Chapter 9

Rachele opens her eyes with a sharp gasp. All she can see is blackness. It takes her a while to remember where she is. She is in her bedroom in her very own apartment, not her quarters back on the ship. The disaster at Vulta was over a month ago. It is over. She had survived it. She is safe now.

It was only a nightmare.

Her heart is still racing, only now it is racing in terror, not passion. It only becomes worse as her mind reorganizes the fact she has just survived the fiction. Yes, she is safe. Death is no longer stalking her. But her team is dead, her best friend is dead, and a new life really is growing inside her. All these emotions that she wasn’t able to feel in the dream suddenly drop on her like a tumbling boulder off the side of a mountain.

For the longest time she is unable to navigate through the confusion of them all. She is extremely distressed, but for no particular reason, and yet for a million reasons all at once. Eventually, once she has calmed down, she owns up to herself with scathing honesty. What she had done with Ghok on that small moon of Vulta was wrong! Not just because she had fucked him, but because she went against all her professional training. The team deserved so much better than that! She brought them to death’s door. She may not have killed each and every one of them, but she may as well have.

Then even after they escaped—even with what remained of the team and crew and her best friend, she never checked on them. She never showed concern for their lives, their safety or their wellbeing. She was busy sitting in her quarters fucking the same alien in the same fashion that brought this down upon all their heads. She seduced Ghok without the slightest regard for any of them. She broke the trust of everybody on that team, her best friend and humanity itself. She even broke her own rules of professionalism and safe sex. And it was all for the opportunity to fuck an extraterrestrial—a godly looking specimen. She carried on again on the ship because she was aware of each and every member of that team that survived was going to die. She watched the other before they got to safety. She knew what would eventually happen, and she ignored it. She used the alien as a distraction from the pain of that reality.

But they all deserved so much more than this.

Now, Rachele finds herself in an eerily similar situation. She is so eager to pretend that the baby inside her isn’t there. She is so willing to forget about it. She wants it to simply go away because it would make her so much happier if it—and all the complications that came with it—simply didn’t exist. That was how she treated them all, especially her best friend. It breaks her heart. She would give anything just to be able to go back and undo the selfish act. But she cannot.

And yet she can. The baby inside her is just like her friend was: frail and in need of her help. If she chooses to reject it, it will die. This is a fresh chance for Rachele to be the better person she dearly wishes she had been before. This is her chance to do the right thing and help someone who needs her, instead of just tending to her own selfish preferences. If she keeps acting as shamefully as she had on Vulta and then the ship, what kind of shallow, lonely life will it amount to? She is only still breathing because Ghok had saved her. What if one day she needs to be rescued again and he doesn’t care enough about her to come to her aid?

As she lay on the bed with Ghok spooning her from behind, she had wished so dearly for life. She had wished that the Nehrezl wouldn’t catch them, even though she felt that that was almost certainly going to be her fate. But her she is, her wish granted. Her fortune seemed to turn around in her favor yet again. But then there is the baby ... While Rachele cannot bring herself to believe that it being inside her is a means to redemption, she has been given the chance to live just as the one growing in her deserves to. To so callously discard this other life seems like an insult to everything Rachele had prayed so earnestly for. She has a renewed appreciation for how precious life is. She is immeasurably grateful that her life was spared. Now, with another life in her own hands, she feels that she can do no less than to grant the same mercy.

The thoughts that she is having scare her immensely. Her train of thought is taking her somewhere she really, really does not want to go. Beginning to panic, she tries to recall Ghok’s counsel from before. She remembers his words, but the logic suddenly seems so flimsy. They are words that sound nice on the surface, but now Rachele knows that they are just what she wants to hear. They come from a point of view that has been distorted to offer her convenience, by obscuring greater truths that she now finds impossible to ignore. They come from a creature that doesn’t seem to share the same emotions as humans. She weeps as she makes the decision with absolute resolve.

She will see the pregnancy through.

She weeps for all the discomfort it will press upon her. She weeps for the hormonal chaos that will assault her. She weeps for the fact that it will make her fat and ugly. She weeps for all the fun she will miss out on over the coming months. She weeps for the agony of labor she will eventually go through. But most of all, she weeps for the way this wrecking ball will turn her life into a shambles. She cannot romanticize the thought of holding a gurgling little baby in her arms. The thought of being called mommy makes her gag. She most definitely does not want this baby. She most definitely despises having it inside her. The road ahead of her is not a rollercoaster of highs as well as lows. Carrying this baby is nothing to her but a burden, plain and simple. But it is a burden she simply cannot skirt away form.

Rachele lets the full weight of her worry over her now daunting future settle upon her. She explores all her uncomfortable thoughts about what this pregnancy will do to her life. She asks poignant questions that she simply does not have any answers for yet, like what if it looks half-alien, then what? She finally lets down her defenses surrounding the circumstances of the baby’s conception and allows herself to openly confront the realities of the affair. She laments what she has done, not because it has gotten her pregnant, but because it has been so inhumane.

