The Clone’s Mate by Susan Trombley
Thirty-Nine
I lay in bed one night, a handful of weeks later, cradled in Nirgal’s arms in post-coital bliss. My breaths were only just growing even again as I traced the markings on his chest with a fingertip. His seed slicked my inner thighs as it slowly leaked from me in the wake of him withdrawing his shaft.
“It’s a good thing I can’t get pregnant,” I said with a sleepy grin as I dropped a kiss on one orange pec that twitched beneath the brush of my lips.
Suddenly, Nirgal stiffened, then shot up in the bed. He stared down at me with an alarmed expression widening his eyes that raised my own alarms.
“Blighted silk!” His eyes shifted like he was making calculations in his head as he looked at the comforter covering our lower bodies. “How could I forget?”
His gaze rose to meet mine, his eyes no longer dilated but still a darker sapphire blue that showed more of his emotion, rather than his usual icy blue.
“Nirgal,” I said in a worried tone that did nothing to convey how much my heart was pounding as I sat up and clutched the comforter to my chest. “I can’t get pregnant, right? I mean, you guys did all kinds of invasive things to my body, so surely, you made sure I couldn’t accidentally get pregnant… didn’t you?”
He didn’t like it when I brought up our sordid past, and since I knew he regretted it, I tried not to, but sometimes, like right now, we needed to discuss what had happened. Especially since his current panicked demeanor was giving me a very bad feeling.
“The sterilization was only temporary. We didn’t plan on breeding you because of your… because it wouldn’t be ideal, as per protocol, but we decided to keep the option open, so did not permanently sterilize you. It’s been….”
He ran his hand over his short hair, turning his face away from me, though I could tell by the twitching of his wings, one of them still bent beneath his body, that he was agitated.
“It’s been too long since you’ve been given birth control!”
I closed my eyes, swallowing thickly as I fell back on the bed. I covered my face with both hands, my mind racing as I ran some of my own calculations.
My last physical exam was at the intake center, not long after we first arrived here. I should have had a period since then but hadn’t yet. I hadn’t thought much of it because I hadn’t had periods while in captivity, probably because of the birth control method the Iriduans had used on me.
In fact, the thought of having a child had been so far from my mind with all the chaos of my life lately that this was the first time I’d really spent longer than a brief moment to consider it.
Shit.
“Do you think I could be pregnant, Nirgal?” I lowered my hands from my face, opening my eyes to meet his, now that he’d turned towards me, staring down at me with stark guilt in his expression.
“It is possible.” I wasn’t sure from the tone of his voice whether this bothered him or not. Despite his expression, he sounded neutral. “Rhonda, if you are… I swear to you, I’ll make sure your health isn’t put in jeopardy! No matter what you decide to do, I will support your decision, as long as you are safe.”
I had to swallow through a dry throat several times before I could speak again. “Whose do you think it would be?”
His expression blanked, his eyes lightening to a cooler blue. It was his defensive mode. Whatever he felt about the topic in discussion, he didn’t want me to read it in his expression.
“Is that important to you, my queen?”
Again, his tone remained neutral, not giving away how he felt about any of this.
I sat up again, not even bothering to pull the cover up to conceal my naked breasts, my nipples still tender and tingling from his earlier attentions.
“If you’re asking whether I would prefer a child from one of you over the other, then no, that would never be important to me. I’d love any child I created with my mates.”
The fervency of my own words surprised me. It wasn’t like there wasn’t another option than having an alien hybrid child at my age, even if I was pregnant. Yet the thought of a life growing inside me that reflected the love and commitment I had with my mates suddenly sparked the maternal instinct I’d denied in myself for so long while I’d been married to Michael.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t worried that I might be pregnant. My concern became a hope that I feared would be dashed in the morning after a trip to the medical center for another full scan.
Nirgal watched my face with a tenseness in his lean frame that told me he remained uncertain about my feelings or what direction they might take. His tension also told me he was likely blaming himself again for what he’d done to me in that research facility.
I’d awakened his conscience in that place, and now it never seemed to leave him alone. He dealt with a lot of guilt that I wished I could alleviate, but no matter how happy he made me, how content I was in our life, he still held his own actions against himself. Someday, I hoped he could forgive himself the way I already forgave him.
“What if it’s Subject 34’s child?” he asked in a careful tone. “Has he given you his seed at any point?”
“Can he really impregnate me? Despite how different we are?” I was grateful that Subject 34 wasn’t sleeping in my room tonight, and we were talking low enough that I didn’t think he could hear it through our door.
He nodded, his eyes never leaving my face. “He can. He was designed to hybridize with Iriduan females and likely human females as well. That was Ilyan’s decision, by the way. I considered removing the athraxius hybrid’s ability to reproduce sexually, but my directors said to leave it alone.” He shrugged one shoulder. “They wanted it to be an option to breed a better iteration if we couldn’t design one. Obviously, my 33 previous failures did not impress my leadership enough for them to have faith that I could capture the wind in a bottle more than once.”
I barely heard the rest of his explanation, too focused on the words, “he can.” I wasn’t horrified at the thought of having a little scorpion hybrid baby like I probably should be. I loved my monster man so much that I didn’t shy away from the thought of giving him an adorable little monster baby. We would just have to make sure we could control its appetite, because my man was a voracious eater, and our grocery bills were ridiculous because of it. We’d go bankrupt trying to feed two of them.
The slow smile that crossed my face appeared to reassure Nirgal and his shoulders relaxed, his wings settling at his back.
“I would gladly have any of your children.” I pushed down the hope that swelled inside me.
I knew the statistics. I knew my odds of having healthy children decreased significantly at my age—or they did, back before advanced alien medical technology had been shared with humans. Now, we all benefited from “rejuv” treatments that turned back the clock on our biology, repairing damaged cells and DNA and replacing all those biological factors that time and age stole from us, vastly extending our lifespans.
Maybe those treatments even returned our fertility. In fact, Nirgal had mentioned something about my fertility in the very beginning. Something about my “ovaries” and “breeding” that I had forgotten until now.
Hope was a dangerous emotion, especially when it dug up old dreams out of the graveyard of your mind where you thought they were safely buried. It had taken a lot to bury my dreams of having children of my own, but I’d prioritized Michael’s wishes over those dreams, allowing him to convince me that children would just be a nuisance in our lives, and that we weren’t the kind of people who would be a good fit for parenthood.
“Rhonda?” Nirgal stroked my hair away from my face. “Are you okay?”
I turned towards him, throwing my arms around him to squeeze him in a tight hug. My eyes teared up as I thought about what I might—or might not—learn tomorrow. I almost wished I didn’t have this conversation, because now, the idea was in my head, the zombie dream resurrected to shamble around my brain until someone either shot it in the head or brought it back to full life.
God, I hoped it was the latter!
