Kink, Love, and Galactic Domination

"That sounds an awful lot like you enjoying yourself," Leora's voice interrupted his thoughts.

She knelt down behind him, still working the lumpy ornamental hairbrush back and forth in his ass, and reached around to give his erection a squeeze.

"Are you enjoying getting fucked? Like a cunt?"

Trisque couldn't equivocate any longer. "Yes!"

"Good." Leora pulled the brush gently but firmly away, leaving him empty. "Then maybe you're ready to graduate to worshipping one."

Trisque turned around to get worshipping so fast that he genuinely forgot the tie was still there. It dug hard into his windpipe.

Leora chuckled as she unfastened it from the faucet handle and used it to pull him toward her.

He found the closure on her everyday suit pants and pulled them down to plant a soft, full, reverent kiss over the hood of her clit.

Leora went on laughing, as she shifted from kneeling to lying on her back, giving him total access.

Trisque threw himself into the task, kissing and licking with both gentleness and gusto.

The first few minutes were paradise — useful, simple, welcome human closeness.

The longer the minutes dragged on, however, the more other thoughts were able to intrude. And the minutes did drag on.

Leora must not have been as turned on as she was last night. The realization prompted a wave of embarrassment, at having caused her to humor him.

Here they were, barely more than twenty-four hours married, and he had her lying on a bathroom floor, following along with a roleplay borne of years of context she didn't have access to — and if she did, it would probably disgust her more.

Trisque couldn't even remember whether he'd started out trying to win her favor for the cause, or for himself, or just to cheer her up, but in any case, he was making a mess of it. Backing out at this particular moment didn't seem like it would help, though, so he closed his eyes and pushed through.

He couldn't accurately gauge how wet he was making her right now, there was too much of his saliva already in play, but it definitely wasn't the same. He tried not to think about that incredible responsiveness she'd had for him last night, and how badly he must have messed up in order to ruin it.

In the end, it really didn't take all that long for her to cum. She wrapped her legs around his neck and yelped happily, or seemingly happily, but by then Trisque was unwilling to believe that he was capable of doing anything right. Any evidence that pointed in that direction had to be wrong.

#

The mood had taken a turn, and Leora wasn't sure exactly when or why.

She gently suggested that Trisque clean himself up a little bit from what she'd done to his ass and join her on the bed. When he returned to the bedroom, he walked like a person condemned to something even he would not enjoy.

"I'm... I'm just ridiculously sorry," he muttered.

"About the proposal?" she asked. "Yeah, you're most of the way to convincing me of that."

He seemed to miss the playfulness in her voice, or deliberately ignore it.

"No. I mean, yes. But I meant, sorry for the underwhelming service just now."

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"You know," he hunched his shoulders close to his chin. "It took a while to get you going there, and I totally get why—"

"That seemed like 'a while' to you?" asked Leora, covering her sudden self-consciousness with teasing. "Sounds like your tongue could use some stamina training."

"No, I didn't mean..." he backpedaled. "I don't mean you take too long, you're actually the fastest I've ever—" he broke off with a groan and laughed darkly at himself.

Leora couldn't help joining in. "Oh, I'm the 'fastest' woman you've ever had?"

"The fastest at getting off," Trisque clarified. "Not the fastest at getting into bed in the first place, not that that would be a bad thing if you were, or a good thing, it would be a personal choice thing...."

"I was at the end of a three-week orgasm fast the first night," Leora explained, when she caught the point he was fumbling at.

Screw anyone who wanted to lecture her for revealing that to him. If they tried, Leora would just remind them that the occasional genuine confession could be used to build trust. It was one of the first things Flissom had ever taught her.

"This was more like how I usually am," she said, "when I'm not deprived, but am having a really good time."

She infused the truth of this into her emphasis and her smile, and after a few seconds, it seemed to penetrate Trisque's self-pity.

"An orgasm fast?" he asked, already more at ease discussing a factor he had no part in. "Why? No, don't tell me. Committee stuff?"

Leora dipped her head in a nod. "In case I needed an extra boost getting into things."

"Yeah, no, that's exactly as creepy and invasive as I expected it to be," said Trisque.

