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With hindsight, the detail Grace will end up fixating on is that it took him so long to find the porn.
He and Rocky have been back on Erid for a couple of years when he comes across it, entirely by accident. He’s clicking around one of the laptops, trying to follow the thread of a thought about Eridians and cell biology, when suddenly there are two naked people on his screen.
His first thought is that makes sense, they probably downloaded a lot of the internet without much discretion, there’s probably all kinds of random stuff on this thing.
His second thought is huh. It brings with it an increased heart rate and quickened breathing.
He should just close it. Objectively, Grace knows this. He should close the video and get on with his day, continue trying to chase down whatever train of thought he was trying to have, but he can’t look away from the screen.
The video features two men, and it’s this that makes Grace feel like he can’t quite get enough air.
Sexuality, as a rule, is something he does not look at too closely. He’d spent his fair share of time obsessing over it as a teenager, listening as friends started getting girlfriends and talking about how hard it was to keep it in their pants, how strong the pull was, and he’d wondered for a time if there was something broken inside of him. He was never overwhelmed by desire, never so desperate for it that he’d stoop to half the escapades his friends talked of.
But then he went to college, and Samantha Watson from his chemistry lab asked him out, and when they had sex a few weeks later everything worked as it should and it was a perfectly pleasant experience. So he figured the talk had just been talk and resolved not to think about it.
There was nothing to think about, anyway.
Except sometimes he still wondered whether there might be something more to the whole thing than perfectly pleasant, and if maybe the problem was that he was looking in the wrong place. He considered testing out the theory, if only in the name of science, and found himself thinking about it more and more. Wondering what it would feel like, what it would be like, if it would be different. If it would unlock something in him.
But when he imagined it, he could never quite visualise another person there with him, and that never changed no matter how many people he met. No one ever ignited that spark within him, the desire to try this new thing with this person specifically. And as desperate as he’d become to know the feeling of someone inside him, he figured if he was going to conduct some kind of big gay experiment, attraction should probably be a central part of it.
And he never felt it. With anyone. So he packed the thoughts away, and he does not look at it too closely.
Now here he is, sixteen light years away from home, and on the screen in front of him, a man slowly lowers himself onto another man’s cock. His eyes are half-lidded, heavy, his lips part around moans and heaving breaths, and Grace’s own thickening cock reminds him that just because he doesn’t want to fuck either of the men in the video doesn’t mean he isn’t interested. Theoretically. Conceptually.
It hits him, suddenly and violently, that he is probably never going to see another human being again. He’s probably never going to touch another human being again.
He has this realisation periodically. More accurately, he has new versions of this same realisation periodically. He is never going home, so he will never know about any new scientific discoveries. He will never be able to try all the restaurants he’d never gotten around to trying. He will never know how A Song of Ice and Fire ends.
This one, though, hits even harder than usual, because in the back of his mind its always been the kind of thing he’d untangle some day. One day he was going to figure it all out and understand what the fuck is going on with him, and then maybe he could find someone and settle down.
Some day. Guess it’s true what they say about living every day like it’s your last. You never know when you’re going to get drugged and press-ganged into a last-ditch mission to save the world.
In the video, the man lying on the bed starts thrusting up, and the other man moans, low and broken. Even through laptop speakers that have seen better days, Grace can feel the sound in his spine, and he palms himself though his pants, a gasp escaping him at the contact.
Fuck it. He may never know the touch of another human being again, but there is part of this question he can answer for himself right now.
Well, not right now. He needs a couple of hours for preparation and research, but eventually he finds himself propped against the headboard of his bed with the video, the closest thing to lube he’s managed to scrounge up over the past few years, and what is, in all likelihood, the galaxy’s first 3D-printed xenonite dildo.
His dick had lost interest in the proceedings some hours ago, but as soon as he starts the video again it is back on board. For a minute Grace just watches, one hand in his sweatpants, toying with himself almost lazily. Not goal-oriented, yet, just getting himself in the mood.
He’s nervous, the way he used to be before having sex back on Earth—not that it’s going to go wrong, exactly, but that he’s going to do something wrong. That there’s something everyone else knows that he doesn’t, and he’s going to reveal it and make a fool of himself.
It’s something of a ridiculous worry to have when he is the only being in a sixteen-light-year radius with any knowledge of how this is supposed to go, but it turns out neuroses get rooted in deep when you spend a couple of decades turning them over and over in your mind.
Eventually, he slides the sweatpants off. It seems like as good a place as any to start. He debates taking his t-shirt off, too, but it seems weirder somehow to be fully naked on top of the covers like he is, so the shirt stays on.
Grace had a lot of time to read up on this while his dildo was printing, and everything told him to start slow. To relax. To try not to think about it, so he doesn’t clench up involuntarily.
