Chapter 9: Body-Memory Recall
The weight returned. It wasn't the harsh, artificial gravity of the Odyssey. This was gentler, but it was definitive, pulling them from their weightless drift and settling them with a quiet finality onto the cool deck plating. It was the difference between falling and lying down.
Jess gasped softly as the gravity took hold, her body adjusting with a shock. She’d floated, unmoored, for too long. The sensation of her own mass pressing down was foreign, anchoring. She was suddenly aware of the heat of Kai’s thigh pressed flush against hers in the cramped chair, the solid pressure of Kai’s shoulder. The air smelled of stale oxygen, sweat, and the faint, acrid tang of overheated electronics.
Kai had done it with a few precise taps at a sub-console—rerouted emergency power to the pod’s dormant AG field. A tiny piece of control, reclaimed from the void.
They sat strapped in, watching the monolithic, alien structure of Waypoint Zero fill the viewport. It blotted out the stars. Its surface was a complex, fractal geometry of black alloys and deep-set, lightless recesses. It offered no welcome, no flashing beacons. Only a silent, gravitational pull.
The silence in the pod was immense, swollen with the ghosts Kai had just named. A hundred different lives. A hundred different endings. The vibration of the pod’s attitude thrusters, making minor course corrections, was the only sound.
Jess’s mind churned with the echoes. The kiss in the arboretum. The hand-holding that lasted for days. The look of betrayal before an airlock. They were all her, and yet they were strangers. The woman beside her had loved and been loved by all of them. The intimacy of it was crushing, and terrifying, and it ignited a fierce, hungry need in Jess’s gut—a need to claim something back from the void of forgotten time.
Her voice, when it came, was low, scratchy from disuse and emotion. “Did we ever… you know.” She didn’t look at Kai. She stared at the alien architecture looming ahead. “In any of them. Was there more than just… moments?”
She felt Kai go utterly still beside her. The silence stretched, taut as a wire. The pod drifted closer to the monolithic structure.
Kai’s breath let out in a slow, controlled stream. It wasn't a sigh. It was the sound of a door being unlocked. She finally turned her head. The console lights painted harsh angles on her face. Her hazel eyes were dark, unreadable pools. For a second, Jess saw the calculation there—the ancient habit of weighing consequences, of managing chaos, of protecting a version of her that no longer existed.
Then, something in her seemed to yield. A subtle slump of the shoulders. “Yes,” she said, the word simple and heavy as a stone. “We did.”
“How many?” Jess asked, finally turning to face her. She wanted the number. A finite thing to hold onto in the infinite sprawl of loops.
Kai held her gaze. “Four.”
Four times. Across a hundred resets. Four times when exhaustion and desperation and need had burned through the madness and left nothing but raw, physical truth.
“Tell me,” Jess breathed. It wasn't a request. It was a demand. “I want to remember.”
A faint, grim smile touched Kai’s lips. “You won’t. That’s the point.”
“Then I want to know. I need to know what we were. What I was.”
Kai looked away, out at the consuming dark of Waypoint Zero. She spoke, her voice a flat, quiet recitation, as if reading from a damaged log.
“The first time was against the primary reactor core casing. Loop forty-seven.” Her words were stripped of emotion, which made them somehow more brutal. “The ship was in a quiet phase. Just the hum. We’d been running diagnostics for twelve hours straight. You were covered in conductive gel from repairing a relay. You looked at me and just… snapped. You shoved me back against the warm metal, got your hands in my hair, and kissed me like you were trying to start a new war. It was angry. Frustrated. All teeth and nails.”
Jess listened, her heart pounding against her ribs. She could almost feel the ghost of the warm metal, smell the ozone and gel.
“You got my flightsuit open. Pushed it down to my waist. You were fucking relentless. You bit my shoulder, right here,” Kai said, tapping a spot above her collarbone. “Hard. Drew blood. I got your pants undone, shoved my hand down them. You were already so wet. Soaking. You came in about thirty seconds, grinding against my fingers, screaming into my mouth. Then you slid down the casing and went down on me right there on the deck, with the reactor humming beside us. You sucked my clit until I saw stars that weren’t on the viewscreen.”
Jess’s breath caught. Her own body tingled, a phantom echo of a sensation she could not recall.
