The dash instruments shed a comfortable amount of light between them; enough that Kay could still see their glimmer in Dimo’s eyes without the aid of other vision modes. They were transporting a hulker south, and you needed two people to do it safely––an operator and a surveyor. The job briefing explicitly stressed the need to stay fully alert over the duration of the transport. It was a run through the crumbling suburban wastelands, some real ass-on-the-line shit where things could go down, and you’d come back home permanently wounded, another neighborhood story teller with no working parts. So they rode in silence now.
Dimo’s fidgeting gaze registered again and again on the periphery of Kay’s enhanced vision, stealing glances at her in the dimness. She pretended to notice something just past his head, and found his gaze quickly shifted, suddenly more concerned with the road. Why is he being so trifling? Kay thought with a sigh, resigning to ride in silence rather than be baited by whatever game he was trying to play. Did he know that she could see everything? Probably not. His prosthetic set-up was second-hand homebrew, nothing like hers.
She looked out of her window and watched the outside world rumble by, hoping that for once there might be something more than unyielding ruination to see.
No, nothing new. Just her reflection and the glittering, flooded earth beyond, dotted with relic vehicles and once-picturesque yuppie mansions long since reclaimed by the new atmosphere. She looked back at the road through the front windshield and immediately caught another glance from Dimo.
“Can I help you?” she offered tersely, looking directly at him.
He returned her gaze with a look of blank indifference, saying nothing.
Was that a dis? Kay balked to herself. You don’t act like that on a ru––Hold up.
She reigned herself in. She didn’t know this kid well enough to get rowdy at him, and anyway, she was too used to Regulators crew yielding to her requests. Too used to being addressed as “Captain,” forgetting sometimes how the regular folks did things back home.
“You got a problem?” he asked matter-of-factly.
Kay detected a hint of sarcasm in his tone, sparking a glowering expression despite herself. He looked at her soberly, then reached for the starter and disengaged it. The machine’s rumbling fell to a purr, then nothing. Faintly, one could hear water sloshing around the tread outside.
“What––”
“You got a problem?” he interrupted, sounding much louder and more antagonistic than before, now that the engines were off.
Kay’s face soured at his seeming nerve, and she paused once again to check the anger response circulating through her muscles (Riding the pulse, her dead aunt’s favorite maxim echoing: “Nobody likes a smartass”).
Finally, “You can’t seem to keep your eyes on the road, huh?”
No response. He only stared at her, his impartial gaze shifting from her eyes to the lines of her mouth and jaw, shoulders and lower. It was bold, and callous given the circumstances, and moreover, she was starting to suspect there were more things at play between them than top dog posturing or a typical bout of miscommunication. Dimo was testing her in some other way, one she was just as familiar with. She looked back with a sort of ruthless appraisal, feeling herself getting meaner as the moments passed.
“Do you wanna get slapped?” she asked finally, voice cool and low.
He still said nothing, only holding her gaze. But there was a change in the set of his jaw, which she read favorably.
They continued to sit unmoving in the front pit of the machine, strapped in on opposite ends of one long, synthetic seat cushion. Kay unbuckled herself and slid towards Dimo; the cushion’s waxy-hard covering announcing her movement with its sleazy creaking.
Dimo’s gaze followed her hands, while his own crept up to release the catch on his safety harness. Kay watched this and smirked at the implications, all the while ignoring the possible danger they welcomed by lingering in the unpowered beast.
“I don’t like having my questions ignored, you know. Not at all,” she said firmly, testing.
He pursed his lips together at this, impassive expression resigning into a challenge of silence. She creaked closer in the dim orange glow of the dash lights, and locked on to his eyes which were still liquid and glimmering.
“You didn’t seem like the type to want this kind of trouble when I picked up the run,” she hummed, easing across the center control unit between them. Dimo sat still, his breath quickening as she edged closer.
“I heard you were one serious motherfucker,” he uttered at last, unmoving.
“Yeah,” she sneered, hand creeping onto his throat. “Real serious.”
He tensed. Kay watched his eyes close with relish, his mouth part open as she put pressure across his neck. Is this what he had been looking for the whole time? His head fell back against the seat, and she tightened her massaging grip in response. She was close enough to smell the musk on the collar of his clothes; a proximity she made sure he knew by the breath on his neck. He was unexpectedly receptive. She grazed the cartilage of his ear with her teeth and listened to him shudder, delighted. Well, shit. Kay supposed she was one serious motherfucker.