He wonders if he can sneak up on himself, and starts trailing a hand down his stomach, along his thigh, meandering patterns with no real purpose as if he can forget what he is trying to do. With his other hand, he strokes himself, and this at least serves as a distraction, pulling just enough of his attention that when his lubed fingertips brush up against his hole it sends a jolt of pleasure skittering up his spine.
Huh, he thinks, and tries again, then again, the sensation stronger now. It’s enough for small noises to start falling out of his mouth, panted breaths that turn into a groan when he slips a finger inside.
It’s not that he was expecting immediate ecstasy—well, perhaps a tiny part of him was, but the rational side of him knew better—but the feeling of a finger inside of him is somewhat underwhelming. It’s pressure, and it’s strange, and only when he moves his finger does he feel wisps of pleasure floating around the edges like a promise of what’s to come.
Grace adds a finger and tries to move faster, to fuck himself on his hand, but the angle is awkward and he can’t get into a rhythm and that promise of pleasure seems like it’s only getting further away. For a moment he had felt on the verge of something, but he doesn’t think he will find it like this.
“Moving on,” he mutters to himself, to the room at large, and reaches for the dildo.
It had seemed small when he was designing and printing it in accordance with recommendations he’d found online, but now that he holds it in his hand it seems suddenly bigger. Too big, for what he is considering, but he hasn’t come this far just to chicken out now.
“Slow and steady,” he reminds himself, and covers it with lube.
He teases himself with the tip of it, recreating the taps of his fingertips that had unlocked the first bolts of pleasure and gasps at the feeling of it, at the electricity suddenly sizzling under his skin. Slowly, carefully, he pushes it in, and he feels that strange pressure again, manyfold with the dildo slightly larger than his two fingers, and the electricity dims to hide behind it. But he moves the dildo, slow at first until something sparks and then faster, faster, abandoning all efforts at being careful until he is fucking himself almost desperately and the hints of pleasure tease him still, taunting him, almost in his reach if only he could figure out how to—
“Grace?” Rocky’s musical voice carries through the little house, and Grace freezes. “Grace, are you—oh,” Rocky says, appearing in the bedroom doorway in his bubble. “You’re busy. What are you doing, question?”
Grace considers how he must look, flushed and panting, legs splayed open and shiny with lube and the base of the dildo visible between them. He considers scrambling for the blanket to cover himself up, but he’s lying on top of it and can’t really see any kind of path to getting under it. Besides, Rocky has already seen everything there is to see. More than once.
He settles for closing his legs and trying not to gasp as it shifts the dildo inside of him. “I know I taught you about masturbation,” he says, and tries not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation.
“This is not how you showed me last time,” Rocky says.
That had been a fun afternoon, and by fun Grace means he cannot quite believe the things he has let Rocky talk him into in the name of science.
“Yeah, well, I’m trying something different,” he mutters.
“Are you almost finished, question?” Rocky asks, as if he isn’t asking something deeply mortifying.
Grace lets his head fall back against the wall and huffs out something between a laugh and a sigh. “No,” he says. “It’s not—um. It’s not working.”
“Your penis is broken, question?”
“No!” Grace yelps.
“Tell me what is broken,” Rocky says. “I can fix it.”
“Nothing is broken.”
“Then why is it not working, question?”
Grace sighs again. For all the time he’d spent imagining making first contact and speaking to an alien race, he can honestly say nothing even close to resembling this conversation ever so much as occurred to him.
Rocky is not human, he reminds himself. Rocky doesn’t think like humans do. Rocky isn’t prying, he’s just trying to problem-solve.
“I guess—” Grace starts, sighs, scrubs a hand across his face. It dislodges his glasses, but he’s glad of the blurred vision. He cannot believe he is about to say these words. Out loud.
To an alien.
“I guess it’s hard to get the angle? Or the thrust, or maybe it’s just the fact that I’m doing it myself—I don’t know, I get close but then—it’s just not working.”
“Okay,” Rocky says. “I can fix that.”
“What?”
“Wait here,” Rocky says, turning in his xenonite ball before Grace quite knows what’s happening. “I’ll come back and fix it.”
“How the fuck are you going to—” Grace starts, but Rocky is already gone.
Grace swallows. What has he gotten himself into? What is Rocky going to do? Is he going to fetch some kind of xenonite oven mitt so he can fuck Grace with the dildo himself without scalding Grace with his skin temperature?
Would he be into that? His dick, starting to cross into the realm of painfully hard, is an enthusiastic yes. The rest of him—
It’s an interesting question. He has never really been enthusiastic about the idea of sex with other people involved, but Rocky isn’t exactly a person. Or—he isn’t human. Which might be the key factor here. Rocky has seen him jerking off before, and didn’t seem particularly affected by it. The human penis probably isn’t very sexy to Eridians.
