Stars Dancing [Dreams-To-Lovers Romance]

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EURI

Okay, yeah, I was nervous. My idiot brother Dwinlyn sang his way onto the Sloan's starliner like it was no big deal that we were going off sphere for the first time. "Flee!" he'd declared letting me know he'd telepathically picked up amorous thoughts from our dads, and then he'd taken off into the bowels of the ship like we did this everyday.

Leaving me to greet Portia and Larron Sloan by myself, which I did hurriedly so we could get our heads stuffed with tech before the parental canoodling began. I waved to the twins and opened my satchel, pulling out my newest gear. I was asking them where we should go when Larron motioned me deeper into the starliner.

I followed him, with Portia behind me. I wished she wasn't behind me because I wanted to look at her again.

There was nothing on the stream about Portia and Larron. I don't mean "little"— I mean nothing. There was very little about me on stream because I mostly stayed in the shadows, so if the Sloans had reconned me, they hadn't found much. Just my brother Dwin's pics.

But I'd found zero about them. It was like they didn't even exist outside of birth certificates. My parents had told me about the Sloan's Talents and their big plans, so I figured P. and L. were probably hiding secrets like their dad. Understandable. Their dad's Talent was off the charts— as in: it made telepathy look like nothing.

I wanted to look at Portia again because she was shockingly pretty. She'd been pretty when we were fifteen, but a little messy— like she hadn't cared about her curly hair, and it'd gotten all frizzed out. But her light brown curls were boingy and moisturized now, and she had perfect creamy skin with deep blue eyes.

Eyes I wanted to look into again because they were as kind as her mind. I didn't pick up stray thoughts from either twin, but their minds were much like they had been seven years ago— friendly and soft.

Larron motioned me into a cabin, and I walked in seeing a bedroom with two sofas and a media station. He obviously liked gaming, so I pulled out our virtual reality visors and hooked up their cybernetic scalp relays. I'd had seven years to work on them, and they were the size of the tip of my pinky finger. Very easy to affix to the scalp.

I'd gotten a lot faster at controlling tech with my relay, so before I'd even finished setting the two of them up, I had their names loaded into the VR.

"He goes by Ronnie," said a lovely voice behind me. I spun around, my eyes wide, and Portia laughed. Laughed!

"Wait— WHAT?!" I demanded, shocked.

"He goes by Ronnie," she repeated, grinning at me.

Mouth agape, I turned to Ronnie. "And, do you speak too? Does she go by something other than 'Portia?'"

Shah works, said a male voice in my mind as Ronnie smiled at me.

My jaw dropped. I opened my telepathy and quested out around the room with my senses. Yep, there they were, those soft, friendly minds, and they were full of humor.

Oh, you two are in so much trouble. You PUNKED ME. For seven years! It's on, Sloan Sibs. You are going down. You have no idea who you fucked with, I said in their minds.

Laughing fully and freely, I grabbed them in a hug, "You crazy bastards. Do you actually talk?"

"Ronnie doesn't say much out loud," Shah said. Then all humor left her face. "Look, Euri, no one knows about us, okay? About our telepathy. Not even Mom and Dad. Can you keep this to yourself?"

My eyebrows screwed up as I tried to figure out the answer to that question.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"I think my mental curtain is good, but my brother picks up things I don't expect. Well, and my dad isn't a strong telepath at all, but he's a beast of a whole other type. He hears mysteries in songs. Dwin does too. I have no idea what they'll pick up, but I'll try, okay? They could get ideas about you no matter what you tell them or don't tell them, though. Understand?"

They nodded, and we sat on the sofa. "So, what are we doing? Gaming? VR? Or having a conversation?" I asked.

They slid on their VR visors, and we got to work building a new city.

SHAH

Euri was a lot faster than he'd been seven years ago— I mean, a lot. He had the landscape and the snow and trees up instantly. Snowflakes poured out of the sky, actually it was more like a deluge of snow that was going to bury everything. Ronnie laughed and made it slow down to something more reasonable. Like, eight inches an hour instead of three feet an hour.

I decided to develop buildings to exercise my mental tech-controlling muscles again. Seven years was a long time to not practice with the cybernetics relay. I pulled up my memories of the favorite building I'd done when we were kids and pushed it out at the VR. It looked pretty good, so I erased it and focused on a cityscape I'd been imagining for book six of Rilla and Rawl.

