by Koko Brown
Dallas adjusted in his seat to look over his shoulder. He chuckled lightly. “Yeah, I see him. He looks like a fish out of water, doesn’t he?”
Tina peered at the bounty hunter. “Sure does.”
How did he ever think he would go unnoticed in a place like this? He basically announced that he was looking for someone. “He’s my ex-boyfriend. He just can’t take no for an answer. All we have to do is get past him and you and I can go back to your place and…” She let her hands travel to his crotch where she found a nice sized bulge. She gave him a squeeze.
“Soooo… all we have to do is give your ex over there the slip and you and I can head back to my place?”
She pulled away and grabbed his cup. She took a healthy drink and almost choked. What the hell is this? Lighter fluid? She cleared her throat. “That’s all you have to do.”
“I’m staying in a transporter. Is that cool? I mean, I have a sleeping compartment with plenty of room for us in the back.”
She couldn’t have planned for a better scenario. “If you play your cards right, I might even let you take me away from this dump of a planet.”
He gave her a lingering smile. “I can do that.”
“Good.”
He got off the stool and when she was about to follow his lead, he stopped her. “Wait here. Let me go see if I can reason with him first.”
She shook her head. “No. He won’t like that. He’ll only tell you a bunch of lies about me. He’s a real asshole.”
Dallas glared at the bounty hunter. “I know the type. They get a girl and they think she’s theirs to do with whatever they want.”
She nodded vigorously. “That’s him all right.”
“There’s another way out. We can sneak past him.”
She frowned. “I already checked. This place only has the one exit.”
“We can leave out through the kitchen. Come on.” He held out his hand.
Kitchen? Why the hell hadn’t she thought about that? She glanced at the bounty hunter. He watched them with a curious look on his face. Would he try to follow? Could they ditch him? “We’ll have to hurry.” She took Dallas’s hand.
She let him lead her through the throng of partygoers. The bounty hunter was fast on their heels. Dallas noticed too. He broke into a run. She followed. They ran through the kitchen, ignoring the surprised protests of the staff and crashed through the back door out into the night. They didn’t stop running until they reached the transporter hub. Only then did he let go of her and she allowed herself to buckle over into a fit of laughter.
“Did you see his face? He wasn’t expecting me to get away from him,” she said after catching her breath.
Dallas ran a hand through his curly afro. “No. I don’t think he was expecting that at all.”
She thumbed the transporter they’d stopped in front of. “This yours?”
It was a small four seater with an extended cab. It wasn’t in the best of shape, but it would do in getting her off the planet and away from the hunter. Too bad she wouldn’t have time to go back to get her belongings. It wasn’t as if she had a lot of things to begin with, but what she did have she liked. Being on the run meant traveling in what she had on—a flimsy ribbon and booty shorts.
“Yeah, you ready?”
She nodded. “Do you think I can stay with you until you finish your job and leave the planet?”
“I got what I came for. We can leave here tonight.”
She smiled. “Great.”
Dallas pressed a button and the transporter door opened. He motioned for her to go inside. “Ladies first.”
“Thank you.” She stepped inside. “Chivalry isn’t de—” The smile dropped from her lips. The bounty hunter sat at the helm. She tried to back out, but bumped into Dallas. He pushed her into a seat. “Wha—?” Shock weighed on her.
Dallas engaged the door lock. “Cindy Smith, or shall I say, Tina Blake, meet my partner, Grekon.”
“Wait.” Her heart slammed against her ribs. This can’t be happening. She glanced wildly from the bounty hunter to Dallas. “You’re working for him?”
Dallas slid into the other seat at the front, next to the hunter. “I said, we’re business partners. We work together.”
“You’re going home,” Grekon said.
Her vision clouded over. They were taking her back to Luxo. She was so screwed.
TWO
Dallas flicked his eyes up to look into the mirror that spanned the top front of the transporter. In the reflection he saw a very pissed off woman. Her brown hair, now dry, hung in clunky waves past her shoulders. She was cute, but livid. He didn’t blame her for being mad. There she’d been, in some kind of alien dance-sex orgy and he and Grekon had come, plucking her from her newfound freedom to take her away.
When she caught him watching her, she narrowed her beautiful blue eyes into a deadly squint and snarled. “How could you?” she seethed. She crossed her arms and dug her nails into her skin.
“You’re gonna have to be more specific, darling. How could I pull off this leather outfit so well? How could I bring the afro back? How did I ever convince Grekon to grow dreads? Literally, I could go on.”
She tried to lean forward but the harness that he’d secured tightly to her torso kept her in place. “Dammit.” She fumbled with the release lever. “What the?”
“Locked,” Grekon said. “This isn’t a pleasure transport.”
Tina cut her eyes at Grekon. “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the human.”
Grekon lifted an eyebrow at Dallas. “So does this mean that she’s not my problem for the duration of the trip?”
“Well, this is a change,” Dallas said with a laugh. “They usually don’t want to talk to me because I’m human.”
