Amore

Day 800 of 909.

You’d stopped counting the days somewhere around the five-hundred mark — or tried to, anyway. The habit stuck regardless, a quiet ritual every morning when you pulled up the ship’s log and let the number settle in your chest like a stone dropping into still water. 800. Just over a hundred days left before you’d either make history or become a very expensive cautionary tale.

The Ardent Pioneer hummed around you, a sound so constant it had long since stopped being a sound at all and become something closer to a heartbeat. Out here, in the stretch of nothing between where humanity had been and where it was desperately trying to go, the ship was less a vessel and more a world — the only one that mattered until landfall.

And the people in it? They were the only ones who mattered, full stop.

You’d been briefed on each of them before departure, read their files the way you’d read a technical manual: efficiently and without sentiment. That felt almost embarrassing now. Choi Yewon — Arin, as she’d corrected you within about forty-five minutes of introduction, in that flat, no-argument tone that you’d since learned was just how her voice worked — had gone from Military Officer & Botanist, decorated to something harder to categorize. A pain in your side, sometimes. Your most reliable sparring partner. The only person on the ship who could beat you at chess and had the grace to gloat about it only a little.

Captain Cho Haseul kept the mission alive through sheer competence and the occasional well-timed joke that she delivered so deadpan that half the crew never laughed until thirty seconds later. Sakura Miyawaki, the second-in-command and resident biologist, approached every problem with the same calm focus she gave to cataloguing microorganisms, which was either deeply reassuring or slightly unnerving depending on the day. Kim Jeewon could make a satisfying meal from nutrient paste and improvised spicing and had once, memorably, synthesized a compound in the lab that she swore was purely for culinary purposes and which Doc had eyed with professional suspicion for a week.

Then there was your side of the crew ledger: Augustus Caesar — Doc, universally, because the full name invited too many jokes and he’d learned to get ahead of it — who had married the captain in a ceremony you’d officiated yourself, being the only one aboard with the credentials to make it legal across three jurisdictions and the open space between them. Orpheus Tellos kept the ship’s systems running with the same quiet thoroughness he brought to his chemistry and botany work, and had an unnerving habit of knowing something was wrong with an engine before the diagnostic did. And Bennimaru Sato, psych expert and the ship’s second military officer, who had a gift for saying precisely the right thing to defuse a situation and who you suspected understood each member of this crew better than they understood themselves.

Couples had formed, dissolved, and reformed over eight hundred days. That was inevitable — 8 people, a metal shell, the infinite dark. What had surprised you was the shape the remaining constants took: Haseul and Doc, steady as orbital mechanics from about day two hundred onward, the only pairing to calcify into something official. And then you and Arin, orbiting each other without ever quite landing, which was either a significant coincidence or something neither of you had gotten around to naming yet.

You told yourself it was the former.

You weren’t entirely sure you believed it. So picture your surprise when Arin walks into your quarters and says, “Okay, Raijin I need you to fuck me,”

You look at your fellow crewmate shocked but also a bit aroused.

It's been almost three years since you've last had a date so the proposition isn't unwanted but it's a lot to process.

“Um, are you sure?”

Arin rolls her eyes and says, “Have you read Bennimaru’s psychological profile on you Raijin?”

You shake your head and Arin begins reciting off things “Crewmate Raijin Theodore Washington is a highly intelligent, diligent, and thorough robotics and rocket engineer. His attention to detail and meticulous handwork border on obsessive. Clinical diagnosis: Spectrum disorder,”

You stare at Arin who in turn stares at you. She smirks.

“I have been sending messages for weeks that I want you to fuck me but I should have just said it outright,” she says sassy

You're left at a pause then say, “um Arin are…” she cuts you off before you can finish the thought.

“I have been feeling a near-relentless urge to be fucked starting damn near a month ago despite all of the birth control and hormone regulators I'm on. You are my favorite crewmate to be around ergo I'm asking you, to do the honors. I need you to spank me pull my hair call me a good girl, kiss me, and fill me up until my cunt belches your cum. Is that clear?”

You gulp and say “Yes,”

Arin Smiles and says “Good, now take my flight suit off of me, with only your teeth,”

You nodded and approached Arin as you did she grinded herself into you. You tensed as she smirked. You found the flight suit zipper at her neck and slowly bit it. You moved around her tight body with an even slower pace. By the time you got to her midsection the top of her flight suit became open. Leaving her chest exposed underneath the suit she had a very lewd lace bra on that emphasized her modest but perky breasts.

She smiled and seductively removed the bra.

As she did you felt your careful control and all the hormone stabilizers and medically induced calm snap.

You latched onto her nipple with no control.

Arin moaned into it.

“I knew you had it in you,” she cooed as you sucked on her nipple hoping (for some reason) that milk would come out. When none did you switched to the other one. Arin encouraged you by saying, “Do you like your good girl's tits?”

You nod as you lasciviously lather her other nipple with your saliva until your bulge is straining in your pants.