I had a contract with a publisher for twelve books of my romantic erotica series. Yes! Twelve! I'd started with four electronic books on stream and then three a years ago, I'd signed with a publisher who'd produced them in paper and audio. Book five was scheduled for release in a few months, and I was well into the draft of book six.

Over the years, Ronnie and I'd traveled further and further out into Andromeda Galaxy visiting spheres to get ideas for my books. Ideas about climate and architecture. People and culture. Food and music. And collecting erotica and porn. Yeah, okay, that was easy enough to do on stream, but sometimes I'd find things in bookshops that were more interesting than the stream versions.

I was six books in, remember, and couldn't afford to be boring. But no matter how far we traveled, sex was still sex. At the end of the day, it was just an orgasm. I could only describe it so many ways. Ronnie was convinced that the next step was for Rilla to realize that she needed real love, otherwise, the drilling was gonna get repetitive.

Sigh. Ronnie was probably right. He usually was.

I threw up some houses shaped like ones we'd seen on Prix 14. They had steep roofs— like a triangle that went all the way to the ground. The houses had been in an amazing forest of two-hundred-foot tall trees that were forty feet wide. The trees had dropped so many leaves and twigs that the houses were built with really steep roofs so the debris just slid right off.

Actually, that would've probably worked for our VR if Euri wanted to keep making it snow three feet an hour. I chuckled and Ronnie sped up the snow around my houses. I changed the color scheme on my buildings so they blended into Euri's world better, giving them a marble-y look of luminescent teal and green.

Oops! I giggled. I hadn't been paying enough attention, and the snowflakes around my houses had turned into snow leaves like the leaves on Prix 14. Euri laughed and made a wind blow everything around in a maelstrom.

I liked Euri's laugh. It was like caramel sliding down the back of my neck, and it did things to me. It made me want to crawl in his lap and stick my tongue in his ear. I wondered if he would like that?

I got really hot thinking about Euri's ears. Ronnie mentally elbowed me.

Right, stop thinking sexy thoughts about Euridyne Crieve-Madrano. I peeked under my VR visor. Euri had one leg slung over Ronnie's right thigh.

Strinch! Was Euri into Ronnie? My heart went "pang!" Then I stuffed it back where it was supposed to go, out of sight and not falling out of my body and onto the floor. Ronnie rolled his mental eyes at me, completely convinced that Euri was not into him. How did he know? He rolled his mental eyes again.

We could do that, me and Ronnie. We could have a whole mental conversation that Euri would never know anything about. No matter how good his telepathy was, he'd never be as good as me and Ronnie. We'd been communicating before we were born, so no one could match us.

I hadn't expected to let Euri in on the secret of our telepathy. I wouldn't have told him if it had been up to me, but obviously, Ronnie had decided to go for it. Why? He wasn't telling me why he'd done that. I rolled my mental eyes back at my twin.

Ronnie had several different cityscapes going on. I could tell he was playing with old concepts. Stuff he did as a kid because he didn't want Euri to see anything recent and get ideas about his true skills. He threw up a really pretty city variation similar to one he'd done in Euri's VR seven years ago. The buildings were all made of glass and similar to the Shurwinn short buildings but with more rounded edges, softer. Then he switched them from glass to ice that looked sort of marbled.

Euri was still playing with environment. Tossing around trees and forests and rain and wind. A huge lake with a geyser shooting out of it. Then freezing all of that to ice and making it melt.

I peeked under my visor again and looked at his hands which were dancing in front of him as though he was typing or playing a piano. His hands were so nice looking. I remembered what it was like to touch my lips to that skin on the back of his right hand. I wondered if he'd let me do it again? What if my tongue flicked out and tasted that skin, just for a second? Like a snake. Would he like that?

Mmm. I was hot again. I needed some private time alone to take care of myself. Or, like, thirty minutes naked with Euridyne Crieve-Madrano. I reminded myself to breathe normally. Panting was not a normal thing to do whilst VRing with one's twin and the boy who had his leg draped over said twin's thigh.

Peydran: 5 minutes

"Sands!" Euri cursed at his dad's text. "We're there already? I gotta go change."

"Us too," I nodded, handing Euri his gear back. I headed to my cabin to change into garb more suited to the climate of Five Spheres, but no clothes could've prepared me for what I was about to see.