Touch Starved at Outpost 70

(Contains graphic sexual depictions, including some affectionate m/f mutual chastity and remote-control toys. This one also has a significant sequence of sci-fi body horror between the first and second sex scenes. If you're easily spooked, or just aren't here for the plot and prefer to skip to playing with the toys, the happy couple gets to it at about the halfway point.)

***

Charlie: Got switched to the evening patrol today. Would love to spend it looking forward to coming home to you. Come by whenever you like and make yourself comfortable. I promise I'll make it worth the wait ;)

Lacy: No, I'LL make it worth the wait ;) See you then.

Lacy had no intention of making this an idle promise. At the end of her own shift in the biology lab, she smuggled out a few supplies she was sure she could find some new uses for, and prepared herself to wow him.

By 10pm, her makeup was on point, dessert was all set to be printed with the touch of a button, and she was reclined on Charlie's bed with one knee bent, dressed in her hip-length intern's lab coat, her laciest black bra and panty set, a pair of safety goggles, and nothing else.

Her pulse wouldn't quite relax, as she considered possible roleplay scenarios and ways to get them started.

Right on time, the front door of the compartment slid open, and Charlie called out to her from the short blind hallway that prevented his one all-purpose private room from opening right onto the rest of the outpost. "Babe?"

"Here," she answered innocently.

"Awesome. You're never going to guess what happened today."

The serious, professional demeanor Lacy had selected to go with her work-inspired costume fractured in response to Charlie's low, fast, bubbly voice. His enthusiasm could melt a comet, and it took great restraint for Lacy not to break character to bask in it.

"Oh?" she asked, holding onto her pose.

"So, you know those eggs that have been coming in through the rift?" he started.

Outpost 70 was a pressurized facility built on the surface Tolmay 9, a barren planet with only one noteworthy feature: a ten-kilometer canyon containing the largest reality-rupture in charted space, where literally anything might spill through at any moment.

It was called Outpost 70 because it was the sixty-ninth permanent off-world research outpost Humans had established, and like superstitious hotel owners, the Science and Exploration Commission couldn't possibly allow their already notoriously freaky staff of scientists and support personnel to call it what it was.

"One of them hatched!" Charlie went on.

"No way!" Lacy's interest got the better of her. "How did I not hear about that in, y'know, the fucking biolab?"

"It happened afterhours on the surface, and we never got it as far as the biolab," Charlie explained.

Lacy could hear him stumbling against the wall between them as he took off his boots.

"Why not?" she asked.

"I'm getting to that. So, it hatches out there and starts emitting this pulse that the linguistics department calls 'interesting,' so Commander Harkness decides she wants to go out there and try to talk to it personally. Which means my whole team gets to suit up for an escort walk."

"Congratulations!" said Lacy. "That's how many environment suit hours for you now?"

"Forty-seven!" Charlie answered, and she could picture him bouncing on his toes behind the wall. His next level of certification came at fifty hours. "But that's not even the best part. When we got to the site, the commander charged forward and tried to introduce herself, you know, on the off chance that it might be more advanced at deciphering language than we are. And then this creature, it looks like an urchin made of magnet dust about the size of a watermelon, it stretches itself up like it's standing up on its tiptoes, opens what looks like a mouth..."

Lacy held her breath for the possibilities.

"And then it pukes out this river of metallic fluid, like, enough to turn itself inside out. And guess who was in the perfect spot to jump in front of it?"

"You saved the commander from being vomited on by an unknown life form?"

"No!" Charlie answered, still just as exuberantly proud. "The stuff cut right through my suit and we both got drenched. But I did get to walk back to the station with her inside the compression hamster ball. And she said she'd waive the last three suit hours and clear me for the next rift charting expedition!"

"That's awesome!"

"I know! She said I showed 'grace under pressure.'" Charlie's head popped around the divider wall, hair tousled from the showers. "...And you're in your underwear, and now I feel like a dick."

"Aw," said Lacy, reclaiming her professional tone. "What would you like to feel like instead?"

She rolled onto one elbow to face him, threw back the flap of her lab coat, and ran a hand lightly down the bare skin of her waist, up the rise of her hip.

Charlie gave a low whistle and stroked his freshly shaven jaw.

