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 10 pm, 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!”

Lacy dropped her head to her hands, speechless except for a breathy, “Oh, no.”

“I’m sorry if the fact that it’s just me every time makes it feel routine to you,” said Charlie.

“Are you serious?” Lacy asked, bracing herself for one of Charlie’s self-pitying jealousy fits, which had plagued their relationship in its earliest days.

She had hoped they were past all that, but if anything was going to set him off again, she supposed this kind of separation would probably do it.

“Why wouldn’t I be serious? Every time we get intimate, you’re literally wishing I was anyone but me.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lacy scrambled to understand. “Are you… are you jealous of your own potential bedroom personas?”

“I don’t know.” Some of the fight went out of Charlie at hearing this out loud, and he shrugged with crossed arms. “Maybe.”

“Okay, back up,” said Lacy, carefully assembling her next words. “Charlie, I want to do this with you. That’s what it’s all about for me. And sometimes… it feels like you don’t want to be here.”

“Of course I want to be there!” said Charlie. “What do I have to do to show you I want to be there?”

“No, I mean, you want to have sex, and you want it with me,” Lacy acknowledged. “But it’s like you want to shut down everything except our bodies while you do, so your mind can avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging that it ever happened. And I want your mind. I want your voice. It doesn’t have to be roleplay, that was just one idea. But I want the real you, the whole you, to play and improvise with. Not just a piece of prerecorded choreography. No matter how dynamite that choreography is.”

By the time she finished speaking, Charlie had his hands clasped hard over his heart.

After a long pause, he responded with a simple, “Awwwwwwww.” It climbed from warm and fuzzy to light and teasing as he drew it out. “You have no idea how much I want to hug you right now.”

“That’s the spirit!” Lacy laughed. “Tell me. How much?”

“Oh, so much. I’d, uh, I’d drink unidentified sample vials to hold you.” He winced. “Too much?”

“Little too much,” Lacy confirmed gently. “But that’s okay! It was your first try.”

“Okay. Do-over.” He took a bracing breath and smiled slyly into the camera. “What if I started by taking off your shirt?”

“That sounds like a good opener,” Lacy encouraged.

Charlie paused. “You know, you could make that happen on your end, and it would be kind of like I’m undressing you through the screen?”

“Oh! Oh, we’re getting to that point!” Lacy hurried to undo her buttons.

“Well, I just thought, if we’re doing this, we might as well—”

“Yeah, no, I just thought we were being abstract, but this is good. Keep going.”

She finished removing her shirt and jiggled her breasts a little for him in her plain work bra.

Charlie moistened his lips thoughtfully.

“Then I’d brush that one wayward lock of hair back behind your left ear.”

Lacy brushed it back for him, wishing he really were doing it himself. Her own fingers felt nothing like his on her skin. It was as if her nerves pre-emptively numbed themselves to her own movements as soon as she decided to make them.

Listening to him describe what she couldn’t have did stoke her excitement, though, in a different way from his actual touch.

“Next, I’d find my way to your bra clasp.”

Lacy trailed her fingers behind her back, and waited.

“Having trouble?” Charlie asked.

“No,” said Lacy. “Did you want me to unclasp it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you didn’t say…”

“No, I realize that now,” said Charlie. “I want to take it off and replace it with my hands.”

Lacy removed the bra and sat holding the underside of both her breasts, with the rest of them propped up and exposed.

“Would you just hold them?” she asked. “Or would your fingers start to wander?”

She swept her index fingers up toward her nipples, determined not to actually touch them until he told her to. They hardened with anticipation, making the self-imposed restriction more difficult to abide by than she would have expected.

“Wander,” Charlie answered, a blush setting in. “Definitely wander.”

Lacy brought her fingertips up in a wide circle, still not touching her nipples. “Wander where?”

Charlie opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He seemed to strain physically against his own silence for a moment, before giving up and turning his glowing face to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

His arm reached to just below the frame, and Lacy was fairly sure his hand was pressed against his own screen, hopelessly reaching for her.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Lacy, a guilt lump in her throat. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed…. We don’t have to—”

“I want to,” he said. “I just… I can’t.”