And at long last, she finally gives herself the opportunity to truly grieve for her dear, departed friend. Up until now, her tears over the girl’s death were largely for herself. Rachele had wept for her own uncertain future, wept for the turmoil of guilt and bitterness that all the deaths had brought up in her, wept for her own trauma from having to watch her best friend succumb to the alien parasite and wept for the way her own life has been ruined by the same expedition that had killed everyone but her.

Now she mourns only for the loss of her lovely friend. She mourns for the awful experience the whole team must’ve gone through in their final hours. She mourns for the loneliness and betrayal her friend must have felt while she lay on that hospital bed all alone because of the fear of the parasite moving to another host. She mourns for the bright, bubbly glow of her friend’s personality that is no longer shining upon the world. And she mourns for the future that everyone had lost, all the exciting and happy and proud moments of life that none of them are ever going to have again.

With her seemingly endless flow of tears still trickling down on to Ghok’s shoulder, Rachele says her final goodbyes to her best friend. She had confronted all the awkward, painful and distressing thoughts that she has been artfully dodging ever since leaving Vulta, at a growing cost to her sanity. She has accepted that she is pregnant and that she will remain so for many more months. She has acknowledged the tragedy of what had happened on that moon, particularly to her friend. She has made a frank and honest confession to herself about her terrible, careless choices and accepted their moral and physical repercussions. Yet as difficult a process as it is, Rachele is ever mindful of the fact that the alien responsible for it all is right beside her. The slack, yet warm embrace of his arm curls around her, his hip bone settled in neatly into the cup of her crotch. Right now, as she is facing all these problems, she isn’t alone and for this, she is immeasurably grateful.

Her mind is well aware that Ghok is fast asleep, that he has absolutely no idea what she is going through. But this cannot diminish the sense that the weight of these heavy matters isn’t resting upon her alone. Someone is here with her in this harsh, frightening moment of reflection and decision. Someone is holding her. This makes all the difference in getting her through what would otherwise be a devastating time.

Eventually, she calms down. The flow of tears dries up and the barely audible whimpers fall completely silent. But Rachele is too awake to go right back to sleep. She spends some time in quiet contemplation. Some of the things she ponders are important, such as her future and how she will manage the pregnancy. But a lot of it is not, such as wondering how friends and colleagues she had talked to at dinner are getting along. She also spends a few minutes reflecting on how enjoyable it has been to spend the night with Ghok. And she has no idea how long she has been awake when the alien begins to stir, though it feels like somewhere around an hour or two.

Ghok lifts his head for a moment, most likely to peek at the clock behind her. Then he drops back onto the pillow with a frustrated huff. “What time is it?” Rachele asks him.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you,” Ghok quietly apologizes

“It’s okay,” she replies.

“It is a little after four in the morning,” the alien sighs in response to her question. “It’s still dark outside.”

“Time to go?” Rachele inquires after an ominous moment of silence.

“Yes,” Ghok confirms in the kind of voice humans use to describe nuisance chores. “I need to get back before your government officials wonder where I have been. I don’t want to face a bunch of questions where I will have to lie.”

“No, of course not,” she says agreeing. “I guess they still have to keep their eye on you.”

“It is part of being an illegal alien here on Earth,” he reminds her.

“That kind of ironic isn’t it?” she says.

Ghok nods, and despite his eagerness to get back, they continue to lie here in silence, still resting comfortably in the embrace they had fallen asleep in. They both know that he needs to make every effort to keep their fling discreet, but neither of them want to see their temporary indiscretion away from the reality of life to come to an end.

“How about one for the road?” Rachele offers him in a gentle, yet eager tone.

“Why not?” Ghok accepts with a joyless chuckle.

The woman slides over so that she is completely on top of the alien and finds his lips with her own. Ghok’s loose armed embrace becomes a firm bear hug as they kiss. Rachele begins to massage the alien’s flaccid prick invitingly with her mound, but makes no deliberate effort to tease his cock. With the tone set for sex, she knows it will come to the party in due course. Ghok sits upright, carrying the human with him. They kiss for a while longer before he dips her back a little and leans in to suckle on her breasts, with which he is so enamored. Rachele fondles the back of his head as he feasts on them like a beast that hasn’t eaten in a week, continuing to slowly rock her hips around on his lap.

As they enter into another prolonged kiss together, Rachele feels the touch of Ghok’s stiffening alienhood against her crotch. She has been a little worried that her nightmare might have soured her on having sex so soon, but thankfully her arousal proves to be quite ready. She finds the sensation of his shaft brushing over her entrance to be very stimulating and increasingly, she aches to stick all that alien meat inside her.

Ghok departs from her lips once again, to kiss and suckle on her magnificent breasts a second time. Rachele lets him have his fill for a time, but when the stimulation becomes too much for her, she lifts his chin with her fingertips and steals a brief, yet firm kiss. While he is distracted, she lifts her hips, allowing Ghok’s erection to raise just enough for her to align their parts for penetration. Then with a gentle motion, she drops on to his fully erect alienhood. Her pussy is saturated with her juices, making the motion as smooth as feeding her arms through the sleeves of a silk blouse.