The Three of Us

Part 11 - Bread

It was a beach, on Ganymede, a little spit of land that he knew really well. The tide went in and out, waves crashing on the shore as Jupiter rose in the distance, huge, striped, with an angry red spot as its focal point.

He walked along, stopping every now and then to toss a stone or pick up and admire a shell. His family was nearby – his mother, Lena; his father, Jeremiah; and his sister, Laura. They were picnicking, and it was sweet and fun. He approached and his parents disappeared. And then Laura did, too, but it was a dream and that is what happens in dreams.

The menu changed and the spread was suddenly just blueberries, and blueberry tarts and homemade blueberry jam. And the companion sitting there was not his brown-haired sister at all. The companion was a pale woman, with platinum blonde, straight hair and impossibly light blue eyes that were nearly white. Crystalline, they seemed to be. She smiled at him, and offered him a bite of the tart.

He was about to take it when the scene changed slightly, and the companion was lying down, on her back, on the picnic blanket. She offered him the jar of homemade blueberry jam this time, and he looked down at her. "There's no bread," he said softly.

"You don't need any," she said, smiling up at him, showing slightly crooked lower teeth.

She was suddenly naked, pale in the sunshine, skin glowing like alabaster, hair looking soft, eyes still mysterious, hands with long fingers and right breast very slightly larger than the left.

He dipped his fingers into the jar of homemade jam and began to smear it on her body, covering peaks and valleys. The supply of jam seemed endless, impossibly sufficient, despite the jar's small size. She was covered in blue. He bent down, lips to her throat, and kissed her there, licking the jam off.

The dream jump cut, and she was suddenly clean and pale again, and he was on top of her. Incoherently they moaned together as sand flew all around them. Climaxing, hot and forcefully, he awoke.

The alarm was loud and insistent, and Jay shut it off. He could only say one word, out to the empty room.

Lili.

=/\=

"Another New Year's Eve," Brian complained as they worked on getting the menu together for the evening's festivities.

"Yep," Lili said, tasting a bit of tofu that Craig had replicated. "Hey, this is good," she said, "I'll see if T'Pol notices any difference before I roll it out for general consumption, okay?"

"Sure thing," he was looking at the replicator and frowning, "I think I'm gonna spend the first month or so of '39 backing up all the files on this thing."

"Don't you back it up all along as you go?" asked Will, coming in.

"I do," Craig confirmed, "but I like to be sure. Don't want to lose anything. It would be a lotta work down the drain."

"I'm outta here," Will announced, "Night off, you know. Everything in hand, O'Day?"

"Of course," she said. "Go have fun." He left.

"Where's he going?" asked Brian. "The party's in like an hour or so."

"Cherchez la femme, I think," Lili said.

"Oh?" asked Craig.

"I'm not sure whom. Not a lotta options these days," she said.

"I had thought, uh, you and him," Brian said.

"No," she said, "it's too weird."

=/\=

"On screen," T'Pol commanded, as Maryam fiddled with the controls. The party was close to starting but they, as usual, were on the Bridge so as to allow others to have their fun.