A Change in the Air

When he let her swivel round to face him, he could see her eyes as green as before, but with the trace of the last of something brilliant fading away. Dearly he regretted not being able to see them when she came, and hoped that he might still have another opportunity.

They kissed: not urgently, but sensuous and lingering. And then she left his lips and kissed the sensitive skin of his neck; he arched back his head to let her kiss just under his chin, then down his throat, tickling and tantalising, dashing out with her long thin tongue. She pulled at his shirt to indicate that it was in the way, and Bartleby undid the top button, letting her draw her lips down a little further onto his chest. He fumbled for the next one, and the next one, and as he did so she moved her attentions downwards, until finally, with her tongue lapping across his belly, he undid the bottom button and let the whole shirt fall open. Still she kissed her way downwards, one hand holding his cock out of the way, until she reached his carpet of pubic hair and was forced to draw her lips away.

But she carried on down with her fingers, wrapping the long, thin, flexible digits of one hand around his balls and squeezing gently, making him grunt. Then the other hand, tracing slowly up the shaft of his cock until it reached the end, pulling back the foreskin, and a single fingertip questing around the slick surface of the sensitive head.

Bartleby tried to lean forwards to kiss her again, but she pushed him back. "Ssshhh. I let you do me, now this is me doing you. Just sit back and enjoy it."

He nodded, and let his hands rest limply on her shoulders where she now knelt in front of him. With one hand still clasped around his balls she lowered her head and lapped the tip of his cock with her long, flexible tongue, making him writhe despite his best efforts at control. And then again, a little further, this time bringing her lips in contact to kiss him there, sliding and circling over the responsive head, then further, engulfing him in her mouth.

Pleasure consumed him and he cried out wordlessly. He knew, in his current state of high arousal, it would take little work to bring him to a climax, and as Sekla brought her head forwards and back, lips surfing over the shaft, her tongue working miracles on the head, he mourned that this ecstasy must surely be short-lived. But she worked him slowly, and he willed himself to hang on, and a minute later they were still going, and a minute after that, the pleasure accelerating, him gulping air in ragged breaths, she staring up at him with gorgeous green eyes, maintaining an inexhausting and unrelenting rhythm.

At last he felt the pressure in him build to where he knew he couldn't hold it back. He shouted out as the dam burst, and he felt his liquid love shoot into her mouth, gasping as it pulsed strong and sumptuous out of his shaft. Her mouth kept up its work on him until the last dregs had been tempted out, and only then did she slow to a gradual stop, a slight trickle of milky semen escaping from one corner of her lips.

She let him go almost reluctantly, stood to look him in the eye, and swallowed; when they kissed again, tender and weary, he tasted the salty tang of her mouth. They wrapped their arms about each other and let themselves fall back onto the bed, sated and trembling.

Bartleby wasn't sure how long they lay there for. Maybe it was only a few minutes, maybe an hour or more. They didn't speak. They didn't even move, but simply lay staring at the ceiling, each entwined in the other's arms. He could feel the rise and fall of her chest and the slow beating of her heart, and was completely at peace.

Eventually Sekla broke the silence. "Do we have long together? Before the air changes?"

With a start Bartleby realised that he hadn't thought about the air, or the migration, or Her, since the morning. He took a deep breath and concentrated. Still the same. "No, not long. It could even happen tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. Probably no later than that."

"I really will miss you."

"And I'll miss you." He wondered if it was true. Would he forget all about her when he was back with Her? Or would he be pining for the migration back here, in a strange reversal of the way it had always been? No. He couldn't imagine it.

"I never really understood what you meant when you said the air changes."

"That's alright, I never really understood it either." He stroked a finger fondly across her arm. "One day at the start of spring, every far breathes the air and knows, just knows, that something is different and that it's time for them to go. I can sense it without the least ambiguity, but I couldn't tell you in words what is different, or begin to find an explanation for it.

"Throughout the winter we all live our scattered, solitary lives spread out across the surface of the world. But as soon as the air changes, we start moving, every one of us moving towards a common point."

She lay listening intently, one hand playing slowly across his chest. "How long does it take?"

"About two months each way. It's almost the opposite side of the world from here."

"Can't you just get on a plane or something?"

"No." He couldn't put any really rational arguments against the idea, but on a fundamental, unarguable level he knew it was deeply wrong. "It's against my nature."

She was silent for a minute before asking, "What's it like?"

He had to think about it. It was a question no far ever had to ask. "You start out on your own. You don't take anything with you: just your feet to carry you and your eyes to guide you. Every day you keep moving the way your body knows to go, eating whenever you can find food, sleeping wherever you can find shelter, never the same landscape around you.

"And sooner or later, you meet someone else heading the same way and you stick together. And then you'll run into someone else, or another little group, and before you know it you're part of a herd, all moving together, all excited, swapping stories of the solitary world you've left behind and the loved ones you're rushing to meet. And as the days go by the herd gets bigger, and the end of the journey gets nearer and nearer, until finally..."

