**********************************
We're going to be transported.
I'm to join the landing party on the surface of an unknown, red planet, where I'll help catalog flora. I stand with him and several others in the transporter room. The weight of the last moment we shared in the lift oppresses, dense and crackling. He towers gently over all of us with hands behind his back and shoulders rolled slightly forward. He always stands this way, but right now I imagine it's so he can look down at me. In this close space he's pure and weighty. I want to nuzzle into his stony neck and smell him. I can't think about leaves and fronds.
When we reach the ground I have to, because they've given me work to do. A tricorder. I set out after some readings to catalog, samples to collect. The flora is no less than breathtaking, in shades of red and orange moving from deepest blood and scarlet to palest peach. There are fronds, vermillion ones, leaflike expansions a meter across, stem and foliage in one. Other plants have tiny leaflets, striking orange, with white petaled, fragrant flowers.
The plants are lovely. I follow them. Too far away. And in a moment I realize I can't see anyone, cannot even hear their voices. The slurred commands of the idiot captain, the cool, intelligent responses that come from my Vulcan's mouth. I'm in a grotto, surrounded by molten colored foliage. I turn in all directions and find no way in or out, no inkling as to where I've come and no mark to point a passage back. I open my communicator and call to the landing party. There is no answer. I begin to feel the planet's exceptional heat, the temperature and the colors, completely lacking any cool tones, working together to create a sauna-like, dizzying oppression.
So, here I am.
I hear rustling in the thick leaves. I'm not going to weep, to be undignified in the face of the unknown. I stand wondering. Then I see him emerge from the trees and leaves, sauntering toward me. Smiling. Something is gravely different. He is not a man who fully smiles, ever. I back up, full of questions, tingling fear, desire.
"Communicators are malfunctioning." Fact, explanation, warning all at once. Underlying them all it's a simmering observation. His words give a simple report. His voice snakes out at me and tells me we are alone.
He offers me his hand as if to walk me back to safety, and I take it blithely, forgetting how he would never give his hand that way. With a painful snap he pulls me by my wrist. Pulls me to him and my face is even with his rock solid chest. He looks down at my eyes. After a thousand years of yearning and a love so deep it crushes, he is about to kiss me. My mind stumbles. My body liquefies. His temperature is extremely high, higher than I'd imagined. His arms encircle me, a crucible. Everything whirls together to become hotter than the planet and the flowers and the leaves and his height and lips and eyes and brilliance combined.
His mouth descends to touch mine.
For less than a second, and then he pulls away as if singed. I am aching for this to happen and tears spring fresh and burn my dry eyes. He looks at me, for permission, for inspiration, trying to decide? Suddenly he dips my head back, cradled in one huge hand, and his mouth opens wide and bites into a kiss. And I am swimming in his tongue, not rough like I thought it might be, but soft and wet and tasting of a red grotto.
**********************************
…