“The second time was in a storage locker in Bay Three. Loop sixty-two. That was a bad loop. The scrub had taken out most of the crew early. It was just us, hiding. It was slow. Quiet. Desperate. You cried the whole time. I held you while I fucked you with my fingers, slow and deep, whispering things I don’t even remember. You came silently, just shuddering, your face buried in my neck.”
The stark contrast between the two stories was its own kind of violence.
“Third time was in my quarters. Loop eighty-eight. That was… different. Less desperate. More like an experiment. You were on top. You rode me, my hips bucking up to meet you. You made me say your name. Over and over. ‘Say it, Kai. Say my fucking name.’ And I did. I chanted it like a prayer until you clenched around me and collapsed. We fell asleep like that. Didn’t last. Woke up to a hull breach alert three hours later.”
She stopped. The pod was closer now. Details were becoming visible on Waypoint Zero—jagged spires, vast, smooth plains that looked scarred.
“And the fourth?” Jess whispered. Her mouth was dry.
Kai finally looked back at her. Her mask had slipped. The raw, unguarded pain was there, mixed with a heat that made the recycled air feel thin. “The fourth was the last time. The loop just before this one. The one where we almost made it to a different pod.”
Jess remembered the story. The different bay. The almost-escape.
“We thought we had it. We were giddy. High on hope. It was in the corridor outside the bay door. We were laughing. You kissed me. It was sweet, at first. Then it wasn’t.” Kai’s voice dropped, grew rough. “You pushed me up against the bulkhead. You were hungry. You said, ‘I need to feel you, all of you, before this fucking ship takes it away again.’ You were begging. ‘Please, Kai, I need it, I need to come with you inside me.’ So I did. I fucked you right there, your back against the cold wall, your legs locked around my waist. It was hard. Fast. You came so hard you forgot to breathe. Just silent, wide-eyed shock. Then you screamed. And ten minutes later, the scrub caught us. Wiped it all clean.”
Silence descended again, thick and choking. The memories, now vividly painted, hung between them—violent, tender, despairing, hungry. All real. All lost.
Jess unbuckled her harness. The mechanism was loud in the quiet. She stood, the gravity firm beneath her boots. She took the two steps separating them in the tiny space.
Kai watched her, unmoving from her chair, her expression wary, haunted.
Jess didn’t speak. She reached down, her fingers hooking under the zip-tag of Kai’s flightsuit. The sound of the zipper parting was a rasp that seemed to go on forever. She pushed the tough fabric apart, revealing the grey tank beneath, the sweat-damp skin of Kai’s throat, the sharp line of her clavicle.
Kai’s breath hitched. “Jess…”
“No,” Jess said, her voice low and ragged. “I don’t remember. But this me is here now. This me wants to.” She leaned down, her mouth hovering over Kai’s. “Show me what the fifth time is like.”
It was not a kiss. It was a collision. A claiming. Jess’s mouth crashed onto Kai’s with a frantic, starving pressure. All the fear, the grief for lost selves, the terrifying hope of the unknown structure outside—it all funneled into that point of contact. Kai’s lips were chapped, and she tasted of recycled water and salt. She made a raw, helpless sound in the back of her throat, and her hands came up, tangling in Jess’s honey-toned waves, pulling her closer, deeper.
Jess’s hands shoved the flightsuit off Kai’s shoulders, down to her waist. She broke the kiss to bite at the pulse point on Kai’s neck, exactly where Kai had said she’d bitten her in loop forty-seven. Kai gasped, her head falling back, baring her throat.
“Fuck, Jess,” Kai groaned, her hands scrambling for purchase.
“Yeah,” Jess growled against her skin. “Fuck.” Her hands found the hem of Kai’s tank and yanked it up. Kai raised her arms, letting her pull it off. Her breasts were small, firm, her nipples hard and peaked in the cool air. Jess ducked her head, taking one into her mouth, sucking hard, her tongue circling the tight bud. Kai arched off the chair with a sharp cry, her fingers digging into Jess’s scalp.
Jess’s own need was a fire in her veins. She fumbled with her own suit, her fingers clumsy. Kai batted her hands away, taking over. In seconds, the tough fabric was pooled at Jess’s feet. They were both half-naked in the cramped space, skin slick with sweat, breathing in ragged, shared gasps.
Kai’s hands were everywhere—cupping Jess’s breasts, squeezing her ass, sliding down the flat plane of her stomach. “You want to remember?” Kai panted, her eyes blazing. “I’ll make this one so fucking good you’ll feel it in the next loop.”
