Free Hellcats #6: Lovebot 2.0 by Misty Vixen Page B

from here.”
    They kept walking. Ryan felt excitement stirring within him, mingling with the fear. How many games had he played? Books read? Movies watched? How many of them had action, gunplay, merc work, seedy starports and shifty suspects? He liked to think he was drawn not to any one genre of storytelling but to quality itself, but he knew, in the back of his mind, that gritty noir and hi-fi shooters held a special place for him. He liked watching gun battles, car chases, back room deals gone bad and the anti-hero has to shoot his way out.
    Now he was living it.
    Okay, well, not really. More like, he was hanging out with a few low-key mercenaries while they picked up a package from some kind of dirty space station. But it was still fun. A lot of fun, actually. He was genuinely enjoying himself. Though some of that probably had to do with the fact that he was high on the chemicals in his head being released from all the sex he was having. He remembered reading that for a while, back in the twentieth and early twenty first centuries, sex was a strangely taboo thing. It was uncommon in society to just straight up ask for it, and was even viewed negatively. Things were somewhat different now.
    While galactic civilization wasn't one constant orgy, prostitution was legal and a booming industry and one night stands weren't difficult to come by. There were all sorts of studies that basically pointed to a simple fact of life: sex was healthy. It did all sorts of things to help people, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Sometimes, Ryan wondered why he hadn't had more sexual partners in his life, but he always reluctantly came to the same conclusion. He was just wired a different way: he wanted to have sex with aliens.
    And despite society's much more open views on sex, they seemed to have collectively shifted the 'frowned upon' notion to sex with aliens. He didn't see what the big deal was. It wasn't like they were ugly or inhuman with extra eyes or they looked like slugs or something. And yet people acted like going to bed with a Xenian was the equivalent of murder.
    They came out of the long, dim tunnel and stepped into what seemed to pass for the main thoroughfare for this station. It was a larger, more open, better-lit tunnel. Dozens of people were walking along now, and not all of them were human, not even most of them. He spied several Xenians and Dysil, a few Cyvits and even a handful of Quine. Ryan stared briefly at the nearest Quine. She was beautiful, tall, elegant. The Quine were originally an aquatic species. They had smooth, almost ethereal white-gray skin and large eyes.
    He wondered if he'd meet any.
    “How do you feel?” Colleen asked suddenly.
    Ryan returned his attention to Colleen and Syl.
    “Good,” he replied. But because he sensed that she was asking a deeper question, not a simple platitude, he thought about it a little more. Finally, he said, “I feel like...how I thought it would feel to be really cool in high school.”
    Syl burst out laughing. “High school, huh? Well, as long as you've achieved that level of cool, I guess that's all that matters.”
    “Ugh, high school,” Colleen muttered. “I am the only one who still gets high school nightmares?” she asked.
    “No,” Syl replied with conviction.
    “Definitely not,” Ryan replied. He shuddered. “I still have nightmares that I have to go back for some reason, put up with all the social awkwardness, the indignities, everyone fighting so hard to prove how cool they are...”
    “It's even less fun when you're a Cyvit going to a human high school,” Colleen replied glumly.
    “Yeah, I bet.”
    “Xenian high school isn't much better, especially when it gets out that you've got a crush on the human foreign exchange student,” Syl said.
    “I so wish we could have gone to school together,” Ryan said. “I know I'd at least be a lot happier if we'd met.”
    “Oh my God, I so would've jumped you if we'd been friends back then,”