Wide Open Spaces

By Shae Connor

Seven short stories, seven couples, seven different worlds.

What to Expect When Your Boyfriend Is Expecting
What fun is a cross-species pregnancy without an old-fashioned kidnapping to shake things up?

The Ringmaster
What’s in the past doesn’t always stay in the past—which might not be a bad thing.

Clean Up on Aisle Me!
The customer is always right. Unless he’s dead.

Discovering Columbus
A shared hotel room and some uniform appeal.

I Married the Best Man 
Waking up married in Vegas might have been the best accident of their lives.

The Half-Life of Pumpkin Pie
Of bakeries, holiday parties, and unexpected gifts.

Faux Cowboy
Save a fake horse—ride a fake cowboy.

All stories have been previously published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shae Connor
• Release date: Sep 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386703617

Book preview

Wide Open Spaces: A Short Story Collection by Shae Connor

All copyrights by Shae Connor:

What to Expect When Your Boyfriend Is Expecting ©2013.

Originally published in Butt Pirates in Space, MLR Press.

The Ringmaster ©2015.

Originally published online at Prism Book Alliance.

Clean-Up on Aisle Me! ©2014.

Originally published in Butt Ninjas from Hell, Wilde City Press.

Discovering Columbus ©2011.

Originally published in Uniform Appeal, Dreamspinner Press.

I Married the Best Man ©2015.

Originally published online at The Novel Approach as part of the What Happened in Vegas?? Blog Hop.

The Half-Life of Pumpkin Pie ©2014.

Originally published in Butt Babes in Boyland, Wilde City Press.

Faux Cowboy ©2015.

Originally published in Butt Cowboys on the Range, Wilde City Press.

All rights reserved. Transmission or distribution of any part of this work in any form without express written consent of the copyright holder is forbidden.

These stories are fiction. Any resemblance of characters, events, or locations in these works to real persons, events, or locations is coincidental.

Purchase of this book licenses it to the purchaser only. Duplication or distribution by any means is a violation of international copyright law and subject to criminal prosecution.

Cover art by Shae Connor.

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.

One

Zeph’s gone rogue again.

I stand just inside the door of the space my boyfriend and I call home and review the evidence. Lights on all over the place, but haphazardly. Computer open on the table. Remains of yet another weird meal nearby (probably something I can’t even pronounce).

Like the rest of his species, Zeph normally is a neat freak, so all I need is a glance to tell me he’s run off.

Literally. He’ll run a good ten kilometers before he returns, I’m sure. As usual, I have to remind myself that it’s fine. It’s not going to hurt him or the baby.

I try not to dwell on it as I close up and start turning off all the lights except the ones in the ceiling. I’m still not used to the idea of the baby, even though it’ll be here in a month, more or less. The experts are still working out the specifics, Lalandian gestation being shorter than human, and I guess we’re the guinea pigs.

There’s not much I can do until Zeph returns, so I busy myself cleaning up his mess, knowing he may not notice I’ve done it but that he definitely would notice if the mess was still there when he got back. The smell of the cheese-like substance left on the plate has me swallowing back a gag and thanking any deity the universe might contain that he’ll likely never want to eat the stuff again. Once or twice per weirdness has been the norm over the past six months.

One of the many adjustments I’ve had to make since arriving a year ago on Lalande—the name we humans gave it, the natives’ own title being too long and difficult for us to pronounce—has been the differences in technology. Most of it has been mildly annoying in a negative transfer kind of way, but some of it’s been a revelation. The leftover food on Zeph’s plate goes into a contraption built into the kitchen counter that grinds it up into a powder and drops it into a box downstairs, where it becomes fertilizer for the gardens behind the building where we live. It’s a streamlined, much less messy version of Earth composting, and it’s as ubiquitous as the similar systems in the hallways that take all the other forms of trash away. Well, ubiquitous for us, at least, since working on ways to reduce waste has been Zeph’s mission in life almost since he was born.

I met Zeph days after my arrival on Lalande with only the second group of humans to visit the planet, and the alien species with which we’d first made contact. Or, I should say, that first made contact with us, because without their help boosting our space travel capabilities, it would’ve been a couple more centuries before we could’ve gotten to their planet on our own. Lalande, nicknamed after the star of the same name, is some eight light-years away from Earth, but we got here in a matter of weeks. My specialty is human biology, not physics, so I didn’t pay all that much attention to the details. My focus was on how the people handled the trip, not on how the trip happened in the first place.

Thankfully, we all came through it fine, and after the required quarantine period to make sure we weren’t going to kill the locals with smallpox or something, we went to work on the intergalactic projects we’d been brought out to oversee. Zeph was one of the small team brought in to help us adapt to living on their planet, and he and I hit it off immediately. So much so that we were sleeping together within a week and living together soon after.

I have to say, it’s refreshing to be in a culture where no one wastes energy worrying about who sleeps with whom. For all the advancements of the previous few decades, homosexuality still has plenty of opposition back on Earth. Here, no one blinks an eye. The humans don’t care, and the Lalandians see nothing different from the usual, since they all look like human males anyway.

That’s not to say it didn’t rattle the hell out of me when Zeph told me he was pregnant. Or, as he put it, If I am not mistaken, we will be producing progeny. Okay, so the Lalandian-to-English classes he’s been taking have him sounding more like an android than a human at this point. I’m not doing any better with the opposite. Languages have never been my thing.

