The Shuttlecock

This is my first post. Very little sex. Feedback welcome!

--jewel_thief

Five minutes to seven. K shivered helplessly as a single drop of sweat slid between her shoulder blades and down her back. She hated the tickling trickle and would swipe it away if she had a spare hand to use but she didn't. One held her racquet bag and the other pulled her roller case, both jostled mercilessly by the surging crowd of commuters swirling around her.

K hoisted the racquet bag up in front of her chest like armour and pushed through a clutch of clones in identical military uniforms. Ordinarily she wouldn't fuck with clones--they were mental, everybody said so--but she had to catch the shuttle. She didn't want to be late for her husband's special dinner, when she would meet his brother for the first time.

The 7pm shuttle's bay was packed, a small herd of hopeful passengers pressing their way into the vessel with their assortment of baggage. K felt almost sorry for the boy with the scooter but he had to have known it would be her or him and her relatively easy to maneuver baggage gave her the edge. She pressed her advantage and eased into the shuttle a moment before the soothing voice overhead announced, "This shuttle compartment is now full." The doors closed with a hiss behind her. The breeze they stirred chilled her damp back.

On board, she looked for a seat. Since she was the last passenger to board that compartment there would be only one seat, and she schlepped her stuff towards the single empty space halfway down the aisle. K let go of the handle of her roller case and reached up to open the overhead baggage storage to stuff her things into it. It was a tight fit but she rearranged a couple of briefcases and made room. With murmured apologies to the other people already seated by the empty spot, she awkwardly angled her body and wedged herself into the space.

"Please stow all baggage and fasten your seatbelts for departure. The shuttle will depart in 15 seconds..." The cool, ghostly announcer's voice counted down the seconds until the sleek air train roared to life and sped out of the station towards Luna.

The announcement continued: "Worlectron welcomes all passengers to the 7pm lunar shuttle from Quito. Our estimated flying time will be three hours and five minutes, and we will land at Serenity Terminal at 6.38 pm Luna time. If you are in a silent compartment, please respect your fellow passengers and refrain from talking. If you are playing music, or watching videos, please do so silently. Thank you for flying Worlectron." The lights dimmed as the voice stopped.

K looked up at the signage at the front of the compartment and noticed that she was indeed in a silent compartment. Oh well, she sighed to herself silently. She leaned back. The information screen cycled soundlessly through Worlectron content about off-world water mining, which kept the colonies alive.

Earth flew by outside the windows; she'd seen the view thousands of times. Her eyes drifted shut. She didn't know when she fell asleep, but she was jarred out of it when the man whose arm she'd snuggled into suddenly stood up. Embarrassed, she wiped drool from the corner of her mouth and looked around sheepishly at the other passengers beside her. Nobody seemed to care. Most of them were asleep.

They'd been flying for some time, she saw by the map and clock projected on info screens; the seatbelt light had also gone out. She unstrapped her tired body and scooted out to stand in the aisle.

K's lithe muscles burned from the hard work out she'd endured just before boarding. Her weekly badminton fix, as her husband J called it: a three-hour battle against all comers on the Quito Public Courts. She rented a court and spent the time perfecting her violently aggressive strokes, her lunging, soaring footwork.

She didn't play seriously anymore--with classes and work and J and the house, who had the time? In fact, she was thinking of letting even her weekly fix go. She was getting older. Her 25-year-old ovaries were shouting "Last call!" Add a baby to the mix and holding on to badminton practice would be a pipe dream. She was ovulating; maybe that baby wasn't so far from reality, she thought. Maybe they would get to baby-making after dinner.

Dinner was all J could talk about that morning. "God, I can't wait for you to meet him!"

K called L "J's invisible brother." She'd never even seen a photo of the guy. She and J had been married three years before, after a whirlwind courtship on a Rio package holiday. L had been in the Service for five, a hitch that took him to the asteroid belt; too inconvenient to return from during his enlistment, and it was hell on comms.

The brothers hardly talked; and J was weird about showing her pictures of the brother he'd clung to in foster care. They were orphans, J said, and they had no other family but each other. Dinner would probably be intense, she thought.

Stretching her arms widely in the broad aisle, K looked at the sleeping passengers. They seemed the usual mix of business people, students, and tourists. She normally took a later shuttle, but because of her brother-in-law's impending visit planned for that night, K had hustled off the court without showering to catch an early shuttle. She had been very sweaty, but had dried in the cool of the compartment. Now she just smelled rank. She had a change of clothes in the roller case, and decided to clean herself up in the washroom. It was only a tiny cubicle at the back of the compartment but she couldn't bear her own stench so she would make it work.

