Chapter 60

Valerie pushed the ribbed fabric of Lucca’s tank top up their torso, her fingers trailing lightly along the revealed skin. She undressed Lucca like she was unwrapping a gift; unveiling a sculpture.

Valerie had only ever seen the fringes of Lucca’s tattoos, abstract splotches of line-less purple and pink scattered across their left shoulder. The designs were intriguing but unidentifiable out of context; and the full piece was nothing like she imagined, a stylized spiral galaxy occupying perhaps a quarter of the front of their chest and torso; a significant amount.

The art, the galaxy, was more beautiful than she expected; an oblong spiral, viewed at an angle, a false color artistic rendering of one of the billions of star clusters that existed far beyond the edge of the milky way, which science can only barely image and speculate about.

The lowest point of the tattoo was still hidden from view; it started somewhere around their right hip, and the work mainly rose diagonally across their body, curving up over their left shoulder. Closer to the center, impressionist swirls of colorful gas clouds shared space with white-inked knots of stars. Approaching the center of the piece, the interstices gradually darkened with stippled grey until, eventually, a finely-detailed blue and teal accretion disc swirled around a black hole over their heart.

The outermost edges of the tattoo degraded into fine-line whorls that evoked the chaotic eddies of nebulae, thinning and fading out as they swirled down their arms; the abstract lines that had so tantalized Valerie.

With a small laugh, Lucca bent forward slightly so that Valerie could reach to pull the tank top off their upper body. They stripped out of their shorts and underwear themselves, and stepped back so that Valerie could admire their body art in full.

Valerie stepped closer, reaching a hand out to touch the ink-darkened skin at Lucca’s breastbone. She paused, an inch away, and looked up at them with a hint of nervousness, asking silently for permission. They nodded in assent and she trailed her fingers across their skin. She could feel their heartbeat under her fingertips.

“I always wondered if the skin would feel different,” she said, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

“You don’t have any tattoos,” Lucca offered in reply.

It might have been a question, but Valerie knew Lucca had had ample opportunity to observe her lack of them. She nodded in agreement.

“I would, but… I don’t know. The cost? I was never close with anyone that had them. I guess I didn’t think they were really for me, you know?”

“What would you get?”

Valerie took a small step back, withdrawing her hand. She looked at the swirls of ink that swept across Lucca’s torso.

“Something… important. Meaningful. I don’t know. Not just decorative. Is yours…?”

“It reminds me of how small I am.”

Valerie laughed involuntarily, and reflexively covered her mouth.

“What?” Lucca shot back, amused.

“No, I mean, I kinda get it. Just, you’re not…” Valerie gestured vaguely at them; they stood about a foot taller than her and outweighed her by something like a hundred pounds, maybe more.

“We’re all small,” Lucca replied softly. “And our lives are so short. Tiny little flickers of pain and struggle in a universe that is almost entirely nothing, even now; and will be completely empty for most of eternity.”

“So… what, then?”

“So I try to make the best of things, and not get too big of a head about it. If this were our galaxy, then our entire planet and everyone and everything we know wouldn’t even be a single speck.”

They stepped forward, sliding one hand along her flank and around the small of her back. The other hand gently tipped her face up toward theirs.

“I think that’s enough philosophy for one morning,” Lucca declared.

They kissed her, hungry and tender.

The intensity of the kiss and of their skin-to-skin contact was too much for Valerie; she melted into their arms and by the time Lucca pulled away, she was panting, and thinking of much more immediate things than her role in the universe.

She might have collapsed to the ground if their hands had not stayed on her; not exactly supporting her, but showing her body where it was meant to be, to stand.

“Fuck,” she whispered, between breaths.

Lucca ministered to her gently; they invited her to the bed, and ran their fingertips along her body, exploring to find all of the little spots that made her shiver or gasp, or tickled enough to make her laugh.

“May I?” They asked, running the pad of an index finger along the curve of her breast.

“Yes,” she whispered back, nodding.

She was eager for their touch; she suspected she would say yes to anything they asked, but their asking felt genuine, important, and meaningful. Sex with Heather had always been awkward, fumbling, and eventually rote. Dana, she realized, had never asked, even once; she had only ever taken, not least of all during their terrifying first meeting.

