Coitus Experimentus

A/N: lol this story was written on a whim in Sep 2006 and turned into a long series (as these whims often do).  I found some badly-done TnT nc17 fic many years ago and thought "I think I could do better that that."  So I hope I succeeded.  :P  Originally posted at houseoftucker as "Experimentus" by me (enterprikayak).  Basically a fill-in-the-gap of what happened during that conveniently missing scene in harbinger.   ENJOY!____________________________________________________________________

Trip sighed with anticipatory pleasure.  "Between all this training and the extra shifts in Engineering...I've been looking forward to this all day."

T'Pol didn't respond to the warmth in his voice.  She was preoccupied.  "Sit up," she directed quietly.  Trip did and sat facing her upon the floor.  T'Pol carefully placed her small, strong fingers upon the next set of neural points and began to apply steady pressure.  Trip relaxed into the pose.

"You aren't saying much tonight," he commented amiably, a question in his voice. 

Nada. 

A strange suspicion hit him; a crazy one.  He wondered if he should even voice it, but he found himself speaking before he could stop.  "Don't tell me you're still upset about me and Amanda."

"I'm not upset," T'Pol replied firmly.  Too firmly.

Trip instantly became more interested.  "Sure sounds like it."

T'Pol looked him in the eye and paused in her motions for an instant.  "You're mistaken."

Trip pushed his tongue into his lower lip in frustration.  "Why would a few neuropressure sessions between me and a MACO be such a big deal?" he asked as if he had no idea.  You wanna pretend there's nothing between us, fine....

But T'Pol's eyes gave her away.  They always did.

Impulsively, Trip decided to risk it. 

"Unless..." but words failed after those first two syllables.  What was he supposed to say?

T'Pol eyed him, still absentmindedly working on his bare shoulders.  "Unless what?" she quietly challenged.

Trip forced himself to finish the sentence: "Unless you're—a little jealous."

T'Pol spoke carefully.  "I don't experience 'jealousy'."

Trip warmed to the debate, as he always did.  "You're doing a pretty fair imitation of it."

T'Pol sat up straighter and enunciated each syllable to ensure that he understood her.  "I am not... in any way... jealous of you and Corporal Cole."

"You know, your voice is tensing up."  Trip was starting to enjoy himself.  "That's a dead giveaway."

T'Pol maintained her chilly reserve.  "I didn't know you were an expert in vocal inflections."

"I don't need to be an expert to read you," Trip retorted, realising it was true only after he said the words. 

He became more logically coaxing.  "Come on.  Admit it.  You're a little jealous."

"You're implying that I'm attracted to you," T'Pol stated, as if it were a ridiculous premise.

Trip dug his heels in.  Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  "That kind of goes along with the assumption, doesn't it?"

T'Pol continued to work on Trip with lofty detachment.  "I think you're mistaken about who's attracted to whom."

Trip shook his head in confusion.  "Are you saying I'm attracted to you?"

"I don't need to say it," T'Pol clarified primly.  "You already have."

Trip scoffed, momentarily thrown off-track.  "Uh, I don't remember that conversation."

"It wasn't you," T'Pol corrected, somewhat defensively, as if she'd only just herself remembered.  "It was your clone.  Sim told me."

"Sim?"

"He said he had feelings for me."  This almost smugly.

"He told you that?" Trip demanded, eyes wide with surprise.

"Standing right there," T'Pol confirmed, nodding to her entryway.

Trip looked over at the empty space as if he expected to see his long-dead clone standing there, smirking. 

"What the hell was he doing in your room?"

"Your voice is tensing up," T'Pol mimicked.  She'd turned it around.

"Now you're the vocal expert," Trip defended.

"I don't need to be an expert to read you."  T'Pol flippantly hammered her small triumph home.  And it was true.  She didn't.  He was an open book now, whereas before, she had found him a continual source of inscrutability.

