Liquid Diplomacy

It didn't revisit any of the memories it had dug up before. Instead, it landed me back at age eighteen, on a humid late-summer night. Sitting with Kelly in the used van my cousin gave me. Sometimes we didn't use it to go anywhere, just as a place to hang out, away from our families. We had the windows cracked, and the crickets were singing.

In the memory, I was saying, "Kelly, I need to say this before..." We were headed off to different colleges. Our colleges weren't all that different, or all that far apart, but we both knew it wouldn't be so easy to hang out anymore.

When I found the strength, I went on, "I'm sorry your first time was with such a huge asshole."

She chuckled, but there was a bittersweet edge to it.

"Trevor says just horrible things sometimes, and I never called him on it enough," I said. My friendship with Trevor hadn't lasted past graduation, and I didn't really miss it. "At that point, I didn't know what we had, if anything, so I didn't want to presume...I mean, I shouldn't have denied being with you."

There was a long pause before Kelly replied. "You know, losing my virginity and getting dumped for the first time in the span or a few days, I feel like I did a speed-run of dating. That's probably enough drama for a lifetime."

She leaned her shoulder close to mine. "It wasn't all bad though. At least we got to hang out just as friends for a little while longer."

When this happened for real, I had turned bashfully away. Reliving it now, I turned to look at her. I had often wondered exactly what she meant by that, and I thought maybe this time I could find out.

Kelly brought her lips to mine hungrily. Oh. That's what she meant.

I was instantly hard, as I yielded to her embrace, and returned it with my own. Whether this was teenage hormones in control, or the hours upon hours of unfulfilled desires from yesterday, I couldn't be sure. I was hopelessly immersed in the moment. I already knew I would miss her at college, but now she was inspiring new ways I'd miss her.

We made out on the front bench seat of the van for a while, until I became glaringly aware of just how much streetlight was coming in through the windshield. We retreated to the back of the van, shoving aside the fast food bags and backpacks.

Kelly pulled away to lift her shirt up over her head, and I remembered suddenly that none of this was real. And that I was placed in this situation deliberately, with a goal in mind. A goal that I suspected ran contrary to my species' best interests.

"This isn't how it happened," I thought, directing the thought at the alien. "It isn't supposed to happen like this."

In these memories, I was playing the role of my past teenage self, and I realized that I could break the scene at any time. I could stop playing along. That was the power that I had, if I had the will to use it.

"What's wrong?" Kelly asked, noticing my hesitation.

Truthfully, I wanted to play this scene out to the end, and see how else it could have gone. But I knew it would never be real, and it would mean giving in.

At the same time, the questioning in her tone was real enough. I knew if I rejected her in that moment, it would sting more than if I had never gotten her hopes up in the first place.

"Stop this," I thought.

And then all of it was gone, as the alien went looking for fertile ground elsewhere.

I found myself waking in my cramped dorn room bed, with Kelly pressed up against me. There was only one time this could be, the morning after my twenty-first birthday. Kelly had taken the train down to come to my birthday party, and she'd been the last to stay. I remembered that much.

"You came!" I murmured in her ear.

"Well yeah, you ate me out until like three in the morning," she said. "Do you not remember that?"

"Kinda. I just mean I'm glad you made the trip." I cupped one of her large, soft breasts in my hand, hardly believing this could be real. "When do you have to uh...get off?"

"The train back is at one in the afternoon, if that's what you mean," she said. Plenty of time, I thought.

My hand found its way down between her legs, and I found her wet and sensitive already. I slipped a finger inside her, and felt her muscles contract around it. Her eyes fluttered closed as she moaned.

"Mm, don't you think it's your turn by now?" she asked, her hand finding my erection. She started to sit up to bring her face down to it, but I pushed her back onto the bed, climbing on top of her.

"I can think of one way we could both have a turn," I said with a smirk.

"You know, if we're going to take that step..."

"Again," I reminded her.

"Again," she agreed. "...Would you object to being in a relationship with me?"

What happened next, in real life, was that I weighed the options. There were a couple of girls at my school that I had crushes on. One I'd recently gone on a first date with. Another I'd made out with at a party, but we hadn't managed to connect yet since then. A third who had just given me her number. College seemed like a wide world of possibility.