“There is no next loop,” Jess gasped as Kai’s fingers dipped into the waistband of her shorts.
“Good.” Kai hooked her fingers, pulling both shorts and underwear down Jess’s thighs in one rough motion. The cool air hit Jess’s wetness, making her jerk. Kai didn’t give her time to think. She shoved her back, not into the chair, but onto the narrow, padded maintenance bench that ran along the opposite wall. Jess’s back hit the padding, and Kai was on her, a knee pushing her legs apart.
Kai stared down at her, her blue-black hair a messy frame for her fierce, beautiful face. She looked at Jess’s naked body, at the heat and wetness glistening between her thighs, and a shudder ran through her. “You look the same,” she whispered, almost to herself. “Every time. You always look like this for me.”
Then she lowered her head.
Her mouth was hot, desperate, and devastatingly skilled. She didn’t tease. She licked a broad, firm stripe through Jess’s folds, making Jess cry out and buck her hips. Then she zeroed in on her clit, sucking it into her mouth, applying a rhythmic, relentless pressure with her tongue.
“Oh, God, Kai!” Jess screamed. The sensation was too much—too intense, too direct after centuries of abstraction. Her hands fisted in Kai’s hair, holding on as if she were drowning. Kai’s tongue flicked and pressed and circled. One of her hands came up, fingers sliding into Jess, deep, curling. Two fingers, thick and sure.
“That’s it,” Kai muttered against her, her voice vibrating through Jess’s core. “Come for me, Jess. Come for this me. Let me hear you.”
Jess was unraveling. The coil of tension that had been building since her first disoriented awakening in the cryo-pod, through every death and reset, through the terror of the escape and the void, snapped. It shattered with a force that whited out her vision. Her orgasm ripped through her, a silent, seizing convulsion for a terrifying second before sound followed—a raw, broken scream that echoed off the pod’s close walls. Her body arched, clenching hard around Kai’s driving fingers.
Kai didn’t stop. She worked Jess through the first peak and straight into a second, shallower but just as intense, her mouth gentle now, lapping, soothing, until Jess was sobbing, sensitive and overspun.
Only then did Kai pull back, her chin glistening. She looked wrecked, her own need a palpable wave coming off her. She swiftly shed the rest of her clothes, her movements efficient. She was lean, muscular, a body built for survival. A faint, silvery scar—from the reactor bite, Jess realized—marred her shoulder.
Kai kneeled on the bench, straddling Jess’s hips. She took Jess’s hand, guiding it down between her own legs. “Feel what you do to me,” she commanded, her voice guttural.
Jess felt the hot, swollen flesh, dripping wet. She moaned, sliding her fingers through the slickness, finding the hard nub of Kai’s clit. Kai’s hips jerked. “Finger me,” Kai gasped. “Now. Hard.”
Jess didn’t hesitate. She pushed two fingers inside Kai, who was impossibly tight, clenching around her immediately. Kai cried out, a sharp, beautiful sound, and began to move, riding Jess’s hand with a frantic, pounding rhythm. Her head was thrown back, her breasts heaving.
“Look at me,” Jess begged. “Look at me, Kai.”
Kai’s hazy eyes focused on her. The connection was electric, more intimate than any penetration. They held the gaze as Kai fucked herself on Jess’s hand, as her breathing became ragged sobs, as her movements grew frantic and lost their rhythm.
“I’m here,” Jess whispered, curling her fingers, pressing deep. “This time, I’m here.”
With a shattered cry, Kai came. Her body locked, shuddering violently, her inner muscles milking Jess’s fingers in rhythmic pulses. She collapsed forward, catching herself on her hands, her forehead pressed to Jess’s, their breath mingling in hot, ragged pants.
They stayed like that for a long time, sweat-slick and trembling in the aftermath. The pod hummed around them, carrying them steadily towards the monolithic unknown.
Finally, Kai rolled off, lying beside Jess on the narrow bench. They stared up at the curved, scarred ceiling.
“The fifth time,” Jess said quietly, her voice hoarse, “was in the dark, on the way to something worse.”
Kai turned her head. She looked exhausted, spent, but her eyes were clear. “Or something better. We don’t know yet.”
We don’t know yet.”