"Effective, though," said Leora.

She played with a corner of the bedspread and bit her tongue until a sour taste subsided from it. She'd never get a better segue opportunity than this.

"Have you ever tried it?" she asked casually. "After a while, even a passing touch feels like the best toy you've ever played with."

"As tempting as that sounds," Trisque skirted the question, hopping onto the bed with her, "you did make me a promise, involving ink and licking tonight."

His erection, so full and ready while she'd been going at him with the hairbrush, had subsided by the time he left the bathroom, but it was beginning to make a comeback now.

"That promise was for my husband," Leora reminded him. "What kind of wife would I be if I gave it away to some asshole from his staff instead?"

She flicked the tie, still hanging at a disheveled angle from his neck.

Trisque immediately yanked the short end free of the knot and tossed it dramatically off the bed.

No blowjobs for the bastard she'd been punishing. Just for Trisque.

Leora grabbed him by his rumpled collar and kissed him, realizing only as she did so that it was the first time. Of all the ways they'd touched each other so far, this one had not yet had its moment.

His lips were soft, and he kissed deeply, continuously, with no clear opportunities for a conclusion. Eventually, she had to tear herself away in order to make her way down his torso to his re-hardened cock.

She tested it first with one long, slow lick along the word "MARRIED" on the left side. The acrid-smelling ingredients from the pen had completely evaporated, so she could only really taste the faintly salty musk of his skin.

"No smudges yet," she told him, pausing a few extra seconds for a truly thorough examination, before taking him all the way into her mouth.

He sighed with contentment.

For just a moment, while she sucked the Litani prince's cock, Leora braced herself for that overdue disgust she'd spent so long preparing for. It still didn't arrive.

Trisque reached down and stroked her hair, while she enjoyed his smoothness in her mouth.

#

Satisfied and comfortably cleaned up, Trisque lay on the bed with Leora snuggled against his chest, their unhurried breathing synchronized into an infinite and ancient-seeming rhythm.

The last thing he wanted to do was break the moment, but he'd learned from experience that the relief he could get from doing stuff with Aidrom's tie didn't last more than an hour or so. The results had to be used right away, or lost.

"So..." he said awkwardly, picking up the tablet from the bedside table and holding it in front of the two of them.

"So...?" Leora echoed, looking up at him as if he were about to say something insightful and new.

She continued to wait, not reaching to take the tablet, so Trisque set it down on his lap and scrolled down to the signature boxes, ready to be the first to debase himself before the system.

"What the hell are you doing?" asked Leora, sitting up and removing her warmth from his chest.

Trisque froze with his finger over the tablet, mouth dry, afterglow chased off by sudden, harsh adrenaline.

"I told you I wasn't going to sign it," said Leora.

"But we just..." Trisque motioned toward the bathroom, backward in time. "I thought we were...."

"Were what?" asked Leora. "Fucking away our consciences?"

"No, just, you know, helping each other deal with what we're going to have to do?"

"I thought it was consolation for having to hear you suggest this in the first place!" Leora shouted.

She snatched the tablet from his hand, shook it in front of him, and then tossed it to the foot of the bed as she stood up. Her other hand retrieved her pants from where she'd draped them over the footboard. She began stepping back into them in spite of the late hour.

Her tongue worked at the back of her mouth, as if any lingering taste of him had suddenly turned sour for her.

Trisque swung his feet onto the ground and caught up with her, the momentary fear of an interpersonal faux pas deepening into the horror of true failure, with lives on the line.

"You're seriously just going to let all those people die?" he asked.

Leora stared back at him, looking exactly as incredulous as he felt. "Why are you yelling that me, and not at whoever wrote that bill? Because I'm not the one who took a humanitarian crisis and thought to myself, 'hey, I bet I could exploit that to make the galaxy a worse place.'"

She did not wait for him to compose a reply about how futile complaining to the department heads would be, but grabbed her jacket and strode toward the door.

"I can't believe I actually thought you were a human being," she said as it closed behind her.

#

"There you are!" Kevina huffed, sitting down in the chair across from Leora in the ship's high security café, without waiting for an invitation.