“Wait,” she tried to stop him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have an idea.”

With that, his face vanished from her wall screen, leaving her alone.

The thought of touching her own body turned sour in the darkness, though its agitation remained for hours afterward.

#

Lacy sleepwalked through her next lab shift, prepping slides and restocking supplies like the good intern she always tried to be, but unable to lose herself in the usual thrill of working her dream gig.

Charlie’s cryptic messages on her pocket communicator didn’t make it easier to focus.

Charlie: I’m okay.

Charlie: And I’m not mad.

Charlie: I’m just saying, because I realize I might have seemed like I was mad, or not okay, and I know how that gets to you.

Charlie: Did that sound like I was calling you oversensitive? I wasn’t. I love you. I love how much you care.

Charlie: I think Doctor Porton and I are on to something. I’ll talk to you tonight.

Lacy: Wait, like, the kind of thing that could make it safe for us to touch again?!? And I love you too.

Charlie: No, not that kind of thing.

Charlie: Well, sort of.

Charlie: But mostly no.

Charlie: For the purposes of expectation-setting, no, it’s not.

When Lacy returned to her compartment, there was a small giftwrapped box waiting on her bed.

“Open onscreen,” said the note.

Lacy turned her screen on and gave the command to connect it with Charlie’s.

Charlie accepted the connection immediately and appeared on her wall, large as life, with a blanket over his lap and a nervous grin already on his face.

“Should I?” Lacy got right to it, holding up the box.

“Yeah,” Charlie urged her onward with a wave. “Just do it.”

Lacy tore away the heart-covered paper, opened the box, and pulled out what looked like a pair of blue silicone panties.

When she looked questioningly at the screen, Charlie pulled back the blanket to show his crotch, already encased in what looked like a male-shaped version of the same garment, except that it didn’t bend with his movements like the soft material in her hands.

“A couple engineers from the Tech Solutions department helped me put them together,” he said excitedly. “And Doctor Porton, of course. They’re made from a metamorphic smart-polymer. They can move themselves, and change shape and texture in almost any way you can imagine. Look.”

Charlie picked up his communicator and manipulated an interface on its screen.

In response, the panties in Lacy’s hand hardened from the texture of silicone to the texture of glass and began to vibrate. The inner crotch undulated in a sinewave, then formed a set of protrusions of all shapes and sizes, which rose and fell like water jets in a decorative fountain.

“They’re already programmed with a bunch of, uh, what I thought might be go-to functions,” said Charlie.

With another touch of the screen, the panties formed what was unmistakably a copy of Charlie’s own penis.

“But we also gave them a robust sandbox interface,” he went on, turning his communicator to show her a virtual grid of the panties’ current surface area. He touched the grid lines, drawing freehand on them.

With almost no lag time, Lacy was able to watch the scrawl of, “Hi, Lacy” appear across the seat of the panties, followed by a heart.

“They’re ultra-hygienic, breathable, and self-cleaning—”

“Why would they need to be…?” Lacy interrupted, and then realized the answer with a start. “Oh, can we not take them off when they’re hardened?”

“…No?” Charlie acknowledged self-consciously, then added, “Neither of us can! I mean, we can’t take our own off. We’d each have the controls for each other’s. Doctor Porton has the overrides, of course, in case, you know, something happens to one of us.”

“Was making them lock onto us her idea?” Lacy asked.

“She… well, she agrees that it could be a fun way for us to feel more connected, as long as we…. Sorry. That’s not what you asked. It was my idea,” Charlie confessed. “Do you hate it?”

“I’m processing,” Lacy said, putting her hand over her smile, so he wouldn’t think she was laughing at him.

More than anything, she was stunned and fascinated that he would ever be the one to suggest something with so much spice to it.

Whether she liked the specific flavor blend he’d concocted was another question that would take some more consideration.

“Is this because you’re afraid I’ll be looking for someone else?” she probed his thinking.

“No,” Charlie answered with a vehement shake of his head.

“Because I love you,” said Lacy. “I thought I’d finally gotten that through your head.”

