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It wasn't long into our shared process of language learning that I noticed how deeply metaphorical Grace's language was. Often, I would learn a new English word, only to hear Grace use it in a completely different, figurative manner two sentences later, and there were multitudes of idiomatic phrases that referred metaphorically to circumstances on Earth that I had no knowledge of. Because I was quick to memorize sounds and concepts, Grace sometimes assumed I understood more than I did, and I was left puzzling over an expression like gear up or butterflies in my stomach or a needle in a haystack, even if I already knew what gears, butterflies, and needles were. (I was still uncertain about the haystack). Grace would offer me a highfive, a social bonding gesture that we liked to share, and then tell me we're killing it, buddy, and I would be taken aback for a moment before remembering that it was yet another figure of speech, albeit a particularly violent one. And so it went, the occasional fragment of language, casually deployed by Grace, shocking my senses into stillness.
Some metaphors came with a whole suite of expressions: I learned early on that humans, or English speakers, or maybe just Grace? used eating as a metaphor to represent thought, which was absolutely grisly. I think Grace even noticed my apprehension at these particular phrases, because they stopped saying let's chew it over and it'll take me some time to digest that quite as often. And the less said about the apparently normal but absolutely disgusting phrase by the skin of our teeth, the better, even if Grace did feel it represented how narrowly we had escaped death over planet Adrian.
Some of Grace's metaphors made sense to me; chill out was actually one that we had in common, though I wasn't sure why humans would use a metaphor of being cold to discuss relaxation, when they craved warmth in their sleep. For Eridians, chilling out literally meant cooling down to get ready for sleep, and so we sometimes used a phrase like that to refer to the quiet, soothing activities that people liked to do before they began a sleep cycle. But Grace had multiple figurative uses for the words hot, cold, warm, and cool, some of which still eluded me months after I had first heard them.
What took me longer to understand was that it wasn't just Grace's language that was metaphorical. Or, to put it another way, that Grace's language wasn't metaphorical for no reason. It reflected the workings of their mind. Grace thought in metaphors, in comparative structures, in a kind of pattern recognition that was bizarre and, well, alien, to me. We would be talking about one problem, like how to collect a sample of the astrophage from Tau Ceti, and Grace would suddenly snap their fingers—one of my favorite sounds that they could make, so sharp and so fleshy at the same time—and say it's just like . . . before going off on an extended description of a simple machine, a human social behavior, a weather phenomenon, or an Earth animal that they would somehow, eventually, make relevant to the issue at hand. It's like fishing, Grace would say, and then show me images of fishing so I could understand the metaphor; and then, through the metaphor, Grace would ask some insightful question, like how do we reel the fish back in when the chain won't respool like fishing line would? or how can we create tempting bait for microorganisms inside the collector? It was clear that Grace didn't speak this way solely out of habit or linguistic convenience: Grace thought this way, at a fundamental level, borrowing meaning and insight from anything and everything to construct their mental models. Sometimes, it meant that their models were flawed, distorted by the comparison, but often, it lent them a kind of creative insight that I found astonishing and perceptive, if sometimes annoying and hard to follow.
They couldn't do complex math in their head if their life depended on it, which it frequently did, but oh, they could do this, this thinking that scrambled meaning so thoroughly that it could make something truly impossible become real. The more I observed these patterns, the more fascinated I was.
We had metaphor on Erid, of course. It wasn't that we didn't compare things to other things. But it was a mode of thought more often reserved for poetry and songs; it wasn't part of the scientific method as we had developed it. When Grace first explained relativity to me, they began by saying, imagine a flat rubber sheet, a fabric that's strong but flexible, and that image so filled my mind that everything they said afterwards, as impossible and ridiculous as it seemed, made sense within that context. The fabric is spacetime, and spacetime bends when mass is introduced. No Eridian would ever explain an advanced scientific concept in such terms, but when Grace did it, it made sense. They somehow sang science through poetry, and it was beautiful.
In retrospect, it gave me some appreciation for the two days we spent, back when we first met, learning the words "like" and "similar" and their use in comparative structures. At the time, I'd felt annoyed and impatient as Grace brought object after object into the tunnel to explain how the objects were like one another. But later, I understood that Grace had been, whether they knew it or not, teaching me something essential to their cognitive processes. To understanding them, their mind, their core.
