A Solid Core of Alpha Read Online Free PDF Page A

hips. If Anderson was going to room with a woman, he wanted her to look different from men and boys, and so she was.
    She was three years older than Anderson and Bobby, but Anderson had grown in the past three years, and so had Bobby. They were taller than she was, although their wrists were still thin and their hands and feet seemed abnormally large. (According to the newly released files, that was not uncommon among adolescent males, a thing Anderson really wished he’d known before he’d started sprouting out of his coveralls like a bean plant.) She was also….
    God. Was she as lonely as Anderson?
    Anderson looked at his friends, who were staring at each other as though frozen, although Anderson could see a pulse throbbing in Bobby’s neck and Kate occasionally licking her lips. He recalled a box he’d checked during their programming, a time he tried more and more not to think of. The box had been irritatingly vague.
    The box had read “Proclivity.”
    At the time, Anderson assumed it had meant the things that were important to him at thirteen years old—sports, comedy vids, music, amusement parks (he and Bobby spent hours planning theirs), dogs (he and Bobby had been trying to program a dog for the holodeck since their very first sentient conversation), and playing games (they had graduated from games to three-dimensional multi-faceted jigsaw puzzles, and it was one of their favorite things to do when they were playing a vid or listening to music). He had tried to type in these proclivities in the box and had wondered why it seemed redundant along with “tastes,” “hobbies,” “interests,” and “skills,” but none of those things seemed to be what the computer had wanted. In the end, he had simply programmed “standard” and left it alone.
    After this morning’s reading and his conversation with Bobby months before, he thought that maybe “proclivity” meant this—this thing that had Kate and Bobby staring at each other with hunger in their eyes and skin as flushed as a red sun.
    “Would you two like to….” He flushed, uncertain how to phrase this. “Would you two like me to leave the room, so you can…?”
    “No,” Bobby said breathlessly. “Don’t leave the room.”
    Kate stepped into Bobby’s space then and caught his chin between her fingers. Bobby was taller than she was by three or four inches, and he looked down at her with an expression that was so crushingly vulnerable Anderson doubted he would ever have the courage to show it to another being.
    Their lips touched, and Anderson gasped. His own skin flushed hot, and a chill took up residence in his groin. His cock began to swell again. Bobby’s bunk was across the room from his own bed, and Bobby pressed Kate there, kissing, kissing, his hands rasping on her pale skin. Bobby had a tan on his neck and the backs of his hands—he and Anderson spent time outside and in the greenhouse—and Anderson watched, his breath frozen in his chest, as those dark hands cupped Kate’s pale cheeks, her chin, her neck, then unzipped the front of her coveralls, baring her breasts to the air.
    Anderson could see every detail—the way Kate’s nipples puckered in the air, the way her vulva glistened when Bobby spread her thighs to explore. He watched Kate’s expression as she bit into her palm to keep from making sounds of arousal and then saw how frantic she was as she scrabbled to bare Bobby’s skin to the air so that she could touch him the way he was touching her.
    Anderson watched as she opened her mouth and pulled Bobby’s cock into it while Bobby was pleasuring her own erogenous zones, and he thought of someone—a male—performing the same act with him, with the same hot desperation, and without even quite realizing it, he shuddered, convulsed, and climaxed without even touching his own body.
    And still he could not take his eyes off of the sight of two people making love.
    Yes, he’d read those words too, and this was what Bobby and