Past Pleasures Read online

  A Total-E-Bound Publication

  www.total-e-bound.com

  Past Pleasures

  ISBN #978-0-85715-254-1

  ©Copyright Charlotte Stein 2010

  Cover Art by Natalie Winters ©Copyright August 2010

  Edited by Christine Riley

  Total-E-Bound Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2010 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way

  , Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom

  .

  Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has been rated Total-e-burning.

  Desire Through Time

  PAST PLEASURES

  Charlotte Stein

  Dedication

  For A and Z. A gal could not ask for finer inspiration.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  V: Warner Brothers Television

  Mt. Doom: The Saul Zaentz Company DBA Tolkien Enterprises

  Skynet: Warner Brothers

  Lego: Interlego A.G. Corporation

  Chapter One

  When the machine first wound down, Kate Connor couldn’t quite decide if it had worked. The room she was standing in looked ordinary—neat and uniform, but ordinary. The carpet was a rough beige pile, and a little curving armchair stood to her right, by the door. Warm light spilled from beneath another door directly in front of her, giving the entire room a soft ambience that she found somewhat comforting.

  It could have been anywhere. It didn’t have to be 3033. For all Kate knew, the machine hadn’t worked, and instead she’d been teleported to somebody’s plush, little apartment.

  But then more details surged into focus, and a different idea of what sort of year this was came with them.

  The door to her right, for example. It had the look of something you’d find on a submarine. It seemed reinforced and strangely shaped, rounded where it should have been sharp-edged, sunken and scalloped where it should have been smooth and straight.

  There was no discernable handle.

  There were no objects in the room, either. It took her a while to notice, but once there they became starkly obvious. No books, no DVDs, no magazines lying around—nothing but a little table, a bed and an armchair, with nothing resting on top of any of them. Everything was pristine and seamless, as though no-one had ever lived in the room she stood in.

  Even though she knew someone did live here. She could hear them, in the bathroom.

  Of course, it could have been that the room before her was not, in fact, a bathroom. After all, the running water might have signified anything, in this brand new alien context. Perhaps they used the water to pass electric currents through their molecularised bodies here. Maybe it wasn’t water she could hear at all, but stabilising fluid, for their mechanised gears.

  For the first time since starting this whole crazy thing, awareness of the complete unknown grabbed hold of her guts. She thought not of the sweet countdown to her first journey through the machine, but of its opposite—how long until Waites zapped her back? How long was left? Ten seconds? Twenty? It had seemed like a scrawny little glimpse, before, and she had pushed for more.

  Why in God’s name had she pushed for more?

  The bathroom door was starting to open. Any second, and Earth’s bleak and terrible future was going to emerge and grab her with its tentacles. She held her breath without even being aware of it; her hand clenched tight around the timer strapped to her wrist, ready to press and press and send a frantic plea for help across the vast acres of time and space—

  He was almost a disappointment, after a build-up like that.

  “Hello, brother,” he said—and not even in a Chaucerian accent in reverse, or with a buzzing mechanical note behind his voice, like the lizards in V. She ran her gaze the entire length of him, but no third arm sprang out. There didn’t seem to be a ray gun on him or a tentacle growing out of his bum or anything, not anything at all.

  He looked like a normal human man. Apart from the preternatural attractiveness, which Kate was pretty sure didn’t count as terrifying. In normal circumstances, perhaps, but not when in the future, trying to cope with everything aside from handsomeness.

  Like the gesture he appeared to be making. Hand up, palm facing her. It seemed impolite not to make the gesture in return, and yet awkwardness flooded her on doing so.

  “Hello,” she found herself replying, the steady tone of her voice a flickering surprise. It should quake, if only because of one constantly beating fact—she was speaking to a man from the year 3033. Whether or not he was about to eat her face seemed somewhat irrelevant, in light of that fact.

  “Can I help you?”

  She heaved in a deep breath and reflected on her luck—clearly, in this time, people didn’t automatically bash intruders. Which would have been absolutely awful, considering his immense size. Hadn’t Waites said that people would be smaller? Hunched, like trolls?

  If there was ever an opposite of troll, it had to be the guy in front of her. And although he did seem to be kind of hunching, she felt that was purely due to his giant ceiling crushing head. What on earth such an immense man was doing in so tiny a room, she couldn’t say.

  Finally, words magically appeared in her mouth—

  “No, that’s all right. I’ve just come to…to look at you.”

  Clearly, the request she made to her brain for sane and sensible words had been denied. She thought of all the preparation, all those terms—observational data, habitat studying, analysing field parameters. Meaningless terms so general that even the future might be able to take them.

