Moonlight

The night was warm, so we shucked our kit and plunged laughing into the surf. Massive clouds scudded and scoured the air, and the stars gleamed their brightest in a sky polished to a high clear gloss.

We had been together for seven years by then, but his flawless skin remained tight across his corded muscles -- a little more ruddy for his age, as was common for the males of his lineage, his youthful milkiness giving way slowly to roseate maturity. His hair was longer, too, than he ever used to wear it, and it followed the shape of a ridge across his scalp. It might have looked like the fin of some fearsome, carnivorous cetacean as he ducked and sliced through the water.

This was his element. He was a creature of the water, a native of oceanside pursuits and expert at all things maritime. "Careful of the rip tide," he called to me from across four meters of rolling water that flickered green with bio-luminescent dinoflagellates.

I was useless once immersed, and stayed where my feet made contact with the sandy bottom. "Don't worry," I replied.

He laughed at me for my slight unease with the sea, with his characteristic blend of mocking and affection. "If you get swept out I'll come and save you." He flashed me his handsomest smile.

I had no worries on that score. He was a strong swimmer.

The moonlight, dimmed and diffuse through clouds, brightened as the clouds moved on. He shone in that light, a sight to behold: Streaking below the surface, leaping into the air, even doing a flip before he pierced the water once again. More clouds cleared away in the night's warm breeze, and the scene brightened as a second and then a third moon emerged, all of them full, two of them golden and brilliant, and the third, largest moon, rusty and dim.

His people and mine accepted the two of us as life partners, but it had taken them a while. They had told us that we were foolish to marry, even though we were two males and interspecies children were never a possibility -- not unless we resorted to genetic splicing. On Earth, our union created a media sensation; that's how rarely humans marry outside their species, even now. On his world, it was not my terrestrial origins as much as my landlubber status that stuck in people's craws.

The objections we heard ran a gamut, grounded in science and faith, in social expectations and gut-level speciesism. What if our histamines were not compatible? What if our ph balances left one or both of us with acid burns? We'd be lucky not to die of anaphylactic shock during a bout of our unnatural sex, they scoffed. Mixed marriages never worked, they told us, the doubters and skeptics and bigots of both worlds. My side of the family -- the human side -- went so far as mutter about "aliens," but in a cosmos opened up by the lepton star drive, what did that mean? Who was an alien in a universe that harbored so many species of similar build and stature? One cosmos cradled all of those stars, after all, and all the living planets that whirled around them. All their complaints and mutterings meant nothing against the majesty of the great night in which all worlds sailed.

I half-swam, half-hopped to my husband. He greeted me with a smile, his tiny pointed teeth irresistibly cute in the soft, attenuated light, his black eyes deep and curious. I took his hand, wrapped his webbed fingers around my own, and then drew him to me with a gust of wild laughter.

Seen by the light of the moons sailing the sky of his home world, he was stunning, unforgettable. I led him through the surf to the beach, where I unwound one hand from his grasp and found his penis... his primary penis, I mean. His other two sex organs, smaller and shaped more like cones than phalli, pulsated as his member stirred. I had been thinking of creative new ways to play with all the toys he had to offer me: The silky erotic areas that stretched from his elbows to his armpits; the nubby darker nodes that ran like a chain of islands from the back of his neck to just above his sacrum; the slightly rough border that outlined his sea-slick chest and belly in a serrated pattern of erectile tissue that darkened and swelled, not unlike human nipples.

I worked my other hand out of his webbed fist and slipped it slowly, gently into his most intimate place -- the carry-pouch where both genders gave shelter to their young. My hand gradually, completely buried within him, I probed with tentative fingertips and found his vestigial lactation ducts. Lightly, without hurry, I treated him to expert frottage and a pianist's flickering permutations of pressure. He gasped, arced his back, opened his mouth so that his glinting teeth bit the streaming lunar light.

It's not true that his people have scales. They are amphibious, but they aren't fish; they are mammals, like us, and though his smooth, pale skin isn't exactly human -- he has no pores, and no body hair except for the thatch running along his cranial fin -- calling them dolphins, as the haters do, is utterly inaccurate. Their hair isn't really hair, but a cilia-like symbiotic animal life form, which despite thriving along their cranial ridges actually has to do with their digestive health, providing enzymes that their own bodies don't produce. Their skin is not bitter to the tongue, and neither do they secrete poison like some terrestrial frogs. I know this because I have licked him tuft to tail many times, as they lick each other in shows of affection (or sexual frenzy). I know plenty about his physiology after so many years, but still feel there is more to discover.

But by now, our sexual habits are pretty well established; at this point whole new techniques rarely (if ever) come to light, and it's mostly a matter of refinement. I know his likes and his responses well, and there's a sympathy between us that feels far more familiar than alien; his excitement is mine, his pleasure is my own. My fingers working inside him, my fist playing a cantata that focused on his primary member with quick side trips to his secondary phalli, my tongue and blunt human teeth working his sleek hide, I brought him closer and closer to that happily universal apex. When the moment arrived he convulsed and covered my fist with a hot, briny torrent of his inner sea, and he sang -- he sang a marvelous note that pierced my heart and made me glad.

We stretched out and let our limbs entangle. Usually his people mate in the water, and their post-coital habit is to float half-submerged and drift into a near-sleep for a while. In a concession to my tendency to sink like a stone, he had long adapted to dry land for his brief refractory period. His breath was hot against me, and his sleek skin hotter, as he snuggled close.

"I love you, Attal," he mumbled -- 'Attal' being his nickname for me. In his language it means 'heart-root.' It's the word his people use to indicate a spousal relationship... and not any spousal relationship, but a special one, a marriage partaking of the deepest bond. They are polyamorous, his kind, and their unions are typically short lived, lasting only a few years -- really, just long enough to produce young. To be heart-root, though, is akin to being a soul-mate to another human being: It means you're together forever because you cannot live apart. In my twelve years here, in my seven years with him, I've come to know the many nuances of that name he calls me, and hearing it from him always gives me a deep glow of security and satisfaction.

When I traveled those 756 light years to arrive here, I thought it was to launch a career in interstellar commercial relations. Now I know it was to meet him -- the other half of me, strange and familiar in ways that anchor and bind us, making us both complete.

In a few moments he would run his cetacean whiskers down my chest and abdomen, giving me shivers. In a few moments he would use his bifurcated tongue in fantastic ways that no human being could ever duplicate. In a few moments, he would remind me of the other reasons I found his webbed hands so enticing. But this moment was his, as he sighed and trembled, recovering from his orgasm, and I held him on the sand, next to a green glowing sea, in a flood of moonlight.

Season Two of HALF LIGHT starts September 1.