And then there Kelly. She was a known quantity--I'd been with her before, and my memories of my first time were muddled. Of course it felt great, it was sex and I'd never had it before, but at the time I didn't really know what I liked or what I was doing. Plus, the memory of it was tainted with the mess I made of things afterwards.

I'd known Kelly for years. I knew we got along, though mostly just as friends. A long distance relationship would mean seeing each other once every week or two, if we were lucky. A lot of opportunities lost. A lot of nights not getting laid.

And then, somewhere in the back of my mind, there was still some ingrained process, categorizing the women around me into relationship material or not. I knew how Trevor would laugh, if I ended up in a relationship with Kelly. I could only wonder what my parents would say. Would they quietly disapprove? Would they be patronizingly supportive? I didn't look forward to any of the possibilities.

"I don't know..." I told her honestly. I rolled to the side, giving her room to breathe. "Do we have to decide this now?"

She got up and started putting her clothes back on.

"You can think about it for as long as you want," Kelly said.

"Kelly, hey. Are we still cool?"

She just shrugged. "Yeah. Of course." She didn't want to admit that I had hurt her again, but I knew I'd blown it.

Reliving it now, courtesy of this alien encounter, Kelly broached the big question, "...Would you object to being in a relationship with me?"

And I cringed at the self-deprecating way she phrased it. Would I object? She was worth so much more than that. I felt like the right answer was clear. She had given me multiple chances already, and I had failed her. I was tired of being the guy who let her down. This was my chance to make it right.

"Kelly, I'd be thrilled to be in a relationship with you," I told her, and it was hard to tell who initiated the kiss then.

She wrapped her arms and legs around me, pulling me so close that it would have been difficult to not slip inside her. She felt perfect, snug, like home. And yet I was consumed with an animal desire. Maybe it was my youthful libido. Maybe it was that I had been kept on edge for so long without release, day bleeding into night bleeding into day. As I drove myself into her, she clung tight to me, her full breasts shaking with every thrust, her every breath a ragged moan.

"I...it's my...it's not..." she tried to put the right words together while struggling to think, but there was clearly something she was trying to tell me.

I paused my onslaught. "What is it?"

"It's not safe...unless you want that too."

Her eyes were unfocused, but there wasn't a touch of worry in them. She would have let me go that far, and if she hadn't said anything, I very well might have done it. But she was right to tell me. I had to know the implications of what we were doing, and what might happen as a result. Heck, even being inside her unprotected might be enough of a mistake.

This situation was new. There was no precedent guiding me, no script to read from. And in the back of my mind, as distractible as I was, I still remembered that this wasn't real, that the alien put me in this situation, and that alien had an agenda of its own that I didn't yet comprehend.

It must have sensed my intent, and known that I wasn't going to go through with what it wanted. That scene fell away too soon. I realized that if the alien was in full control of the experience, it could've just had Kelly not warn me. It could've had her do anything it wanted. Somehow that was a line that it couldn't or wouldn't cross.

The next scene it plopped me into was from when I was twenty-seven. Fresh off a nasty breakup with Lila, after I caught her with another guy. After the fight, Lila changed the locks on the apartment, blocked my number, ghosted me on all the apps. I was pissed and in denial and desperate at first to find some way back into her life, but she cut me off completely.

When I finally accepted that it was over, I embraced the freedom she'd given me. I traveled for a bit, reconnecting with so many old friends. People I hadn't had the time for, during those tumultuous years with Lila.

That was how I conveniently found myself passing through the town where Kelly lived, in the hills of Pennsylvania. I didn't know what to expect; her posts on social media had been sparse and vague. We used to message each other a lot, but when I was with Lila, I wasn't sure how to talk about it with Kelly, or what Lila would think of it, if she found out. But when I reached out now, Kelly seemed glad to hear from me again.

We met on neutral ground, at a cafe along the river, in what was once a steel mill town. We walked through the parks and caught up on our years apart. I was surprised there was no husband in the picture, just a devoted dog.