Meanwhile, Trip was shaking his head as if trying to get water out of his ear.  "I can't believe this.  I—I'm jealous...of myself?"

"You're jealous?" T'Pol asked with interest.

"No," Trip stressed.  "Absolutely not."  He looked at her.  She could see right through him. 

He conceded.  "Okay, maybe.  Maybe I am...a little."

"Which would mean you're attracted to me."  A flawless piece of logic.  Trip glared at her.    "It goes with the assumption," she added as a helpful aside. 

She was no longer working on his shoulders, but simply paused—looking at him.

Trip took a deep breath.  He felt like he was dreaming.  He had to know. 

"What just happened here?" he asked in total disbelief. 

The energy building between them was intense.  T'Pol said nothing, her gaze smouldering. 

"Did we...?" He stopped and tried again, "Are we...?"

And T'Pol suddenly, simply, lunged forward and fastened her mouth to his. 

Trip's physical body, which had been waiting for this since the moment it had set eyes upon her, didn't hesitate.  It hungrily and instantly responded to her moist, seeking mouth: a dying man discovering the elixir of life—even as his mind and soul reeled from the shock of it all. 

And then she stopped and pulled back suddenly.  Trip's face pleaded with her fiery, enigmatic eyes, wondering what the hell was happening—faintly hoping she wasn't planning on killing him next. 

T'Pol—her breath short, quick, powerful—hesitated the briefest of moments before deftly tugging the belt from her robe, letting its silken lapels whisper gently down her upper arms to flutter, discarded, to the floor.

Trip's eyes momentarily explored her body as she knelt there in front of him.  He had to.  He knew she wanted him to.  She had removed her top before, but only with her back to him.  Tonight, for the first time, his eyes rested frankly, if only briefly, upon her round, heavy breasts, the nipples dark and hard, her emerald blood giving them an eerie olive glow. 

Trip allowed his gaze a half-second to caress her taut, tawny middle, her navel barely a dip in the muscled road of her abdomen.  Finally, his eyes strayed lower, for his first glimpse of her sex...and he truly grasped she was a creature from another world.  Where a human woman had a triangular patch of curls obscuring her cleft, this Vulcan had only a V-shaped suggestion of the finest dark brown hairs that traced, like two sparse eyebrows, downward from either side of her pubic bone and along the labia, seeming to meet in that dark place Trip burned to touch and explore. 

Looking up into T'Pol's eyes again, he found his beautiful best friend calmly waiting for him...and openly wanting him.  Wanting him, as he had wanted her from almost the first time they had spoken.

All this spanned just less than two seconds—before T'Pol leaned in again.  And Trip, finally catching up with her, wrapped his arms around her slender frame and kissed her deeply and yearningly, the way he'd imagined a thousand times before. 

Soon, his right hand wandered away to hungrily investigate her left breast.  After a cock-hardening seven seconds of that, he explored lower—massaging her muscular ass cheek, gently pressing, teasing deeper with his fingers, never quite touching where she was dying to be touched. 

And all the time, T'Pol twined her fingers tightly into his hair, pulling him to her.  He pressed his tongue into her unbelievably warm mouth, feeling hers fighting back, ravenous for more.  He remembered distantly, in some functioning part of his brain, that the Vulcan body temperature averaged 41°C.  He had noticed the differential before, during their neuropressure sessions; however, mouth-on-mouth he could now taste the difference: and her fiery tongue in his mouth was spice and burning. 

T'Pol was pressing the length of her body against his as they knelt there before one another, kissing on the cold nubbly floor of her quarters.  She could feel the rearing hardness of him pressing insistently now against her bare stomach.  She reached down and grasped him through the thin cotton of his pyjama bottoms and gasped through her kisses, startled at the girth of the member she meant to ride tonight. 

