It would be 1937 soon. War in Europe was looming, that fanatic Hitler. Except it wasn’t real. Everything he read was made up: by her-by her people.
“I want my life back. I want my freedom.”
Annoyance marred the sensuous pout of her lips. She sat up. “Why don’t you just walk out then? I can’t stop you.”
“Outside are these guys. They’d blast me with sleeping gas before I got to the lobby then return me here and meddle with my head again. I can’t escape, I’m a prisoner.”
George sat on the bed, defeated. Her arms around his neck, her warm lips against his cheek, her naked thighs against his. “Aren’t we all just that, prisoners?”
Easing the tension from his limbs, her hands caressed his body, touching, guiding, urging him so that, mindlessly, he straddled her. Her legs shifted apart. Her body welcomed him, as it always did, her hips rose, like a wave reaching the shore, drawing him out from the shallows.
It was difficult to remain angry with her for very long. He was weak willed, he knew. Had he always been so compliant? Their mouths locked in a kiss, tongues probing. She gave a cry of surrender and delight, their bodies glued together frantically on the hard, creaking mattress. When finally they climaxed, their bodies sawing noisily in wet friction, it was like his first ever orgasm- repeated and magnified. It was so intense and profound that for a moment he felt like crying. Why, he wanted to ask, why do you do this to me? He fell asleep like that, angrily defeated. Satiated, his penis slipped from her sex.
“George?”
Stella gazed compassionately at the sleeping man and felt another guilt pang as a mental picture of George’s wife and family came, unwanted, to her mind. They were dead, of course. All life on earth had been wiped out, with the exception of George. The earth had been … sanitized. Looking on the bright side, they had left George, her pet project, alone. George would serve as a template for a new, improved world of men. He would be her husband and they would love one another, openly. Freely. She smiled.
She gently disengaged and dressed. Reverting to her true form, she materialised ten miles above the Earth, on the orbiting satellite platform left over from the wars. The ground floor of the redundant military complex had been re-allocated to the designers. The Earth’s original owners, returned from their ten billion year sojourn, were dictating to architects continental features they wanted put in place. There were various forms to be completed, insurance and liability clauses mainly. Stella went straight to the offices of her superiors on the second floor, knocked, and entered.
“I’ll never get pregnant by the human,” she concluded her report by saying. “The environmentalist lobby must be wrong; we are not biologically compatible.”
Her superior gathered his many limbs in a gesture of polite implication. “Marketing have decreed our experiment to be halted indefinitely.”
“So we’ve failed?”
“It is illogical to resurrect an enemy we’ve defeated. If we were successful, then maybe next time mankind might destroy us.”
“Then we terminate the experiment?”
The superior made the gesture of regretful inevitability.
So be it.
Several hours later, George woke up from turbulent dreams of tentacled monsters to see Stella standing over him. She wore a look of concern he’d never seen before, and for a moment he experienced a nameless fear.
“Hey, do you want to go out someplace?”
He grinned along with her. “What did you have in mind?”
“A coffee?”
“Okay, I guess.”
He dressed by the window, enjoying the morning sun. The sun that wasn’t there. Not that it mattered any longer. It was going to be a beautiful day; he just knew it. He was finally, forever, heading home.
© 2007 G. Russell. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.