"Well, this is me," she said, pointing to an old stone house. Her dog was sitting in the bay window, watching us with a wagging tail. "Want to come in?"

The weather had been threatening all morning, and rain began to splatter on the sidewalk.

"If you don't mind, just until it passes," I said. I hadn't come here with an agenda, at least not a conscious one. Now I didn't dare read too much into it. By now, Kelly and I had years of practice at being just friends again.

Her dog loved me at first sight. It was warm inside the house, and I found myself stripping off my layers.

"Wine?" Kelly asked.

"I...uh...I shouldn't. I'll have to press on later," I said, gesturing back to where my car was parked, a few blocks away. My plan was to drive until I got tired, and sleep it off in a Walmart parking lot.

Sensing my lack of enthusiasm for that, she said, "Are you sure? You can stay the night if you want." Then she added quickly, "I've got a guest room..."

"Okay," I said, easily won over. "I mean, thank you."

It was just like old times, hanging out with her. Except I'd been down a destructive spiral, and she'd done pretty well for herself. I tried not to be ungracious and expect anything from my host.

After dinner, we sat together on her couch, her hand playing with my hair, like she sometimes did when she was drunk. I was well and truly tipsy myself, and I asked her, "Are you seducing me?"

She laughed and took a sip from her wineglass. "I don't know, am I?"

And in that moment, I was full of conflicting emotions. Yes, I was finding myself attracted to her again, or still, even if she was nothing like any of the other women I'd ever been with. Yes, Kelly was still very much herself, in how she acted, how she looked, how we got on together. And yes, I could certainly use a good fuck after a couple lonely weeks on the road and a quickly collapsing relationship before that.

But I knew I was just passing through, and that wasn't likely to change. It had been so good to reconnect with her, and I didn't want to ruin what we had. After Lila, I was damaged goods, in the process of detoxifying. I had rejected Kelly before, I had wronged her, and I didn't deserve another chance.

What happened in reality is that I got up and went to the guest room, and didn't come out until morning. Over breakfast we joked about getting kinda sloshed the night before, and when I left that day, it was as a friend.

But I wasn't in that post-Lila depression anymore; I had come out of that long ago. And what the alien was showing me was the wealth of evidence that had always been there, that Kelly and I always could've had something more. I was seeing now that Kelly was always there for me, and never gave up on me, even when I gave her plenty of reason to.

I didn't have to do anything but hesitate a moment too long. In that moment, her hand found mine and brought my hand to her lips. With all my repressed, unspent desire, it didn't take much to ignite me. I found myself kissing her neck, thinking it wasn't too late to put a stop to this before it went too far, even though that excuse was thinning by the second.

We didn't even move from the leather sofa; she had the curtains drawn. Her dog was asleep in the corner, as Kelly drew her sweater up over her head, her heat already too much to be contained. She fished the erection from my pants, her tongue driving me wild. My body was in two states at once, superimposed: sore from hours of edging, and just getting started. So despite her expert performance, my release would not come. It was almost frustrating to experience so much pleasure without an end in sight.

"You know I'm just here for tonight, right?" I asked.

"Mm hm," she moaned, before drawing back. "Who said I wanted anything more?"

"You did, years ago," I said. "If you want to cross that line tonight."

She shrugged. "People change. Rules change. I'm not hung up on that anymore."

She moved up, straddling my waist, her hair falling around my face as she kissed me again. She must have slipped out of her yoga pants while I was distracted. We were moving so fast. It was surprising, but it felt natural somehow. Like we'd always been building up to this.

"Kelly, you're...perfect," I said.

"I'm aware," she said with a smirk, rubbing me against her slit.

"Should we be using a..." I began.

"Fuck that," she gasped.

And she lowered herself onto me, going slow at first, working me into her while all the muscles inside her were tensing, resisting the intrusion. I had missed her heft, her soft strength, her curves. All the places I could grab her and hold on without hurting her.

"Oh my god," I said, my hands digging into the flesh of her back.

She laughed. "Just you wait."

"Won't be long," I warned her.

She stopped moving her hips, maybe trying to let me catch my breath. But still, everything inside her was tugging at me, caressing me. Her body was comforting, welcoming, in a way that urged me on.