The words hung in the humid air between them. The slick heat of their bodies was already cooling on the bench, a sticky testament to what they’d just reclaimed from the void of forgotten time. Jess traced the line of Kai’s jaw, her finger coming away damp with sweat. The immense, silent structure still filled the viewport, a patient monolith.
“You lied,” Jess said quietly. Her voice was not accusatory, but certain.
Kai’s eyes, which had been drifting shut, opened. She looked at Jess, her expression unguarded in the eerie console glow. A faint, defensive smirk tried to form and died. “About what?”
“The number. It wasn’t four times.” Jess propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at Kai. The raw energy of their coupling had clarified something in her mind, sharpened her perception. “You hesitated when you said it. You counted in your head. So tell me. How many loops did we fuck?”
Kai held her gaze for a long moment, then looked away, out at the starless blot of Waypoint Zero. She swallowed. “Five.”
The correction was a small, seismic shift. One more entire reality where their bodies had known each other. One more history erased.
“Tell me about the fifth one,” Jess said. She didn’t ask. She didn’t plead. She stated it as the next necessary fact in their bleak, shared equation.
A low, shuddering breath escaped Kai. She brought a hand up to cover her eyes. “It was a strange loop. Quiet. The ship’s systems were… complacent. No major failures for weeks. It left too much empty space. Too much time in our own heads.” She dropped her hand, turning her head back to Jess. Her hazel eyes were dark with the memory. “You were different that time. I don’t know what the fuck had gotten into you. You were a freak.”
Jess felt a thrill that was part fear, part fierce pride. “How?”
“You wanted things,” Kai said, her voice dropping to a rough whisper. “You’d get this look. This hungry, commanding look. You’d tell me to get on my knees. Or you’d shove me onto a console and order me not to move. It was lowkey BDSM shit. Nothing with tools, just… power. You wanted to control it, or you wanted me to control you. It switched. You’d beg me to hurt you, then pin me down and make me scream your name. We fucked for what felt like the entire damned loop. Every quiet corner, every empty module. It was all we did. Until the scrub.”
The image unfolded in Jess’s mind, vivid and terrifying. A version of herself, unspooling under the pressure of infinity, finding a dark, singular focus in physical sensation. It didn’t feel alien. It felt like a potential truth, waiting in her marrow.
“What was the best part?” Jess asked. Her own voice sounded strange to her.
Kai didn’t hesitate this time. A real, genuine smile touched her lips—wry, impressed, full of dark nostalgia. “The marathon. I made you come four times in a row. Different ways. You were shaking like a faulty engine by the end.” She paused, her eyes searching Jess’s. “You want the gritty details? You asked for them before, in that loop. You liked the filth.”
“Yes.”
“The first was from behind, in the zero-g gym. I had you braced against the handrail, fucking you hard and deep with a strap-on we’d salvaged from God knows where. You came shouting, your knuckles white on the metal.”
Jess’s breath hitched. She could almost feel the phantom pressure.
“The second, you were riding my thigh on the command deck captain’s chair, grinding down like you were trying to start a fire, my hands all over your tits, twisting your nipples until you sobbed. You came quick and messy, all over my leg.”
A pulse of heat throbbed between Jess’s own legs, a sympathetic echo.
“The third,” Kai continued, her voice gaining a possessive, heated rhythm, “I sat on the floor of the mess, and you sat back flush against my chest. I held your leg up and open like this—” She hooked a hand behind Jess’s knee, pulling it up high and wide, demonstrating. “—and I fucked you with my fingers, so deep and slow, while I bit your neck and told you exactly how pathetic and gorgeous you looked. You came just from the words and the slow grind, you were so fucking gone.”
Jess moaned, the sound ripped from her. The position was vulnerable, exposing. The description was a key turning in a lock she hadn’t known was there.
“And the last one,” Kai murmured, her lips now against Jess’s ear, her hand still holding Jess’s leg aloft. “The last one was the most dirty. The most brutal. I bent you over the sink in the biosample lab. It was just raw, animal fucking. No toys, just me, pounding into you from behind until the metal creaked. But I teased you. I’d bring you right to the edge, then stop. Again and again. You were begging, crying, threatening me. It lasted for ages. When I finally let you come, you blacked out for a few seconds. Just collapsed. I caught you.”
Silence, thick and heavy with the ghost of that savage intimacy. Jess was panting, her skin on fire. The past wasn’t just a story anymore. It was a blueprint.
“Recreate it,” Jess breathed.
“What?”