Virginal in her sixties, T'Pol had educated herself as to the human reproductive techniques before beginning this well-planned undertaking.  However, reading statistics about circumference and length was nothing to actually taking the live thing in her fist and feeling it tremble and pulse.  Nothing to the unexpected and violently gentle passion surging from the man who would presently drive it again and again into her most secret places.  She moaned as sudden, shocking, trellium-spiked lust boiled in her sex.  She needed to feel something, anything, touching her there before much longer or she would surely die. 

As if reading the tatters of her thoughts as they whirled through the space around them, Trip took his right hand from its clasp upon the back of her upper thigh and moved it around to press his hard, dull, calloused fingers questingly into her moistness.  Still kneeling up, T'Pol nearly collapsed against Trip's chest, her pelvis grinding rhythmically into his curved hand. 

He slid two long fingers up inside her and looked down into her face as he gently pushed her back onto the floor.  He laid next to her, kicked his pants off, and pushed her hair off her forehead a few times with his free hand, kissing her mouth softly and pulling back every few seconds to look deeply into her eyes; those eyes...still so troubled by he-knew-not-what, but at the same time swimming with concentrated desire for his body and his touch.

After a moments' tender nibbling at one another's lips in the new position, both found the hungry heat rebuilding, and their kisses became nearly frantic. Trip's fingers were still ravishing her virgin cleft to her encouraging whimpers.  Suddenly he pushed himself up and placed himself between her smooth, muscular legs. 

Pressing cool palms upon the hot flesh of her inner upper thighs he spread them wide.  The taut, plump, barely-feathered lips of her adolescent-seeming vulva separated at last, to reveal the dark, moist, and greenish membranous skin of her inner place. 

Again, Trip was startled to witness the differences between their races.  There was no clitoris where he expected one, yet the slick slit of her vaginal opening was encircled by a small hard ridge of dark green tissue.  Trip held her open wide with his hands and dipped downward to gently touch her there with his tongue. 

Not knowing her past experience and not wanting to alarm her (guessing it was likely very limited), Trip took his time exploring every inch of her with his tongue and gentle teeth.  He was rewarded by the soft sobs and ragged moans of a woman who was powerless in his grip, unable to resist the incredibly sweet assault of his mouth and hands.

T'Pol writhed, powerless indeed, in the face of what she had started.  The trellium she had covertly dosed herself with earlier in the evening was flaying open her neurological pathways and shredding her control; yet she flung herself gladly, almost fiercely, upon the conflagration and willingly burned herself up in it.  If it meant this: this scorching and passionate emotional release...that did not, as she had been warned by her elders, destroy her or send her mad. 

Madness was holding yourself as a stone: cold and apart from everyone else in the indifferent black of space.  When you could be here, on the floor, with a human man who adored her (yes, she knew he did) and who was now pouring himself into her most private places, showing her exactly what they had been put there for.  His mouth.  His hands.  Surak, his teeth!

For, ever so gently, Trip was now whispering the very edges of his teeth back and forth over the hard ridge of tissue that circled the opening to her deep passage.  The two thumbs of his hands were simultaneously pressing themselves alternately into the opening itself, and in doing so, he discovered two raised nodes of what felt like the same clitoral tissue just inside her tunnel. 

He stroked one purposefully and, as if in a dream, watched his friend T'Pol spasmodically pull her own knees up and apart with her hands, opening herself more fully to his ministrations.  He barely let himself imagine what his thick cock was going to feel like to her once he finally plunged it into this tight well.  The thought of what he planned to do with her made him almost faint, and he suddenly realised he wanted this yearned-for coupling to happen on a bed: not the itchy carpet. 

He knelt next to T'Pol's side and lifted her easily in his arms.  A prodigious erection leading the way, he moved to her bed and laid her down upon it.  The dark pools of her eyes, ringed with thick lashes, shone trustingly up at Trip in the liquid yellow lamplight.  Trip paused for a moment to scrutinize her from above, his shaft quivering in anticipation.

