Choices
Copyright© 2025 by Don Lockwood
Chapter 4
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 4 - Todd's an engineer, working for an outfit that sends him all over the galaxy. This new planet he's on seems very lovely. But what's the bonding law, and who's that princess?
Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Fiction Science Fiction Aliens Extra Sensory Perception Space
She spent a few hours in her room. When she emerged, I was at my desk, typing on my laptop. She came over. “What are you doing?”
“Writing a few emails.”
“Even though you’re off work?”
“Oh, these are personal,” I smiled. “I’m writing to a couple of good friends that live on Rizhiv. And my sister Amanda, on Earth.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. I thought you had no one left on Earth.”
“Just her. She’s 6 years older than me. When I was 20, five years before I left, she moved halfway around the Earth. We grew up in a city called Chicago, and she moved to a city called Sydney. I love her, and she loves me, but we’ve always led separate lives. She actually encouraged me to join LunaTech and get off Earth.”
“You’ve been off Earth for 5 years, right?” she asked. I nodded. “Have you not seen Amanda that long?”
“Nope, I saw her 2 years ago,” I smiled. “Got a few weeks leave to go to her wedding.”
“Awww,” she grinned.
“My brother in law’s name is Fred. He’s great. They’re very happy.”
“Well, the way bonding works, it’s private, but there’s generally a big celebration about 6 months after. If you decide to bond, we’ll make sure to get Amanda and Fred here for the celebration.”
I took that as she intended it. “That would be great.”
Her voice dropped a bit. “Did you tell her about me?”
“Amanda, yes. I even sent a picture. My other friends, no.”
“Why not?” she asked, slightly hurt.
I laughed. “Have you ever spent time with a Rizhivi?” She shook her head. “I would never hear the end of it. Rizhivi are gentle and peaceful and calming, but they’re also a planet full of Yentas.” She cracked up—and I didn’t even have to translate Yenta! “If my friends knew I had been offered a bonding and hadn’t accepted, they’d be on a ship headed here to twist my arm.”
“Ooh, let me write to them,” she joked, laughing. I cracked up.
The rest of Wednesday and into Thursday was more of the same. We talked about everything while she glowed at me. She talked about her recent schooling—she had just gotten her degree in xenobotany.
I also learned more about her. She talked about the deep love she had for her parents. She talked about some royal drama. She talked about plants.
This woman must have been anxious as hell, waiting for me to make a decision that could wreck her life. And there she sat, chatting, smiling at me, with happy silver patterns running all up and down her arms.
I was stalling.
I was also terrified.
I was also ... rapidly falling in love with Yura.
Damn. Why couldn’t I have met her under normal circumstances, without a gun being pointed to my head? Why couldn’t she come from a species that does simple marriage, without all this bonding rigamarole? And then a voice in my head reminded me what she told me she was going to do: make me forget all that bullshit, because it was her.
It might have been working.
On Friday, I made what she told me was her favorite meal: grutsek. I enjoyed it myself, as long as I closed my eyes; it looked disgusting, like a slimy amoeba, but it tasted like lobster. She was very happy I made it.
I had been telling her about old Earth movies. She wanted to see The Princess Bride. I said sure, but I wanted to talk first.
“I need you to help me out,” I said. She nodded. “I’m going to ask you something, but I want you to do your best to answer it from my point of view. In other words, as a human. You know a lot about us, and you know me.”
“OK,” she replied. “I should be able to do that.”
“Good. I want you to tell me everything bad about bonding. And then I want you to tell me everything good about it. Again, from a human perspective. Start with the bad.”
“OK,” she said, and thought a moment. “The first bad thing is probably the one you’re most concerned about: you’ll never have any privacy, not from me. Vidrunians don’t consider this a bad thing, by the way, but you asked about your perspective.”
“I’m not surprised. Your people care less about privacy and autonomy than mine.”
“True, but the only part of your autonomy affected is that you’re being forced to bond or suffer consequences. Actually being bonded doesn’t affect your autonomy. Privacy, yes, but not autonomy.”
“Really?” I said. “You can’t influence my choices through the bond?”
“Not directly,” she replied. “Let me think of a way to explain this. OK. Let’s say you were planning to do something foolish and dangerous.”
“So, you’ve researched my teenage years,” I laughed.
She laughed back, “No, I thought this was a hypothetical! Either way, how would Amanda react?”
I laughed louder. “Oh, Amanda has The Smirk. The Smirk says, ‘Good luck with that, you idiot,’ without her saying any actual words.”
Yura loved that one. “I really need to meet your sister. Anyhow, if we’re bonded, it’s the same, except you’ll just hear, ‘Good luck with that, you idiot,’ in the back of your mind. I mean, if you decided you wanted to jump off one of the spires of the Government Tower, I wouldn’t be able to stop you over the bond.” She grinned. “The only difference is you can’t walk away from me yelling at you in your mind.”
“Ah,” I grinned. “So it’s still just privacy.”
“Right. OK, other bad things. I know humans have till death do us part in their marriage vows. With a Vidrunian bond, that’s really true; if your bondmate dies you quickly follow. With a couple of months, usually.”
“Even if it’s an early death?”
“Yes. Which is probably the only time you’d have to worry about it. If we live our natural spans, odds are that you would die first. You’re 8 years older and Vidrunians have a longer lifespan than humans by about a decade.”
“OK.”
“The only other bad thing I can think of is this: there is no getting out. No divorce. No separation. Even temporary separation has its limits.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Let’s say you go to Earth without me. You’d last about a month before you started going mad. You can’t be out of contact with the other person for long. Now, luckily, the bond does exist over vast planetary distances. We can sense the bond for all of Vidrunia’s surface, for instance. She grinned. “But if you are going off-planet, then we are going off-planet.”
“Gotcha.” I was taking it all in.
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