"Grace is like Rocky," Grace told me, on the second of those two days, as one of dozens of examples. "Grace and Rocky are alike. Both alive, both think, both move, both alone in space."
Learning both had been a three-hour digression the day before, and Grace seemed determined to use it.
"Rocky like Grace," I said, to show my understanding. "Both made of water and carbon."
"You don't have to rub it in," Grace said, which was another metaphor that I didn't understand, and that was gross once I understood it later.
We'd spent some time on the difference between be like, as in Rocky is like Grace, and like as its own verb, to mean enjoying or having an affinity for something, as in Rocky likes Grace. We had ended that conversation warmly, to use one of Grace's temperature metaphors, when Grace told me Grace is like Rocky, and also Grace likes Rocky, and I trilled back that I liked them too, and we just sort of stood there together dopily in the tunnel, Grace smiling, me cooing, both of us happy to be in like with one another.
And I did, I liked them, and I was fascinated by them. If we didn't have an interstellar mass extinction event to prevent, I would've been happy to just talk to Grace for years on end, learning more and more about their world, their species, their culture, exploring the exciting and unexpected patterns of their thoughts.
But the mass extinction prevention came first, so I tried not to get distracted, and instead did my best to acclimate to Grace's expressions and ways of thinking. We were both motivated, and intelligent, and gregarious, and we made a good team, with Grace having their weird metaphorical ideas and me engineering them into being.
We saved our planets, we separated, we came together again, and then we found ourselves on a long journey together back to my home planet. Sometime in there, as well, I found myself long past liking them, all the way to being in love with them. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, that love, but when I was lost in despair and self-recrimination, my ship breaking down and my body injured, when Grace showed up to save me, I knew then that I loved them, that I craved being with them above all else, that I would do anything to spend my life with them. It was a crystallization of a long process, but I could only identify its culmination, not its beginnings.
I was grateful for the taumoeba leak that had almost killed me, almost doomed my planet. It was a shameful thought, but it was mine, and I knew it came from the part of me that loved Grace so fiercely that I would walk through a freezing almost-vacuum with my blood boiling inside of me, just to save their life. It was the part of me that was fearless, now, on their behalf, despite all the years I had spent alone and feeling nothing but fear. It was the part of me irrevocably changed by our connection.
We spent the first two weeks after our reunion as close as we could get to one another, pressed together on either side of the xenonite barrier, whether it was the tunnel wall or the sphere. We had Earth hugs and Erid fingertaps, and we touched through the flexible panel, exploring each other's fingers and hands, or sometimes just weaving our hands together and holding them that way. It was apparently a common human way of expressing affection, and I found that I liked it, even though it would be considered inappropriate on Erid, at least in public.
It was the opposite of a surprise, the first time Grace kissed my hand with their lips, touching their soft wet mouth to my body. It was the natural progression of what we already had. I knew how much Grace wanted to experience my body that way, sensually, even sexually. I knew because I wanted the same, some impossible mixture of curiosity, and need, and disgust, and pure, blood-pumping love. Grace had been the brave one, the one who made the first bold gesture with that slow, gentle kiss, but it was what we had both been yearning for, on either side of the xenonite, why we had been pressing our hands and bodies together, why we had been holding each other, thrumming with each other. It wasn't a surprise, but it was still a shock, to feel their hole rubbing against my body, to know with crystallizing certainty that something powerful was about to happen between us. That something was just on the point of changing, and the way we felt for each other could now be expressed physically.
"Do you—is this something you want?" Grace asked, as if I hadn't pressed my fingers eagerly against their wet lips, slipped them into their gaping orifice.
"Sex," I said, simply, scratching my fingertips against Grace's yielding flesh. "Yes." Desperately.
It was, like all things between us, a process of trial and error, miscommunication and startling insight, joy and failure. Even the failures were a source of joy, as we learned more about each other, about what would bring pleasure, what would bring pain or discomfort, what we wanted from one another. Our species' sex practices were . . . not the same. But Grace could tap me, and I could stroke them, and in the end, we were similar in this way too, or similar enough. Grace's orgasms were amazing, both in their similarity to my own resonating peaks and in their differences, but when we had stroked and opened and rubbed and entered and knocked each other, we were both left wet: leaking and disgusting and satisfied. Grace is like Rocky, I thought, wonderingly, after our first time having sex together. Grace and Rocky are alike.
