Alpha Alien: Abducted

We floated in cosmic nothingness. Smooth arms embraced me. Flashes of light hid more than they exposed. I wrapped my legs around a thick waist as his hands slid under my ass. His skin was a golden yellow topaz. My nipples hardened to pebbles against his slick chest.

My hands kept slipping on the warm scales of his back. I writhed against him, trying to find purchase to thrust against him. He bit my neck, sending sharp swirls of desire through my body. Oddly smooth lips nibbled their way to my ear, where a snake-like tongue tickled me.

I moaned as his hands parted the globes of my ass and he finally rubbed his cock against me. I was so wet already, he could easily slip against my folds. My nails dug into his back as he gyrated against me. His cock teased at my entrance, before gliding toward my clit.

It felt like an eternity of him using his hard length to stroke me, teasing me until I was screaming for release. He rocked against my clit and it was all I could do hold myself against him.

I met his eyes. Blue. I felt myself falling into them. He was glaring at me but I didn’t care, I just wanted him. I’ve never wanted anyone so viscerally in my life. He rocked against me and I went up in flames as he took me, roughly.

We exploded into stars, and then I fell into darkness.

What felt like a thousand years later, I slowly cracked open my eyes. Sand. Golden sand. Golden, incredibly scratchy sand. I was lying in golden sand.
Ugh.
The inside of my mouth felt like a vile bag of hate.
Vision quest, my ass. All I did was dream of stars. Stars and fucking Gila monsters.
I felt like I had the worst case of the flu in the world. I could barely keep my eyes open and my bones ached.
Damn shaman. Who knows what freaky drugs he gave me?

I couldn’t believe I’d had such an incredibly detailed sex dream. About screwing a crazy lizard while floating in a space nebula. A crazy lizard with a truly epic penis. I sighed to myself. At least I didn’t wake up mid-dream. That would have really, really sucked.

I glanced around, and then closed my eyes again as my head spun like a drunken carousel. I was still lying next to the fire I'd made last night.
Build a fire, bright and tall. Then drink the tea. The flames will take you to the places you need to be.
I muttered to myself, "Meli, you freaking idiot. It was a stupid rhyme and why on earth did you listen to a man that reeked of cheap bourbon. Cheap bourbon has never, ever led you to good things. Nothing but sorrow at the bottom of
that
bottle. Sorrow and vomiting. At least it wasn't an Alabama Slammer though. That is a far uglier path."

I stuck an arm out and felt around in the warming sand until I could get my hands on my water bottle. I rolled on my side and took a tentative sip. It was warm and tasted plasticky, but it felt like heaven to rinse out my mouth.

That tea tasted pretty bad the night before, but this morning? It was a million times worse, like all my rejected childhood veggies plotted a cruel revenge on my tongue.

I finally found the strength to sit up and glanced up at the harsh blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. It was going to be a hell of scorcher today. Barely past dawn and the heat was already wafting off the sand around me.

All I freaking wanted was to find my stupid purpose in life.
Why on earth did I think that a weekend hallucinating in the desert would give me different results than anything else I've ever done? Magic 8-Ball says, "Results hazy. Please try again later."
Was it so much to ask to have any sense of what I wanted to do with myself? I was tired of drifting around, lost and bored.

I grimaced at the thought of walking into my mother's kitchen to report on my latest hair-brained idea. Mom would pat me on the shoulder, put on her mom voice and say, "Oh Meli, you are putting too much pressure on everything. Maybe…maybe don't worry so hard about it. You're still young, adventure for a while, see the world. It's much more fun than your laser focus on finding the one true thing you think you should be doing."

I hated that response. I hated it in high school when everyone around me seemed to have a firm idea and path they wanted to walk down. They all had things they'd dreamed of doing their entire lives. Teachers, doctors, firemen, lawyers. Everyone but me had dreams and aspirations. Goals they were reaching for, not just stumbling around hoping to find something to do that didn’t suck too much.

There were two things I discovered that I enjoyed in my misspent youth: rebuilding engines and painting. I had no strong desire or drive to make those my life's work, but I figured if I was going to be a shiftless artist, I should also have some really practical skills to pay my bills. And good mechanics always had work.

So I took shop classes. I admit, I was hoping my hippy-dippy mom would flip out a little, tell me I was going to waste my life, that I should just do…something else. Because then I would have some guidance.

However, instead of the hoped-for reaction, my mother just gave me a hug and said it was good to be grounded before you figured out which stars you wanted to reach for. Which, of course, triggered the biggest fight we
ever
had.

I was a pretty bratty teenager, so I rolled my eyes at my mom. I was just so damn frustrated and wanted to needle her. But I also really wanted to know something about her past, so I asked what my father had done for a living.

Whoooooo, boy! I’d thought it might give me another thing to explore, a possible
thing
I was meant to do. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, though, I knew she was pissed. But her mouth just got really tight and she ignored me in favor of chopping a cucumber.

