Forget Me Not, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Karissa Kinword
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Cover Design by A. Thomson
Developmental Editing: Kelli Mazanec
Line Editing: Charlotte House
Beta Reader: Marlee Talbot
Contents
Playlist
Author's Note
Dedication
1. Prologue
2. Fortuity
3. Ambivalence
4. Covetous
5. Vexation
6. Epiphany
7. Volition
8. Desideratum
9. Fallacy
10. Cogitation
11. Amalgamation
12. Rhapsody
13. Deliverance
14. Insatiable
15. Clandestine
16. Modicum
17. Interlude
18. Malfeasance
19. Reckoning
20. Indemnify
21. Ardency
22. Druthers
23. Pike
24. Trepidation
25. Elysium
26. Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Hello readers! I'm happy you're here. Before you get lost in my little world, I do want to warn immediately that this book contains extremely explicit sexual content. And not just a sprinkle of it, a generous helping. Please take that into consideration before you flip the page. I'd also like to warn for specific triggers such as drug use, gambling, gaslighting by a romantic partner, emotional infidelity, and graphic violence. If all this floats your transport—enjoy!
To Joe. The other half of my shooting star.
“They’ll kill me first, you know. Before I’ve had the chance to taste you.”
“I won’t let them.”
“Dream girl, I applaud your altruism. But unless the sky suddenly becomes starless and there’s a tear in the cosmic thread, I may never be graced with keeping you from my darkness.”
“It’s not your fault. What happened to him.”
“Then why did every day on this moon feel like a sentencing? If the atmosphere didn’t bring me to my knees, the predators still kept me afraid of my own shadow. My only solace is sleep.”
“You’ve kept your promises. You’re here repaying that debt like an honorable man. All the while this life has made you a shell. Those people don’t care about you, they care about what you can do for them. You’ve figured it out before, many times.”
“I’ve lost every friend, but you.”
“I’m not your friend, Silas.”
“No, you are my reason.”
“And you’re the one who survived, for a reason. The universe doesn’t operate on chance. Don’t allow the last seven cycles to let you forget that.”
“When I leave here tomorrow, I intend to never come back.”
“I’ll follow you wherever you go.”
It would take at least a cycle and a half for the transport ship to make its way entirely back to the Otera. Back to the dense, bustling, mainland planet I fucked off of several moons ago with Logan.
Let’s go rogue for a little while, he had said. Stick our feet in the sand.
So we did just that. Traveling as young lovers do, still yet to stake a permanent claim in a safe and explored stratosphere, and with not much more than a couple duffle bags between the two of us. It was divergent from our normalcy, refreshing. We hopped on a connection pod with whatever currency we had jingling in our pockets, found a twinkling constellation orbiting a habitable planet on the map, then threw the dart.
The Glades were perfect. A beautiful oceanic moon, thriving culture, black sand beaches. The climate kept our skin glistening happily during the day, bodies warm to the touch—and at night the breeze danced through the billowing curtains of our cozy bungalow and wiped the sweat off our bodies tangled between the sheets.
We spent every day wrapped in barely enough clothing to cover ourselves. Drinking in the sun as we laid across the sand, dining with the locals on fresh aquatic dishes, shopping through markets of the indigenous villages. We learned new languages, practiced new traditions, engulfed ourselves in the freedom of a holistic culture that was worlds away from the life we lived on the Otera.
I became consumed by the salt-fleshed nature all around me. Food and drink, efflorescence, incense, oils, natural medicines, the fruits of the land that were recycled into every edge of society.
And the sex was invigorating. When we felt that good all the time, were that tipsy all the time, we couldn’t help but screw each other senseless.
Logan and I were welcomed outsiders getting fat on the feeling of a life that didn’t exist on the Otera. We thought several times about ways that we could stay on the island forever, different odd jobs we could do in that foreign society to keep us submerged in it. We even sold our own personal belongings to the locals for a while to spread ourselves thinner—things they could only find on the mainland. But, eventually the money had to run out.
If we leave now, we’ll have just enough tally to catch the return back to the Ote, Logan had said. If not, we’re stranded here, Eliza. The next freighter doesn’t pass for another three cycles.
So that was that.
We spent a final night in paradise listening to the waves as they rocked us to sleep, and like every single night before that one, like clockwork, I still dreamt about him.
The man with the ocean flecked gaze and sideways smile who came to me so often in my sleep I just learned to expect it.
I didn’t know his name, or how many years he’d had before him—where he was from, or how he was in my head, constantly. But, he had been a perpetual stronghold in my life since I was young. An imaginary friend, a lover, the reason I couldn’t wait to drift to sleep and visit my dreams.
When I opened my eyes it was with a content sigh, rolling sidelong to face the man who laid in bed with me.
“Hi.” I smiled.