I knew it would be so easy to just let go, and meld my body to hers, to let my passion crest and spill over. But seeing the edge of the waterfall ahead, I remembered all at once what it meant. Even as my body was yielding to her completely, some corner of my mind was still in touch with reality, and starting to panic.

"Stop," I thought. "Stop this now. This isn't how it happened. This isn't what I remember."

Even as I thought it, I could feel it becoming untrue. I was reliving a memory, but in doing so, I was changing what I remembered happening that night. I was overwriting it with this new experience.

"Stop! I won't let you take my cherished memories!" I thought, even as my body betrayed me.

Day 743

I was spat out of the past, landing in the present. Sure enough, the alien's proboscis was latched onto my cock again. I was less surprised by it this time, but still disgusted. Part of me thought it would be better to just let this alien suck me off with it, than to let it dig around in my head. But I wasn't quite ready to accept either option.

"I think it's time you tell me exactly what you're after," I said. "I know you understand me."

The proboscis let up on its suction but didn't withdraw, leaving me still encased in the warm, moist flesh. Perhaps the alien noticed that I hadn't exactly told it to get off me this time. It occasionally gave me a squeeze, keeping me firm but not actively trying to get me off. I found myself accepting that.

"I'm here to collect your DNA," it said in my mind. "This process is highly successful in extracting DNA from 98% of sentient races."

I could see why. I had nearly given mine up without argument. But why? To craft a virus that would wipe us out? I thought about the detonate button back on my ship. The alien would know about that too, by now.

"What do you want it for? I need to know."

"We will use it to create more of your kind, raised to be loyal to us. When we reach your planet, they will be...branch managers."

"What? Like a franchise?" I asked. I wondered if this was a translation issue.

"Yes, a franchise. That is the closest word in your language. You could also use 'colony'. We will facilitate trade with your world. You will no longer need to burn your natural resources to reach space."

It took me a second to internalize. So that's why other worlds they visited no longer ventured into space. It was taken care of for them. For a price, presumably. They wouldn't bother unless there was something in it for them.

"You could have taken DNA from me any way you wanted," I said. Hair or skin or spit were all easy to collect.

"That is not our way. It must be freely given," it said. "We respect each colony's unique ritual for exchanging genetic material."

I thought of how, when I demanded it stop, it had stopped. It meant admitting to myself that this ordeal was partly my own choice. I had wanted to revisit these memories. I had wanted to taste these sexual delights again. It made me question who was drawing this out--me, or the alien?

"But every memory you showed me, to get me to ejaculate for you, was one with no protection involved. Why not just let me think I was cumming into a condom?"

"It would be unrealistic," it said, a bit agitated at my suggestion. "It must be freely given. And you will produce more genetic material that way."

I knew I had to think, but my mind was a fog of pent-up arousal, and a longing for what I now saw was the greatest missed opportunity of my life. Kelly loved me, and might love me still. Why hadn't I seen that before? Why did it take an alien showing me a curated selection of my own memories to realize that I loved her too?

And yet, I'd just spent two years hurtling through space at relativistic speed. More time than that had passed on Earth since I'd been gone. And I had no way back, not on my own ship, at least.

I found myself coming around to the alien's suggestion. It had a concept of ethics and consent. So how bad could its kind be for Earth? When there were so many of us who couldn't even practice consent.

Besides, what did I owe Earth Command anyway? They flung me out here, fully expecting me to never come back. Knowing I could meet any number of possible ends: the alien could kill me, I could kill us both. The alien could have let me fly right past. It could still leave me here, drifting forever.

Besides, against a psychic force this powerful, I never really stood a chance. If I tried to hold out, it would eventually break me one way or another. Better to do this intentionally, and have some control over how it happens.

"Okay, fine," I said. "But when you do go to Earth, you'll bring me with you."

"This will not be for another ten of your years," it said. I wondered if its vat-grown humans would be adult by then.

I just didn't want to be left alone in space for the rest of my days. Having an alien for company for the next ten years would be something, at least. And I'd have a hope of seeing people again. Maybe even Kelly.