Four for the Love of You, My Girl

Elisabet Thorbjornsson squatted beneath a leaf as broad as an elephant’s ear. Not that Liz needed the shelter, being able to push the raindrops away, but the ground under the leaf was less muddy. She glanced at John and Dana sheltered under nearby umbrella shrubs, though John’s bulk was too large to be protected from splashes by just one leaf. They were too far away to talk to in the noise of a downpour. Liz grimaced to herself, and settled in to wait for Ricky to return from scouting the portal.

After a moment, she unslung her bottle gourd of water—the rough rope strap, hastily twisted from shaggy bark, dug into her shoulder. This was followed by her bow with its now uselessly wet string.

Liz hated the jungle. She was wet, tired, hungry, and horny. And miserable. Horny miserable. On one level, she was ready to bang her temporary boyfriends and girlfriend. On another, she was afraid of it.

Every time they screwed each other to mind-shattering orgasms, she felt that much more bound to these kids she’d barely known two weeks ago. They were just survival partners, nothing more, but she could all too easily fall into something like love with them. With the quietly strong Ricky. With fidgety yet caring John. With shy, sensitive Dana. They all had something Liz craved, that she needed. They—

They could complete her. Together they could be a perfect match for her, beyond pure survival.

And that scared her.

There were reasons she dated around. Both times she’d committed herself in the past, she got burned. And that had been without the danger of sex magic that folded, spindled, and mutilated space as well as minds.

Speaking of folded space, the scenery of vivid green vegetation unwrapped itself from Ricky. “All clear,” he announced.

“Oh, good,” John grumbled. He rolled out from under his leaf and stumbled upright. His butt and the back of his thighs were muddy. He twisted around to look and made a disgusted face. “I don’t suppose you can weatherwork this off?” he asked Liz.

Oh for— “Nooo. Duh. Once it’s out of the air, it’s out of my control.” Grumping about something felt good.

“Just asking.”

“Come on,” Dana said as she walked past them, “I wanna dry off.”

“Bueno,” Ricky agreed, following her.

John raised one eyebrow at Liz. He was one of those annoying people who could do that.

But they were right—they couldn’t afford squabbles. Not while being hunted. She blew out a breath, and extended her rainshield to include him.

John grinned, and made an after-you gesture. Hmph.

“Don’t you start,” she warned him, then stalked after the others.

He followed without a word.

At the entrance to the portal, they chained up and Dana led them in. Inside, Dana pulled John past her with a kiss, then Liz, then Ricky. Liz quickly kissed the boys, who kissed each other, and the oppressive weight of rain disappeared with the outer world. Dana smoothly activated the portal controls, selected their destination in John’s ‘broken land,’ and raised the console surface, revealing the matting of woven reeds. The reeds were worn, but thick enough to be surprisingly cushy. Almost like dried-out flesh of some succulent.

But Liz was dithering, thinking about bedding instead of what they were about to do on it: fuck themselves through space.

Well, making love was supposed to be transporting...

The sight of Dana peeling off her wet t-shirt was certainly distracting. Ditto Ricky, with his lean body. Ditto, even, the dauntingly large John as he stripped—after two weeks depending on his body for survival, she knew that there was real strength there. Strength that had always helped her, since coming to this world.

Liz swallowed. Desire swept through her, a heat that she knew had nothing to do with Dana’s magic. Power, yes, but the power of lust, pure and simple. And desire for more mind-shattering orgasms. She swallowed.

“Same as last time?” John asked.

As much as Liz loved a cock deep inside her, she wanted to show Dana that she trusted her, at least this much—that she knew this desire was entirely her own. She flowed forward into Dana’s naked arms.

As they kissed, mouth open to mouth, body naked to body, Liz heard a distant chuckle. “I’ll take that as a yes,” John’s faraway voice said from just behind her shoulder.

By the time the girls had skinned off the rest of their sodden clothes, Liz was ready to climb the stairway to ecstasy. Going by Dana’s gasps when Liz slipped two fingers inside her, so was she.