Shaking, T'Pol sat up and placed herself before him, where he stood looking down upon her, his hands gripping the low bulkhead above.  It was her turn to explore him.  She wonderingly took the rigid length of him into her hands and stroked its soft, velvety skin.  The first man she had ever touched this way.  Trip put his head back and leaned into her darkmagic caress while she looked up at him and, gaining surety, milked his cock with steadily stronger strokes. 

After a moment, her left hand discovered the taut pouch below his straining member.  She fondled them gently, curiously, cupping the soft sac and shivering as she felt Trip's skin pucker and tighten reflexively under her touch.  Now it was Trip's turn to throw his head back and hiss through his teeth, fighting for control of both his voice and his seminal vesicles.  She ran her fingernails over his skin, alternating hands as she stroked him and marvelling at how hard a piece of flesh could become.  He was like steel.  No, like lead.  Heavy and malleable and hard.

T'Pol now applied her questing fingers to the delicate hood of his foreskin.  She pulled it back, gasping at the membrane that rolled so snugly away to reveal the perfectly smooth head of Trip's penis.  The sensitive pink skin shone dully in the candle flame, and she gently traced this proud, exposed sculpture of flesh with her fingertips.  She found in its tip the perfectly engineered slit that would deposit his seed deep into her body.  T'Pol shuddered violently at the thought and without thinking leaned forward to close her mouth around the firm, tender mound of flesh.

Trip lost his inner battle and cried out volubly as he watched T'Pol slide forward along his length, swallowing an unbelievable amount before pulling back slowly, sucking, and repeating the process.  He grit his teeth and resisted the urge to give in, the urge to just sweetly come and come and come into T'Pol's open throat: he wanted all of her first. 

T'Pol tasted salt, as small drops of Trip's seed leaked from his slit onto her tongue.  She licked and swallowed his juice hungrily, surprised at herself.  Greedily she suckled him, whipping him into a frenzy from which he knew there was only one road home.

Still standing, gasping, still watching the incredibly erotic candlelit scene before him in disbelief, Trip pulled himself slowly from T'Pol's wet lips.  She gazed longingly upward at him. 

Unable to wait any longer, Trip pushed her backwards on to the bed and climbed up to hover above her, cock in his own hand.  Stroking himself for the moment, he pressed his face down deeply into her short hair fanned upon the pillow and inhaled her scent as he panted and gritted his teeth tight with the sensation of T'Pol, T'Pol! pressing herself urgently up to him.  Begging silently for that which only he could give her.

The woman beneath him began to sob with ardent frustration, as if, having begun this, she had no idea how to finish it.  Trip gripped his shaft, grabbed T'Pol by the hip, gratefully guided his searing, sticky head in between her labia and bumped it gently and longingly against the small, boiling-hot opening to her tight, slick breach.

He gazed deliriously down at the face of the woman he had fallen silently, violently in love with.  Eyes riveted upon her mate, T'Pol reached between her own legs with both hands—clinging to his cock as if it would save her soul.  Her cropped hair swarmed in a wild mane around her fevered, emerald-flushed face, which held the terribly placid, melting facial expression of a Vulcan near total mental breaking point. 

He remained motionless above her, held fast by his own rigid arms and the look in her haunted eyes.  And finally T'Pol herself was the one who pressed the tip of Trip's shaft into the strange, tight cleft of her alien flower.  Suddenly, the hot, taut, and sticky skin at the point of his sex blazed: she thrust herself at him, and he slipped all at once past her snug opening and pierced only one inch into her body's agonizing, milky embrace.

T'Pol still gripped his member, gasping; pressing him that far into her close, damp breach, and no farther.  They paused, panting—connected now—clambering into one another's souls.  Her opening was swelling around him, tightening with her furious desire, and seizing the throbbing end of him in a vicelike clutch. 

Trip leaned down—knowing this was likely her first time, not knowing what she was ready for—and whispered raggedly into her neck.  "T'Pol, what should I do?"