"You're supposed to have clearance level nine to be in here," Leora objected halfheartedly, without taking her eyes off her personal tablet.

She was still in yesterday's suit, probably with puffy all-nighter eyes. She'd contacted nearly a hundred people about mobilizing some civilian assistance for the disputed worlds, and heard back from fourteen of them. The answers from her uncle, and everyone who had ever spoken to uncle, were all a resounding "no."

The only person who had agreed to help so far was an old friend, Tammy, who ran a chain of crisis shelters that uncle Dagget had always derisively referred to as Leora's "pageant project." The organization was already stretched so thin that all they could really do was pick her up in the morning and fly her around to beg for donations herself.

Something bumped into Leora's knee, and she moved it irritably away. Only on the third bump did she realize that Kevina was trying to pass her something discreetly under the table.

"For fuck's sake," Leora snapped, grabbing the handful of metal from her. "If anyone's going to see something they're not supposed to see in here, it's you. You don't even officially have a job anymore."

"The unofficial jobs are the only ones that count right now, kid," said Kevina. "The device is titanium. With a kill switch, of course." She pressed a button on her pocket communicator, and the lump of metal in Leora's hand lurched with the hard, sharp shing noise of a heavy-duty paper cutter.

In spite of Kevina's admonishing gestures, Leora brought it up above table-level to look at. It took her a few moments to find the little blade, a bit sturdier but not much bigger than a razor, that must have made the noise. She traced the grooves of the track along the inside of the device that allowed the blade to spring across the main titanium ring - where Leora was no doubt expected to entrap Trisque's cock.

When the blade was all the way to one side of the ring or the other, it camouflaged almost perfectly into the frame.

Who thinks of doing this to a person?

"Did you know where my fingers were when you hit that button?" Leora asked.

"It has other features too, of course, if you insist on looking at it here," said Kevina. "Vibration, for when you need to get his attention." She pressed another button to demonstrate. "A removable spike ring that punishes arousal, so you can decide how strictly you want to control his thoughts from day to day. And you can use that with the vibration mode if he ever gets on your nerves."

Leora could almost have smirked at that thought today, if Kevina had not been there, already smirking, and wanting her to join in.

The entirely unfun, unfrivolous nature of that blade made it hard to look at the rest of the cage in any other light.

"It's also synchronized to a secure server, so all of the functions can be activated from anywhere in the inhabited galaxy. The only place he can hide is in a faraday cage, and even then, the kill switch has mechanical booby-traps for every possible way someone might try to break it off of him."

Kevina pressed another button, which made all of the closable parts of the device spring open in Leora's hand. All she would have to do would be to latch them in place.

"Talk him into a game, slip him a sedative and do it in his sleep. It doesn't matter," said Kevina. "Once it's on, he's ours."

"Ours," Leora repeated, turning the open titanium rings over in her hands. "Who's going to have access to that server? Me?"

"Of course. You're the one who's going to be there in the room, the one he'll go begging to, the one who's going to have to negotiate and fine tune the give and take for optimal compliance."

"Who else? Uncle Dagget? You? How many others?"

Kevina's face did not move, but Leora guessed she was deciding that this was not worth a lie.

"It would be negligent, toward both Parusan interests and Prince Trisque, not to have redundancies."

"Emperor Trisque," Leora corrected, almost automatically.

It wasn't that the thought of Trisque as an imperial authority was comforting, but her team's habit of talking about the way things were as if the treaty she had been raised to fulfill had never actually happened was getting on her nerves.

"Does he make you call him that in bed?" asked Kevina.

It sounded as if she was giving Leora an out, offering the least alarming reason why she might give a shit about his title.

He likes to call me Empress, sometimes.

Leora did not answer aloud.

Kevina didn't seem to care.

"There's one other thing," she added. "I hear you've been campaigning around for relief for the disputed planets."

"Yeah," said Leora. "Don't worry, I'd never expect you to take a day off from designing weapons, surveillance, and torture gear to make something useful for helping people. Even if you did, it'd be too top secret to use, wouldn't it?"

"Your uncle has promised you one humanitarian project of your choice," said Kevina, "interference free, to celebrate your enslavement of the Litani prince, payable at such time when you can prove that you've done it."