His tousled, ash brown locks fell rebelliously in front of his eyes, one a calm sapphire sea, the other emerald, deep and unmistakable like moss in the night. The glint in his stare was mischievous as he smirked back at me.
“You’ve been having fun,” he said. “I have a rightful concern you may forget about me.”
“I’ve tried.”
I reached out, tracing the silver half-moon scar that hung from his brow with my thumb.
The man feigned insult, grabbing my hand to place it over his heart as if it were breaking. “I’m wounded by your brashness, Birdie. You would miss me.”
He was right about that. I twisted my fingers into his own, nodding at the longing look in his eyes before I answered, “Like the rain in a dusking drought.”
There was a comfortable silence then, one where we both basked in the unsaid. He and I spoke to one another like this often, drawn out quietude, mirrored expressions. Our own secret conversations, even under the curtain of my closed fantasy.
He swept a stray blonde strand of hair away from my forehead, tucking the coarse, tangled wave behind my ear. “Are you ever going to tell him about me?”
“About the imaginary man who haunts my dreams?”
My fingertips had found their way to the plush skin of his bottom lip. He was so beautiful to look at like this, bare and vulnerable, as affected by my touch as I was by just his mere presence.
”Is that all I am now?” His voice was honey thick, tied up in a low seductive drawl that hung off his tongue as one eyebrow shot up in question.
“Yeah.” I sighed and kissed the knuckles on the back of his hand. “That’s all you are.”
After that I couldn’t sleep. I sat up in bed, watching Logan snore beside me, pulling out my worn leather journal to write about the man in my dreams for what seemed like the thousandth time.
I was a vassal to my own imagination. There had never been a time in my life that I felt completely in control of my own desires. Even when I thought I had found the same happiness I craved in those fleeting hours asleep, I still caught myself wishing to float into unconsciousness on occasion.
I sat in the darkness so long I resorted to a tincture of natural oils to aid in the rest process, and it wasn’t long before exhaustion overtook me again.
Along with the tranquil sound of the waves, sleep swept me away like the tide.
The next day, our link pod touched down on the transport right around the same time a man named Silas was boarding his own connection vessel on the Pulp. His ship’s cargo was heavy with a precious trove he’d spent seven cycles searching and scraping out of the moon’s murky, yellow flesh with a fine toothed comb.
He planned to catch a ride on the freighter ship back to the Otera and trade his way to riches—sticking around just long enough to make his peace with the mainland, and then become a ghost. Gone in the starstruck dust.
Silas kicked his little ship into orbit without a second look back, scattered belongings that he was in too much of a rush to stow away floating in zero gravity around his head. Books, dog-eared and browning around the edges from wear, several samples of dried flowers picked during his planetary travels weaseling their way out of the folded pages. Stray oxygen packs, a dirty compression shirt he’d stripped himself of minutes before, long forgotten empty wrappers from stale protein supplements.
It had been seven long cycles out in that toxic, viscid forestry alone. It
That was of course behind him now.
Silas hadn’t been entirely alone though, by his own standards. He had his novels, and a shoddy radio with adhesive tape holding the metal antennae at just the right angle for a station to sift through. He had a handful of weathered photographs found on a job once upon a time, and sometimes he’d look at them and imagine the scenarios come to life—giving the people names and stories.
He had even befriended a blue bird for a while. They both ended up at the lone watering gully at the same time a few mornings when Silas slipped in to bathe. He would whistle at it, tell the warbler about his day, speak to it like an old, mute friend. Eventually though, the bird stopped coming around.
And then he had me. The girl that didn’t exist.
For as long as Silas could remember, I took up a stable residency in his dreams. As a friend, a partner—a paramour.
The latter were his favorite nights out in the unforgiving Pulp. Falling asleep, and then finding me there in bed with him, always stark nude as the day I was born.
“You’re tired, Silas.”
My voice was angelic to him, like a calming whisper.
“The strength of these old bones does deceive me, Birdie,” he agreed, pulling me on top of his body and parting my legs over his hips. “But you’d sooner call me manic than tired if I ever wished you away for sleep.”
I dipped down to catch his lips with mine, our tongues sliding together in a quick movement before pulling away.
Silas held my waist while I stretched up on wobbling knees, just high enough to reach between our two bodies and stroke him. The groan he let out was low and deep as I dragged the tip of his cock through the wet valley at my core.
“You’re doing so good out here on your own, Sy. You deserve a break.”
I always slid down onto him perfectly, and he filled me tight, watching as I took a beat to savor the blissful feeling of being so full, body slick and wanting, before lifting my hips and riding him back down again.
“Maker and all his men—fuck,” he breathed. “I have never felt a euphoria near comparable to the likes of you.” His tangled hand in my hair pulled me down against his mouth again as I rocked my hips against his faster, biting at his bottom lip as he kissed me.