“No, I know, you did,” he said. “This has nothing to do with anyone else.”

“So, you just don’t want me to be able to get myself off, is that it?” Lacy asked, a little more playfully.

“Again, it would be both of us,” Charlie said, a little flustered.

“Both of us, including me,” Lacy summed up, “unable to get ourselves off without asking permission.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘permission,’” said Charlie.

“Oh? What would you call it?”

“I’m not trying to…” Charlie took a deep breath. “I’m not trying to take anything away from you. I just want to be a part of it, as much as I still can. So, if you’re lonely, I want you to call me. If you’re watching a steamy movie, I want you to call me. If you wake up at three in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, I want you to call me. I’ll enter any command you want me to, but I want to be the one to enter it.”

“Why?” Lacy asked patiently. “You got your turn pressing my buttons before, and you never had any problem with me pressing them too.”

“Because… because now it takes effort, keeping us together,” he answered. “I trust you, Lacy. I know you’d never do anything unethical, or anything to hurt me on purpose. But it’s like Doctor Porton says, people don’t drift apart on purpose.”

“Our brains are built to protect themselves,” Lacy recalled one of the doctor’s favorite lessons.

“Right,” said Charlie. “Which is why, when something is gone long enough, we miss it less, whether we want to or not. I don’t want me to be gone from your sex life, or vice-versa. Because if we’re not careful, we’ll both catch ourselves contemplating something more… available.”

The truth in this made Lacy’s heart ache.

“Okay, she agreed, squeezing the panties, which had gone soft again in her hands. “How do I set this thing up?”

Charlie squeezed his communicator with a strangled cry of celebration, the kind she could only have hoped to draw out of him before.

“I’m sending you the invitation now, to install the program and take control of mine,” he said. “For yours, all you have to do is put them on.”

Lacy accepted the invitation as soon as it came through, and spent a few moments poking around the complicated interface.

The longer she looked at it, the more she could feel Charlie’s excitable impatience through the wall screen.

“You’ve thought a lot about what you’re going to do once you’ve got me under remote control, haven’t you?” she teased him, setting the communicator aside and holding up the panties instead.

“Uh, I mean, not in a creepy way,” Charlie answered.

“I’m not creeped out,” Lacy assured him, unzipping her work pants.

“Oh, good,” said Charlie, eyes fixed to the screen. “Glad to hear it.”

Lacy removed her ordinary panties and pulled on the smart polymer version in their place. They adjusted automatically to fit as closely as a second skin.

“Comfortable?” Charlie asked.

“Yes, actually,” Lacy answered.

“How about now?”

With a tap of his communicator, the seat of the panties pulled inward, giving her right buttock a very lifelike-feeling pinch.

Lacy gasped.

“Better than comfortable,” she answered, and lay back on her bed, luxuriating in the thrill that her own fingers couldn’t replicate. “You can touch me again!”

Charlie chuckled with delight.

“Obviously, I still can’t touch as much of you as usual,” he noted. “So, we’re going to have to figure out how to make you feel as good as possible with what we’ve got here. What do you think of… this?”

He tapped another command, and a set of vibrating pulses began to run along her hip joints, working their way slightly inward with each pass.

“Oh,” Lacy sighed. “That’s… that’s nice.”

“Are you sure?” asked Charlie. “Because it was only my first guess. You’re more than welcome to play. Improvise. Make requests that aren’t prerecorded choreography. How do you most want to be touched today?”

Lacy tried to respond, to express her appreciation for him taking her words to heart, but she couldn’t think with that much precision over the vibrations. All that came out was “Mmm.”

“Well?” Charlie asked.

“Hmm?” asked Lacy.

He tapped his communicator, and the pulses, which were now a few millimeters away from meeting in the middle, stopped dead.

Lacy reached instinctively down for the device, to restart it like a solo toy. Her hands met only a glassy, impervious outer shell.

“What?” she asked Charlie.

“I asked what you want,” he repeated, somewhere between guilt and laughter. “Should I just turn it back on?”

Head clearing slightly, Lacy forced herself to come up with a more specific request.