For a long beat, she only lolled his head side to side by the throat, breathing into his ear and listening to his shivering anticipation.
“Do you like this?”
“Mm-hmm,” he muttered.
“Well,” she started, giving him a forceful shake, “I suppose we’ll have to figure out what else you like once we get this beast to its destination. Before we get hijacked for sitting out here like a couple of assholes.”
Dimo nodded quickly, registered her hand snaking away from his throat, and straightened up with a whimper; shuddered as he listened to her creak back across the seat and clack-clack into her harness. He exhaled deeply and snapped his own harness back into place, eyes opening slowly and looking over at her with a mixture of childish disdain and bated breath, wondering if she was really “done” for now. Or even if this was merely a flexing of her superiority. Dimo had heard stories. But something about her gaze struck him as too lascivious to write off. Thank god. He reached for the ignition mechanism and reengaged it, the rumble of the engine growling back to life. He looked over at her again, this time finding that she was openly watching him, and quickly put his eyes on the road. They drove on, till darkness gave way to dawn and they reached their final checkpoint on time.
At the unloading station––a real slapdash ensemble––they found out that their ride back was running late due to flooding (typical), which stuck them at the site for another day’s time. When they were delivered this news, Dimo looked over to find Kay already grinning at him. He felt a shiver run right down to his pelvis, unable to even think about the trip back.
“Let’s get some grub,” she said with a head toss, breaking up his wild thoughts. And so they started walking.
The station was essentially a re-arranged pit stop with a diner on a post-highway thruway. It was surrounded by massive, overgrown parking lots and the occasional grown-through husk of a derelict automobile. There were maybe four or five other transporters in the whole deserted expanse, which seemed like a lot until you remembered the place was a main thruway for the region.
Still, the two of them together, one an experienced surveyor and the other a self-enhanced engineer, were perhaps the most put-together team on the lot––Kay could tell yet again that she had the best rig, and Dimo wasn’t sure some of the others even knew what kinds of machines they were driving. But for the short time investment and the pay, the risk was worth it for a lot of folks. There weren’t enough capable bodies anyway, so . . . it made sense. Plus, if you actually got a machine to its destination, it did a world of good; people weren’t stingy with their gratitude in most places either. The machine they were moving was needed by some folks further south who were trying to move a lot of big city rubble and get a hold of a still-active power source beneath (so they heard). Dimo couldn’t even wrap his mind around what that was all about. Then again, some of those southern holds had existed long before the Decline affected the rest of the country, and he could only imagine what kinds of projects they had going down there. One day maybe he’d have a nice set-up like Kay’s and could safely make the trip down to see for himself, but for now he just fantasized about asking her if she’d ever been down that way on her survey runs.
Before this, before the run, Dimo and Kay had barely been nodding acquaintances, even though the small social circles of their hometown ensured they knew each other’s names and occupations, drank at the same bars sometimes, even needed work from each other sometimes. Far from Omwenga now, breaking bread at the diner was their first real interaction. Grub made it evident that they had it pretty good back in their neck of the woods––the fare on their plates was all reconstituted grains and dried root vegetables from who knows where––but any edible food was always a blessing. Under the inconsistent buzzing of overhead lights and an occasional glance from the counter cook (a silent old white man with his beard riddled by what looked to be bad water tumors), Kay chatted about her metabolic controls, which even for a hype cyborg like her, would never override the desire to eat. The act itself, even if it could be chemically scheduled for optimal efficiency, was a necessary component of mental well being, she insisted, looking at Dimo all the while with a gaze that held the same sway over him now as her hand on his throat earlier.
“So,” Kay started as they left their plates in the counter wash bin, “Why don’t we check out this resting room we have access to?” She searched Dimo’s attentive face for a reaction, to which he stupidly nodded a “Yeah, sure.”
They walked across the station’s open stretch of soggy crab grass and anciently cracked cement to what seemed like an old convenience store. With the exception of a latched order window, the floor-to-ceiling glass panels were covered with obscuring white soap swirls and collaged, yellowed newspaper. Dimo knocked on the order window, and a hard-looking teenaged tomboy with a filthy jumpsuit on (no visible tumors) let them in. Inside, with most of the former aisles knocked away, the place was a cleverly partitioned hostel. Saying nothing, the tomboy led them to the only free space, a curtained square that contained a sheetless cot next to a rickety folding table. The tomboy left them inside, then came back with some blankets and left again, wordless and uninterested. Kay turned to Dimo, leaving behind the suspicion that their young host was too wracked by nerve pain to be friendly.
