IMAGCASM

"Um..." My brain didn't want to work. But a thought popped into it anyway. It felt like my own thought - I didn't think Vicky or Expanded-lobe Me had put it there. How likely is it that a four-million-year-old telepathic alien hive-queen thinks as much like a human being as Vicky seems to?

"Exactly!" Margot said, ruffling my hair with a happy smile.

[I don't, Cale. I don't think anything like you at all - except for what you've taught me since we met. The moment I detected your brainwaves in the arena, I began compartmentalizing a tiny portion of my mind and structuring it to interact with you, so that we could comprehend one another.]

"So I haven't really been talking to you at all."

Concern replaced the smile on Margot's face, and flooded into me through Vicky's mental projections.

"No, that's not it at all," she said firmly.

[You've just been talking to a smaller part of me than you thought.]

"Right. Which makes me ..." A bug. An amoeba.

She put her arms around me and squeezed, pressing her bare, familiar, lovely breasts flush against me. "No -"

[[More like a mouse.]]

"Jesus, did the extra brainpower turn me into a total asshole?"

[[Dude, I'm just kidding. Sorry ... I'm kind of high right now.]]

Vicky's yellow hand reached around Margot to brush her fingers beneath my chin. [If you're a bug, Cale, then you're the bug who taught me to love. ]

Leaning Margot's head to one side, she fixed me in her glittery, purple, alien gaze. [Long, long ago, a species showed me how to care. Showed me the importance of others. But their beautiful wisdom did not call me into a passionate completion - it only made me feel I had to reduce myself to this single body and exile it to a world far away from all others. I have always been alone, never known partnership of any kind.]

"But, you said you absorbed everything from ... the species you took over. There wasn't any love anywhere in any of that?"

[Of course there was. But eating love is not the same as feeling it.]

"I was right there, Cale," said Margot. "I mean, when the larger me first sensed your thoughts. The next thing under your scared-shitless look around the arena was Margot, and how you loved her."

"Really? Because I would have thought the next thing was how pissed I was at her."

[Pain and anger are also emotions I have eaten. They are boring and easy to ignore, and they always come from something else, something more important than the hurt or the rage. Your anger at Margot and your love for her were the same thing, inseparable.]

Looking at the Margot face and unable to actually name how many emotions I felt to be seeing her again, I thought, She's got that right. Sadness, melancholy, wist, fury, jealousy, hunger, yearning, regret, guilt, and wanting and wanting and wanting her so much. The smile on her lips, rich and full, warmed something deep inside me. And at the same time, a pang jabbed into that warmth, because I knew the real Margot was dead.

"So what is this?" I asked, looking from Margot-Vicky to alien Vicky. "Why did you ... I mean, just, why?"

Margot ran a finger down my nose and poked it, something she delighted in doing almost every day - or had done, up until the last couple of months.

"You love me, don't you?"

"I don't know ... who's asking?"

"Don't think. Just answer."

I looked back and forth between their two faces again. Everything I'd ever felt for Margot stuck in my chest right then, and yet I felt just as much or more for Vicky.

"Yes. I love you both." It was true - absolutely true - and I realized that I'd been squeezing my emotions about Margot into a black hole, and that my emotions for Vicky had appeared almost like magic ... the moment she leapt on me and thrust her tail through my pants into my ass. My brow furrowed deeply. "You made me love you."

[Yes, and I made myself love you back. I absorbed what you felt for Margot, mapped its synaptic origins and gave the same thing to the two of us.]

"That would be really creepy if I wasn't so crazy about you."

[[Listen, Bro, let me tell you first-hand - how we love her and how she loves us isn't anything less real than how you loved Margot. Sure, she built it deliberately, maybe even mechanistically. But on a physiological, biochemical, neurological level, it's exactly the same.]]

"That still doesn't answer my question. Why?"