But I noticed that Grace was much quieter than usual, during sex. They would say my name, or say please in that quiet voice that barely used their vocal cords, or sometimes they would try to communicate a need without using any nouns: please, Rocky, can you—I want—please touch my—I need—yes, yes, oh god, in my, please, yes, but they seemed to be unable to use either their scientific precision or their more usual poetic language to describe our activities.
I found myself . . . wanting. Compensating. Becoming poetic myself.
"Grace so wet, so soft, like cloud, like rain," I said, two of my fingers buried in their excretion hole, rubbing a gland that apparently gave a lot of pleasure. The texture inside their hole was truly fascinating, folded and wrinkled but tender and yielding. "Meat so pretty here. Like sea-creature meat."
Grace groaned, but didn't speak; they were face down on a mattress on the floor, balanced on their knees and elbows with their legs spread, their hole presented towards the flexible panel of the xenonite ball between us.
"Grace like?" I asked, to try to prompt some words from them.
"Grace like, god, Grace like," they said, which was encouraging. "I feel like sea-creature meat?"
"Delicious," I said, though I couldn't taste Grace through the xenonite. "Tender. Delicacy."
Grace groaned again. "Why is that hot," they said, without the upwards inflection that made statements into questions. I had learned, very quickly, that hot could mean sexually arousing.
I was excited by the metaphor, and wanted more, more of their poetry, more of their thoughts. "Grace say what it feels like."
"Feels . . . feels like, I don't know. Full. Your fingers are so thick. The pressure feels really . . . really good."
We knew a lot more adjectives together by then other than good, but it was what we tended to use most often. Right then, it felt annoyingly imprecise. I curled my fingers and stroked their gland more directly, a little more forcefully, and they cried out, muscles clenching, fingers clawing at the blanket beneath them.
"What this feel like?"
Grace breathed in and out a few times. I kept stroking the gland, watching them twitch and spasm beneath me. Their body was so strange, so easily affected by stimuli. Like a puppet I could manipulate.
"Feels, feels . . . electric. Like you're lighting me up from inside. Sparks, traveling all the way down my, my nerves, god. God. Please."
The light metaphor took me by surprise, but I was getting used to the way Grace associated light with good things—joy, happiness, safety. The electricity metaphor was much more startling. But then, of course, with Grace's high level of conductivity, they would think of their body in terms of electric pathways. I loved the idea.
"Electric feeling?" I prompted, wanting more. I fucked them slow, and steady, and relentless. I had found that they liked this kind of rhythm, the kind that felt like it would never stop or change.
"Yeah, um." They breathed again, involuntary moaning sounds coming out of their mouth with their saliva, drooling down onto the mattress. "Warm. Buzzing. Shooting up my limbs. Fuck. Like I'm on fire, like you're all over my body, like your touch is, is everywhere, fuck, Rocky, I can't, I can't—"
I shivered with delight. To be all over their body, even in metaphor, was a potent thought. For them to feel me, everywhere, all over their sensitive skin-organ. They were squirming on my fingers, now, shifting their hips against the mattress, groaning in pain or pleasure or both. They had already orgasmed twice within the last ninety-four minutes, and I had been fucking their orifice for quite a while, since the last time they came.
"Overstimulated?" This was a thing that could happen to humans very easily, undoubtedly because of all the stimulation that their bodies let them feel all the time on every single surface. It could be good or bad, to be overstimulated; I hadn't quite figured out how to make it good on purpose.
"Yeah," Grace breathed, but pushed back against my fingers. The good kind, this time, then. "Keep going."
"Keep talking," I demanded, feeling too obvious, too needy, but saying it anyway. "Say what you feel."
"God. Um. Okay."
I maneuvered another arm against the flexible panel, grabbing and squeezing the ample flesh of their ass, pulling it aside to expose more of their hole to my hearing, to let my fingers push in just a little deeper. They squealed like an Eridian.
"Say."