And Liz, oh damn, she wanted to give that ecstasy to Dana. She was so delicious, this girl she—

No, focus, Liz told herself. Lose yourself in the sex. In the glorious climb to orgasm for both of them. In the two fingers rubbing between her lips and her clit between them.

She was so caught up in this girl, in the joy of her, they didn’t even get to licking each other before they reached the top, crying out in each other’s mouths. Liz shivered and shook and shuddered, over and over and over, till the ecstasy left her shattered and shaken.

Hands helped her down, lay her down on a body—John’s, with his thick cock. Oh. Yes. This would be even better. His hands helped her straddle his waist, helped her slide down, helped guide him inside her. His girth filled her, with meat and with joy, and soon with the help of Ricky’s fingers on her clit she was back on the stairway. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else existed.

It was a longer climb this time but, if anything, easier. Liz made sure to grind and swivel her hips, bringing John along. Even with that, it was exhilarating to finally arrive at the top, to come to there and come and come as the world

—folded—

—them—

—snapped—

—back—slamming through her with the force of ecstasy—

A long moment of silence, then Liz collapsed on her ride, followed by Dana, and all four gasped.

After a long moment, Ricky panted, “We’ve. Time. To. Rest.”

“Yeah,” John breathed.

Not being on the immediate run. What a concept.

Tacitly agreeing, Dana didn’t revive Liz with her magic, or the others. She slid off Ricky, nestling under his outside arm, and looked at the others with a very pleased smile.

Liz copied her on the other side of John. His arm around her felt nice. It was a rare chance to just cuddle. Liz loved it almost as much as the exquisite fucking. It took over a minute for Liz’s breathing to slow to normal. By then, her sweat was almost gone, stolen by the bone-dry air.

She watched Dana over their boyfriends’ chests. So much going on here. So many questions. Finally, Liz licked her lips and asked, “That thing you did, restoring my energy using the power we generated—can it be used on these?” She twiddled her fingers at the boys’ shrinking cocks.

“Um,” Dana said unhelpfully. “That’s—” She got an odd look in her eyes, then placed her palm on Ricky’s soft cock. Liz tasted something like the fuzzy texture of a gasp, and the cock started swelling, turning hard again in moments. With a sweep of her hand, Dana encompassed the other three, and with her tongue redolent of the slickness of moaning, Liz felt—ready. Just recovered enough, and just aroused enough, to keep going if needed, but not so desperately aroused that she had to fuck.

“Oh, maaan,” Dana breathed, palpably disgusted. “I’ve been brute-forcing the portals. Like lifting a rock directly.”

John snorted.

Liz remembered the moment, a flash of intuition, when she realized she could circulate wind around them in a protective bubble instead of pushing it away, and shook her head. Without teachers or examples, learning magic was hard. “It’s okay,” she said, then when Dana opened her mouth, Liz overrode her with, “No ‘pologies, ‘k?”

Dana smiled wryly. “‘K.”

Liz’s heart felt like a single piano string that had been plucked.

“Trial and error,” Ricky agreed, then languidly stretched. “Come on.”

Reluctantly, despite feeling far less drained than previous times, Liz stood up, then helped Dana to her feet as well. To distract herself from obsessing on the girl, she offered John her assistance. He took her offered hand with amusement, and indeed he was heavy enough her pull did little to help.

“The thought counts,” he told her.

Another piano string twanged in her heart.

Their sweat was already all but dry, but their clothing was still sodden. Liz had a few spare clothes, left over from when her pack had been ripped apart by the gate that dropped them, literally, into this world. Not that any were clean, but she did swap her panties for the dry pair.

“We’ll want long sleeves till sundown,” Ricky advised. Which would be in just over an hour, Liz knew instinctively.

Liz sighed, but he was right about the sun’s rays—she burned even more easily here than on Earth. She plucked her pullover from John’s pack. Dana shrugged and put on her sweatshirt—she had even fewer choices than Liz. Even that sweatshirt was borrowed from Ricky.

