Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies. ~ Christopher Marlowe
How should they proceed? He's deluding himself if he thinks meditation will resolve anything at this point – not with his erect penis poking obscenely over the top of his underpants.
After a long moment she turns away, sits on the edge of the bed. Thoughtful. Dejected perhaps. Too much time has passed between her question and his response. She's giving up. She's going to leave—
Instead, the sound of her boot zippers unlocking their teeth.
His relief surprises him, suffuses him with a strange clarity. Perhaps surrender is the only logical way to proceed. If he is capable of it.
With gentle nudges she encourages him to unfold his legs, slide his body down to lie flat on the bed. He gives into a full body shudder as her hand wriggles down to untuck the full length of his erection.
"Oh," she says, voice unnervingly flat, "it's -it's green. Actually green."
"So is my blood."
"Yes, of course. Sorry. It's really lovely. I mean as far as erect penises go."
"Thank you?'
"Penis is such an unsexy word though. So is vagina. And clitoris." She frowns at the ugly-named penis. He fights an urge to cover it up. "I like the naughty words better." Frown is replaced by an expression he can't quite interpret. "I know the words for all the naughty bits in several languages. Including Vulcan."
Not surprising. Still, he feels he must correct a misapprehension. "We have words that name body parts. We do not ascribe personal qualities to body parts such as 'naughty' or 'sexy,' only those descriptors which might indicate variation or a medical condition—"
"Hush," she says. "Your language has sexy sexy words, Mr. Spock. Lok. Kotik. I love the way the hard consonants sit on the back of my tongue. Or the way the tip of my tongue rises for the sibilant in keshtan, then touches my teeth before the ur slips out – keshtan-ur. Mmmm, sexy. In Swahili the words are softer - uume - the sound my mouth makes around it. Kisimi – where I would like your tongue to be very very soon. But first-"
Her eyes seem all pupils now, fixed and focused on his erection, her breath coming soft and tremulous from O-shaped lips. He presses a palm to her forehead to stop the descent of her mouth. "Please…"
"Please stop? Or yes, please?"
Both. Neither. A sound somewhere between a groan of arousal and a groan of self-disgust leaves his throat.
"I desperately need to kiss something," she whispers.
And that is the key to his surrender. His hand falls away from her forehead and lies limp at his side. Not for long. Moments later he's gripping the sheets and scarcely a minute after that every naughty sexy word he's heard spent in the company of humans starts pouring out of his mouth. He can feel her laughter around his cock.
"You seemed a little concerned I might use my teeth."
"Concerned? Not precisely. Though I confess the thought was somewhat …titillating. But I had already calculated the risk at under 0.0001%."
For a moment she thinks it's sweet, but then— "Wait? Do you think I've performed fellatio ten thousand times?"
"As I could not presume regarding your level of expertise before you began, I based my calculations on several other factors related to human sexual behaviors, including an estimated average of encounters in a sexually active adult human over the course of twenty years."
"And you came up with ten thousand? Ten thousand blowjobs? That's one and a half per day!"
"One point three six nine based on your standard twenty four hour day. But the averages skew towards humans in their early twenties."
"How do you think we humans manage to get anything else done?"
"When I was at the Academy I often wondered."
"What are you doing down there?" She props up on her elbows, glaring down the length of her body between bent knees.
A lesser man would be terrified, he's certain. "I am determining how best to proceed."
She flops back again, knees splayed, mumbling, "I thought you could read minds?"
"If you would simply tell me what you want me to do, mind-reading would not be required. And, to be clear, I cannot read minds. And, also, I am currently nowhere near your mind!"
She lets out an aggrieved sigh. "Fine. Put two fingers in my vagina and move them around."
"Around? That seems—"
"In and out!"
Later, when she is spent, her legs still quaking around his ears, she kicks at him, realizing she never had to tell him what to do with his tongue. "So, you were being willfully obtuse."
His fingers glide up from her navel and over her left nipple sparking a trail of energy. The energy is produced in an area of his brain with no corresponding equivalent in hers, using neurons she doesn't have, transmitting information she cannot receive. Only the ghost of it on her skin. She imagines atoms all shook up by the drag of his finger, like dust motes in a ribbon of sunlight.
Mouths and tongues rove over fleshy landscapes, catch drops of perspiration before they slip down between buttocks, under a breast, behind an ear, in the hollow of a throat. She wants to feel him inside the nooks and crannies of her mind; knows the ways in which they are alien to each other would be painfully clear if he went in that way. She flings a leg across his thighs, symbolic entrapment. Her palm covers his navel. "I am formally inviting you into my keshtan-ur."
His stomach muscles tense. She moves her hand down to his sexual organ, brushing a thumb over the tip as it thickens and stands to attention. After a moment, he removes her hand and places it gently on her own thigh.
"This is the line we should not cross if there's any hope of our return to a professional relationship."
"I think that ship has left orbit, Mr. Spock."
"Perhaps. But consider this: we have been acting under the influence of something outside our control. Technically, neither of us can give informed consent. And though it's true we've done no harm to each other, and our experiences have been pleasurable, what if, when we have recovered our senses, we look upon these experiences as a violation, an assault? I would not want you to think I had been the instrument of your violation. Nor you, the instrument of mine."