“Can you lower the friction of the material at all?” she asked. “As if you’d licked it?”

With a brief search through a menu on Charlie’s end, the device adjusted its texture accordingly.

“And when the pulses reach my clit, could you make them switch from a straight line to a tight circle, right on top of it?”

The pulses returned, slowly following the trail she’d set for them.

Charlie watched her, eyes alight and seeming more present than he sometimes did when they were in the same room.

He gave her several seconds of the circling pulses before prompting the polymer to gently part her labia, and form the shape of a wide head between them.

“Do you want me to?” he asked.

Lacy answered, feeling as nervous and full of fresh adventure as the first time she’d said, “Let’s give it a try.”

Charlie dragged his finger up the interface screen. In sync with his motion, the polymer facsimile of his cock extended itself into her.

He observed her closely, unable to rely on feeling her muscles relax into the demanding stretch.

“How is it?” he asked.

“I…” Lacy dragged the words together. “I’d really like you to fuck me now. Please.”

With a proud smirk, Charlie wiggled his fingertip up and down on the screen, the tiny movement making the polymer cock retract and extend, pounding her inner walls just as he would have himself.

It was disorienting, feeling Charlie fuck her without the weight of his body against her. Lacy wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself, especially her hands.

Not knowing how to use the control program, and not being in any condition to figure it out just then, she couldn’t touch him in return. Eventually, she settled for lying down sideways across the bed, so that he would still have a full view of her, unbuttoning her work shirt, and playing with her breasts, just to have something to contribute.

With the vibration pulses still circling her clit, she came fast, hard, and with very little warning. Charlie paused the device’s program with his usual impeccable timing, right after wringing the last traces of pleasure out of her, and before the sensitivity turned painful. He gave her several seconds to recover, with the polymer construct motionless inside her, before retracting it slightly, and thrusting again.

Lacy cried out with surprise.

“Sorry!” said Charlie. “Did that hurt? It was supposed to be cute.”

“No,” Lacy answered, swimming in the lingering high. “It’s fine. I just thought you’d stop. Once I got mine. Since you can’t get anything out of it this way.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Charlie, giving her another thrust and smiling as she gasped in response. “Do you want me to stop?”

“I wouldn’t say that either,” Lacy mumbled weakly. “I just…”

He thrusted again.

“Can’t promise…”

Again.

“What kind of effect you’ll get…”

The front of the device’s crotch clamped down around her outer lips, just like Charlie’s hand, simultaneously burying her clit far away from any too-direct stimulation and pinching it with a firm, even pressure.

The grip shook back and forth, the dick pounded, and both accompanied their movements with a low, pulsing vibration.

The combination of force and cushioning was even more ideal for her recently used, over-sensitized clit than it was when she was feeling fresh and eager. The vibration pulses pushed the whole effect over the edge, feeling first like an extension of the first orgasm and then leading into a second one, softer, slower, and longer.

“Oh my god, oh god, okay, stop, that’s enough.” Lacy said, as the second orgasm stretched out to overlap with its own too-sensitive aftermath.

Charlie shut the device down.

“Good?” he asked.

Lacy nodded, in case the sight of her panting and struggling to sit up on the bed wasn’t enough.

She fumbled for her communicator. “Oh my god, I have so much reciprocating to do. What do I do for you?”

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Charlie told her.

Lacy looked uncomprehendingly between the screens in her hand and on her wall, her brain muffled inside a cloud of silk.

“I have an afternoon shift,” Charlie explained, pulling on his uniform pants.

The polymer of his own device had changed shape to accommodate his massive erection in a discreet vertical pocket that fit under his waistband. The hard outer shell still kept it securely encased out of reach.

“I’m sorry!” Lacy’s insides twisted with sympathy and guilt. “If I’d known, we could have made time for both of us! I didn’t really need a second one.”

“It’s how I wanted to spend the time,” Charlie assured her. “Enjoy your day off. Glow, relax, all that good stuff. And maybe… take a look through the program? When you’re ready.”