She spoke.  A low and tortured moan.  "Fuck me."

Clearly she'd been going through the ship's database. 

It was the most erotic thing Trip had ever heard. 

Unstoppable lust disintegrated the last shreds of his control.  Still buried in her burning neck, he cried out and plunged himself deeply into T'Pol's waiting body. 

She actually sobbed aloud as her best friend impaled her upon his exotic human shaft.  Longing for the incredible sensation of friction to go on and on, she pulled herself away from him and pressed back in, and within two seconds they were rhythmically fucking upon T'Pol's bed; whimpering and bucking together in the stillness of space.  Quietly, intensely, and staring deeply into one another's eyes: overawed by their new universe even as they created it together.

Unable to control his moans any longer, Trip cried out into the pillow beneath T'Pol's head, rather than wake the ship.  On her back, T'Pol had no such luxury and tossed and groaned aloud with vicious pleasure, as Trip finally gave in to the shattering thirst that had been building within him for years and thrust himself again and again into her magnificent body. 

The only sounds other than their irregular cries were the loud, muscular smacks of firm flesh upon flesh: for Trip was frantically riding his frantic woman as he had never done before in his life.  He could feel a suicidal orgasm constructing itself solidly and irrevocably within his boiling loins, but somehow, he was still spanking the entire length of his cock again and again into T'Pol with no fear of her own pleasure lagging behind.  Far from it: she had his hips gripped in her strong hands now and was greedily guiding his ferocious thrusts into her slick, sweltering cleft. 

Her head twisted feverishly upon the stem of her neck, tortured, her mouth a silent scream of primal gratification.  Her back was rigid, her pelvis thrust and held firm and high and steady now, buttocks and feet and toes clenched inexorably, so that Trip, again high upon both his knees, could ram himself into her deep, open crotch with the feral abandon they had both been yearning so secretly and desperately for since their falsely muted and complicated games of touch and skin and pressure points had begun, so many sleepless nights ago. 

Eons later, Trip suddenly withdrew himself, sparking an involuntary moan of grief from T'Pol.  He fastened his mouth on hers briefly, lovingly, and then whispered urgently into her ear.

"Turn over."

T'Pol didn't know what he planned to do, but she trustingly rolled over onto her front.  A second later, she felt Trip tugging her hips, and she moved with him until she was settled nearly face-first into the pillow, her rear high and firm in the air.  He moved behind her and squared himself up to her buttocks, gently tracing the tip of his cock across her firm flesh, stroking himself and resting a moment as he surveyed the sight of the sexiest woman he had ever imagined, her flushed face turned to one side on the pillow, her back arched deeply inward to allow her ass cheeks to rise up and open invitingly upon the stems of her thighs.  Her arms stretched up past her head to grip the edge of the hard Starfleet-issue foam mattress. 

Trip spread her firm buttocks apart with his hands and slowly pressed his cock back into her warm vagina—this time from behind.  She growled softly into the pillow as he slid into her and began the ancient rhythmic motion again, her flesh slapping him with every plunge. 

She revelled in being taken from behind, thrusting herself up at him as shamelessly as possible, writhing and blissfully biting the pillow, her sizzling nerve endings screaming as Trip gently stroked and pressed her with his hands and fingers and rammed himself relentlessly into her.

And the ardour and the friction now began sparking an unstoppable chain reaction within T'Pol's unique psyche.  Threads of consciousness reeled between her and Trip like white hot wires, and thoughts and feelings were actually speaking themselves aloud in the air, though so blinding, neither one was sure which or wherefore or whence they came. 

Trip collapsed upon her from behind, overwhelmed, and they continued to strain their bodies together for a few minutes, until Trip pulled out again and urgently flipped her back over.  This time, T'Pol raised her knees and legs to her chest and reached down to guide him into her opening, confident now in how they fit together.  Trip slid deeply, thirstily into her passage for the third time.  She wrapped her legs around him, noisily exhaling in pure ecstasy.

