The Last Time and the First Time
by Satinette
Mel's last time with Vic and her first time with Cole, set between "What Lies Beneath" and "Remember When". A somewhat different take on Mel and her favorite Cirronian than you're likely used to reading. Written both in answer to a Valentine's Day challenge and because these plot lines should eventually be addressed by anyone writing Tracker fiction. Believe the rating. Mostly minor spoilers for most of the season's episodes plus some references to my previous fic, "She Looks At Me Like Food".
Author's Note: Introductory threads to new and rather different Mel and Cole historys and backstorys will be amplified and woven into future fictions.
Stay tuned.
I. THAT DAY: MEL
After kissing Vic a rather awkward good-morning-and-goodbye-and-good-luck-nailing-the-bad-guys, Mel exhaustedly drowsed in bed. It was nice to have some time before she had to go downstairs and begin her own workday. Vic was unquestionably the best lover she had ever had. Not that she'd really had all that many. If she wanted to be completely honest about the matter, he was even better than her beloved Rod had been, and last night he had more than surpassed himself. She'd had five spectacular orgasms, had even blacked out once but, as always, she still felt vaguely, undefinably, achingly frustrated, felt as though something inexpressible, something very vital, had been missing, felt she needed something more. By their own volition her hands began to trail over her still tender nipples, one stroking down her stomach and into the soft triangle of strawberry-blonde curls between her legs where it was still warm and moist from her incomplete fulfillment.
Half asleep, she slipped a forefinger into the soft folds, seeking that small bundle of exquisitely sensitive nerve endings that so many men couldn't locate with a road map and so few knew how to properly stimulate even if they did somehow manage to find it. Not that any real man would ever admit these things or allow himself to suffer the humiliating indignity of being given guidance. Those were the guys who would strut like peacocks if they happened to do it for you, but accused you of being frigid it you didn't get off. Fortunately, Vic wasn't among those stupidly misguided machos. His very first relationship had been of the Mrs. Robinson variety and, whoever that dear lady had been, she'd made very sure the young Victor Raymond Bruno learned exactly where and how. Perhaps that was one of the major reasons why she'd so far succumbed to the two of them getting back together three times already.
But great sex alone wasn't what she needed. She knew that last night would have to be their last time together as a couple, even if he didn't know it yet. She just hoped she could salvage the friendship. Damn him! Why did he have to go ruin it all like that?
Willing all those thoughts and their considerable baggage away before she began to wallow in self pity and cry, Mel sighed and closed her eyes, touching herself with a gently teasing circular motion and giving her imagination free rein. She visualized soft lips hungrily speaking her name as they caressed the column of her throat, a hard, muscular body gliding over hers as she tightly clung to the broad shoulders, strong hands firmly cupping her buttocks to hold her at his merciless mercy, a fully engorged penis thrusting deep inside of her in undulating rhythm, in and out, harder and harder, over and over again... Her nipples began to tighten almost painfully and she massaged faster, her back arching, her breath quickening to ragged gasps. She was so close ... so ... very ... very ... close ...
"Miss Porter? Are you awake yet? It's nearly a quarter to ten!" Pat's cheery Irish lilt reverberated through the apartment from the bottom of the stairwell. Pat was her temporary day manager and very much a happy-ray-of-sunshine-type of morning person. Mel was not a morning person. She found it irritating to be around morning people.
With a low growl Mel rolled onto her belly, almost screaming her frustration into the pillows. "Um ... I'll be down in fifteen or twenty, Pat," she called out in a nearly normal voice. "I overslept and I'm about to take a quick shower. Be a love and put up a fresh pot, please?"
"Already perking! And there's no big rush. I've been here since nine and most everything's taken care of. Just have a lot of deliveries coming in this morn, you know? Including all those recovered sofa-chairs. Sure would be nice to have some brawn to lend us a hand. Is Mr Hauser back yet?"
"No, not yet," Mel answered with a faint smile, belting her robe and then stifling a yawn, the legacy of a night of sexual frenzy and little sleep. Now Cole, on the other hand, was a morning, noon and night person. He didn't sleep at all. "I don't expect him before late tonight. More likely not until sometime tomorrow." This time they'd have to manage without the aid of Cole's admittedly impressive brawn'.