#

Lacy did look, as soon as her hands were steady enough to handle the touchscreen properly. When Charlie’s shift ended, she intended to be ready to treat him to the best night of his life.

She started with the menu of pre-programmed functions.

It was divided into folders, each marked with a letter and full of numbered commands, dozens of them in all, maybe hundreds.

But once Lacy started tapping her way through them, discovering a detailed description hidden behind each generic label, the size of the menu shifted from a daunting maze to a treasure trove.

These were the things Charlie liked, the things she’d been trying to guess or coax out of him for months, all laid out for her to peruse and use at her leisure.

Even through the glow of two orgasms, the thought was enough to prompt an excited little stirring under the polymer device.

Folder A was subtitled “Favorites.”

Lacy picked a command at random.

#A9

This one mimics that thing you do with your mouth and your hand together, when you slide my cock as far down your throat as you can take it, and then run your lips all the way back up to the head, trailing your fingers along behind them to rub the wet area of skin you leave behind. With this, you can control how fast you go down and back up again, and how much movement I get from the fingers.

Lacy smiled to herself. She’d been almost sure he liked that one. She picked #1 next. That one had to be important.

It became immediately clear that this description had been written first.

#A1

This one turns the polymer casing around my cock flexible and motion-sensitive.

I just spent ten minutes deciding on the right word for penis in the context of this project, by the way. I started with penis, but then that felt too formal, so I spent a while clicking around the thesaurus, before I settled on cock, which I think I already kind of knew I wanted to use. I’m going to stick with that from here on, because if I let myself think about what word I’m going to use each time it comes up, I’ll never finish the program without pulling some illegal shenanigans involving the spacetime rift.

Anyway, on this setting, the device reads the movements of my hips to extend and contract itself, giving me a lubricated space to thrust into. Basically, it allows me to hump the bed and imitates the feel of your pussy.

I think I’ll stick with that word as a default too, unless I need to reference a more specific anatomical part. I like it, but if it’s a moodkiller for you, let me know, and I’ll change it.

I calibrated the default tightness to match you from memory. I hope you don’t mind.

Lacy’s cheeks were beginning to hurt from smiling. It was such a shock to think of Charlie saying all this so straightforwardly, yet she could hear every word in his voice.

Backing out of command #A1, she noticed another entry within Folder A, labeled differently from the rest.

At the very bottom of the list, it was titled simply, “Babe.”

She selected it. The screen it took her to was full of nothing but words, with no actual command function.

Babe, I numbered all these moves so that I could ask you for them without having to describe them.

But then, of course, I ended up having to describe them here in the program, so that you’d at least know what you were doing to me when I asked you to press a button.

And doing that… made me feel stuff. Well done, Charlie. “Feel stuff.” Very eloquent. Fuck it. It turned me on. Who would have known? Probably you, right, babe?

Just thinking the words, imagining you reading them later, gave me a hard-on that I couldn’t get rid of all night.

Seriously. While I was setting up my device, I was planning to test all the functions on myself for at least a few seconds each, but I couldn’t get myself to a baseline for an accurate test. I tried giving myself a goodbye-for-now round with my hand and waiting twenty minutes, but by then I was back to being as hard as I was to start with.

One goodbye round turned into two, and then five. And every minute, I was either too sore to test on or so ready that I would have exploded before I had the chance to feel what any of the settings really did.

Finally, I just had to put the thing on, set it to lockdown mode, and force myself to wait it out, to get back to something like normal.

All that, from writing descriptions for you, of how I want to be touched. Just descriptions.

I think it’s going to be even hotter to feel the words in my mouth and see you listen to them.

But I’m having a hard time imagining myself doing that.

So, here’s what I’m asking you to do: nothing. Well, nothing that could relieve me. If you want to tease me with a few options from folder B, that might actually help speed things along. But nothing satisfying. Not until I’m ready to ask you for it out loud in full, explicit, humiliating detail.

Please. I don’t want us both to miss out on what that will feel like, just because I couldn’t get there by myself.

Lacy held the communicator to her chest, aching to hold Charlie in its place, to hug him for his courage and promise him her support as he explored himself.