She leant her head against his shoulder, waiting for him to go on.

"The gathering place is beautiful. It stretches for miles, and every little scrap of it is bustling with far. I never know how I find Her, but I do. She's always there before me. I'm looking through the crowd of faces, thousands of them, and suddenly, there She is. I rush towards Her, calling Her name, She turns around and sees me..."

He stopped, realising that he was trembling. Sekla took his hand in hers and squeezed it reassuringly.

"Tell me about her. Your mate."

"She's... we're... we belong to each other. I love Her." He didn't feel like saying anything more, and she didn't ask it of him.

Bartleby turned his head to look at Sekla, who gazed back at him with eyes gleaming a brilliant blue. Suddenly the track of his thoughts changed direction completely. He'd been thinking about Her, and indeed he loved Her deeply. But She was thousands of miles away. And there was another face ingrained in his affections, and she was right there next to him, so strange, so beautiful, and he couldn't be with her for much longer. It would be a shame for both of them if he spent their last time together pining over another.

He leant over to stroke her cheek, then kissed her, softly, slightly, then again, more certainly, more sustained. Before he knew it, all thought of Her had washed away like dust after the rain and his mind was again filled with Sekla, a thought of her so consuming that it pushed everything else out of its way.

It didn't take them long to recover something of the earlier drive of their lust, not with two pairs of lips caressing and exploring each other, just as two pairs of hands caressed and explored the others' body. Bartleby fueled himself on her scent, on the soft smooth slip of her fur under his fingers, on the taste of her lips, on the twitching of her tail coiled around his thigh. In no time at all he stood erect for her again, it standing so hard it ached, and he could see she was as ready as he.

Sekla took an opportunity between kisses to speak. "Bartleby, stop just a minute. How about we take a pause and get the rest of these clothes off? I want you completely naked."

He looked down at himself and laughed out loud, realising that he still wore his open shirt and his trousers gathered round his ankles, exactly as they'd been left after their first fit of passion. As for her, she still wore her white robe-dress, albeit hanging open and loose at the bottom.

It didn't take her long to shrug off the rest of her dress, revealing a chest richly garbed in dense golden fur. It took him slightly longer to liberate his shirt and trousers, during which she ogled him hungrily.

She smiled a critical eye up and down him as he at last stood bare before her. "Very nice. Very nice indeed. But I said I wanted you completely naked."

For a moment he didn't realise what she meant, and when he did, he did so with a start. But then, why not? She must never have seen him completely naked before.

Taking a step back, he dropped the human visage.

Again, the disorienting jolt, and again the room seemed to shrink drastically around him. A familiar wave of nausea fell over him alongside the dizzying blow of the richer information from all his senses hitting him all at once, but subsided when he picked out the scent of Sekla, even richer and more interesting and somehow more tangible than it had seemed to his human nose.

She gazed up at him in wonder, so much smaller now. Her eyes skated over him, taking in his whole body under its network of visage generator paraphernalia, finally coming to rest on one specific spot and flashing white in surprise. "Fuck, Bartleby!"

He realised at once where she was looking, and learnt for the first time that an erection carried over from one form to the other.

The white in her eyes flickered back to the green of lust. "I... think I can take you. I want to try, anyway."

Bartleby moved to stand over her, placing his legs with care to avoid disturbing anything in the small room. "No."

"You don't want to? I want to. I'd let you know if you're hurting me, you don't need to worry about that."

"Oh, I want to. I want to rub this leg against your thigh, and use this leg to stroke your chest, and this leg to cradle your sweet head, and these two to loop round you and hold you close to me."

He looked properly into her eyes, with his far eyes, for the first time. They were green. But what had seemed a simple green to human eyes, he could now see was a whole spectrum of colours, exhibiting three or maybe four flavours of lust, and all of them were on display as she looked at him.

"I want to push into you slowly; and then gently, ever so gently, pleasure you, until I pour into you, screaming in ecstasy."

She stared, eyes burning greener on all wavelengths, and reached out a hand towards his cock. He brushed it aside. "That's what I want to do. But I can't. I'm sorry. This body belongs to my mate." The world flipped around him again, becoming larger and quieter. "I hope you're not too disappointed."

"I..." She paused, uncertain. He placed a reassuring hand on her side. "I don't understand you, Bartleby. But I can see it's important to you." Her hand reached to brush his chin. "And I could never be disappointed with you, whatever body you choose to love me in."

He let her draw him closer until they stood clutched in each other's arms, her chest pressed so close and warm against his that he could feel her heartbeat. His fingers traced the bones of her shoulders; hers skimmed across his bare buttocks. He felt there should be something for him to say, but then he realised there was nothing she didn't already know. So he communicated as comprehensively as he could by kissing her tenderly on the lips.

