Author's Note: This story is a sort of fanfiction of my own work - it takes place between books 2 and 3 of these characters' series (hence the title). For context, Gus has just recently experienced sexual contact for the first time, having grown up in a society that forbids it. Koby is her now-husband, a member of a culture that embraces sex and all sexualities - sometimes too much. As they near Koby's home planet, Gus is starting to worry...
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The whole ship seemed to sigh with Gus. She ran her palm down the smooth porthole, empathizing with the endless shape. They were still in quarantine orbit around Moura, and her new duties were already sapping her energy. At the end of each day, her mind was numb, and she was afraid she was losing what made her—well, appealing.
She thumbed her hipbone with a thoughtful lip-chew. It was still so strange to be in control of her body, to try and remember that the stirrings of arousal were not to be feared. Sometimes, the feelings themselves were not hard to avoid; her body weighed less but felt heavier thanks to the muscle loss of longer-term space travel. Three months, she thought. Three months of this, and I still have no idea what I'm doing.
She thought about Koby. He made her smile, and she did, buoyed up by the mental image of his face. She thought of his broad shoulders rippling as she dug her fingers into his back. She thought of his laugh as he doubled over at her jokes. She thought of the distinct curve of his ass, the smooth lines blurred by his soft hairs. She thought of his hands, the ones she knew as home, soft under the old callouses of working on his first-run. The thoughts made her blush and she dropped her hand unconsciously between her legs.
The door whispered and she smiled again, beaming at her harsh reflection where the Mouran sun blazed unfiltered by an atmosphere. Palms cupped her breasts under her light dayrobe. She breathed in the breath from his nose.
"Two more weeks," he purred into her ear. His hands tightened, and she felt the reassuring pressure of his tungsten ring pressing against her nipple. She clamped a smile onto her lower lip with her teeth and arched back into him.
"I almost don't want to go planetside."
His fingers danced up her bare neck to behind her ear. Koby enveloped her in a reassuringly confining embrace. "And never smell the fresh air again?"
Gus giggled. "You told me like six times it smells like shit everywhere."
"Not everywhere."
"Besides."
"Besides what?" he asked after she lingered on the word.
"I don't know."
"Baby."
"I don't know," she said, planting her palms on his chest as she spun without breaking his hold on her, "that I want to give you up so quickly."
At the end of the sentence, her voice wobbled. Koby whispered, "No," and lifted her chin with the gentlest touch of his forefinger.
"Baby," he said again, and again, until she looked him full in the face. "Are you still afraid?"
It hit a nerve so raw that she shuddered and had to look away, lest he see just how many tears the idea was wringing out of her. "Yes," she said, managing to steady herself. She met his gaze. It was deep and green and fierce. "There's so much more to your world than me."
She opened her mouth to say it, for real: There are so many more pussies, and even dicks, and tits and hair and beautiful eyes and walks that aren't stupid like mine, and whose brains aren't dead, because this is not what you signed up for, when he clamped her cheeks in both palms and smashed his forehead to hers.