Leora scoffed. "Can I get that in writing?"

"So that you can show it to whom later?" asked Kevina. "Your chastened husband? The public you promised equality and partnership to? Nobody's going to force your uncle to do anything. He's going to back you on exactly one project, because he said he would, and because he likes being able to put that look on your face whenever he wants to. Yes, that one. The one you're trying to hide right now. The one you get when you want to believe that he isn't good to his word, but you can't. Don't worry, even if everyone on the disputed planets is already dead by the time you get the prince — sorry, the emperor — locked up, there's always another crisis you could use a favor for. No expiration date."

Leora squeezed the cold metal rings, then dropped them in her pocket.

"Tell him to be ready for this one."

#

Leora did not return to the royal suite that day.

It took three hours for Tammy's ship, the Compassion, to arrive in the Palace Ship's docking bay, and Leora spent every minute of that time trying to compose a script that would allow her to make its mission less pathetically underfunded.

"Hi, honey, I'm home. Sorry I called you not a human being. You were right, I was wrong. On an unrelated note, let's make up with a high-risk trust game."

"Hi, honey. I'm here to collect your apology in the obscure traditional manner of my people. Kindly demonstrate your respect by drinking this potion, so that our marriage can continue."

"Trisque, do you really believe it's right to sacrifice people's fundamental rights to temporarily appease an insatiable evil that's threatening lives? Okay, well, what if it didn't have to be the rights of half the people in the galaxy? What if it could be just one person's? What if it could just be yours?"

In the end, she couldn't trust in any of the options. Not when a failed attempt could tip him off and make all future attempts infinitely more difficult.

She would board the Compassion, try her best to do something with nothing today, and then come back to Trisque with her tail believably between her legs. She'd lie about having already signed, or being willing to sign, whatever it took to create a believable makeup session, where she'd bring out the new "toy."

When she boarded the Compassion, Tammy came to hug her and coo over how great it was to work together again and how glad she was that Leora hadn't gotten too big to remember her friends, even as Empress.

Leora hugged her back and tried to summon the old enthusiasm for grassroots effort with grassroots results.

Next to the prospect of her uncle's help, it all felt uncomfortably irrelevant.

#

Leora gave every crowd of passersby her biggest, sweetest smile, and ran her mouth dry with small talk.

"Thanks for your donation!"

"Yeah, I really am the spitting image, aren't I? Of me. I'm Empress Leora. Yes, really. No, pretty sure I'm not too short."

"Thanks for caring!"

"Emperor Trisque? Oh, we still have our separate projects. That's important, you know."

"Ma'am, help the disputed worlds? Help the disputed worlds, anyone?"

"I mean, as arranged marriages that started this week go, yes, of course it's real."

"Thank you so much! This is great. No, I'm sure we'll find plenty of use for your used coasters."

"Wow, what an incredibly personal and inappropriate question. Would you have asked my uncle that?"

"Thanks for caring, have a nice day!"

The Compassion made its way around a dozen cities on the three most middle-income worlds in Parusan space. This route had been developed for quick, high-efficiency missions over the course of years of trial and error. Most other worlds had either nothing to give or a vehement disgust for the concept of giving.

They stood for an hour at a block party, an hour at a tourist district intersection, and an hour at a university campus. In that case, they were lucky enough to catch a mass exodus from one of the dorms, with plenty of idealistic students eager not to carry all of their accumulated possessions to their next home.

When they reached the strip of disputed planets, their hold was full of frayed pants, shirts with perplexing slogans, blankets of unknown allergen content, bags of grain, less fresh water than it would take to make all the grain edible, and prize of the collection, three whole cases of toilet paper.

Tammy glanced at Leora on the way in, then picked one of the planets at random rather than asking her to do so.

They both knew that they probably wouldn't have anything left to deliver beyond the first one.

The Compassion touched down on the dusty surface of Mychon, next to the powered down system core.

All of the consolidated infrastructure systems on the disputed planets had been cold for the past fifty years, when both the Litani and Parusan governments had refused to send any further shipments of doleum to fuel them, until their jurisdiction was indisputably recognized.