And now it was simple, powerful lovemaking: stridently blending themselves and disappearing into each other and finding each other... with just one simple thought shining around them again and again—a realisation. 

Neither spoke it aloud, though their eyes alleged it boldly across the few inches of space that separated them.

Finally, T'Pol thrust her pelvis up to Trip and froze, their eyes boring into one another's very souls, each unable to believe what was happening, unable to believe it had taken this long to find themselves here.

And their eyes stayed locked as Trip's quivering flesh within her at last goaded T'Pol's body past its point of control.  Her muscles locked for an eternity...and then she fiercely bucked and cried, gripping Trip's body, biting his shoulder and forcing herself ruthlessly against him—as a raging tsunami of physical and mental sensation claimed her: an explosive, rippling orgasm that milked her lover's rock-hard rod in a shattering series of pitiless, liquid spasms. 

And the next second sent the pleasure exploding throughout Trip's body, and he was off upon his own mindless moment, thrusting senselessly as the salty burn of his seed ripped through his passages and spurted deep into T'Pol's womb. 

And it was out of their hands and out of their minds.  And the lava was upon them both, and they burned and died and were redeemed within its thickly bubbling, lethal pools.

Aeons passed.

Then, smouldering, shuddering, shaking for breath, they came apart for what felt like the first time since birth.  Trip withdrew his length slowly, excruciatingly, from within T'Pol's lithe body.  And as T'Pol felt the void where Trip's fullness had only seconds ago thrust so lustily, she was closer to crying than she had been for decades. 

She could only creep damply into Trip's arms and allow herself to be enfolded there in his sweaty embrace, his chin on her head, both of them trying to catch the breath that passion had stolen from them.

Though she had instigated the entire thing, T'Pol was baffled at what had just transpired.  She knew she had been jealous of Amanda.  Two months of secret trellium injections had made sure of that.  But this wasn't simple, possessive retaliation. 

She closed her eyes and savoured the feel of Trip's skin and scent against her cheek.  Years ago, she would have been revulsed by close contact with a human.  She wouldn't even share the Captain's blanket in prison.  Yet tonight, this human was the only thing in the entire universe that mattered to her. 

Her heart pounded chokingly and she looked up into Trip's fragile, young, human face.  "Trip...I..." she trailed off.  Trip smiled ever so slightly as he gazed into her eyes and touched her trembling mouth with a finger. 

"Shhhhhhhh.  Me too."

T'Pol realised after a moment that he did seem to know exactly what strange thoughts and feelings were running through her mind.  She held her tongue and clung to him, still reeling. 

The strong, heady emotional sensation that mating seemed to be releasing in her was unexpected, and she could only guess that, during proper Pon'farr, perhaps all Vulcans felt this way.  Except she didn't know of any Vulcans who harboured sympathies for one another quite like these: all-consuming, passionate cravings, driving her to constantly seek this particular human out.  To touch him.  To have him touch her.  Her body quivered in recollection.  No, she decided.  Likely, Vulcan matings were less ardent, even if they were equally vigorous, and every seven years...whether they needed it or not, she thought, with a little contempt.

Trip's eyes were drowsy beside her, and he held her hands in his and stroked them as if they were small pets he meant to keep and comfort.  T'Pol simply rode upon a wave of trellium-fired sensations that she was powerless to name and watched Trip's face, envying him his calm acceptance of even this, the fieriest of passions.  He seemed a blindingly bright star to her more reserved self, able to burn through emotions unscathed, and at times it frightened her.  She was terribly afraid to allow herself to 'let go' in a similar fashion.  And yet she had sought out the trellium...

Slowly they cooled upon the bed. 