Fetching the roller bag, she somehow managed to open her racquet bag's front pouch and a river of feathered rubber-tipped shuttlecocks poured out.

"Aargh! Blast, damn," she grunted.

"Shhhh," hissed someone behind her row.

K swallowed her imprecations about her own clumsiness and bent over to scoop up the birdies. Her sports dress crept up at the back but since she was wearing shorts underneath she didn't notice or care. All the shuttlecocks she could reach back in their place, she pulled out her roller case and snapped the baggage locker shut. She winced at the loud click it made in the silent compartment.

The guy who she'd fallen asleep on was walking back her way, so she stepped aside and let him pass, mouthing an awkward "sorry" with a grimace as they made eye contact. He shook his head and waved away the apology. She continued to the bathroom.

The passenger had looked vaguely familiar. She wondered if she knew him from work--one of the customers? She was sales manager for a sex novelty marketer. Could he be a sales rep for the dildos? Or was he the rep for the honey-flavoured fake ladycum that went into the synthetic pussies? Nah, she thought. He doesn't look like a pervert. Not like her and J, who regularly played sex games, even at work. One time, J had locked her in her office bathroom and--well, it was a good afternoon and that honey-flavoured lube was not to be sneezed at.

The sea of sleepers strapped in their seats dozed on in the dark compartment. She glanced at their faces as she walked by, until she was caught short. Her husband's spiky blond hair, thin face, and lean, muscled torso were unmistakable. She had so many questions. What was he doing napping on the 7pm shuttle from Quito when he was supposed to be at home in their tidy house in Serenity Gardens on Luna? Why was her work-from-home husband wearing a crisp navy suit? And why hadn't he let her know he was on the shuttle? He had to have seen her come in.

As K stood in puzzlement, his eyes opened and she was as pinned as she ever was under that glacial gaze. His eyes were one of her favourite things about him; they were this indescribable arctic shade that caught the light and seemed to glow. Now they were gazing at her in friendly curiosity, which raised another question. Why was her husband looking at her like he had never seen her before?

She gave him a hesitant grin, asking with her own glance what was going on, was this a new game? Like the one where he would visit her at her job and pretend to be a customer, ordering the most salacious products in her company's inventory and asking her to demonstrate them right there in the office. At home he played games too, often pretending to be a stranger while he ravished her in bed. The stranger would ask, "Is this what you want, you dirty girl?" She liked their games. She decided to play along with this one.

Her puzzled smile now a smirk, she winked, blew him a mischievous kiss and resumed her walk to the bathroom. It was empty, and just as small as she remembered, but she put her case on top of the toilet and hoped nothing would fall from the bag into the bowl below. A dozen paper towels later, she stood in clean panties in front of the mirror and raised her arms to check her pits. They weren't impeccable but they would do, she concluded, and reached for the clean dress and shorts she'd taken out.

There was a knock on the door. "Just a minute, sorry," she called softly towards the closed door.

More knocks, followed by low murmuring. "Just--" she pressed her dress against her naked breasts and opened the door slightly. It was him. Of course. She stepped back and let him in.

The cramped space was even more cramped now, the two of them mashed chest to chest, the roller bag's wheels pushing into the back of her knees. "Wait, wait," she muttered, somehow managing to turn around by sliding her body against his. Bending over the open case, she dropped her dress and shorts inside and zipped it closed.

"This is a nice surprise," he said, caressing the silky briefs she had put on.

"What, haven't you seen these before?" K asked him, still bent over with her hands on the case. She ground her cheeks into his hips. She was starting to perspire anew in the cramped cubicle.

"Not for a while," he sighed. "It's been too long..."

"Now that I know you like them so much I'll put them in heavy rotation," she said with a giggle. He was now openly feeling her up, sliding his hard, cloth-covered dick along the curved valley of her ass.

"Oh yeah," he softly groaned.

"You wanna?" she coyly asked.

"Um hummm," he moaned, unzipping his pants and shoving her panties to the floor.

He was unusually rough but she was wet and it was quick. She bit her lip and came when he did.

"Wow, J!" she panted in a low voice. They were, after all, still in the silent compartment.

"Sorry," he gasped, "what did you say?"

"I said, 'Wow, J!' I didn't know you had it in you, Husband...." Her back was still turned to him as she picked up her panties from the floor and reached for yet more paper towels. She didn't see his face when he gently kissed the back of her head, zipping up his pants and ducking back out of the bathroom. "Ugh," she growled, cleaning up the new mess. She dressed as quickly as she could and sprayed a little perfume in the cubicle before she left it.

