Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

Then, all at once, he saw her again as she really was, standing with slightly parted lips within reach of his arms, so unbelievably near that he could have clasped her and drawn her to him by taking a single step forward. The fantasies conjured up by the voice—were they hallucinatory or merely mind-beguiling?—became shadowy and unreal, and her actual physical presence was all that concerned him.

In daring dreams Loring had, like most men, imagined what it would be like to make instant and completely uninhibited love to a woman without preamble and with no need to rely on past acquaintanceship, however brief, or to summon to his aid any of the social devices by which ardor without limit, can be excused or palliated in the eyes of the world.

It was primitive, perhaps, but he had often imagined himself walking between the huts of a South Sea Island village, seeing in a doorway a brown native girl who set his pulses to pounding and wasting not a second's time in gathering her into his arms and carrying her inside the hut. The girl would have to be willing, of course, even eager. Even in his most audacious dreams Loring was not a brute.

Making love that impetuously was certainly frowned upon by society, even if a man wasn't a brute, and very difficult to achieve in reality, because almost all women preferred the slower, more graceful and romantic approach. The whispering of at least a few sweet nothings into a woman's ear could work wonders and it helped to have known her for at least ten or fifteen minutes.

In sober fact, Loring had never quite been able to reconcile himself to an amatory pattern that was taken for granted in the Village. You went to a party and met a girl you liked and slept with her the same night. He liked to tell himself he couldn't be shocked and yet, almost invariably, he was shocked. Some vestigial Puritan remnant deep in his nature, perhaps. He was glad that it hadn't happened that way between Janice and himself.

And yet, strangely enough, he experienced no such inhibiting emotional reaction when he looked deep into the eyes of the woman standing before him. He felt completely freed from all conventional restraints, untouched by scruples of any kind. Her eyes both mocked and challenged him, with an almost animal sensuality, as if even his few seconds of hesitation were wholly inexcusable and were becoming intolerable in her sight.

She was unsurpassably young and vibrant, a temptress with sultry eyes and heaving bosom. Her lips were full, red and curving, her hair silvery blonde, her skin fair and smooth, unmarred by the tiniest blemish.

She gave a little cry when he seized her. At the touch of his hands on her back and thighs a spasmed aliveness took possession of her and she writhed in his clasp with an ardor that drove the blood in torrents from his heart. Her lips were fire, her kisses a burning that dissolved the barrier of flesh where their tongues met in molten sweetness.

Her body molded itself to his, pressing against the hard muscles of his chest and thighs. His own passion equaled hers for an instant and then surpassed it, and in the fierce, unrelenting masculinity of his embrace she became suddenly passive, content to surrender completely to his guidance. But in that very surrender there was a continuing wild responsiveness, a fervor that matched his own, as if she had been caught up in a wilderness of desire where bright bursts of lightning forked down and the trees were sheathed in flame.

He had lifted her up and was carrying her toward the bed, the passion seething within him making him oblivious of his surroundings and blotting from his mind all thought of Janice, when his hand on the throbbing warm flesh of her thigh, just above the knee, encountered a startling coldness. An obstruction and a coldness—something solid and very hard which sent a shock through his arm when he touched it.