"You're fucking me so good, Rocky. So good. God. I can't think—you're fucking my brains out, jesus, fucking me stupid, you're like a fucking jackhammer, just, just, powerful, and hard, and god, the—the way you do it to me, the way you do it to me, I love it, like I'm a machine you can engineer to, to—"
They cried out again as I lost my rhythm and fucked them faster, sloppier. My seam was beginning to vibrate and twitch without any taps or knocks, without any resonance, just from the ideas, from Grace's wild and impossible ideas.
"Machine for Rocky to fix," I agreed, shocked and delighted by that image. "Machine not need to think, machine just let Rocky fix, feel so good good good after maintenance all done—"
Grace's third orgasm was long, at least seven seconds longer than average, and they shook all through it, like a machine whose gears were coming apart, vocalizing helplessly, their sex organ dribbling slowly with the last of their semen. I had wrung them out, like fabric, squeezed all of the pleasure from their body.
I fucked them through it, until they waved a hand back towards me, a signal to stop. Their comedown period was very, very short, I had learned. I pulled out of them, sad to lose the sound of their squishing intestines as the contact between us broke.
Grace collapsed down onto their chest and was still for a while, heart racing and breath coming fast, skin twitching in places, but otherwise unmoving. I was incredibly aware of my seam, already beading with slick, aware of the urge to open and finger myself as I had just fingered Grace. I even thought about using the same fingers to do it, as if I could transfer something from their body to mine. But I had never done that in front of them before, and I didn't even know how I was so ready to open without a single tap or note on my carapace.
"Gimme a minute," Grace said, words muffled where their mouth was pressed to the blanket below them.
"Fucked your brains out," I said, shifting from foot to foot as the ache of my seam intensified, still thinking about that metaphor. About fucking Grace so hard and so completely that their brain meat came out their ears. It was grotesque, but strangely appealing. I liked the idea of stopping them from thinking, turning them into a creature of pure sensation.
"You really did, buddy." Grace continued to twitch for a few minutes. I stood, hesitant, wishing, yearning, unsure why I was feeling this so intensely. When Grace finally pushed themselves up enough to roll over and sense me with their eyes, they stared for a long moment.
"You're leaking," they said, which was such an obscene utterance in my language that I would have to use a special, and very rude, verb to communicate the idea at all. Grace said it easily.
"Yes. Grace," I whined, my vents clattering. "Please."
Grace was used to us taking turns, and to me not feeling much arousal until they actually touched me, so this situation, my neediness, was unprecedented. But they only took a second or two before coming up on their knees and shuffling towards me, grasping my hands through the flexible panel.
"Hey, hey, come here," they said, squeezing my fingers. Just that touch soothed something in me, made my ache lessen and my seam begin to release. "What's got you so turned on, huh?"
Turned on, like a machine, like I was the machine now, for them to fix. I wanted so badly for them to fix me, tune me, operate me.
Grace was still covered in their fluids, their movements slow and sore. Normally, after their orgasm(s), they would take some time to clean up and even sleep; normally, I would be content to wait for them. Upon waking, they would touch me, make me resonate, and then watch me if I wanted to sleep, too. But they seemed to understand my need, this time, and didn't mention their own comfort or exhaustion, just started stroking my fingers. I imagined that touch the way Grace had described it, like an electric sensation, like strong voltage moving up my fingers and into my body, shocking and zapping my insides. I could almost feel it, the idea was so visceral.
"You," I answered, honestly. "You turn me on. Make me leak on myself." That verb was even more obscene in the reflexive.
"Oh, oh, Rocky," Grace said, in a soft, sweet voice. They were always so moved by my desire for them, as if it was new every time. "What do you need?"
"Mouth on hole. Fingers in ovipositor." That was usually how Grace got me to resonate; it was a bit hands-on for Eridians, but it worked. Grace nodded, accepting this request. But I felt strange, greedy, out of control, and so I asked for more. "And talk. You tell how you feel, I tell how you make me feel."
"Hard to talk while I'm eating you out," they said, smiling. That particular metaphor always made me shudder, and now was no exception. Humans used eating as a metaphor for everything, and I would have found it disgusting if I didn't want it so badly. I wished, desperately, that Grace could eat my fluids, lick them out of my hole like food, and even the thought of it always rang me like a bell. I imagined it, their tongue covered in mercury, the subtle viscosity of it coating their mouth, their face.
"Please," I said, again, still twitching, still vibrating, my hole still wanting to open.