Back in his seat, J was leaning back and seemingly asleep, facing away from the aisle. K shook her head ruefully and made her way to her own seat. Soon, she too dozed.

*

The passenger's abrupt shove woke her as they began their descent. "Seatbelt," he grumbled.

"Oh, sorry," she said again, still dopey from the sex and the sleep. She strapped herself in and zoned out as the automated announcements went through the disembarkation procedure for the benefit of the newbies on the flight.

As a frequent commuter she knew the drill, and mused instead on the game she and J had played in the bathroom. Mile High Club eat your heart out, she thought with a giggle, still feeling a tingle between her thighs. And then they were landing and everyone was getting up to leave. She let the others in her row go out before she did, remembering her embarrassing fumbling with the birdies when she had first tried to get her baggage out of the locker overhead. Best to let them out first, and take her time. She wasn't in a rush now anyway. She would meet J in the Serenity Terminal and they would take a rider home together, she thought.

But dammit the bag opened again--Is something wrong with the zip? she wondered--spilling shuttlecocks once more. She sat down, mortified, and hid her face in her hands. She waited to pick them up after everyone else had gone. By the time she walked through Customs and Immigration the exit platform was empty. J was nowhere in sight.

K was more than mildly annoyed that he'd apparently left her there, without so much as a message or call to say he was leaving the terminal, but she shrugged it off and called a rider. She was home in minutes, and opened the door to find J seated on their living room couch with a beer in his hand. He wore the same suit and a nervous grin.

"Honey! What the--" Her complaint was stillborn as another J walked out of the kitchen. This J wore his normal sweatpants and tunic, and was smiling like the sun. "J! What--"

"You're home!" said Sweatpants J. "Meet my brother L. Great surprise, huh?"

K couldn't breathe. "Your... brother?"

"'Fellow clone' sounds so cold," Suit J murmured apologetically. "We've always considered ourselves--"

"Brothers!" Sweatpants J concluded. His smile was a wondrous thing to behold, beaming joy towards K and L. "But I can't burn this cassoulet," he grumbled, still smiling, and returned to the kitchen. "Get cleaned up quick, K, and come get to know L better!"

Her stunned gaze drifted to L's disarmingly bashful look.

"I didn't know," he whispered. "I thought you were a--"

"Oh God, I don't want to know," K groaned. "I..." She shuddered and dashed to their bedroom. Diving directly into the shower she scrubbed and scrubbed, hoping to get as much of her husband's clone's semen out as she could. K sobbed. This was not how she had hoped the evening would end.

She dried off and dressed--in sweatpants and a tunic, just like J's kit--and made to return to the living room and be convivial with her husband's cl-- brother. L, her husband's completely identical in every way brother. Oh great, she thought. How am I going to pretend that nothing happened? She stood hovering behind the door when Sweatpants J came in.

"L said you dropped this on the shuttle," he whispered, holding out a birdie.

K slapped it from his hand, suddenly sobbing again. "Did he tell you that we--?"

J nodded warily. She looked into his beautiful eyes, searching for a clue about how he felt. In the glowing blue depths, she could see nothing but love. "It's okay," he said in a low, gentle voice. "We always shared everything anyway. And it was an honest mistake. I guess I should have told we were... identical," he dissembled.

"Ya think?" she growled sarcastically through her tears. Sweatpants J, her own sweet husband, looked abashed, contrite, regretful... until she hugged him tight. "An honest mistake. Yes."

"We'll laugh about it one day," he said.

"Don't push it, J," she muttered, brushing away the wet tracks on her cheeks.

Holding hands, they stepped out to meet his cl-- his brother.

*

J's prized cassoulet recipe took two days to cook. He took it out of the oven like he was handling a baby, and cradled the pot as he took it to the round dinner table. He'd set three identical places; she took the seat to his right. She didn't ask if he needed help; he'd come up in kitchens and was a qualified chef.

Thank God, he still made good money as a compliance supervisor for a chain of Luna hotels, a job that he did mostly from home with remote surveillance. Their little house was way out of her budget. K knew she was mentally blathering on, in an effort to ignore the awkwardness of their situation. And being at J's right hand meant L was on his left. They faced each other over the table.

"So, K, tell me about your job?" asked the stranger with her husband's face.

Is this how we're going to play it? No, she decided. "I'd rather talk about you," K replied with a bland smile. "I know... so little about you," she said, tossing her husband an evil glare. "J never talks about his childhood."