Border-line depressed and yet hyper from all that had transpired between her and Vic the night before, Mel made it downstairs within eighteen minutes and found herself bustling around all morning. Which was exactly the way she wanted it. Her fatigue and constant forced, hectic activity saved her from having to think. Once the Watchfire's morning deliveries had been checked, inventoried and stored away, the day's specials agreed upon, the surprise visit by the City's Health Inspector handled, the newly recovered furniture set up, assorted supplier and distributor reps met with or talked with over the phone, and Lela, the cook, and the three part-time barmaid/waitresses, Sharon, Aline and Doreen, had set to work, the lunch crowd was getting heavy. It looked like it was going to be another very good day.
Satisfied that all was well under control and would continue to run smoothly without her, Mel decided it was time she cleaned house, a mindless activity if ever there was one. She spent most of the afternoon stripping her bed, doing laundry, and dusting and polishing all the wood and glass surfaces in her home, leaving the air pleasantly redolent with the twin scents of lemon and pine. She was just finishing up with a thorough and long overdue sweeping, sponge mopping and vacuuming of all the rugs and floors and found the only room left for her to tackle was the War Room.
Bracing herself for the confrontation with Cole's organized chaos, Mel opened the door and surveyed the battlefield. All in all, not too bad, she thought, not bad at all. In fact, she hadn't seen this room looking so good since before he'd moved in. Either she had finally shamed him with her not so subtle hints or things had reached the point where even Cole hadn't been able to keep track of all the myriad bits and pieces of electronic, mechanical and computer clutter – plus his other stuff. She noted that he'd recently even gone so far as to purchase an assortment of storage racks and boxes, these last all neatly labeled with Cirronian glyphs and stacked up on the shelving. As Cole regarded dust as being any machine's mortal enemy, at best interfering with its optimal efficiency – and as she had no intentions of even touching the several projects he was currently working on spread out on nearly every available surface – there was actually very little to be done. Perhaps he was becoming domesticated after all.
Or perhaps not. Scooping up the discarded socks, briefs, towels, jeans and sweats piled in a far corner on the floor, plus the four shirts he'd left hanging on the closet doorknob, she dumped those items in the bathroom's hamper, then busied herself with polishing the glass of the room's few pictures. That left only the floor to do. And maybe another load or two of laundry after that.
Humming to herself to fill both her mind and the quiet, Mel began sweeping the broom around, making a special effort to get it as far beneath the free-standing tables, carts and shelving as she could. Like magic, all sorts of things began to appear along with the expected debris of floor dirt and discarded lengths of wiring: long lost rubber bands and paper clips, lots of loose change as well as fourteen dollars in paper currency, a Chicago street map, a bus schedule, a test tube with some unidentifiable dried crud stuck in the bottom of it, the missing set of special mini electronics tools that Cole had virtually torn the place apart searching for, a very overdue library book on human evolution, the Apache headband Wahote had given him and Cole had despaired of as lost, some torn-out newspaper clippings, numerous sheets of both used and pristine printer paper, an orphan sock ...
Her humming now replaced with grumblings along the lines of how typical maleness probably transcends species lines throughout the entire known universe if not beyond, Mel got down on her hands and knees so that she could extend the broom clear back to the baseboards. Ah ha! A coffee-stained spoon, a fossilized pizza crust, an outdated train schedule, dozens of X-Acto blades, an empty fek-maln dropper-pen, an unpaid parking ticket, Cole's ID wristband from when he was in the mental hospital, a tourist map of the Roswell crash site, nearly a dozen blank recordable CDs, a wide assortment of screws, nuts, washers, clips and bolts, a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie ...
And moving right along around the room ... a bus transfer, both his first and second cell phones, more rubber bands, paper clips and pocket change, three Scrabble tiles, a fifty-dollar bill (!), a lone size-twelve Nike running shoe, a still-wrapped Hershey's Kiss, an assortment of pens, pencils and markers, a crushed half-gallon milk carton, one of her missing stud earrings (yesss!), a travel brochure to Bora Bora, two unlabeled VHS video cassettes, the libretto from the opera she'd dragged him to see and he complained was too loud, and three paperback books: Stephen King's "Misery", The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and ...
Mel blinked in shocked surprise, unaware that she'd uttered aloud a common swear word that she usually rigorously banned from her spoken vocabulary. She was looking at a very broken-in copy of Doctor Janet Sullivan's "Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex". The author was one of the couple's therapists who had guided the Marital Bliss Seminars she and Cole had attended undercover to Track a particularly vicious pair of Orsian fugitives.