"C'mere, then," they said, their tone amused. "I'll . . . yeah. I'll talk to you, bud."
I maneuvered around, getting onto the wire apparatus I had designed for this purpose. It was like my sleeping rack, but in a different configuration: it held my body up so that I could press my hole right against the flexible panel, and so that Grace could bend at a comfortable angle to eat me out.
"That thing is so hot," Grace said, quietly, as I got myself into it.
"Why?" I asked, as I shoved my leaking orifice into the panel. I had no shame about this, anymore, not with Grace.
"Mmm," Grace said, bending over to hug the ball, pushing their face against my hole, closing their eyes. They loved to touch things with their face, but they seemed to take such special pleasure in sensing my hole with their cheeks, their nose, their lips. "I guess . . . it's hot because you can't move. You're immobilized. I get to take care of you."
I was struck, rung, knocked by this expression. I had never thought of my little wire stool in those terms, as representing something abstract about how Grace and I could feel about each other. I had only thought of it as a tool to ease our physical positions.
Grace shoved their tongue against me, licking me right where I had learned I liked it, around the edges where my hole met my carapace, along the lines of my seam, pushing into me, moving my fluids around with slow, passionate swipes of that wet, muscly organ.
"I love this," Grace said, quietly, against me. It had been obvious to me many times that they enjoyed the act, what they called oral sex, but they had never said so. I twitched, hard, under their tongue.
"Love to take care of Rocky?" I hummed, quiet, unsure, but wanting. I could almost imagine my want the way Grace had described it, like being on fire, like my whole body could somehow burn with desire. I wanted their wet words, and their cool touch, to assauge the flames, and every moment without them was exquisite, aching.
"Yeah. Oh yeah." They licked, and kissed with their plush lips, and scraped their teeth against me. I shuddered. "I love it. Let me take care of you. Just like this. When you're all propped up and ready for me to give you what you need."
They had never spoken so much during sex before. I imagined that I had set something loose, by asking them for this. I imagined their words as a river, flowing freely, rushing from their mouth. I had asked for this, and Grace, who was normally so shy, was doing it just because they wanted to please me.
"Always give me what I need," I said, more fluid dribbling from my seam, onto their tongue. "Always, always."
"Yeah," Grace sighed, nuzzling their face against me again. "Always." And they licked, and kissed, and made soft vibrating throat-sounds, until my hole was fully open, wet and gushing as my ovipositor slipped out.
Grace tongued it a few times, licking into and around its tip, an odd, slippery feeling that I liked more in theory than in practice, but it thrilled me to hear them with their eyes closed, fully dedicated to the sensation of their tongue pushing inside my organ.
"Grace, Grace, fingers, please," I said, because I wanted something harder, rougher, more forceful than their tongue.
"Yeah, I got you, I got you," Grace said, pulling back and taking my ovipositor in their hand, sliding three fingers into the hole at my tip and stretching me wide. I felt my resonance begin to build, the feeling propagating within me, peaking and falling, peaking and falling, but each peak a little louder, a little bigger than the last.
"Talk talk talk," I demanded, again, wanting to know how Grace thought about this, how Grace conceptualized this intimacy.
"God. Rocky. Okay." They licked their lips, took a breath. My hearts beat faster, watching them be brave because I asked them to. "You're so beautiful like this, the way you shake for me." They started running their other hand up and down on the outside of my organ, squeezing, massaging, while their fingers spread me wide at the tip. The combination of sensations was enough to make me claw at the hard panels of xenonite, scrabbling for purchase. No one but Grace had ever touched me like this.
"For you, yes. Touch me so good, make me full," I managed, squeaking at the upper end of Grace's range of hearing. They bent forward and kissed the ball.
"I'll fill you up, baby," Grace said, breath still coming fast, fingers thrusting into me, curling and stroking. "Give you what you need."
My resonance synthesized then, a single note holding inside of me, rattling my body. I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. "More more more," I pleaded, helpless, lost in the pleasure of it, the sheer obscenity of it.
"You're so good for me like this. Let me fuck you, baby, let me, let me fuck your tight little hole and jerk you off and make you come—"
"Rocky is baby," I squealed, shuddering against Grace's fingers. It was weird, it was so weird, and it was all I could think about, the idea filling my mind and plucking me like a string, helpless, vibrating. Grace taking care of me like a parent. "Rocky your good baby."