Over the course of hours, Lucca fulfilled their promise, or at least the first half of it. Their fingers stroked, squeezed, and gently stimulated the sensitive parts of Valerie they found; and soon Lucca’s mouth joined the exercise.

By the time Lucca’s tongue found Valerie’s achingly swollen glans, she was already shaking, gasping for air, and emitting soft whimpering moans. After days of relentlessly climbing libido and the whatever uncountable amount of time Lucca had spent engaged in foreplay, Valerie’s mind felt like a guitar string stretched to its limit, vibrating and on the verge of shattering.

With what little breath she could spare, she tried to beg; though she was unsure what she begged for. It was all she could to do simply express her need and desperation. Her words manifested as nothing more that fragmented whispers; a stray Please or Lucca uttered in a way that was much more a moan than it was legible speech.

If Lucca even heard her trying to speak, they gave no sign.

When they finally ran the tip of their tongue up along the underside of her shaft, collecting the droplets of salty sweet pre-cum, the stimulation was all she needed to crash over the edge. Her breath fled her longs as a strangled half-moan, half-scream. She arched her back away from the bed, hands scrabbling for purchase on the already-tangled bedsheets.

Lucca did not relent; they licked Valerie clean almost dispassionately, easily holding her hips firmly in place while the rest of her thrashed uncontrollably. Their pace was measured, gently exploring her curves and crevices without apparent mission; but Valerie rose inexorably toward a second orgasm, with no opportunity to rest or recover her breath.

Lucca’s plan diverged only because, after the third consciousness-obliterating orgasm, Valerie wanted nothing more than for Lucca to keep going.

The sensations were intense and her body was tired and her muscles beginning to ache; the thrashing and shaking took a toll that even her runner’s endurance was ill-equipped to sustain. For all that, if she were capable of begging, she would have begged for more.

Lucca finally let her rest; they crawled forward and held her trembling form while the aftershocks subsided. Valerie drank water from a bottle that Lucca had to hold for her, but she still managed to spill as much down her cheek and neck as she was able to swallow.

Valerie’s breathing was calmer, though not fully returned to normal, when Lucca’s questing fingers resumed their mapping of the contours of her body. She whimpered pleadingly, though Valerie herself was unsure whether she wanted Lucca to stop or to keep going. The exhausted part of her begged for rest, but her desperate need for more tenderness, closeness, and pleasure showed no signs of abating.

Lucca did keep their promise, despite their failure to make her beg. The sixth orgasm left her insensate; she collapsed back on the bed. It felt appropriate that the sheets were dampened with her sweat; she felt like a ragged and threadbare towel that had been wrung out beyond the fibers’ ability to recover.

Lucca worked their jaw from side to side with one hand, stretching sore tendons and tired muscles.

“More?” they asked.

Valerie stared at the ceiling, barely able to uncross her eyes enough to focus on the light and fan installed there. She made some sounds that might have been adjacent to the idea of speech, which elicited another involuntary aftershock of moaning and twitching.

She wanted to say yes, but she could not remember how to turn ideas into spoken words. She managed a gesture that resembled a nod closely enough that Lucca laughed, amused.

“If you can’t even say the word, I’m gonna take that as a no. Besides, my jaw could use a rest.”

Valerie did not have the wherewithal to argue. She melted back into the bed, letting her muscles relax and all of the tension flow out from her body. After goddess knew how long spent shaking and moaning, the sheer pleasure of relaxation was enough to bring about another aftershock, a flash of lightning whiting out her conscious mind for a split second.

She felt a kind of calmness and bliss that had been exceedingly rare in her life; she refused to engage too much with the idea that it would remain out of reach for the foreseeable future.

Those thoughts would have their own time, inevitably.

Lucca held her until she had recovered most of her faculties. She was not sure how much time had passed; daylight still sliced through the gap in Lucca’s bedroom window curtain, but the angle was low enough that she knew evening was just around the corner.

“We still need groceries,” Lucca told her, with a note of regret as they extracted themselves from Big Spoon position. “We can grab dinner while we’re out and save cooking for the rest of the week, though.”