That Seminar had been a very major turning point in her life, changing everything, turning her entire world upside down. There was where she'd finally faced up to all that Cole had come to mean to her. There was where Cole had very nearly died, his lifeforce all but drained away to nothing. And an essential part of herself, one she'd never even realized had been missing before, had been forced to die a still-born's death shortly thereafter. Neither she nor they had been quite the same ever since.
"Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex".
Why would he even have such a book? Was it simply a matter of idle curiosity?
Ever since the day he'd shown her his Cirronian form – at her request – and especially ever since he'd described to her the intensely emotional spirituality of a Cirronian joining, she'd forced herself to come to terms with the idea that having a physical relationship with a human female might be about appealing to Cole as having one with a pet Collie would be to her. No matter how deeply loved the Collie. After all, he'd had many opportunities. She'd seen him hit upon numerous times, sometimes quite blatantly, but never once had she ever seen him show the slightest sexual interest for any woman, not even for herself. She supposed that, while he might seem to be an extremely desirable human male to any human female with a normal red cell count, no human female could even begin to provide him with so much as the illusion of being a desirable Cirronian female! Their two species were just too different.
Moreover, his species was ancient. He'd told her that they were the oldest sentient form of life still extant in this galaxy. Cirronians had already outlived the star they'd initially evolved under and had spread out to colonize their neighboring solar systems long before the dinosaurs walked the Earth, long before the ancestors of the human species even evolved. Cole had even told her that humans and their physiology were quite primitive. Although he'd certainly never said so, she wouldn't be at all surprised if he viewed humans much as humans viewed gorillas and chimpanzees. He'd even recently said that "Being human sucks". All in all, she'd been forced to conclude that, just because the corporeal human form he'd created seemed to be susceptible to sexual stimulation and capable of response, it didn't mean that the soul within was equally keen for it.
And she'd never kidded herself that Cole was a complete innocent' in any true sense of the word. Regardless of how naive he sometimes seemed, and despite his relative infancy as a human, he was actually a grown man. Well, an adult Cirronian male, anyway. He'd once had a beloved mate and child. He had traveled to many worlds and was familiar with hundreds of extra-terrestrial species, likely learning at least something about their male/female relationships, if only by observation. Since he was exposed to human sexuality in some form or another nearly every day here on Earth, he'd certainly had the time to absorb the basics. It would be beyond belief, for example, to assume that he'd never explored some of the mysteries of his own new body, if only out of curiosity. Everybody masturbated at least occasionally, even very young children. She knew he'd seen hundreds of TV shows with more or less sexual themes – the antics on the Jerry Springer Show seemed to mesmerize him – as well as enjoyed seeing numerous movies, including a good number of the better R-rated ones. He had full access to the Internet, including any and all of its sexually-based websites, if he cared to peruse them. While helping him Track a Nodulian in the body of a 15-year old boy, out of the corner of her eye she saw him cop a girlie magazine and slip it beneath his jacket. He read novels, some containing sexual material. He read the newspaper and saw the news. He'd seen couples making-out in the parks and snuggling together at the tables at the Watchfire. He'd been the recipient of a lap dance (he claimed to have enjoyed it and had suggested she try it). In fact, the bar's own miniscule dance floor had, on several occasions, been the stage for hot and steamy Dirty Dancing-style dancing. He'd even been rather comically (in retrospect) almost molested by a Tiffany. And he was a far cry from being stupid. He'd known damn well what was going on when Tev tried to rape and infect her. She was quite certain he had a very good and reasonably accurate idea of the goings-on in a human bedroom.
Perhaps his body's responses and his undeniable affection for her were enough for him to initially consider the notion of a physical relationship, but then maybe that one real kiss they'd ever shared, the one that had so utterly and completely blown her away, had exactly the opposite effect on him. Certainly he soon thereafter rejected the idea of the two of them becoming physical. Although he'd been very gentle about it, letting her down as nice and easy as a pro (if she wanted to get cynical about it), he'd made it clear: he couldn't afford to be distracted' again. He'd used his nearly getting killed as his excuse. Although she knew that desire is always a very major distraction' whether it's acted upon or not – especially when two people live and work together twenty-four/seven – she hadn't dared challenge his decision as being absurd, just tried to accept it at face value and went meekly along with it.
Her only other option would've been to translate it as: Sorry, Mel. I like you, and I thought at first I might be interested, but I've found that isn't the case.'