Grace squeezed me, hard, fingers stilling inside me, just for a second or two, before they moved again. "My good baby," they say, after a moment, voice strained. They kissed the ball again, and again, as if helpless with emotion. "Gonna take care of you. Give you what you need."
The resonance crested, carrying me on its waves, overwhelming my thinking mind for long, blissful seconds as my eggs descended, stretching my hole and spilling all over Grace's fingers in a gush.
"Say again, again, again," I demanded, as Grace stroked my ovipositor through the long, slow comedown. The resonance took almost as much time to dissipate as it did to build, and felt almost as good.
"Baby," Grace said, softly now. "Baby, baby, you're so good like this, so sweet. You feel good?"
"Good good good," I hummed, squeezing myself around Grace's fingers. They kept stroking me, and running their fingers around my sensitive tip, and kissing the ball, until all the waves of pleasure faded away.
"Stop now?" they asked.
"Yes, good good."
I retracted back into myself, my hole closing quickly once my ovipositor was back inside.
"Um. We should possibly talk. About that." Grace sounded nervous.
"Grace extremely kinky," I said, because no one had ever said such a filthy thing to me in my life. "Is okay. I like. Would do again."
"I am not—okay, look, let's table that question for now. What I need you to understand is that it's pretty . . . normal? On Earth? To use that nickname for a, um. Sexual partner."
I stilled, absorbing this. "Grace make joke?"
"Not even a little."
"All Earth sex partners call each other children? Baby?" Some English words had multiple meanings, but this one seemed excessive.
"Not, not all? But in my culture, yeah, pretty normal. It's not—it's not about children." Grace grimaced. "It's not about thinking your partner is an, an actual baby. It's a metaphor."
I climbed, laboriously, down off of my little wire stool. Grace had thought that stool was a metaphor, too, for my trust in them. I wondered if the baby thing was similar.
"Metaphor how?"
"Well, I guess it's like . . . it means I like looking after you, like I said. And that you can trust me to be good and gentle to you, to never hurt you." Grace swallowed. They didn't normally talk like this, and I thought again of the river, flowing freely, because I had asked Grace to share it. I wondered if they had been holding back their words this whole time.
"Trust so deep, Rocky helpless like baby, but safe," I said, trying to get my mind to absorb it.
"Yeah." Grace shuffled closer. They were still naked, and caked in dried fluids, with tears building up under their eyes. I had never known them to be so vulnerable. Baby, I thought, full of wonder as the idea unfolded inside of me. Their hand came up to brush against the flexible xenonite, and I raised a hand to meet them.
"I like," I said. "Like to be helpless, be cared for. Still very kinky. But I accept. I like to be your baby in this way."
"Um, okay," Grace said, with a little laugh. "I like that too. It's nice when you let me take care of you. Makes me feel good."
"You be Rocky's baby too? Or only one way?"
"We can do both," Grace said. "Yeah. I'd like that."
"Come here, Rocky's baby. Give kiss."
Grace's blood went rushing to their face and chest, which Grace had told me was a sign of profound embarrassment, but which I had mostly observed to be a sign of Grace liking something so much they felt overwhelmed by it. It was a beautiful thing to hear, that movement of their blood, that signal of their need. Grace bent down and pushed their face against the ball, and I touched their lips with my finger, slowly, gently. The tissues here, I could feel, were swollen with fluid, a reaction Grace experienced sometimes when they kissed my hole like they had today. Their lips plumped up where they had been in extended contact with my hard, rough exterior.
"Love you," I hummed, happily, as I trailed my claw over their thick, fat lips, sensing the fluid within. "Good baby."
Grace opened their eyes, pressing their lips hard against my finger, once, before pulling back. They made a little smacking sound as they did it, wet and happy.
"That's the other thing, I guess," they said, their eyes pointed at me. "Unconditional love. That's the other thing that baby means. Um. Sometimes."
"Unconditional," I repeated, putting together the semantic prefix and the derivational suffix with my understanding of the word condition. "Without limits?"
"Without limits. Forever," Grace said, and the tears that had been threatening spilled down their face. "I love you forever."
"Yes," I replied, stroking their hair. "Baby."
"Baby," Grace said back, sighing, and already, the idea felt perfectly natural.