Silas was careful with his hands, kneading me as I rode him. He pushed and pulled, guiding me at his pace, licking the supple moans out of my mouth as they left my throat.
“Can you take me harder, little bird?” The question sounded more like begging than an inquiry. The unabashed groan that slipped from his lips had me whimpering against his ear. “That sound.” He half sighed, half chuckled, delirious on how close I was getting him. “You make me depraved, dream girl, you make me—oh, fuck.”
With feet planted firmly underneath him, he wrapped his arms around my body and hammered upwards, matching the wave of my hips with his thrusts until the tightening feeling in his shaft became devastating.
“Don’t you dare stop on me,” he warned shakily. “Don’t—don’t you dare.”
“Come for me, Silas.”
He pressed his face into the slope of my chest, muffling his pleasure into damp skin as his body shook. Before he could even pull out entirely, Silas felt the warm drip of his own release trickling down to matte the wiry hair at the base of his stomach.
Just like that night, he would often wake up in briefs sticky with his own seed, cursing himself alone in his bed and wondering who and why I was. A fever dream, his own personal form of glorious torture.
NOW
“Quit fucking stealing off my plate.” I jab a half eaten wafer at Logan across the table. “You’d think you hadn’t eaten for days.”
Even as I say them, the words feel silly. My partner is more than obviously not starving. He’s tall and effortlessly lean, square shoulders, strong arms, a rough line to his jaw. He has daggers for eyes, sterling gray, and thick strawberry blonde hair that he habitually tucks behind his ears while he speaks.
“Oh, come on, babe.” He stabs at the plate again, grinning as I spar with his utensil. “You know you won’t finish that.”
I give in and let him pick a stray piece of meat off the tray.
“The food on this ship won’t be the same as it was in the Glades,” I say, tipping my body back against the cushion of the booth. “It’s back to reality.”
“Well, not completely.” Logan’s fork is abandoned as he takes a swig of his drink. “I mean yes, when we get home—but we still have a long ride on this transport before we hit the Otera.”
I look around the communal dining area. The place is like a shopping center food court, several ticky-tacky shacks with different cuisines lined up next to one another. Every-which gender and species scattered about at their own little tables. Maybe families that are traveling to visit more of their own, maybe friends headed to a vacation spot. Possibly a lone straggler starting a new life on whatever system the ship happens to pass.
There’s a giant screen hitched on one of the walls showing arrivals and departures, next destinations, systems we’re passing through currently and what’s on the literal horizon. The red, blinking alarm light attached to the screen indicates there’s a pod on-load docking currently in the garage bay.
This system of intergalactic travel has opened the gates to millions of new unimaginable discoveries, allowing ventures well beyond the mind’s capability of what exists in a space that never ceases to unfold.
And yet, “I just wish there was more to do on this thing,” I complain.
Focusing again on the meal in front of me, I notice that quite a bit more has gone missing off the plate. I point an accusatory fork in Logan’s direction, but before I can berate my boyfriend over the obvious lack of food, he cuts me off.
“Ah look, new travelers just pulled in.” He gestures in the direction of the steel elevator doors across the room as they open, and a drove of people make their way into the common area. Bags in hand and confused looks on their faces as they try to find their way through the busy quarter.
“This is a great place for people watching,” he adds. “Getting to judge everybody immediately, you know? It’s kind of fun.”
I ignore him for the most part, only giving the arriving group short glances as they move their way into the space.
There’s a family with young children that amble distractedly behind their caretakers. A couple, probably ten years older than Logan and I, mid-to-late-thirties, holding hands and heading toward the health food concession. A group of girls follow, giggling and whispering to one another, preoccupied with a communication tablet they’re all looking at.
Then a man. Just—one man.
My neck tilts to follow him, curiosity and shock, blurring the edges of my vision.
Shaggy brown hair curls over his forehead, and even half-hiding his eyes, the stark blue and green irises still puncture the veil. He wears dark cargo pants tucked into half tied boots, and a waffle-weaved, black long sleeve shirt that’s wrinkled enough I can still notice it despite the color. His olive skin gives way to scratchy looking, unkempt stubble; it starts halfway up his neck and peppers his cheeks and chin in patches. A faded half moon scar hooks around the brow on his left temple.
There’s a sudden tightening in the cavity of my chest like my heart is in a vice grip, and I’m left mouth agape as I take the stranger in.
One ratty duffle bag slung over his shoulder, a thick, soft-covered book stuffed into his back pocket that I can see when he turns to the side. His disparate eyes that dart around adapting to the area are familiar in a way that pulls me like a current.
I know you.
It’s like I can’t breathe. I pinch my own skin in an attempt to wake myself from the daydream I must be in—but I can’t, because it’s not. All of a sudden my mouth is wet, too wet, and I try to swallow down the nauseous feeling climbing its way up my throat, but it’s a meager fight. I feel my skin flush, hot and feverish.