Grace slumps against the headboard, and the dildo shifts inside him in an extremely unhelpful way, and Grace decides he is ready to try anything Rocky has to offer as long as it gets him that elusive climax.
When Rocky returns, he is towing some kind of contraption that he positions at the foot of the bed. There are no oven mitts in sight. Instead, there is a xenonite arm stretching out from the main body of the contraption, and at the end of an arm is a xenonite dildo approximately the same size and shape as the one inside him. Grace clenches around it.
“Rocky, what is—why do—you didn’t just build that, did you?”
Rocky trills something like a laugh. “I am fast, but not that fast.” So Grace’s xenonite dildo wasn’t the first one in the known universe after all. Damn.
“So you just had a, uh—” Grace swallows. He doesn’t quite know what to call it. “You just had a sex machine lying around?”
“I saw it in a video on the computer,” Rocky says, and Grace makes a mental note to track down that video. Later. For research. “I thought it was important for humans. For masturbation. So I built it.”
“Wow,” Grace says.
“You want to try it?”
“God help me,” Grace says. “I really do.”
“In the video, the human is on hands and knees,” Rocky says. “It would probably help if—”
Grace holds up a hand. “Rocky, buddy, I appreciate this, I really do, but remember how we talked about how masturbation is something humans do alone?”
Rocky is silent for a moment. “Can I watch?” he finally says. “To make sure the machine works?”
Grace thinks about arguing, but he’s getting kind of desperate. And Rocky has seen him jerking off before. “Fine,” he says. “But no talking, okay?”
“Okay!” Rocky says. “Good good good. Here is the remote for the machine.” He taps something attached to the machine, then takes his bubble over to the corner of the room. “No talking.”
Grace pulls out his dildo, gasping as it pops out and clenching around the feeling of emptiness. He detaches the remote from the machine, lubes it up, and positions himself in front of it, very determinedly not looking at Rocky as he settles himself on all fours.
It takes some fiddling to get himself aligned, then he pushes against it and the machine’s dildo slides into him. It’s a little bigger than his, and he feels stretched, filled, feels that pressure again and feels the pleasure too, like every time he tries this it gets closer and closer until it is very nearly in reach.
His hand shakes as he reaches for the remote and turns the machine on.
The arm moves slowly, pulling back at first and then thrusting back into him, deeper than it had been to start; the dildo finds something inside him he hadn’t known was there and it punches a moan out of him, it withdraws and comes back, again and again, and Grace pants through it. With every stroke it builds, and within moments he has already surpassed anything he had made himself feel with the power of his own hand, and still it builds, still it reaches towards something it cannot touch.
With trembling fingers he turns the machine higher, faster, and his body is a livewire, is nothing but a conduit for the pleasure coursing through him, and all he can do is breathe and his breaths come out as moans, a broken litany of oh, oh, oh, and his skin is flushed and it seems absurd that he is still wearing his t-shirt, damp now with sweat he had barely noticed beading on his skin. And he’s so close, so close he can almost taste it, so close but he just can’t get there.
He whines and pushes back against the arm that’s fucking him, and the movement makes his cock slap against his stomach, and through the mess of sensations flooding his body he grabs on to that one like it’s a lighthouse guiding him home. He wraps a hand around himself, frantic and messy and keeping time with the machine, and a few strokes later the wave that has been building in him finally breaks and the orgasm washes through him, white-hot and all-consuming, and he thinks he cries out but he can’t quite tell.
He pulls himself off the machine and collapses onto the bed, into the puddle of his own release, and fumbles for the remote. The machine turns off, and silence settles over the room.
His mind is hazy, and his ass is sore, and there is a syrupy kind of heaviness developing in his muscles. Aftershocks still flit through him when he tries to move. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, and abandons all ideas about getting up and cleaning up and generally being at all human-shaped for the next five to possibly five hundred minutes.
There’s a clattering from the corner, and Rocky appears briefly in his peripheral vision and then disappears again. Moments later, the bed dips as Rocky hoists his xenonite ball up onto it, and Grace lets gravity pull him down until he is, essentially, spooning the ball.
“It worked, question?” Rocky asks.
Grace huffs a laugh. “Definitely works,” he mumbles. “Thank you. Which is a weird thing to—or, it would be weird on Earth, at least, but—thank you.”
There’s a lot about this that would be weird on Earth, and a lot of new inputs for the thing he does not look at. But that can wait until tomorrow. For now—
“Sleep, Grace,” Rocky says. “I will watch.”