And for the very first time, I got mad about my mother's avoidance of anything about my father and pushed back against Mom's wall of silence. It wasn’t fair that she kept everything about him from me. I only wanted a little information.

I grabbed the cucumber out of her hands and said, "Look, I'm not asking you who he is — it's obvious he isn't interested in being around — but it's not all that strange for me to want the vaguest of details about him or his family. All I want to know is what his freaking job was. I'm trying to figure out who I am, and he's half of me."

My gentle, hippie mother threw the knife down on the counter in disgust and said, "He had no part in raising you! You don't have to let him influence you. You can be anything you want, without any pressure from anyone!"

I waved the cucumber in her face. "That isn't the point, I just want to know something about who he was!"

"I don't have anything to tell you!"

I threw down the cucumber and snarled, "Yeah, sure. Was he some one-night stand and you don't know his name?"

Mom's mouth puckered into a tight ring and clipped words slipped out of her barely moving lips. "He's just not from around here and I don't know what he really did.”

The room’s temperature shot up about a thousand degrees and we started shouting at each other.

“It’s not fair,” I screamed. “You’re wrong to keep it from me. I’m half him.”

She scooped the cucumber off the floor and threw it in the trash with a thud. “And half me. It doesn’t matter what he is or did. He’s gone.”

“He left you, not me. Does he even know I exist? Or am I a dirty little secret you whisked away?”

She jerked away from me and I could see her eyes glisten with tears. I felt like a total asshole. She just stood there a moment before she finally spoke, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her. “Regardless of what you want to know, talking to me like that is unacceptable. Please go to your room."

I slunk away to my bedroom to think. My mother had always given me everything I needed. She must have a reason not to tell me about my father. She’d always been a straight shooter with me. If she wouldn’t tell me anything, maybe she just couldn’t. I had to let it go and figure out my own path. Don’t get me wrong, it took more than a few years to reach the ‘letting go’ path, but I got there.

At that point, I decided it was easier to believe that my dad was likely a shiftless drifter she was too embarrassed to tell me about, so I threw up my hands and spent the next few years drifting around from place to place.

Always seeking, trying to find something that would make me feel settled. Grounded. Part of the world. Part of something.
Anything
. Nothing ever felt right, even when I flung myself into silly things.

The summer I spent as a regional wrestling championship ring girl was the most random, and the thing my mother liked the least. It lasted until someone tried to get a little too handsy and I welded his car doors shut.

It was pure luck that I didn't get caught up in some cult. I was too angry at the world and my absent father to fall for dudes with blazing eyes who promised to make the hurt go away. That and the pitches were always shockingly boring ways of trying to get into girls pants. I did almost fall for one very charismatic guy with deliciously blue eyes. But it just ended in more welded doors.

But the insatiable drive to find the
something
I was missing never went away. And that is how I found myself spending the night hallucinating about boning a lizard-man in the desert, a few bucks poorer and no closer to any answers.

Although I realized, for once, the hum that danced along my bones, driving me to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, was gone. I wanted to shower and to sleep in a real bed, but I didn’t feel the insane pressure to keep moving.

I sipped my tepid water and held my throbbing head. I felt like the bottom of an old shoe. Crunchy, dirty and cracked down the middle. The heat smacked me around and a line of sweat slid down my back. No way was I doing this shit two nights in a row. It was a profoundly stupid idea in the first place.

Hilariously, it was one my mother had set in motion. She's a total hippie so, on my last visit home, I talked about how totally lost I still felt yet how driven I was to keep. She hesitated, and then told me to see a friend of hers who lived on the edge of the desert.

He was another hippie who lived out of time. He called himself a shaman who bridged worlds, connecting people to their missing peace. He was dedicated to sending people on vision quests to find themselves.

I walked into his lodge and introduced myself. The air was heavy with burning herbs and incense. I was surprised at how clean it smelled. I guess I expected patchouli and body odor. I’d met plenty of my mom’s hippie friends, it wasn’t so strange to imagine that his house might smell like a Phish concert. But as I took a deep sniff, it was mostly sage, with a touch of pine.

He gestured at a stool next to him and I sat down. He held my hands and stared into my eyes for a very long time. I saw a kindness in his and the nest of crinkles around them made me want to smile back at him. Even if I thought it was all a bit silly, looking into his eyes made me trust him.

He hummed softly and time stood still. It was so new age-y I expected him to cover me in feathers and make me drape crystals all over myself. But he just patted my hand and stood up.

He puttered around the room, pulling together a random assortment of ingredients that mostly looked like scrapings from the floor of a forest. He asked me to meditate while he brewed the tea. Then he gave me directions to this campsite with the incredibly nasty drink in two bottles.

That’s how I found myself miserably ill in the desert. I still wasn’t going to do the second night. Just thinking about trying to drink more of the tea made me heave a little. I rubbed my face and watched the glorious sunset rising over the desert. It was almost worth the misery.

Something in the distance caught my eye. It took me several long moments before I realized what I was seeing. There were dust plumes stretching into the sky. They were clearly coming up the tracks toward my campsite.

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