Had she chosen to wallow in an angsty "Now, Voyager" fantasy of the two of them wanting each other over the risk of facing the possibility of him not desiring her as anything other than a friend, someone he could sometimes stroke and cuddle with like a favorite pet cat? Had she been afraid of discovering that he might not share her feelings in the same way or to the same degree or even at all and so had just let it ride? Or was she afraid that he, for whatever reason, had decided that he didn't want to pursue it? Or her? Is that what she had really done to herself?
And if she were going to chastise herself that far, then why not go for all the rest? Why had she permitted any of it to happen at all? Why couldn't she just have fallen for one of those very nice but average guys who frequented her bar, or who sat down next to her in the library's reading room, or who chatted with her on the teller's line at the bank or over the gas pumps on the self-service island, or who asked for her help in determining the ripeness of a melon in the supermarket's produce section? For that matter, why had she ever picked Cole up in the first place? What had ever possessed her to give him a home like adopting a stray kitten instead of calling Social Services as she'd originally intended? Why couldn't she have left well enough alone and spent the rest of her life in blissful ignorance?
She'd never allowed any man to get as deeply embedded in her soul as she'd let this Cirronian. Not even Rod. And certainly not Vic. Ever since her early twenties, after that disastrous, crushing affair with Bobby, she tried to keep every man she involved herself with at some sort of safe, arms-length emotional distance, so she wouldn't end up getting too hurt, so she could assure her own survival, so she could always feel that she was maintaining at least a modicum of control over the situation. But having an alien move in with her had been so intriguing, so bizarre, so surreal – and yes, so exciting, such an escapist upper after the anguish of losing her grandmother and suddenly finding herself the new owner of the long-struggling bar – that she'd simply never bothered to erect her hard-learned psychological barriers to keep him out, never for a moment thought those barriers were even necessary.
Why should she think she'd even need them when she was renting Sesame Street and Barney video learning tapes for him, for pity sake! (Although even the gentle Cirronian couldn't tolerate Barney for more than five minutes). She'd risen to the daunting challenge of giving him a crash-course in humanity by taking him under her wing, patiently educating him in the English alphabet, the uses for and names of objects, grammar, pronunciation, sentence structure, verb tenses, numbers. She'd dragged him off for tours of the city, taken him to the zoo, the natural history museum, the aquarium, the historical society, various art museums, the mall. She'd outlined history and geography for him, explained human political, religious, philosophical and economic systems and beliefs as best she could, taught him how to write. Never before had she checked so many books on so many different things out of the library. They spent countless hours huddled together in his room, even further pursuing these myriad subjects over the Internet. Although he was soon reading well beyond Dr. Seuss, for quite some time his favorite book remained "Green Eggs and Ham". And he'd learned everything she could think of to throw at him with staggering rapidity, absorbing it all like thirsty desert sands soaking up water, seldom having to be reminded of the same thing twice and rarely forgetting anything.
Through it all, by blindly thinking of Cole as an alien, another species entirely only wearing a human suit, and not even considering the ramifications of the fact that, by human standards, that suit was devastatingly gorgeous and the rest of him was quickly becoming as human as anyone else in all the ways that really counted, she'd allowed him to become an integral part of herself before even realizing when or how it had happened. It was completely obvious to everyone – Jess, Jonas, her friends, Vic, the Watchfire's regulars, and even that creep Nestov – that Cole had become so much more than just a friend' to her long before she herself was willing to acknowledge or accept it.
And before she could even begin to adjust to what her heart had been trying so hard to tell her, before she could even begin to recover from the sudden ending of their brief but cautious courtship, while she was still struggling to deal with her feelings for him as likely always and forever never going beyond platonic friendship, her upside down world had turned utterly inside out. She'd learned that she herself wasn't entirely human. She was, in fact, part Cirronian; a part of her was exactly what Cole was. But she wasn't completely certain she knew quite what that was. Or what it meant.
All she did know for sure was that, when Cole's job on Earth was done, when the last of the fugitives were finally caught, when he would pack it all up and return to his home planet some 100 light years away, dispense with his undercover human masquerade and resume being Daggon, he'd be taking with him the heart, the soul, the very essence of everything she was, of all she could ever hope to be.
And he would never even know it.
It would be unlikely that their paths would ever cross again.
And she would never find another even remotely like him to share her life.
She'd never wanted any of this to happen. She'd never dreamed that it would. But it had ... And everything about it, about her life, about herself, about Cole, about what they maybe were or maybe weren't to each other, about her future, about her world, terrified her to near total immobility.