"I think you look like a fascinating specimen, in need of intensive study," Lacy said, picking up the pair of lab tongs she'd laid on the bedside table and clicking them together. "But then, you could be my grant manager, here to check on my progress."

She tucked her knees under her and walked forward on them, toward the side of the bed closest to him.

"I know my research is a little... unorthodox, but I swear I'm close to a breakthrough." She touched the underside of her bra cups. "Maybe a hands-on demonstration would convince you."

Charlie stared at her, wide-eyed and dumbfounded. It was close to the reaction she'd been hoping for, but so extreme that she felt the need to ask, "Are you okay?"

"Me?" he asked, as if she were a stranger trying to get his attention from across a crowded room. "Okay? Yeah, I'm okay. Totally okay, looking at my girlfriend, not even close to the most naked I've ever seen her before. Nothing to be not okay with about that."

Well, at least he was talking again.

"You did say it would be hot to see me in action in the lab," Lacy noted, self-consciously pulling the lab coat closer around her.

A hard lump was developing in her throat, the one she always got when she felt like she might be doing something wrong, and especially when she wasn't sure how to do right.

"Yeah," Charlie acknowledged, blushing and further ruffling the back of his hair. "That sure is a thing I said in passing once or twice, isn't it? After a few drinks?"

"So, I brought the lab to you," Lacy reopened the coat, purposefully, trying to relax. "Only hotter, and more action-packed."

"Yeah, I see. That's really... thoughtful."

Thoughtful. Lacy supposed she could accept that.

"And now that you're here," she said, playing with the open edges of the coat and wiggling her hips, "what do you want?"

"You," Charlie answered, blush deepening.

"What do you want to do with me?" Lacy pushed him for some specificity, gathering up her tongs, rubber gloves, handheld biometric scanner, and an assortment of other lab toys, and fanning them out for him.

Charlie covered his face with both hands, unable to hide a rim of blazing pink around the edges, and muttered inaudibly to himself between a few deep breaths.

Collecting himself, he lowered his hands, took in the sight of her for one more second, and then pounced.

The props scattered as he tackled her onto her back.

"Does this answer your question?" he asked, pressing his erection, easily discernable even through his bulky uniform pants, against her thin panties.

"Ooh, aggressive," Lacy squealed, relieved by the tactile confirmation that she hadn't totally missed the mark. "You know, maybe we could use some, big, strong security boys in the lab, ready to subdue the experiments that get out of hand."

She ran her fingers over the security insignia stitched into his uniform jacket.

"Oh, well, then, I guess you'll, uh," Charlie cleared his throat, "probably want to inspect what you're getting, so you can, you know, feel safe."

Charlie stripped off the jacket, followed by his undershirt. Lacy continued touching that same spot over his heart, then trailed her hands approvingly across the rest of his thin chest.

"Officer, I breathed the fumes from the beaker," she confessed, "and now I have this uncontrollable urge to—"

Charlie kissed her on the mouth.

"Don't worry," he said. "I've got what you need right here."

"It's a fascinating phenomenon, actually, and—"

He kissed her again, keeping her mouth firmly occupied while he reached beneath her to unfasten her bra.

By the time he pulled away to drag her panties off, she had given up on trying to improvise. The temptation of his kisses was too strong. Each one promised to wipe away the awkwardness from her attempts at novelty, and replace it with some safe, tried-and-true fucking.

Charlie touched her as if he were booting up a temperamental computer. Every movement was practiced and efficient, right on the buttons, with the pressure, angles, and extra little jiggles calibrated to placate her finicky inner workings.

He caressed her ears, neck, and breasts, then moved on to her inner thighs, and then her labia. The foreplay routine ended with two soft taps on the hood of her clitoris, like a polite knock on the door.

There was still a disappointed a part of Lacy that didn't want it to work, just for variety's sake. Just to give them a new puzzle to talk out and solve together, instead of the same old speed run.

It did work, though, drawing a reflexive rush of wetness and an eager tingle.

Charlie unzipped his uniform pants and pushed them down his thighs, along with his briefs.

The very first time Charlie had undressed in front of Lacy, she had responded with a burst of panicked laughter, which she had spent the next half hour reassuring him was not an insult.