This did put a damper on her evening plans to reduce him to the same satisfied, quivering wreck he’d made of her this morning, however.

She backed up to the folder list and selected the one marked B, the one he’d said he was ready for her to use.

“Restrictions and Incentives,” said its subtitle.

Lacy selected the first function.

#B1

This one allows you to limit the maximum erection size the device will accommodate. As a default, it gives me as much space as I can fill, but no extra for movement. If you dial down the limit, you can make my erections more uncomfortable and urgent-feeling.

Lacy could follow the logic, in theory, but making Charlie more uncomfortable was not something she had ever wanted.

She checked the next one.

#B2

This one lets you tickle the frenulum of my penis — that extra-sensitive triangle on the underside of my cock.

Sorry, that might have come off condescending. I described it two ways because I couldn’t decide, not because I thought you wouldn’t understand.

The thing about this command is that it will only work if the device detects that I’m flaccid. So, no matter how worked up or deprived I get, you can’t accidentally make me cum with this.

Yes, I spent at least a minute deciding which way to spell cum.

The point is, you can use this, even when we’re out of contact, to keep me thinking about this project between us. You can make it feel like a finger, a tongue, or a vibration pulse, and set it up to nudge me at predetermined intervals.

That didn’t sound too bad, Lacy decided. If it got too distracting for him, he could always tell her to stop.

She scrolled down to the actual controls, selected the mildest, finger-like touch, and set a schedule of one nudge per hour, from now until she had him back on her wall screen.

With a deep breath, she tapped the execute button to send the first nudge.

A pair of messages came through on her communicator a few moments later.

Charlie: This might drive me crazy.

Charlie: Thank you.

#

Lacy was so restless by the end of Charlie’s shift that she felt ready to tear her skin off.

Reading his words in the control program had made her horny again in record time after his morning attentions. The effect was powerful enough that she would have given herself a quick orgasm to tide herself over, if the device hadn’t prevented her.

Yet most of her impatience wasn’t for herself.

When Charlie sent the request to connect their screens, she was perched on the end of her bed in his favorite of her slips, cleavage tilted forward to give him a little extra motivation.

“Hi,” she said, as soon as his face appeared on her wall. “Have you come up with something you’d like to ask me for?”

Charlie let out a long, slow, breath through his hands, taking in the sight of her.

He had already stripped down to nothing but his device, which shifted at the sight of her, allowing him more room.

After several hours of unsatisfying tickles whenever he was at his most relaxed, he was looking considerably less composed about the whole thing than he had that morning.

“You know… what I want you to do.” Charlie looked horrified at his own words as they seemed to force their way defensively out of him.

“I honestly don’t,” said Lacy, scrolling through her communicator in what she hoped was a casual posture. “You gave me so many intriguing options.”

Charlie leaned forward, pulling on his hair.

“Uh… I want… I… damn it! Why is this so hard? I just… uh…”

Lacy’s throat tightened, her body threatening to strangle her for being less than kind.

She was causing Charlie distress. Her lifelong instinct was to stop completely, but if she did that, she might disappoint him even more.

She hunted for any way to go softer on him, without robbing him of the dirty talk incentive he’d asked for.

“Do you regret asking me to do this to you?” she asked.

Charlie looked almost completely incapable of speech at this point, so she made it simpler.

“If you want to take it back, just say ‘Folder Zero,’ or hold up your hand in the shape of a zero, and I’ll set your device to unlock mode. You can take it off, and we can revisit this conversation when and if you feel better. But if you want me to execute any more interesting functions, you’re going to have to ask for them.”

Charlie nodded, confirming that he understood the out she was giving him.

He didn’t use it.

“I want… to fuck you,” he managed.

Lacy bit her lip, fighting the urge to turn one of the functions from his favorites folder on full blast.

“That could mean a lot of things,” she said. “I’d argue you that fucked me this morning, and nothing’s stopping you from doing it again. But I’m guessing that’s not quite what you’re asking for.”

Charlie’s face burned.

“Would you like me to let you fuck my pussy until you cum?” she led him.

He nodded.

“Say it,” she prompted.