What happened next, Bartleby could only later recall as a vague blur of stroking fingertips and dancing lips and gentle arousal, saturated with the spicy smell and taste of Sekla. A blur of kisses, and quivering legs, and golden fur, and his hands roving all over her, needing to touch every inch of her strange and beautiful body. And shining through the haze, her eyes, shining greener and greener, staring adoringly into his own.

One moment stood out clearly. She kissed him, for perhaps the fiftieth time, but this time she let her long, agile tongue slip into his mouth and flicker about, probing, wet and wonderful, whispering against his own. At the same time she ran her flexible fingers over his responsive cock, squeezing it, taunting it.

After that, there was again a blur, but this time more heated, more urgent. A blur of hands gripping and pulling at tender flesh, of tongues rasping ravenously over slick skin and damp fur, of her hands palpitating and tormenting his eager shaft.

Sekla wrapped one flexible leg around his waist, the fingerlike toes gripping tightly. Throwing herself athletically up into his arms, she brought the other leg round the other side, leaving her arms clasped around his shoulders, her legs wrapped around his hips, her dripping pussy rubbing against his cock. She moved her hips experimentally, making Bartleby moan in response.

"Like this?" she asked.

Bartleby carried her slowly to the bed and laid her down gently on her back, climbing on top of her, her legs between his knees. "Like this."

Her tail wrapped up from between her legs, coiling around his waist, pulling him down. He let himself descend. There was no more foreplay: both recognised that the time for that had passed, and there was nothing more to be done but feed their urgent, consuming need. Her hands clasped around his back as the tip of his cock met the mouth of her pussy and he pushed slowly inside without pausing, feeling her warm and wet welcome that seemed to try and help pull him in, seeing her eyes blaze green and her mouth open to shout silently.

He was determined to fuck her slowly and sensuously, to draw out the pleasure for the both of them. And so he began, grinding his hips against hers, as restrained as he could bear, relishing the tight pulsing wetness of her, the way her eyes lit up with his every movement. But soon he couldn't stand the slow pace and found himself speeding up, pounding into her in deep, delicious thrusts, his skin gleaming with sweat, his breaths fast and ragged. She writhed under him, every contortion of her limbs as expressive of her ecstasy as the gasping of her voice or the flashing green of her eyes.

Faster he thrust and faster. With every push he could see her eyes burn brighter, hear her voice cry louder, feel her body twist more convulsively. He was reaching a climax, building irresistibly to burst out of him but he willed it back, waiting, just another thrust... and another... and another...

Everything happened at once. Her orgasm boiled violently around his cock, a hot wet spasming squeeze that gripped him tightly. At the same moment he let himself go, shouting wordlessly as he exploded into her. Her eyes snapped shut, her body taut and still for a moment except where she clenched rhythmically against his shaft, milking the juice out of him. And then she screamed, a primal howl of rapture. And opened her eyes.

They screamed with colour. Not just green, although green was there, even brighter than before; every colour, flashing and dancing and combining, erupted from her eyes in an orgasm of light. Bartleby stared, gasping, as he pumped the last diminishing injections of his seed into her, and her throbbing climax died away, leaving them quiet and still and exhausted.

* * *

He was suddenly awake. Sekla lay close beside him, sleeping, one arm spread limply over his chest, but it wasn't her who had woken him.

He had to be sure. Moving her arm gently to one side he stood up, moved to the centre of the room and flipped into far form. And breathed.

"What is it?" a voice mumbled sleepily from the bed.

"The air has changed."

* * *

Sekla's deft hands finished untying him from the last remnant of his visage generator, dropping the piece into a neat pile with the others. It was a bright, crisp spring morning and a good crowd of people of various types had gathered outside the Institute building to see Bartleby off. That, or to ogle at his far form, which most of them had never seen. He chose to assume the former.

As he stared out in the direction of the sand hills, his feet itched to carry him away. But he had to finish things here. Stooping to pick up the heap of visage generator paraphernalia, he deposited it in the arms of Sekla.

"I told you that this body belongs to my mate. Well... this body belongs to you."

Her eyes flashed in amusement. "Bartleby, I'm not going exclusive with you!"

"I don't expect you to. You do things your way, but let me do things my way."

"I... alright."

"I'll be back to claim it in the autumn."

"I'll take good care of it until then. And after then I'll take excellent care of it."

Bartleby extended a forepaw and she kissed it softly. There was an awkward silence. He felt he should say some kind of goodbye, but didn't know how to begin.

Sekla saved him. "Why are you hanging round here when I can see you're bursting to get going? Go on, don't keep her waiting. Go!"

"Alright." He nodded at K'ar-Eek in the crowd. "You two enjoy yourselves."

He turned around and left, walking at first, and then breaking into a run. He had the suns on his back and the ground between his toes. Ahead of him rose the sand hills, and beyond them, the plains, and beyond them, the swamps, and beyond them, far beyond them, somewhere... was Her.