“Do you want to get that set up?” she requested simply.
“Oh. Sure,” he said, feeling especially anxious as he turned his back to shake the sheets open and lay them down. She made no mention of one of them sleeping on the floor, or taking turns sleeping or what, and that also made him nervous with anticipation. After he set the blankets, he turned to look at her for further instruction, realizing then just how completely obedient he’d become. Shit, he thought, stiffening uneasily under her scrutiny.
“Sit down,” she directed, moving towards him across the fractured linoleum. He sat down. His overcoats were still on. She hovered over him, deft hands settling on the various zippers, straps, and buttons keeping his grease-covered clothing on, drawing loose and tugging open, until the pleasant shock of chill hands registered on his skin, and he recognized the scent of his own body odor freed from the confines of heavy outer layers. He was in his room clothes now. He watched her face as she took a step back to admire her handiwork (he supposed), nervous enough that she seemed to be fixated on his chest (let alone elsewhere). Then her hands were already fallen to the planes of muscle between his shoulders and neck, and he felt his chest tighten with a rush of blood. They crept up the back of his neck, tenderly stroking the warm length before settling higher on a grip of hair. She tugged him around carefully, playfully. He wanted to nuzzle against her. Her grip would not allow. He closed his eyes with a pitiful exhale and heard her laugh.
“Are my hands too cold?” she asked quietly.
“No.”
Her hands were powerful. She slipped them beneath the collar of his threadbare shirt and began to grip up the denser parts of his shoulder and neck muscles in a way that seemed almost fetishistic. Not like a massage. More like being handled. Soon, he found his face cupped in her hand while the other stroked at the hairline near his ear; a newfound pet. He heard her lean closer, could smell the human scent in her hair as she began lapping at the thin skin where his ear joined his head. Heavy breathing. He whimpered against her.
“Do you like this?” A steady voice.
“Yes,” he breathed.
She bit his earlobe and began to probe inside with her tongue, slow and methodical; a hand found its way to his chin, fingertips creeping up to his mouth, prying at his lips. He opened to her. She drew his bottom jaw open, and all his carefully pent-up sighs came tumbling out.
“Give me your tongue,” she ordered. He complied, and she took hold of it in her mouth, filling him. Dimo shuddered under it all. She hummed approval, soon replacing her tongue with fingers. He went to reach for her. She grabbed his hand and held it against him; pulled back just long enough to give him a menacing look before shoving him down by the chest. Now she held his arm down and penetrated his mouth at the same time.
“Ugh, you’re really hot like this,” she spoke in that low voice against him. “What a nice surprise,” she grinned. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Oh my god . . .” he shuddered, nodding, unable to articulate anything more.
“Good,” she stated, wet fingertips slinking to his throat as she replaced them with her tongue once more. She kissed him slow and deep, choking him lightly at the same time. He could feel her pleasure rising against him; she pressed her body closer and closer . . . But after a moment, she pulled back and gave him a few mild slaps against the face, smiling.
Dimo, reluctantly sensing a break in intensity, laughed sheepishly, shaking his head as he caught his breath.
“Mmm . . .” she sighed, sitting on the edge of the bed finally, no longer hovering over him. Kay grabbed a fistful of his hair and shook his head around playfully, letting go with a dismissive shove and a laugh. “I’d really like to keep going, but I think it’s in our best interest to get some rest.”
“Yeah,” Dimo resigned. “I don’t think it’s very nice to the other people staying here,” he added with a sigh.
“Maybe not,” she shrugged. “Besides, I’m feeling extra mean and I don’t want to lay all that on you in this little tent square. I don’t know you that well.”
“Oh god, do whatever you want to me,” he breathed.
“Mmm. Then don’t you fret,” she responded, smirking. “Your prosthetic body is really something.”
Dimo found himself staring into her stern, slightly menacing gaze again as she kneeled on the ground before him. Her hands found his torso, drifting past his pelvis to his thighs, squeezing the fortified muscles that comprised them. He felt his breath hitch in his chest again, like before, nervous for her intentions and welcoming all the same. He felt her fingertips curiously pulling at the edges of his clothing, making contact with the flesh beneath, tugging on elastic hems. Kay watched him writhe shamelessly under her touch and edged closer to his body as she made way to the insides of his thighs, where ass joined leg and likewise.
“Can I touch you here?” she asked, easing his knees apart, massaging a handful of muscle high up on the back of his leg. Dimo nodded a yes, eyes fluttering shut. Kay grinned as her hand snaked closer to his crotch, first stroking with almost wistful, soft brushes against the cloth there.