  And yet come to look at you were the first words her brain managed, to this thousand-years-beyond-her creature. Her embarrassment was so thick it could have soundproofed a room, but crazily, he didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “You’ve come to look at me?” he said. “Are you from the government? Have I breached protocol?”

  There was definitely something worrying about those words—a little flavour of 1984 or other dystopian wonderlands—but he didn’t look afraid or nervous, to her. His perfect face remained smooth and lineless, and his hands remained un-wrung at his sides. It made her wonder if he was capable of making an expression—until he actually did so.

  He tilted his head, just ever so slightly, and gave her a little frown. Not an angry one, however—nor a nervous frown. It was delightfully recognisable, on so open and lovely a face:

  Curiosity.

  “Where are you from? Are you from Kelded? You look different. Your clothes are different.”

  They had chosen something simple, something common—plain white shirt, plain blue trousers, black boots. But it still appeared very different to what he was wearing—a thin t-shirt sort of garment, and matching trousers. Both item
s hugged his every plane and contour, and she would have been the first to admit—they did so very nicely indeed.

  Her thoughts turned briefly to Waites, and what he had hypothesised—that the people of the future would be weak, and wasted. Muscles atrophied, everything done through headsets or internal links to super computers or such similar nonsense.

  The man before her proved Waites so wrong she was sure she could see his muscles laughing at the idea. She weighed him at maybe two-fifty, perhaps a little over six foot three. His shoulders were broad, his biceps sinewy and interesting beneath the thin material of his t-shirt. Even his hands looked large and well-used, though in pursuit of what she couldn’t say. Mining for children? Carving “Two legs bad, six legs good” eight thousand times into the side of Mt. Doom?

  He didn’t look like he spent his days being oppressed by an Overlord. Then he laughed, and she forgot every hell-future babble Waites had ever indulged in—mainly because the sound almost made her wet herself.

  Every other sound—every word and gesture—up to that point had seemed quite normal. But the laugh…it rang in her ears, grating and unearthly. She only managed to label it as a laugh because his face stretched into a smile, as he delivered it.

  Then, as though that wasn’t weird enough—

  “You’re very small. Can I come closer and touch you?”

  She rifled through every possible appropriate answer, in her head. Was it normal, for people to ask a thing like that in 3033? She knew it must be and yet found herself breathing hard again. Maybe in his time, such a question was a prelude to conducting an internal exam, or exerting his large dominance over her, or some other such thing.

  How long was there to go, now?

  Too long. She hadn’t said yes or no or was your laugh birthed by the aliens living inside you, but he was already stepping closer. Any second, and he would have a hand on her. His dystopian cooties would be on her body, and she’d be trapped here, forever, with—

  “I’m afraid to touch you, you’re so small!”

  The excitement in his voice had the strangest of effects. Rather than making her excited, too, or more terrified, or weirded out, or any of the things it should have done, it fell on her, soft and soothing. There was something shy about it, and baffled, and she recalled how she had felt when Waites explained what the machine might do. That she would never again know something so wonderful and new.

  When he reached out a hand, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, but let him place it on her shoulder. And when he took her hand in his, she didn’t particularly feel like saying anything at all. Not a protest, not anything.

  She only watched him turn her hand about in his two huge ones, as though it was made of gold.

  There seemed to be little point, in trying to pull away. He didn’t hurt. He wasn’t rough or forceful. He simply examined each of her fingers in turn, minutely, commenting again on her size.

  Though there was certainly something about the whole business—something she couldn’t place, no matter how much she tried to stop examining him back. There just wasn’t the right frame of reference available to her—what activity included a strange, calm hand examination, as though hands didn’t exist in your time?

  And yet, the more he turned her hand in his—with that wondering expression on his face—the more familiar the scenario became. She could feel its familiarity, pressing down on her.

  But of course, it didn’t come to her fully until the machine began to whir up, in her background. The pressure of it, the beep of her timer. Perhaps he sensed she was about to leave—she couldn’t be sure. Either way, he chose that moment to meet her gaze, with his big guileless eyes. He chose it, and said:

  “You’re a woman.”

  And she knew then why it had all seemed so familiar. Like a little kid, at the zoo for the first time. As his world faded out, she saw his expression, picture perfect—that of a small boy, upon seeing a creature he had not previously known existed.

  * * * *

  She knew, of course, the first questions Waites would ask—how mutated were they, how oppressed were they, how decimated was earth? It was the reason he had the machine linked up to a decontamination chamber—in case she came back radioactive.

