QSFer Storm Caywood has a new bi/gay erotic sci fi romance out: “Alien Hands.”
An interstellar romance awaits you in this scorching hot novella…
Adil Raif is a relief-effort doctor on a space station orbiting a war-torn planet. Disconnected from life on Earth, he’s looking for sex, adventure, relief from boredom–anything but love. Esihle Queran is an alien refugee on the station who never tells the whole truth. He’s given up on ever returning to his planet, and knows that love is for other, better men.
But then, the two meet…
Adil and Esihle’s relationship is one of intensity and lust. Can they find their way home together?
This sexy science fiction romance contains BDSM themes, several scintillating love scenes, and a HEA.
Get It At Amazon
Excerpt
Prologue—Earth
When Adil Raif was a child, he had a beach ball printed with the continents of Yalaphor. It was during the heady, post-first-contact years so, like most children, he would sit in his rocket-themed pajamas and watch his Saturday morning cartoons filled with peaceful, technologically-advanced Yalapha. Now, with Yalaphor visible from the infirmary windows, he often stopped his work to look out and remember bouncing that beach ball in the waves of the Indian Ocean at his grandparents’ house in South Africa.
Every Christmas his family had left dreary London for Durban, where it was summer, and Jaddi and Jaddati would make him sweets and mint tea and tell him stories about First Contact—sighting the Yalapha ship in orbit, watching the live transmission to the people of Earth. They would play the 35-year-old SABC recording for him, made in a hissing, accented English, subtitled in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Mandarin and Arabic. “We come in peace.” The visitors had learned that phrase from the Earth media they had studied pre-first-contact.
“‘What do they want?’ It was all anyone could ask!” Adil’s jaddi had made him feel the thrill of those early days, the fear and possibility. But apparently, what they had wanted was simply contact. Like the humans, the Yalapha had spent centuries wondering if they were alone in the universe. Unlike the humans, they had developed the technology to find out, and they had even chosen to share it.
Jaddati had loved the Yalapha. The price for the sweets had been looking at vids with her of the Imperial Court. At first Adil had been enchanted, but he soon grew bored, especially when she would start to pull out pictures of the long-defunct British royal family for comparison. The royals had fascinated her ever since hearing her mum’s bedtime stories about the time she actually saw them. It had seemed as if the Yalapha were a revival with all the romance and none of the conquest. They were grand—soaring beyond humanity’s petty squabbles and babel of tongues and irrational borders. Technology and glamor, unity and peace, a sparkling Empire that had reached its hand to Earth.
Jaddi had loved them, too. On the days Adil felt trapped on the station, desperate for fresh air and the smell of dirt, he would remember the glow in Jaddi’s eyes when he talked about space. Jaddi would lecture him, “You can’t know what it means for a man my age that we can go to another planet now! You kids take it for granted—but this was science fiction in our day, and then, suddenly overnight…it was real!” Adil never once mentioned that none of them would ever be able to afford the voyage or the visa, and setting foot on Yalapha was as unlikely as walking on the sun.
Author Bio
Storm Caywood is a queer, wlw writer living in the Great Lakes region with her family, partner, and pets. Her writing career started with distributing her girl-detective stories to friends in the third grade. Alien Hands is her first published work. When she isn’t writing, you can find her reading, picking up rocks and sea glass, and swooning over Star Trek.