In the warm lighting of the dining room she could plainly see the differences between them. J was softer, his skin smoother and unblemished. He hadn't been out in space guarding interstellar rocks. They were indistinguishable in the big things--same haircut, for example--but variation lay in the small--J's hair gel made his spikier than L's. L had a scar on his neck. J had a blistered burn on his arm, fresh from the oven. She could see it when he served the cassoulet and his sleeve rode up.

They even moved differently: L walked like a soldier, stiff and strong; J was water.

"Ahhmm," L said. "Well, I guess he told you about foster care." Their eyes met across the table. J shook his head slightly, but L merely cracked a smile. "He was my protector. They bullied us all the time. Even the parents," he chuckled darkly. "J was cleverer than me. He would get us out of any fix."

"Not true," J jumped in. "You're as smart as I am."

Evidenced by their identical genetic material. Brothers, he'd said, but even twins weren't clones. Twins were born of one sperm and one egg from one womb; clones were made in a lab from sliced samples incubated in batches. For all she knew there were hundreds of her husband scattered across Earthspace. It was disquieting. "Are there more of you? J's never talked about being.... Well, about his...." Words failed her.

"K," her husband murmured, reaching for her hand. She saw the burn. It made her feel better, somehow. That was only his. The scar it would form would be his alone.

"You never talk about it, J," she said. "It's this deep black hole in our universe. There's no air in the room if I ask about your family. And, I guess, now I know why."

"I wanted to tell you," he said. She could see the pain on his face. This wasn't easy for him either. "People tell stories about Clone Rage and all that bullshit. Say we have no soul, that we're crazy. We aren't crazy. We just aren't loved. It fucks with you, as a child."

L nodded, chuckling. "Boy, does it fuck with you. Even as an adult. Like I said, without J--"

"Come on, man, L," J said, blushing.

"No, no," L insisted, his own face red with pent up feeling. His eyes glistened and filled as he talked. "The last time you took a beating for me, I--"

"Shhhh," J interrupted, "we don't have to remember the hard things. We can remember ice cream on a Thursday. We can remember figuring things out together. We can remember C," he ended with a sly smile at his clone.

L burst into gales of laughter. It was champagne. It was fireworks. He wasn't stiff anymore; his coiled power had sprung out in violent mirth. "C!" he gasped between guffaws. "That was epic!" He turned to K. "Did he tell you--?"

"No," she said, frowning while she tried to put on a puzzled smile. "Tell me what?"

"About the threesomes with C," the stranger in the suit said, still laughing his guts out at her dinner table.

She found it hard to smile now. She remembered the awkward conversation in the bedroom. "We always shared everything," he'd said, or something like that. "Nope, he never mentioned that! But like I said, we never talk about his childhood. It's like he sprang fully formed out of the Ipanema sand, seduced me and dragged me off to his cave on the Moon." She was cold, and she was bitter. It was embarrassing enough to accidentally fuck your brother-in-law without being humiliated by old sex stories you knew nothing about.

J was sputtering now. The treasured cassoulet was growing cold and claggy in his bowl, the painstakingly handmade dressing wilting the once-crisp greens in his salad. "That's enough, L," he said firmly, when he could get his mouth to work properly again. "K and I don't have that kind of relationship," he added nervously, throwing a glance at his wife. "Can we eat, please? I've been cooking this for two days. You better fucking like it, L."

They ate. It was delicious, and the salad wasn't too soggy. She looked at her food and the wine L had brought, ignoring the identical pairs of hands slicing, spearing, scraping, scooping food. She had found another difference: the glint of J's wedding ring. She wondered how she had missed its absence on the shuttle.

He got up when they'd finished, picking up the dishes and clearing the table for dessert, an apple tart with ice cream, he announced.

"Pie!" L screamed with joy. "I haven't had pie since--"

"I know," J said. He wore a tiny smirk. "I remember you said that the last time we talked."

"Oh, I said that?" L asked as his clone disappeared into the kitchen again. L turned to her. "Sorry about the C story. I'm not great at reading a room. Obviously. I'm so sorry about... the thing on the shuttle."

Her curiosity got the better of her. "When did you know?" she asked.

He closed his eyes, his shame and embarrassment proportional to hers. "When you called me J."

"You didn't recognize me? J wanted to surprise me, I guess. He just said we had dinner with his brother. I never expected you'd be on the shuttle with me and not recognize me."

"It's crazy," he muttered. "What were the odds?"

"What's that?" J butted in, bringing the last dishes in with a coffee tray.

"Oh, I was explaining to K that I didn't know who she was until I heard her say your name." He was uncomfortable; she wondered why he would say it like that. But then, she thought, they're clones. They can't lie to one another. They'd always know.