Charlie closed his eyes, apparently giving up on the part of his fantasy where he’d watch her listen to him say those dirty, dirty words.

“I want you to open Folder A and turn my device to setting 1,” he said, “so that I can…”

He took a breath, shook his head.

“So that I can ejaculate into a facsimile of your vagina.”

He looked up, obviously embarrassed with his verbal performance, and not quite in the way he’d been hoping for.

Lacy wanted very much to give him a kiss and a pat on the back.

“Do you remember what Doctor Porton told us about ‘shaping’?” she asked.

“Uh…” Charlie reached with some relief into the factual, analytical corners of his mind. “That’s rewarding a behavior that’s a step in the desired direction, even though it’s still not right.”

His voice got more hopeful as he reached the end of the definition.

“That’s right,” said Lacy. “It means I’m going to give you this one, but you’ll have to do better next time.”

“Oh my god, thank you.” Charlie sighed with relief and repositioned himself on his bed, lying on his stomach with his face to the camera.

“Where’s your communicator?” Lacy asked.

“Huh?” Charlie glanced around and reached back to grab it.

“If you’re going to fuck my pussy, you’re going to warm it up and fuck it for both of us, like normal,” said Lacy.

With a smile, Charlie activated the vibrating pulses in her device.

Today, Lacy didn’t mind being turned on like a machine. She relaxed into the swirling, closing pulses and let them do their work.

In no time, Charlie had the head of his polymer cock pressed against her entrance.

“Let’s give it a try,” she said immediately, and tapped the command to turn his device from prison to pussy.

With a euphoric moan, Charlie pressed his hips down into his bed, into the lifelike sheath his device had formed for him. At the same time, he dragged his finger up the screen of his communicator, penetrating Lacy’s actual, living sheath.

She moaned with him, sliding off the bed and arching her back against it. Her feet planted themselves on the floor so that she could grind instinctively against the air, even though the device followed her with the same pressure wherever she went.

Charlie paused his hips in time with his finger, waiting just as he would have in person.

“More,” Lacy encouraged. “Harder.”

Charlie didn’t need to be told twice.

Isolated to their separate rooms, they fucked harder, more reactively, more intimately than most of their sessions in a shared bed.

The eye contact was near-constant and intense, in spite of the slight misalignment of their cameras. Both of them studied each other with what senses they had available in the absence of touch.

The combination of settings they’d chosen put Charlie in charge of the pace, allowing him to choose his thrusts for both of them, but Lacy had pre-scouted a few extra functions that were simple enough to operate while being railed.

She used them to run her simulated hands along his ass, and squeeze him with a few imitation muscle contractions when he was at his deepest.

For the first time ever, Charlie couldn’t help cumming first, and then collapsing in an exhausted heap. He took a little creative license at this point, however, and went on using his computerized erection long after his real one had receded. He ran his finger up and down the screen until Lacy screamed, first in ecstasy, then in a rush to tell him that she really, truly couldn’t take any more.

They sat together for a long while, after resetting the devices to lockdown, panting in front of their screens. There were words, but every other one was some variant of “wow.”

The only thing missing was their arms around each other.

#

“There you are!” Doctor Porton rushed over to Lacy, as soon as she arrived in Laboratory Three for her shift the next day.

Lacy quickly checked the time on her communicator, and the number on the door, to make sure she hadn’t slipped through a spacetime disruption and ended up in the medical office a week or two in the future.

“Am I late?” she asked. “I thought I was scheduled for the afternoon. And I’m supposed to be working with Doctor Xibix today. In specimen analysis?”

“No, no, you’re right on time,” Doctor Porton acknowledged. “I just thought you might be here first thing, under the circumstances.”

“Why?” Lacy asked. “What circumstances?”

“Is she here?” Charlie’s voice called out through a room intercom. “Tell her I was just trying not to get her hopes up!”

“Your boyfriend assisted with a rift-charting mission this morning,” said Doctor Porton, leading Lacy over to the lab’s row of hermetic pods.

Charlie waved to her from inside one of them.

