Page 77 of Folds
There was a brief, blissful second where she shattered, the sound that tore from her almost a sob, and in that instant I let go too, rutting into her in a final, brutal surge. My cock swelled, releasing in long, hot floods, and the sensation of her milking me—greedy, unyielding—stole every word and thought from mymind. When the tremors faded, I wrapped myself around her, dragging her up into my lap so I could keep her close, my chest fused to her back. Her whole body trembled, but she laughed, a dark, glorious sound that rolled through her shoulders like thunder. I held her, sensing the tension bleed off her limbs, the pulse of her heart slowly calming as we both caught our breath.
For a while, we did not move. I felt the wet heat of her against my lap, the flex of her body still holding me tight, neither of us quite ready to break the moment. My hands roamed up her spine, learned each vertebra, the twitch of every muscle in her back. Sadie’s head dropped against my shoulder, hair sticking to her damp skin, and she laughed again.
“Holy fuck,” she said, voice shredded to a whisper. “I think you just reset my entire central nervous system.” She turned her face toward mine, lips parted, the taste of her breath as rich as anything I’d ever inhaled.
chapter seven
SADIE
Two months later
The blue streak in my hair faded back to dull, ordinary black. A cheap caff pod burned in my hand; I nursed it, tongue still raw from my last overtime. The station’s clocks all ran slow, dragging the monotony out like some cosmic joke. Most days I patched pipes, recalibrated life support, spliced cable. Sometimes I got to play medic, the minor stuff, when Mara was on leave or hungover. If I closed my eyes and let the off-gassing hum of the ventilation pipes fill my skull, I could almost forget that two months ago, I spent a whole night reprogramming an alien’s nerve endings and letting him rewrite mine.
Izu Karel had been very explicit: he’d return, and soon. He’d left a note, even—I stared at the strobed projection sometimes, a blue-green glyph with a translation beneath. “You have altered my axis. I will return.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant it metaphorically or in the orbital mechanics sense. Either way, I hadn’t heard from him since. I knew time worked funny wherever he’d been reassigned. I knew the Bozad had comms embargoes that made even a simple “hey, what’s up” into a breach of procedure. Still, I missed him. Ididn’t tell Mara. I didn’t tell anybody. I told myself it was just a hookup, a once-in-a-lifetime fluke—no, a two-time fluke, because we’d done it again the next night, and that second round of exploratory surgery made the first seem like a handshake.
But then Izu was gone, and the only thing left was the echo.
Just as I was starting to feel like myself again, I woke up one morning in my pod to the most insane lower back pain I had ever experienced. It felt like period cramps, but they radiated out from the base of my spine. What the actual fuck? It was bad enough that I decided to take myself to the med bay to see Mara about painkillers and maybe a muscle relaxant.
The med bay was quiet, humming with the low-level anxiety of shift change, too early for drama, too late for the graveyard calm. Mara was off—I’d checked the schedule twice—but the interim medtech was new. Not fresh-from-school new, but new-to-our-wreck-of-a-station, a transfer from some lunar outpost where they probably didn’t get patients who reeked of melting insulation and back-alley caff bars. She had a scar below one eye and a voice that saiddon’t fuck with me,even as she handed me a seat and started up the diagnostic panel.
She eyed me sidelong. “Chronic pain, or acute?”
“Acute,” I said, and tried not to look like I might throw up on her shoes.
She scanned me with the basic wand, shining a pale bar of blue through my abdomen and lower spine. She spent extra time at L3 to L5, made noises at the screen, then shut everything off except the nightlight. “No herniation. No shrapnel. You do manual labor?”
I shrugged. “Mostly. Sometimes I sleep bent in a question mark. Is that important?”
She cracked her knuckles and gestured for me to stand. “Let’s try full range. Touch your toes, then rotate left.” I did as told, noting the way my hips creaked and the sharp line of heat that shot from my lumbar straight through to my ovaries. I’d beendealing with cramps since I was thirteen, but this was on a new level.
“How’s your cycle?” the tech asked, voice disengaged as she typed notes into the pad. “Predictable?”
I opened my mouth to sayclockwork,but my brain started to tick through the calendar. When had my last period been? The one before? Had I really been so busy, so wrapped up in overtime and side jobs, that I’d missed a whole month? Two? I waited for the horror to catch up—the menstrual apocalypse that stalked every woman on a fixed rotation—and realized, with a cold, sick drop that it hadn’t shown up.
I stared at the medtech. She was already prepping a routine hormone panel, but the words jammed up behind my tongue. “I—uh—” I started, but it came out as more of a burp. “Actually, now that you ask, I don’t think I’ve had one since—” I did the math. Since Izu. Since the day I, uh, got laid like a starship hull. But that couldn’t be it. Right? That wasn’t how this worked.
The medtech must’ve caught the hard reboot behind my eyes, because she pivoted in her chair and leveled a look at me.
“There’s always anomalies in artificial environments,” she said, “but if you’re two months late, we should screen for pregnancy anyway.” Her tone was clinical, no-nonsense, but under it I could hear the faintest quiver of her enjoying the show. The station population had maybe three unplanned pregnancies a decade, and I wasn’t aware of a single one that started with a one-night stand and ended with a blue-skinned baby. I wasn’t even sure how it would work. I’d always assumed—hell, everyone assumed—that different species meant different DNA, different gametes, different everything. Impossible to create life together. It was basic xenobiology. I hadn’t even given protection a thought.
She slid a sterile swab under my tongue. “We’ll run a full panel, but in the meantime, I’d like to do a standard urine dip. Just protocol.” Her voice was dry as chalk, no edge of judgment, which somehow made it worse.
I tried to laugh it off. “Yeah, let’s hope it’s just a parasite.Or a—” The next words dissolved. Because if it wasn’t a parasite, it was a?—
Pregnancy test. The thought landed like a brick in a zero-G locker. The medtech handed me a tiny specimen cup and pointed to the curtained alcove.
“You know the drill,” she said. “Fill to the line.”
When I came back, she was tidying away the blood draw, her hands sure and a little smug. I handed over the cup, climbed back onto the table, and pretended to scroll my public feed. Every muscle in my body tightened, a full-body clench I couldn’t shake no matter how I tried to relax my jaw or unclench my toes.
The medtech set the cup down. She slid a spatula of dipsticks through, then double-checked the result. “Huh.” Not the most reassuring sound. She reran the strip, squinting. Then she looked at me, and for the first time in ten minutes, showed emotion, a small lift of the eyebrows, the ghost of a smirk.
“You’re pregnant,” she said. Just that. Not a question, not a congratulations.
A weird, high ringing started in my ears. For a second, I thought there had to be a punchline coming. Maybe the Bozad had played a prank on me, or maybe this was how the station’s new medtech unwound after a sixty-three hour shift, by making a tired pipe rat believe she was ground zero for the first documented case of interspecies conception. But the tech just stared at the results, then at me, then back to the results, like the translation layer in her brain was buffering too. I tried to laugh it off, but the sound that came out was more like a hiccup.