“The best part. The four times. Here. Now.” Jess pushed herself up, her body thrumming with a need that was both ancient and brand new. “You said you were more than happy to do it again. So do it. Make me come four times, Kai. I want to feel what she felt. I want to remember in my bones.”
Kai stared at her. The last vestiges of her protective shell dissolved, burnt away by a hunger so profound it mirrored Jess’s own. It was the hunger of countless resets, of watching the object of your desire be perpetually wiped clean. It was the hunger to finally, finally leave a mark that would last.
“Alright,” Kai said, the word a dark promise. “But we start at the end. We start with the brutal part. You need to be begging first.”
She moved with a sudden, predatory grace. She flipped Jess onto her stomach on the narrow bench. The padded surface was cool against Jess’s feverish skin. Kai’s weight settled over her, not crushing, but dominant. Inescapable.
“You want the filthy version?” Kai hissed, her hands pushing Jess’s hips up. “You get the filthy version.”
She didn’t ask for permission. She didn’t prepare. She spat once, twice, onto her fingers, then smeared the wetness between Jess’s ass cheeks, not touching her center yet. The act was crude, primal. Jess jerked, a shocked gasp escaping her.
“You liked that,” Kai growled, leaning over her, her mouth at Jess’s ear. “You loved how fucking degrading it was. Admit it.”
“I don’t know!” Jess cried, the confusion and arousal a wild cocktail in her veins.
“You will.”
Kai’s fingers finally found her cunt, sliding through the wetness already gathered there from their earlier coupling and from Jess’s own intense arousal. She pushed two fingers inside, deep, curling them. Jess cried out, pushing back against the intrusion.
“Yeah, there it is,” Kai murmured. She began to fuck Jess with her fingers in a hard, steady rhythm, her other hand braced on Jess’s shoulder. The pace was relentless, focused solely on a spot inside that made sparks flare behind Jess’s eyelids. The coiling tension began almost immediately, a tight, screaming knot in her gut.
Just as Jess felt herself rushing towards the peak, Kai stopped. She pulled her fingers out completely.
Jess whined, a sound of pure, desperate frustration. She rocked her hips back, seeking friction, finding nothing. “Kai, please—”
“Please what?” Kai’s voice was calm, taunting. She trailed a single, dry fingertip up Jess’s soaking slit. “Use your words. What did you beg for in the lab?”
“I don’t remember!”
“Then guess.”
“Fuck me! Just fuck me, please!”
“Too vague.” Kai slid a finger back inside, just to the first knuckle, and held it there. The shallow, maddening tease was worse than nothing. Jess sobbed, her fists clenching.
“Please let me come,” she begged, the words mangled with need.
“Again.”
“Please, Kai, I need to come, I’m right there, please let me!”
Kai withdrew the finger. “No.”
She repeated the cycle. Three more times. She brought Jess to the trembling, gasp-ravaged brink with her fingers, with the heel of her hand grinding against Jess’s clit, once even with just the hot, open-mouthed press of her tongue. Each time, she stopped at the last possible millisecond. Jess’s world dissolved into a haze of aching need. She begged, she cursed, she promised anything. Her body was no longer her own; it was a instrument Kai was playing with cruel, exquisite expertise.
The fourth time Kai worked her up, the edge felt like a cliff she was already falling from. Kai’s fingers were pistoning inside her, her thumb a firm, circling pressure on her clit. Jess was babbling, tears and sweat on her face.
“Now,” Kai commanded, her own breath ragged with effort. “Come now, Jess. Shatter for me.”
The permission was the final trigger. The orgasm didn’t roll through her; it detonated. It was a convulsive, violent rupture that ripped a scream from her throat so loud it felt like it would crack the viewport. Her vision tunneled to black, her muscles seizing, clenching around Kai’s driving fingers in helpless, rhythmic spasms that seemed to go on forever. She truly did black out for a fractured second, consciousness flickering like a faulty lamp.
She came back to Kai pulling her from the bench, turning her, laying her down on the cool deck plating. Jess’s body was limp, boneless, vibrating with aftershocks. Kai loomed over her, her face a mask of fierce, hungry triumph.
“Three to go,” Kai said, her voice husky. She knelt, pushing Jess’s trembling thighs apart. “And we have time. The pod’s on a slow approach vector.” She lowered her head. “This one’s the quick and messy one. Just try and keep up.”