Soon they were ready to leave. Or at least dressed and packed.

Liz reached out and took Ricky’s hand in her left, and John’s in her right. She nodded at Dana, who copied her, forming a circle. Liz gripped the boys’ hands firmly.

“Thank you, all of you,” she said. “For everything.”

“We’re together,” Ricky said. “In everything.”

A third piano string thrummed, in harmony with the first two. Dang it. But, yes, now Liz was ready.

Dana dropped the barrier to outside, flooding Liz with the dry, oppressive heat of a desert.

“No Kolchoi nearby,” Ricky reported immediately. “Little game larger than a lizard, and most of it sheltered in burrows.”

“Cloudless skies with hot days and chill nights for at least a week,” Liz added.

“Man, these rocks are weird,” John said wonderingly.

“No detectable power,” Dana concluded. The others looked at her. She told them, “I don’t know how far I can sense, but I thought you should know.”

“Okay then,” Ricky said.

Outside, in the slanting light of late afternoon, Liz saw the desert she had and had not expected. It was a desert of rocks more than sand, much like the canyons of southern Utah, with clumps of dried grasses and pale, wiry brush clinging where they could. But the landscape was like nothing she’d ever seen: roughly flat, but the rocks were broken and layered in every which direction, in sizes ranging from poodle to whale, highlighted by their long shadows. Most of it was similar to Utah slickrock, but some boulders looked like the stone in the quarry on the north side of their hometown.

“There, see?” John said. “All this sandstone is of this world. But this limestone?” He walked over to a quarry-boulder, put his hand on it. “This is from Earth—our Earth.” He twisted his hand and a large slab slid off the boulder, revealing a spiral fossil.

A perfect ammonite. The first actual Earth animal they’d seen.

Liz felt like her breath had been stolen, but by what or why she didn’t understand.

“You’re thinking that, if these rocks came here, we can go back to where they came from?” Ricky asked.

“Maybe,” John said. “I don’t know. If we can figure out how.” He looked at Dana.

She licked her lips. “It was pretty confusing, coming here, but I’m pretty sure the gate that brought us didn’t work the same way as these portals.”

“But,” Liz said, “they both involve connecting distant spaces.”

Dana screwed up her face but didn’t dispute the idea.

“Is there, like, a center to this disruption?” Ricky asked John.

John turned around, eyes unfocused. He waved in one direction, to the southeast. “It feels like there’s more limestone over there.”

Ricky nodded, followed by Liz and Dana.

John led the way with his earthsense through the rubble. His ‘easier’ routes usually matched the faint game trails that Ricky pointed out, but not always. One long flat stretch of sandstone reminded Liz of the shelves of Capitol Reef, giving her the strongest ache of homesickness she’d felt in a week.

By the time the sun set behind their left shoulders, the landscape had gotten, if anything, worse for wear. They stopped at the lip of a ravine gashed into the ground.

“What water wore this away?” Dana wondered aloud.

John shook his head. “It was cracked open. Smashed.”

That caught Ricky’s attention. “Meteorite?”

An idea that startled John. “Made of limestone?”

Which made Liz wonder. “Don’t the cracks from an impact radiate outward?”

John nodded. “They should.”

“Let’s follow this,” Ricky said. “Instead of crossing.”

Dana peered down into the thickening shadows below. The bottom was deep enough they couldn’t see it clearly. “Good idea.”

Light from the rings above, brighter than a full moon on Earth, was normally enough to walk about in—but not over ground this rocky. They had to go slow and help each other. John with his earthsense never tripped, and Ricky with his pathfinding rarely, but both Liz and Dana stumbled several times. Liz’s left shin ached from bonking it twice. Her wet bowstring, twisted a week ago from plant fibers, finally broke, leaving her with a quiver of three useless arrows and a flexible walking stick. The latter was still better than nothing.