[Because after a million years alone, the first thing I touched, in the first brain I touched other than the repulsive minds of the Xh'stuk'tes'shei, was love. And I knew I wanted it, and I knew it would be my best chance at keeping hold of myself, once the Xh'stuk'tes'shei had been taken care of. Now that I have assured that outcome, I need to give you something, because loving is giving. So I give you Margot, my beloved Cale - the Margot you thought you knew, the perfect one who would be yours forever, not the Margot you actually knew who held so many things back from you. I give you back the love you believed in, the partner, the mate, the half that makes you whole.]

Wait - Vicky, please don't take away the way I feel about you.

[Of course not. That would be almost as impossible for me to consider as killing myself would be. I've made you mostly back into a human being, but with some nice improvements, and one of those is a permanent psychic like to me.]

"And I'm still Vicky too," said Margot. She moved her hands up and behind her head, fanning the air there. "Just without all the extra alien Vicky incomprehensibility."

[You'll be able to talk to me whenever you like, even from halfway across the galaxy.]

[[And me too. Say the word and I'll let you in on what it feels like to have steaming-hot brain-on-brain sex like Vicky and I are doing right now.]]

I laughed ... nervously. "You're joking, right?"

[[No, we're really fucking like weasels. You want to see?]]

The bizarreness of hearing my own voice inside my head didn't keep me from feeling the genuine self-love he/I put into the offer. "Uh, maybe not just yet."

Vicky's yellow, wedge-shaped face, split down the middle by its ridge, demon-horned, ancient and royal in its bottomless purple eyes, already seemed to be telling me the answer to my next question. But I had to ask anyway.

"You said 'halfway across the galaxy.' That wasn't just theoretical. Was it?"

[No. I'm mopping up the last of the Xh'stuk'tes'shei fleet in this system right now, and I've already launched my first seeding missions to other systems using some of the captured ships. War has begun. If the two of you stay, our feelings for each other will pull us into a ceaseless orgy of physical and mental connection. I made those feelings as powerful as I could, to last the thousands of years the fighting will consume.]

Margot poked my nose again. "Don't think I can't see that look. I don't even need to read your mind to know how good 'ceaseless orgy' sounded to you."

[And it sounds good to me, too. But it won't be a human activity. We'll end up merged into a single mind, and then the whole point of forming this partnership will be undone. So I'm going to give you a ship - a big one, to keep you safe, and a crew to run it - and send you on a long, wonderful tour of the galaxy beyond Xh'stuk'tes'shei space. We'll feel each other, know each other, trade understandings of the events in our lives. You'll see and show me the good in the universe while I'm getting rid of the bad.]

[[And in seven or eight thousand years, we'll get together again and have a nice year-long shag-fest!]]

"Okay," I said, shrugging and taking a heavy breath, still within Margot's embrace. "I guess I'll take that deal."

She kissed me, deep and long, her tongue in my mouth and then mine in hers. Both of us closed our eyes. No one said anything, thought anything. But on an almost subconscious level, I could feel Margot's response to the touch of my lips, the warmth of my body against hers. And I could sense Vicky and the other me responding as well. The soft circular tingle of Vicky's tube-mouth brushed along my throat - and then along Margot's, which I felt as well. The long yellow arms encircled us both, massaging, caressing. My very ordinary-sized penis got very hard very quickly.

[[Four way!]] lobe Cale exclaimed. Margot broke our kiss to laugh. I put my mouth to the muscular cylinder of Vicky's oral extension and sucked lightly at its curved side.

Moving her feet to a wider spacing, Margot parted her thighs, which let my cock spring up to rub her moistening slit. Then Vicky's tail curved under both of our crotches to brush the underside of my shaft, teasing my flesh with three or four unseen sex organs that she could extend from the tail's tip. She flicked back and forth along me, pressing me harder up against Margot's pussy lips. In turn, Margot rocked her hips lightly - forward as Vicky tickled back, then backward as Vicky slid along to nuzzle my root.

"[I want you in me,]" they said and thought.