His fully erect penis was almost as thick as her wrist, and proportionate in length. It wasn't quite absurdly oversized for a Human, but juxtaposed with his skinny, narrow frame, it certainly looked that way at first glance.

He brushed the head of it along her inner labia now, finding his way to the entrance.

Once there, he said the same thing he'd said that first time, the same thing he always said. Sometimes, it was the only thing he'd say for the duration of a sexual encounter.

"Do you want me to?"

Lacy's clit and vaginal walls pulsed their votes of yes.

"Let's give it a try," she gave the standard answer, more a running joke now than anything else.

Charlie pushed it in, and Lacy took in a few quick, sharp gasps in a row, as her body simultaneously sang with celebration at his arrival and struggled to make room.

The size of him always made her feel like a virgin undergrad again, albeit much better cared for than she had been during those first few rough, dry experiences with nameless dates. Sex with Charlie came with the same overwhelming stretch, but only a tiny, manageable, even enjoyable, fraction of the pain.

Once he was as deep as he could get, he gave her several seconds of stillness, and then a few very slow thrusts, feeling for the moment when she relaxed completely into him. Only then did he really go at her, pounding like a deep tissue massage on a tight muscle.

The most challenging thing about making things work physically between them was not the stretching. It was the fact that he was simply too long to fit all the way inside her. That was fine for him — his head was still getting all the attention it needed — but it meant that they couldn't get close enough together for Lacy to rub her clit on his pelvis.

Having this part of the puzzle long memorized too, Charlie sat up on his knees, making room to reach down and wrap his hand around the front half of Lacy's vulva. He squeezed it, gently but firmly, by the outer lips, and shook it back and forth while he continued to pound her inner wall.

Cushioned comfortably inside layers of skin, her clit rode the storm of forceful movement all around it, catching exactly the gentle, half-dissipated waves it needed.

Lacy lay back, closed her eyes, and cried out when her orgasm replied with its own delicious set of waves, trusting Charlie to keep on shaking her for just the right length of time. Once the moment passed, he let his upper body drop parallel with hers again, preparing for the final stretch to his own finish line.

Lacy had no grounds for complaint.

Just like every time.

#

Almost as soon as Lacy dozed off in Charlie's bed, she startled awake to the sound of his screams.

"What? What is it?" she shouted, gaining enough consciousness to notice a tickling, crawling feeling all over the left side of her body. "What the fuck?"

She swatted at her face, feeling a handful of the tickling specks scattering away. She reached for Charlie, and felt her hand sink instead into a nest of dry, crawling life.

With a shriek, she jumped out of bed and turned on the lights, expecting to find an insect infestation pouring out of the bed.

Instead, when her vision adjusted to the light, she found Charlie clutching at what was left of his face.

His right cheek appeared to have shattered into a thousand rebelling fragments, all crawling over each other to escape. The hand he was using to press them back into place was in even worse condition. Lacy could see flashes of bone under the restless crystalline swarm his flesh had become.

"I thought... nightmare," Charlie cried, as confused as she was. "I can't wake up. Why can't I wake up?"

Lacy looked down at her crawling hands and tried to brush them off. To her relief, her own skin seemed to be intact, but the fragments of Charlie's clung to her as persistently as ants.

"Just hang on," she told Charlie, and ran to the intercom button by the door. "Medic on-call! I have a situation in Officer Chanceling's room!"

"Team incoming," the medical office responded.

"What's happening to me?" Charlie shouted after her, his low voice rising to a squeak.

"I don't know," Lacy answered, shaking pieces of him off the shirt he had loaned her to sleep in. "But we'll figure it out. Someone here always can."

She went to the bag where she'd stashed her lab equipment and grabbed her goggles, gloves, and biometric scanner.

Charlie looked a little better when she turned around to examine him, with her safety gear in place. Most of the skin on the right side of his body was still moving, but he had more of his normal shape back.

"I'm not picking up any known contaminants," Lacy told him, sweeping the beam of the scanner over him. "Your vitals aren't too bad. Your blood pressure is elevated, but that could be from anxiety."

She took a step closer to the bed for a better look.