She rolls away from him, onto her back, stares at the ceiling. She thinks about what a state her hair is in, and that her stomach is rumbling and that they are both in need of electrolytes. She's just starting to drift off when he says, "I've been considering your friend's hypothesis about our having witnessed something of significance in that alley."
"My friend?"
"Mr. Sabanci."
"He's hardly my friend. I met him the same time you did."
"You seemed … friendly towards him. But I sometimes misinterpret flirtatious behaviors."
"I was flattered, not flirting."
"It is of no consequence—"
"You're right. It isn't."
He cocks an eye at her, checking the level of her annoyance before continuing. "I have formulated a hypothesis regarding what we may or may not have witnessed in that alley—"
"Okay."
"—and if we actually kissed or have been made to believe it."
"Interesting. I've been pondering that as well. But my thoughts are we did kiss—"
"Interesting." He rolls to his side to look at her, bends an elbow and props his face in hand. "But why would we? You were arguing with me about the protesters."
She's momentarily stunned by the fact of him, naked, engaging with her intellect. She wonders if a person can overdose on oxytocin. "Maybe you were trying to shut me up."
"I could have simply ordered you to stand down."
"Why didn't you?"
"I did not disagree with your motives, Lieutenant, only that they should not be acted upon because of our positions as Starfleet officers."
They settle into silence and their own thoughts for a moment.
"We need to return to the scene of the crime," she declares.
"Hypothetical crime."
And the pedantry is back. She swings her legs to sit on the edge of the bed. Shudders when he presses his thumb into the dimple at the top of her ass, runs his hand up her spine.
"It is time to take our concerns to the captain now," he says. "I can speak for both of us if you're uneasy."
She grunts her acknowledgment, closes her eyes as his breath brushes across her hip. "Can you manage to be truthful without providing unnecessary details?" she asks him.
"I never provide unnecessary details." He gazes up at her, absolutely convinced of it. She returns his sincerity with a look of frank skepticism. He sits up. "Fine. Yes. I will manage the details with all due discretion. I would prefer not to share details as well, you understand."
Taking a deep breath, she slaps her knees decisively. "We're going to need to shower. Again."
She heads into his bathroom and he follows.
"Since we returned from Caishen Colony we have been experiencing unusual and… problematic behaviors that have only increased in intensity," Spock said. "I believe these behaviors are a direct result of what happened to us in the alley where we took refuge when the protest became violent."
They were gathered in a small staff room adjacent to McCoy's office that offered a round conference table, reasonably comfortable chairs that no one was sitting in, and a beverage dispenser where Kirk was currently stirring something pretending to be cream into his coffee. He made note of Spock's tone and stance, the eyes front and center, hands locked behind his back, wearing that extra-strength neutral expression which suggested these "problematic behaviors" were likely emotional in nature.
In contrast, Uhura was practically vibrating with nervous energy. Her makeup was unusually sparse, no earrings, and her hair, a kinky cloud pushed back from her forehead with a gold head band, glittered with errant beads of water as if she'd raced here straight from the shower. She was not at the wringing-of-hands stage, but had been compulsively flicking her fingernails with her thumbs. She caught him eyeing these twitchy movements and put her hands behind her back, a mirror to Spock's own stance.
"Any anxiety or irritability should be mostly gone by now." McCoy spoke to Spock, but his eye was also on Uhura. He ducked into his office to pull up the results of their recent scans. "The physician I spoke with assured me the after-effects were short-lived," he called out. "Maybe you got a higher dose? The tox screens don't indicate it, but I can speed up the detox process just in case. It'll mean staying in sickbay for a few hours."
"The difficulties are not limited to the symptoms we complained of earlier," Spock called back.
"Okay." McCoy came out of his office with a hand-held medical scanner and proceeded to wave it over Spock like a shaman with a sage bundle. "Have you been drinking lots of fluids like I said?"
"We've been having sex," Lt. Uhura blurted out. "We were fully horizontal twenty minutes ago."
The bleep of the scanner stopped, but she hardly noticed as more words tumbled out filling the ensuing silence.
"It started as soon as we left sickbay. I wanted to smack him so hard but also kiss him – hard. But we couldn't so – so we had to do something, something to alleviate the pressure. Not, not, you know, all-the-way main event wall-banging sex sex – Mr. Spock made a convincing argument for why we shouldn't, uh, consummate – but it's only a matter of time. We both know it. We've done everything else, I mean, everything – mouths, fingers, tongues, shower heads and all without kissing each other on the lips because for some reason – and we have no idea what it is – we aren't supposed to kiss on the lips. Even though we think we already did, and it's probably caught on surveillance camera, but maybe not because we don't remember who started it and it might not have happened at all? So clearly, clearly something or someone is screwing with our heads and our hormones and I'm about to start crying and that just pisses me off!"
She paused her agitated pacing to suck in a much-needed breath before the horrified realization struck and she clapped both hands over her mouth, leaned over and screamed into them.
Kirk and McCoy stood frozen on opposite sides of the room in matching states of agog. Spock, whose eyes squeezed shut when the word "sex" left her mouth, seemed fatalistically calm, awaiting Dr. McCoy's inevitable dance of schadenfreude.
"Holy shit," McCoy whispered. Which seemed all he could manage.
Kirk looked at Spock, stupefied. "You've only been back on the ship for six hours!"