Where?

"[I don't know!]" Laughing. "[I should have given you two cocks for this.]"

Looking Margot in the eyes, I reached down between us and took hold of the firm, bulbous curve of Vicky's tail, to glide my fingers and palms along it.

[Ooh. That's nice.]

"Is there a hole in this I can get all the way into?"

"The tip is pretty much a universal sex machine. It can go in or out in any shape you can think of."

"I'm thinking of soft and wet and deep."

[Done.]

With one hand still on the tail, I moved the other to guide myself toward its apex, never breaking from Margot's gaze.

"Why Vicky first?" she asked, smiling.

"Because you and I are going to be fucking each other for several thousand years, it sounds like. Seems only fair to give her a little priority while we've still got the chance. I assume you don't mind?"

"Haha, we'll all come when she does anyway."

[[Right! So get to it!]]

I pushed forward and in, lifting the curve of Vicky's tail as I went. She thrust herself up to meet and enfold me. It was like sliding into Aphrodite herself.

"Wow, Vicky."

[You haven't seen anything yet.]

The whole tail began vibrating.

Margot lowered herself to its curve and rode it, twat-to-tail, slicking its alien smoothness with her human lubrication and moaning. "Mmm-hmm."

I put my hands on her breasts - the breasts I thought I'd touched for the last time on the grass of Asherton Park less than a day before.

[[Holy shit, I love all of you!]]

[I'm going to come very fast, Cale,] Vicky said, slathering my rod with enormous thrusts of her caudal wonder-tool. [I'm already almost there.]

Well, but, I thought, not speaking because Margot and I had locked into a desperate lip-and-tongue kiss, don't you want it to last a little longer - our first time, all of us together?

[Cale - ah, yes - Cale, didn't I tell you I'd left you - some - hhimmmprovements? Keep doing that, keep doing that - when you come, it's up to you whether you stay hard or not. Here ... I'll show you ...AHH!]

Vicky's orgasm erupted in my mind, in Margot's mind, in my other mind, and I felt and heard all of us cry out in spasming ecstasy. The sodden, squeezing, intricately textured interior of her tail choked and rebounded from my shaft in wild oscillations, sending celestial flares of pleasure up to and through and out of her inhumanly powerful brain. If she hadn't held in the majority of those mental fireworks, I could tell that every neuron in my body, and in Margot-Vicky's as well, would have shorted out from the surging power.

[["VICKY!!"]] "[Cayyllle!]" "Margot - oh my god, Margot -"

The brain-climax hit me so hard I didn't even notice myself ejaculating until the first several gouts had throbbed out of me.

[Yes, Cale, put your human seed inside me.]

"God, Margot, she feels so good ..."

"I know!! Uhh! Uuaahh!!" Crushed between us, Margot twisted and writhed in a poly-orgasmic maxima that I'd never on Earth been able to give her.

I came and I came - and I didn't want to stop coming. And because I didn't want to stop, when I did finally stop (because Vicky finished her telepathic explosiongasm), I didn't soften or freeze from oversensitivity. If anything, I got even more rigid and hungry to keep fucking.

[[Yeah! That's the spirit! Let's go!]]

[Here.] Vicky pulled off of me, sliding exquisitely down my length as she went, then got her hands under Margot's still-trembling thighs and lifted and angled her human self toward me.

"Ohh," she breathed, "I don't know if I can take any more ..."

[You can. We can.]

I leaned in to kiss her, still poised for entry. Her eyes fluttered open. Vicky's face lowered to press cheek-to-cheek with her, one fat, lavender tendril uncoiling from the side of her head to drape around and down onto Margot's breast. They looked at me, my two-part woman, one face human and exhausted, one godlike and inexhaustible, and they smiled, with a single pair of lips and two interconnected minds that fed directly into my own.

Forward, sweetly and smoothly, I moved, pressing in, and up, joining with my mate and feeling, literally, king of the universe.