Trip reluctantly stirred himself after what felt like hours and reached his pyjama bottoms from off the floor.  He sat on the edge of the bed and put them on under T'Pol's silent gaze.  Turning to her where she lay on the pillow, he placed his hand upon her flat, naked breastbone and stroked it a little, considering her face.  He knew she would need to be alone now, knew that he couldn't demand too much all at once.  He leaned down and whispered into her ear. 

"I'll let you get some sleep.  I'm gonna to go down the hall to my quarters and dream about you in my lonely bed."

T'Pol knew she wanted time alone to figure her thoughts out, but she was illogically loathe to let him leave, and she turned onto on her side and held his hand in both of hers, looking up into his beautiful, friendly face.

"Meet me for breakfast tomorrow?" she asked, hushed. 

Trip grinned and kissed her slowly, promisingly.  He stood up.  "0700."

T'Pol nodded up at him from her spot curled in the bed.

Trip pulled his shirt on over his head and went to the door.  He looked back once at the woman he loved: tucked into the blankets, her hair still wild, her eyes still half-wild, still a creature in need of gentling.  And he smiled at her and left, the door hissing shut behind him.

Of course, if he had known what she would decide before breakfast, he would have stayed right there with her, shagging her until she was powerless to formulate a coherent thought, much less an airtight, logical excuse to turn and run and run and run.

The next day they met, as planned, in the mess hall.  It was uncomfortable.  Where had the easy passion vanished to, in the five hours since he had last seen her? Trip steeled himself, trying to break the ice that shouldn't have been there.

"I guess we should talk about what happened last night," he began hesitantly.

T'Pol (deliberately?) misunderstood him.  "I've been briefed on the situation," she replied, sipping her tea, and referring to the Xindi.

"Well," Trip tried again, "I was referring to what happened between us...in your quarters." 

T'Pol simply looked at him, her lacquered calm firmly in place.  He felt himself redden.  "I guess I'll go first.  I...." he trailed off, unsure of how to begin.  He chickened out.  "Actually, why don't you go first?"

T'Pol nodded equably.  "I suppose I should thank you..." she offered politely. 

Trip reddened further and smiled self-deprecatingly.  "No need to thank me," he began, somewhat modestly.

But T'Pol broke in and clarified: "...for facilitating my exploration of human sexuality."

Trip was lost.  He swallowed.  "I'm—not sure I follow."

T'Pol continued her well-rehearsed speech.  "It's one of the many aspects of your species which I've been meaning to explore since I left the High Command."

Trip looked at her, and then nearly relaxed, laughing.  Boy, they were really getting their wires crossed here.  He paraphrased what it seemed she was trying to impart.  "Sounds like—you're saying that last night was...some kind of...experiment."  It sounded ridiculous out loud, and he waited with amusement for her to contradict him.

But she merely considered and then reflected, "I wouldn't use that term."

"But that's the general idea?" Trip confirmed disbelievingly.  His stomach fell through several decks and landed in the antimatter mix with a splatter.  She wasn't kidding.

T'Pol eyed him with arch concern.  "Are you getting emotional?"

"No, I'm not 'getting emotional'," Trip said sullenly, "I just don't like being compared to a lab rat."  His heart was breaking.

"I'm sorry if I offended you."  T'Pol said with superb calm.

Trip chuckled bitterly.  "Forget it."  He should have known.  He sighed.  "I'd, uh...appreciate it if we could keep this between us."  He rubbed it in, feeling extremely sorry for himself.  "In fact, we should probably just forget it ever happened."

T'Pol's face softened slightly.  "Agreed."

The two friends regarded one another for a moment. 

T'Pol's face was nearly inscrutable as she sipped her tea, but Trip caught her in an unguarded second, and he realised she wasn't as firm as all that in her sudden morning-after convictions.

"Doesn't mean we can't keep doing the neuropressure, though," Trip ventured, on a sudden impulse. 

And T'Pol looked at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. 

No.  They would keep on with that.

Series To Be Continued In

Coitus Conceptus   -  Chapter 1