  It was the reason he sent her, instead of going himself. It was also the reason why she had to fight the urge to answer—I now have SuperHerpes, and have just infected your body simply by looking at you. Oh, and by the way—it makes you grow a second head that hates you.

  But instead, she tucked the real knowledge deep down low inside herself, and answered with all the most meaningless information—just a room, pristine and neat. Nothing falling apart. Nothing terrible lurking anywhere. No giant handsome man who played zoo time with me.

  Waites, unsurprisingly, looked more than a little deflated to hear the news. It wrote itself clear, on his face that hunger for something as awful as you’re a woman, in that incredulous sort of voice. As though all the women in the world suddenly vanished in the year 2020, and never came back.

  It was better, to keep it from him. For one thing, she knew that if she told Waites, he’d start bashing on about rape and Neanderthal men wanting to carry her off, or other such things from schlock sci-fi stories about barbaric futures and men in loincloths. He spent his time believing he was living in something by L. Ron Hubbard, so what could she say?

  Except nothing. There simply wasn’t anything to say at all. The future man’s sweet wondering face deserved her silence.

  And yet unease dominated her body, when Waites told her to lie still and strapped her in. From somewhere beyond the thick metal casing, she could hear him telling her that her heart rate was high and how she should take deep, slow breaths, but the brand new frame of reference kept right on looming into view. A world without women—how could such a thing happen? Then new thoughts came in, tumbling on top of the old ones—

  It didn’t. It’s something I don’t understand. It’s something beyond my ability to comprehend, something so bizarre that blond handsome future man will tell me, and I’ll go insane trying to process it. I’ll—

  The world faded back in again—the brave new world, the future world—as the same simple room it had been before. The same strange man-boy, sat on his low little bed. He looked for all the world like a housewife, anxiously awaiting a special guest.

  As did the friend sitting with him.

  Both of them jumped to their feet upon seeing her, but it was the first one—the blond one—who spoke first, in babbling excited tones.

  “I told you! I told you!”

  Kate could only barely imagine what, exactly, this friend had been told. The expression on the friend’s face seemed both terrified and awed, as though an extinct animal had just appeared in his living room.

  Which, she considered, was likely not that far from the truth. In fact, it was so not far that it stung her in ways she found hard to process. Like needles, jabbing at parts of her body that she wasn’t sure existed.

  “Are you really a woman?” the second man asked—just to jab the needles in further, perhaps. His hair was darker than his friend’s—almost midnight-coloured—and slicked to his head in a rigid sort of way. It gave him a precise, finicky air that his friend lacked—and his eyes. Oh his eyes. They seemed blacker than was strictly natural, and they assessed in a way that made her feel naked.

  Though that same wide-open curiosity still bristled, all over him. A little more cautious, perhaps, but still there.

  “I am,” she said, though her instinct was to tell them she couldn’t answer their questions. That was the protocol, but then—the protocol made no real allowances for something like this. It made allowances for being attacked, or hounded, or approached by the Future Gestapo.

  Not for two men who didn’t seem aware that the heavy shadows of their cocks were really showing, through the barely-there material of their uniforms. She would have been embarrassed for them, if they seemed to care even one little bit.

 
“Look at the hair,” the first one said, but the second kept his excitement reigned in much tighter. His eyes busied themselves all over her, clearly fascinated but not willing to jump up and down.

  “I’m looking,” he said. “Where have you come from?”

  The tone of his voice was not what she had been expecting. Somehow, she had imagined a slow, patronising tone, as though he was speaking to a small child. When his words finally came, however, they held the same hint of awe and reverence as his friend’s did.

  It made her want to tell the truth.

  “From the past,” she said. After all, what did it really matter? In what way would the timeline be polluted, if she told them things? Everything here had already happened. They couldn’t take her information and stop Hitler from marching on Poland. Stamping on a butterfly wouldn’t turn everyone into ape-people.

  “Time travel,” the dark haired one said, and nodded, as though saying so made it final. When the other one rolled his eyes in response, Kate had to suppress a giggle. They rolled eyes, just like in her present!

  “There’s no such thing. It’s a replica! I told you the government had replicas.”

  “I don’t think replicas look the way it does. It looks like a man.”

  “It looks nothing like a man. Look how small it is! And it has boobles!”

  Now it was the second one’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “Those are not boobles. Perhaps they’re some sort of…growth. Maybe he’s wearing something under his clothes.”

  “Like what?”

  The first one turned to her, almost agitated but not quite. She wasn’t sure if he ever reached anything like agitated. Even his excitement seemed calm and almost…impassive. And it didn’t change, not even when he caught her laughing.