I try not to think too much about the differences between us. As I said, I’m a biologist, so intellectually, I know that Zeph’s species, despite outward appearances, is, in fact, agendered. Their internal makeup is similar to that of humans, but different in several important ways; most important of those is that they can either impregnate or be impregnated.

It wasn’t until I managed to impregnate Zeph that anyone had real-world experience with interspecies breeding, though.

Poor Zeph has been treated more like an experiment than a person—excuse me, sentient being—since the pregnancy was confirmed. I don’t know if any other humans have hooked up with Lalandians, here or on Earth, but no one knows of any previous pregnancies, so we’ve been under a microscope, literally and figuratively. It’s hard for me to be objective, but this is my specialty area, after all, so I’ve had a hand in all of it.

Okay, well. Not the physical examinations. Either or both of us popping wood halfway through wouldn’t have been helpful.

I wash the plate Zeph left—no way I’m leaving that stinky stuff to go into the automatic washer—and finish straightening up until I’ve gotten the place neat again. I’m sure it’s not as spick-and-span as Zeph would make it, but it’s enough that he won’t go into a cleaning frenzy when he returns. Maybe. The effects of Lalandian pregnancy hormones aren’t all that different from those in humans, which means it’s hard to predict how he’ll react.

Actually, now that I consider it, there’s one thing I’ve been able to predict pretty accurately since before we even found out about the baby.

Zeph is going to be horny as hell when he gets home from his run.

The thought brings a smile to my face and also makes me glad human men can’t get pregnant, because after all the sex we’ve had the past few months, I can’t imagine that wouldn’t have happened by now. Apparently a pregnant Lalandian can’t impregnate another, but there’s literally no data about whether that applies to humans, so it’s a good thing Zeph’s only interested in having sex with me and not any of the human women now living here.

Even for a scientist, it’s weird to be part of a scientific anomaly.

I’m in the kitchen but still close enough to the front door to hear footsteps outside a few seconds before the door opens and Zeph steps inside. I hear him slide off his shoes, which aren’t that dissimilar from Earth running shoes, though I know the raw materials are quite different.

One thing that is quite different between humans and Lalandians is that the Lalandian equivalent of human pheromones is very obvious, at least to the target. And Zeph’s got me in his sights, figuratively speaking. I can picture his skin glistening with moisture—yes, Lalandians sweat like humans; our biology overall is much more similar than it is different—but I can smell him even from the next room, the salt of his skin and the musk of his body.

My body reacts before my mind can even form the thought of arousal. It’s primal, instinctual, and it always leads to the hottest sex of my life, so it’s not like I’m going to resist.

Zeke?

Zeph’s voice is a rich baritone, fitting for the beauty of his body, with an accent reminiscent of a brogue, lilting and sweet. I wonder sometimes if it sounds so perfect to everyone or if it’s another effect of Lalandian sexual biology, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, as long as it feels this good.

And oh, does it ever feel good.

My cock’s already at full attention by the time Zeph rounds the corner into the kitchen, where I’ve got a bottle of rehydration drink ready for him. It’s basically Lalandian Gatorade and safe for humans too, but with a weird, bitter aftertaste. Not as nasty as that cheesy stuff Zeph eats, but not pleasant, either.

Zeph smiles as he takes the bottle from me and tips it up. My eyes are drawn to the muscles of his throat as he swallows. One of the best features of Lalandian biology, at least from the point of view of a gay human male like me, is that lean, defined muscle is the norm. Sure, there are some overweight Lalandians, but they all have the same general build—tall, with long arms and legs and a classic V-shape from shoulders to hips. They’re a race built to swim, which makes sense, considering the planet has just one landmass large enough to qualify as the equivalent of a continent rather than an island. It’s a wonder they haven’t evolved with gills and webbed fingers.

Not that it would’ve mattered to me. Watching the lines of Zeph’s body as he moves, smelling his scent, I can’t imagine anything that could keep me from wanting him.

He finishes his drink and sets the bottle aside, the movement catching my attention peripherally, even though it’s unlike his tidy nature not to dispose of it properly. But I can’t bring myself to care when he’s reaching for me, pulling me in close with his strong hands, dipping his head to nuzzle his lips along my jawline.

Zeke. His voice vibrates against my skin. I want you.

The words Zeph uses during sex prove that practice makes perfect. His day-to-day English remains on the stilted side, but when it comes to more intimate idioms, he’s a fast learner. Of course, as often as we’ve had sex during the pregnancy—and we weren’t exactly idle before—he’d have to be particularly slow not to pick things up by now.

I’m already shivering in his arms, the combination of scent, touch, and pheromones leaving me a mass of stimulated nerves. I can feel him against me, hot and hard and blessedly long (another bonus of Lalandian physiology), and my hole clenches automatically at the thought of taking him inside. Before the pregnancy, we were share-and-share-alike types, but because of the uncertainty of the effects of cross-species breeding, I’ve become a temporary full-time bottom.

That’s not a complaint.

Zeph pulls his head back and kisses me, something he told me he’d rarely done before we met. It’s not a big part of foreplay for them—their lips don’t have the same sensitivity as humans’—but he’s taken to it like a fish to water. Knowing it turns me on is more than enough for him, and if I didn’t love him already, I would just for that.

In the back of my mind, the part that isn’t focused on Zeph and how he feels, I’m picturing