A prickly, metallic creature imitated his greeting from inside the next pod, extending part of itself in the rough shape of an arm. Doctor Xibix and Doctor Adler, head of the Linguistics department, both observed and made excited notations on their tablets.

Doctor Xibix twitched her antennae, and Doctor Adler stroked his beard with significance.

“The team was able to trace our last visitor’s point of origin, and make contact with more of its kind,” said Doctor Porton. “And we think they want to apologize for accidentally spreading an endemic plague of theirs to us. Right, Adler?”

“Well, the concept of ‘apology’ is really quite complex,” Doctor Adler equivocated. “I hesitate to assume an equivalency—”

“The newly hatched specimen on the surface was sick,” Doctor Porton cut to the point. “Whereas this individual seems to be healthy, and has kindly allowed us to examine them for comparison with our previous samples.”

“Come take a look at this, Lacy,” Doctor Xibix beckoned her over and showed her the tablet she was working on.

On its screen was a side-by-side microscopic view of the sick and healthy aliens’ cellular structures.

The difference was so obvious, Lacy couldn’t believe she hadn’t guessed at what the sick cells were, even with only half the puzzle.

“The relative degradation is consistent with the homogenization virus!” she gasped. “It’s just like what happened to Officer Dennings last year, only starting from a baseline physiology we didn’t know how to recognize. The immune system, the digestive system, the virus itself, they’re all merged together into a new type of cell that’s programmed to do everything, but can’t do any of it very well.”

“Yes,” Doctor Xibix confirmed proudly, in her teaching voice. “So, what would be your prescription?”

“Simple genetic reset,” Lacy answered immediately. “Just like curing cancer.”

Doctors Xibix and Porton exchanged a nod of agreement and approval.

“Would you like to do the honors?” Doctor Porton asked Lacy.

“Yes!”

Under supervision, Lacy programmed Charlie’s pod with the correct combination of aerosols and radiation waves to restore his original genetic code.

Before entering the final command, she pressed the intercom button.

“Do you want me to?” she asked.

With a secret smile, Charlie answered, “Let’s give it a try.”

She started the sequence.

The pod vibrated, glowed, and filled with vapor. Charlie breathed deeply, keeping his eyes on hers through the clouds.

When the sequence concluded, and both Lacy and Charlie looked hopefully to Doctor Porton.

“There’s one way to find out,” Doctor Porton answered their unspoken question, and opened the door of the pod.

Lacy and Charlie looked at each other for a long moment, with nothing between them, waiting to see if he would fall apart.

Then they grabbed each other and fell directly into a kiss, the kind of kiss that they would usually have saved for a more private moment.

Given the situation, the doctors allowed them nearly thirty seconds to savor each other’s lips, and re-chart the shape of each other’s bodies by hand, before nudging them apart with some awkward throat-clearing.

“I hope you’re still feeling up to carrying out your shift,” Doctor Xibix censured Lacy gently.

“Oh, of course.” Lacy adjusted her lab coat and her ponytail, which were both askew.

“Because now we need to come up with a way to package a genetic reset, so we can share it with our new friends,” Doctor Xibix went on. “Porton, I assume I can count you in?”

“You couldn’t drag me away,” Doctor Porton replied. “And I’ll inform the Commander that we’re ready to see her here at her leisure.”

Charlie backed away to leave the lab crew to their work.

“See you tonight,” he told Lacy, with a parting squeeze of her hand. “My place?”

“I’ll be there,” she told him.

#

As the commander received her cure, and Lacy took her coffee break, a message arrived on her communicator.

Charlie: What would you say to leaving these things on anyway, for a while?

A warm excitement bloomed in Lacy’s chest, confirming how much she’d been hoping he’d say that.

Lacy: Yes! I mean, it feels like we’re just scratching the surface of their capabilities. It’d be a shame to abandon them now.

The next reply Lacy received was a discreet, vibrating tickle. Just one loop around her clit, and then gone. A reminder. Something to look forward to.

***

Thanks for reading! If you had a good time, show me some love with your follows, favorites, and/or comments, and let me know if you want more adventures at Outpost 70.