Dellian had swum, powerskied, learned the rudiments of windsurfing, canoed, played tennis and beach volleyball, lazed around drinking by the pool, or sat in the open-air amphitheater watching old dramas. Then as night fell all the boys would pair up, or form larger groups, and head back to the water bungalows for hours of energetic sex. The sea air and the freedom had reacted with their hormonal bodies to fire their libido up to a relentless height. In those ten days Dellian had been to bed with more than half of the boys, including Xante, of course. Xante, who had everyone queuing up to find out how big his cock really was, and who fucked like an angel.
Some of the boys had even been bedded by Tilliana and Ellici. And that had been a major disappointment for Dellian—which for some reason he couldn’t let go of. He’d been extremely eager to find out what sex with a girl was like, but Yirella hadn’t shared his enthusiasm. He told himself he could wait until she was ready for that level of intimacy, that their friendship was more important to him. Even so, lost in ecstatic congress with his friends every night, it was her face he’d pictured over theirs.
As he waited on the beach, the skin on his bare torso started to tingle in the sunlight. Every morning he’d put on the highest-rated sunblock, which the bungalow’s dispenser assured would last all day, only for him to have to apply it again at midday—or, more often, for someone else to slather it licentiously all over his skin for him. He sat up and started pulling on his t-shirt. As he did, Yirella came off the wooden walkway that led to a cluster of the water bungalows. Dellian waved hopefully. She smiled and walked over.
Now that she and the other girls had molted, Dellian considered her bare skull to be quite erotic. He’d been fantasizing about rubbing sunscreen on for her; after all, who didn’t like a scalp massage?
“The genten said our ride would be here in ten minutes,” he said in greeting.
“And you don’t think that’s odd?”
Dellian frowned, not quite sure what she was talking about. “Odd how?”
She knelt on the sand beside him, looking down quizzically at his thickset form. Dellian had grown a lot over the last three years, but while he’d increased in shoulder-breadth and weight, mainly due to muscle mass, Yirella had continued her upward climb, leaving her and the other two girls increasingly spindly compared to the boys. When they stood up together now, his eyes were level with her boobs, which he considered a size match about as perfect as you could get.
“Why not just portal back to the estate?” she asked distantly.
“Uh…because there is no portal, would be my best guess,” he retorted.
“But why is there no portal, Del?”
He frowned, wondering, as always, how her brain functioned. Her head was in direct proportion to the rest of her, which he reckoned made her skull a good twenty percent larger than his—or any boy’s. The geneticists who’d designed the clan’s binary children had given her a cute flat nose, wide enough to hold additional blood vessels that fed into a carotid rete at the base of her cranium, a configuration of arteries and veins that basically served as nature’s heat exchanger. Yirella and the girls needed it to help cool their larger brains, along with the absence of hair, which would’ve otherwise acted as insulation over their skulls, preventing the heat from escaping.
All that extra gray matter generated more and smarter thoughts than Dellian could ever manage, just as the geneticists intended. But it meant keeping up with her and the other girls was hard sometimes. “Because now everyone’s gone, most of the portals have shut down, especially to somewhere as remote as this.” He gave her an expectant look, pleased that he’d come up with a logical and rational answer.
“The resort is maintained to give people a holiday. Therefore, regular transport is an obvious requirement. So why shut it down?”
“I liked the sense of isolation we had here. It made me feel…I don’t know, different, like seeing what being an adult is going to be like.”
She grinned. “Me too. It felt like we were being trusted for the first time ever. That was nice.”
His eyes tracked along her amazingly long legs, wondering how they’d feel straddling his hips. Perfection, he decided. “Could’ve been better,” he said wistfully.
Yirella laughed and flicked some sand at him. “Oh, Del, you’re not still cross that we didn’t have sex, are you?”
“Saints, no. I wasn’t cross. I was disappointed, that’s all.”
“It’s just, I don’t think this was the right place and time for you and me, that’s all. The island was purely about everyone partying and having lots of fun sex. We deserve it after all those battle games we’ve been playing for the last couple of years; they’ve been tough. Now we’re all as relaxed and happy as we’ve ever been.”
“Yes, but…No, sorry, I still don’t get it.”