"I totally get it," J said reassuringly. He wanted to put this behind them, clearly. "She didn't know you and I were batch brothers, and you didn't expect to see her on the shuttle. You must have thought she'd be home if I invited you to dinner."

It was K's turn to blush, feeling bad that she hadn't skipped badminton like a normal person would when expecting company. It was just that she had a routine. It was hard for her to deviate. Even taking the 7pm shuttle was weird; she ended up in the wrong compartment, and her bag malfunctioned... everything had colluded to make her not expect that the man on the shuttle was her husband's clone.

Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is probably true. Ergo, the man on the shuttle who looked like her husband was her husband, not his clone returning from five years' military service on an asteroid.

"I think you should tell her about C," L told his brother, putting a hand on J's wrist. "It's funny but it's also kind of pertinent, you know?"

"I know," he sighed. He faced K, slipping his arm from his brother's grasp. "When we were kids, I liked a girl named C. She wasn't a clone, she was a normie like you, K. I was crazy about her," he said with a fond grin. She kicked his shin. "Ow! It was a million years ago on Earth. I don't even know where she is now! How can you be jealous?"

"Just finish the damn story," she growled, partly joking. "I'll rub your shin better later." She winked. She was emotionally all over the place. Fucking hormones.

If I got pregnant by L, would it be the same as having J's baby? she wondered. While J talked, she pondered the possibilities with half her attention.

"C was my secret girlfriend, kinda. She liked me but I was a clone. We used to make out behind the science lab at school and I'd convinced her to meet me at the house so we could make out in our bedroom--mine and L's, in the third foster home we lived in, on Third Street--"

"Eighth Street, not Third Street, you ADHD fuck," L teased.

"Yeah, whatever, you autistic fuck," J retorted, and slid smoothly back into his story: "Our bedroom in the house on Fifth Street. But that day I had detention and came home late and found C and L making out like crazy. They said it was an accident; he'd seen her waiting for me outside and sweet talked her into the bedroom--"

"I didn't know she was your girlfriend," L grumbled, clearly relitigating an old case. "I thought she just liked me. I swear," he said, sincerely. "And I was wearing your shirt that day, remember?"

She believed him. She'd have thought he was J, too. Even knowing they weren't the same person, looking at the two of them together put her deep in the uncanny valley.

Clones were commonplace, it was true. The military-industrial complex had guaranteed that they were a staple of humanity's thrust towards progress.

But it's one thing to know something as a distant, mundane truth, and another to see it in granular detail in the sunlit, glass-walled domesticity of your own dining room. She cleared her throat to clear her mind. "Please, continue, J," she said.

"Well, C was a little wild. She had to be, to run around in secret with a clone," he declared. "So she just laughed about it and invited me into bed with them. We only fooled around that day but after that--"

"You were a throuple?"

"Something like that," L responded.

The silence that fell had weight, body, the texture of fog, the scent of hope and fear.

"No," she said.

"I never--"

"You thought it," K said. "You both did. The answer is no. You'll just have to find your own toy to play with this time, L. If I wanted to share, I'd have stayed single, J. You know that. The answer is no," she reiterated.

J sighed and cut into his dessert, taking a big scoop. L had a little ice cream at a time, eating around the pie to save it for last. They weren't identical in every way, she thought. Thank God.

They stayed there talking long after dinner, and K finally got to learn about J's life. She wasn't anti-clone like some people; she was broadminded. Did she feel betrayed? Yes. Did she feel compassion? Yes. J the clone would never have gotten a good job on Luna, no matter his smarts or his qualifications. But J the orphan from Montana? Sure! Faked documents. She didn't ask and he didn't tell how he paid for them.

And L had hardly had it easy in the Service. A soldier, trained on a 12-month-long voyage to the asteroid belt, and brought back to Earth five years later. It was no wonder he'd been horny enough to fuck a stranger; he'd just returned from hell.

When it was time for him to catch the 4 am shuttle, L hugged K and J at the same time. "Last chance for the threesome," he joked.

"Not on your life," she snapped, and slithered out. The laughing clones said their goodbyes and L went out the door. She checked J's arm just to be sure which clone had stayed and which had gone into the rider outside their door. "Ouch," he hissed, as her finger touched the inflamed skin.

They went to bed. She had showered again, still icked out and paranoid.

I could take a morning after pill, she thought. Emergency contraception is definitely on the table. But then again, why? Who could tell?

Clean and fresh, K slid into bed beside J. "Wanna?"