“Oooh . . .” she exhaled. Dimo looked up at her intrigued tone. “A really nice prosthetic body,” she reaffirmed softly at his attention, continuing to stroke gently against the cloth between his legs.
“Mmm?” Oh. “Yeah, I have a cunt,” he offered sheepishly. “Or, I usually have a cunt,” he corrected. “How do you feel about that?” he asked in a quiet voice, already distracted by the stroking between his legs.
“Pretty fucking turned on,” she purred, hand rising to the top hem of his pants, fingertips slipping just beneath to tug on the band of his underwear. “Can I take off your pants?”
Dimo’s hand moved, undoing the top button for her in answer. She cooed at this, undoing the remaining buttons and taking great pleasure in pulling his pants down as slowly as possible. She stroked him as before, this time one layer less and much closer to a beckoning warmth. Kay’s movements were slow and deliberate, and she went up on a knee reaching for Dimo’s throat again, applying that firm pressure they both seemed to enjoy so much. His hips rose against her affections. Kay began to slip her fingertips beneath the hem of his underwear.
“Is this okay?”
He nodded with a hum.
“I’d really like to get you off,” she said quietly.
Dimo moaned in response, once again making enough eye contact with her to nod his consent. He watched an expression of deep pleasure set in on her face, and then she was probing teasingly at the opening of his cunt.
“Mmm, you’re really enjoying yourself, hmm,” she muttered near his ear. Dimo’s legs rubbed back and forth against each other the more prolonged her teasing strokes became, until finally he felt the tip of her finger begin to ease its way inside him. Heat flushed through his body in a wave; his mouth opened, and in that moment she was there to fill it with her tongue, Dimo panting against her now as her finger slid all the way inside, searching for a rhythm he would respond to.
In the silence of their curtained square, hushed panting.
“Can I touch myself?” came a muffled request. Kay stroked Dimo’s hand with a nod. His fingers found the engorged organ and began to apply the ached-for motions, biting his mouth shut to abate the sounds of his own pleasure. Kay watched intently, finger deep inside him, pressing firmly against textured flesh while she tried to reign back her own heavy breathing. After a short while, Dimo began to clench more tightly around her, mouth hanging open as he rode further along. Kay placed her hand on his throat once more, to which he gasped, exhaling with a loud moan that was bitten quickly silent. They worked on.
Soon their panting became a rhythm. Kay realized Dimo might be close to coming. She moved the hand on his throat to probe his mouth as well, and he responded with another moan, clenching harder and harder on Kay inside of him until suddenly there was a sharp hitch in his breath and his cunt took hold of her, tighter and tighter and then, through intense, gasping waves, full blown coming. Kay watched his thighs and lower abdomen tense and shudder and his mouth hang open as the orgasm quickly ripened and overtook his body, her fingertip still pressing hard against the trembling flesh inside, until he had ridden it all the way out to a place past tension.
After a moment, his body relaxed fully and Kay withdrew her finger, hand awash in his wetness. She let out a long exhale, exchanging glances with Dimo, who now seemed happily fatigued. A beat passed.
“The way you touch me . . . That was fucking crazy,” he uttered then.
“Do you want to get off again?” she asked in earnest.
“I do, but . . . fuck. We should probably cool it,” he said with a worn-out breath.
“Probably . . .” she repeated.
Some hours later, when it was close to dusk, the pair found themselves out on the loading area of the station, switching out keys and operating instructions for their return vehicle, hoping that the recently ingested stimulants would even out the exhaustion set in their bones. Their ride back was much quicker than the growling machine they plowed there. Daylight made the desolate straights somewhat less depressing, and they even had an audio deck to play music. Kay drove. They spoke little. Dimo couldn’t tell if she was having virtual conversations online or if she was just zoning out while they drove, but he didn’t find a real need to interrupt, nonetheless. At the diner before they left, she said he could look all he wanted from now on, and that she didn’t pull that kind of thing on any old fool––she liked him. And he believed that. She felt honest; the way she spoke, the way she moved. Maybe that’s why her Regulators crew was so tight. And now it seemed, by some absurd circumstance that he couldn’t figure out, their wanton night of fucking had spawned an intimate bond––the kind that has a bit of trust right from the beginning. In her company now, he felt almost darling.
I had a blast tonight, Kay told him before they took their desperate pre-ride nap. Dimo wondered how often he’d actually see her back in town.