Immediately, the top layer of skin crystals abandoned Charlie's body and swarmed toward Lacy. The blood pressure reading on her monitor jumped threateningly upward.

"Oh, shit," said Lacy, backing up.

"What?" Charlie pleaded. "What does it say?"

To rule out coincidence, Lacy stepped forward once more, and then back.

"It's me," she said. "You're reacting to me, somehow."

#

Twenty minutes later, Lacy and Charlie were sitting on opposite sides of an airtight door in the medical office, waiting for Head Doctor Porton to formulate an idea she found worthy of sharing.

Doctor Porton was on her third cup of coffee since being called out of bed to respond to this unprecedented case. Her curly brown hair was spilling out of its sleep braid, and she was pouring over her data with a manic glint in her eye.

Lacy would have liked to whisper something comforting to Charlie, but he was currently sharing a hermetic cell with Commander Harkness herself, who had apparently begun to disintegrate at almost exactly the same moment he had.

With communication in and out of the hermetic cell only possible through an intercom, there was no privacy for couple-talk.

Lacy waited in silence, along with Commander Harkness's wife.

At least both Charlie and the commander looked like themselves at the moment, and didn't seem to be in any physical distress. The disintegration symptoms had stopped almost as soon as they were quarantined.

"So," Doctor Porton said at last. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure the alien vomit is the cause."

Lacy tried not to sigh too loudly.

"What did it do to us?" asked the commander. "And more importantly, what do we do about it?"

"The medical terminology for what I'm seeing here doesn't even exist yet," answered the doctor.

"Then use lay terms," Commander Harkness insisted.

"I'll... do my best," Doctor Porton agreed uncomfortably. "These... tissue fragments, they seem to have become... fixated on your partners' tissues."

"Fixated?" asked Commander Harkness. "Are you saying they can think?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Doctor Porton. "The good news is, the fragments don't seem to be willing to shift their focus. They've chosen their targets, probably based on timing, intimacy, or duration of contact, and now that targeting is fixed."

"How is that good news?" asked the commander.

"It's good because it means the condition shouldn't be contagious," explained Doctor Porton, "and the symptoms shouldn't return, as long as you...."

"What?" said Commander Harkness. "Never go near the people we love again?"

Charlie put a hand on the glass in Lacy's direction, horror in his eyes.

"Obviously, being separated from your partners is a problem we'll need to find a solution for," Doctor Porton acknowledged. "But at least you'll all be able to go about the rest of your lives as normal while we're working on it. In the meantime, I'll make myself personally available to counsel all four of you through the new challenges in your relationships."

Doctor Porton's experience treating a never-ending string of bizarre sexual and emotional issues was indisputable.

Still, her credentials weren't enough to brighten anyone's mood on that sleepless night.

#

For two weeks, Lacy and Charlie returned to their separate rooms at the end of each shift, sat on their separate beds, connected their wall screens in a video call, and talked in excruciating detail about the most mundane aspects of their days.

Absolutely nothing about sex, or their separate counseling sessions, was mentioned.

It was Lacy who first grew tired of this unspoken holding pattern, waiting on a perfect solution that might take years to arrive, if it ever did.

"So... what would you do if we were in the same room right now?" she asked, interrupting a movie they'd been awkwardly watching, simultaneously but apart.

"Babe—" Charlie started hesitantly.

"If you're not feeling sexy because you're still processing having half your flesh crumble off and try to run away from you, I totally understand," said Lacy. "But if the only problem is the distance, and the screen, I'd really like to give some of Doctor Porton's interim suggestions a try. I miss you."

"I miss you too," Charlie said immediately. "In, yeah, lots of ways, including, um, that one."

"She said fantasizing out loud would be a step in the right direction," said Lacy.

Charlie shrugged, helplessly. "I think you've already got a pretty clear idea of what I'd do if I could touch you."

"That's for sure," Lacy agreed.

"Y— Wait, what does that mean?"

She hadn't really meant to say it as passive-aggressively as it had come out.

"I mean, we've both got the routine memorized by now," she said, keeping her tone neutral, with a slight purr. "But I'd still like to hear you describe it."

"Routine?" he didn't let it go. "What are you talking about? You kept your lab coat on last time!"