Humans were the new species in this brand new world and thanks to the Loconuist, they’d been introduced on the auction block.
“Exactly why I don’t get why you could do this,” Tina ground out. “They don’t like us. All the other species treat us like shit, bottom feeders, slaves, property, and you’re working for one of them to capture me.”
Dallas sighed. “We’ve already gone over this,” he said. “Grekon and I are partners.”
Tina rolled her eyes and humphed.
“Look, it’s nothing personal,” Dallas continued. “You’re just a bounty. A job. It wouldn’t matter what species you were.”
“So you would sell out another human for credits?”
“Um, you’re locked in the back of our transporter. Do you even have to ask?”
She kicked his seat.
“Whoa!” The girl had spunk, no doubt about that. He pushed the button that reclined her seat. No more kicking for you. They had a long way to go and he didn’t intend to travel it with a backache.
As her seat reclined she let out a string of curses, English and alien.
“This isn’t going to be a quiet trip, is it?” Grekon asked dryly.
“Whatever gave you that impression?”
“I was hoping to listen to the newest musical release from Zarcaria.”
“Oh, God. That horrible crap? I’d rather listen to her rant and rave than that music. That shit sounds like a bunch of cats in heat.”
“What’s a cat?”
Dallas sighed and let Tina’s seat up to a sitting position again. Normally he didn’t mind not talking to the jobs, but she was human, their first. When she was upright, her face was a dark red. “Behave and I’ll let you sit with the adults,” he mocked.
She opened her mouth to say something, but quickly shut it. While she didn’t verbally say anything, her eyes spoke volumes. She wanted to kill him.
All the jobs wanted to kill him. It was the nature of the business.
“A cat is…was an animal on Earth. I haven’t seen another animal like one to use as a reference.” He looked at Tina’s reflection. “Have you?”
She kept her arms folded and glared at him. “Luxo had an animal, an aespu. It reminded me of a ca
t,” she spat.
“Interesting,” Grekon said.
“No, what’s interesting is that a free human would hunt down another human to return her to a life of servitude,” Tina said. “How could you do that to your own kind?”
She just wasn’t going to let this go. Dallas shook his head. “I told you, it’s nothing personal. It’s business.”
“Then why don’t you let me go and pick another job? A non-human job?”
“It doesn’t work that way. We get the jobs that come our way. If we pass on this one, someone else will take it. Regardless, you would’ve been caught eventually.” He shrugged. “It might as well have been us who collected the credits.”
“What was your fate after being captured by the Loconuist, Dallas?” she asked slowly.
“I lived on their vessel for about three Earth years. When some aliens came through to pick out humans for whatever purposes, I to—”
“For slaves,” she interrupted. “They took us as slaves.” The last sentence was said more softly.
“I took the opportunity to sneak out and escape,” he continued. “Along the way I met Grekon.”
“Well, the rest of us didn’t fare so well.”
“Not my problem.” He shrugged. “I’m not the savior of the human race. I was taken from Earth just like you and just like you, I’m trying to make my way.”
“By working for the enemy,” she bit out.
When he’d escaped, he’d done so on his own, where he’d been until he’d met up with Grekon. He hadn’t planned on staying with Grekon long, but in the alien he’d seen a piece of himself. Loneliness. Deception. Suffering. Neither would admit it but they needed each other. Together they seemed whole. They were family. Better than any family that they were born into.
And it was a damn shame that it had taken Dallas being ripped from Earth to finally find what he’d been missing his entire life in an alien who didn’t share a drop of DNA as his.
“That’s unnecessary,” Grekon said. “And here I was thinking we would become besties.”
“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of us didn’t have it as easy as you.”
Dallas knew that he’d done better than many other humans. In his line of work he’d ran into the less fortunate all the time. But that was life, right? Whether on Earth or in space, sometimes people got the raw end of the deal.
“I was sold to someone who thinks that just because he has ownership paperwork on me that he owned me. He thinks that he can do whatever he wants to me.”
“I hate to break it to you, but that’s the textbook definition of ownership.”
“Dallas,” Grekon whispered. “That’s too harsh.”
Dallas let out a chuckle. “But it’s true.”
“Slavery is wrong,” Grekon continued. “On my home planet we didn’t practice it. In fact, it wasn’t heard of in my sector.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.” Dallas rubbed his forearm. Then to Tina he said, “I told Grekon all about slavery that happened on Earth.”
“So you of all people should know how wrong it is and why you shouldn’t return me to Luxo.”
He lifted a shoulder again.
Between him and Grekon, he was the level headed one. He could put everyone in their proper place and keep every situation into the correct category. It was too bad that Tina had an owner. But she had run away from her owner and the law dictated that she be returned to him and he and Grekon were going to get paid to do it.
“Someone from your family is probably out there, somewhere, being treated like I was. If she or he escaped, would you want them returned to their captor or would you want someone to show them mercy and let them free?”
He knew what her speech was all about and it was falling on deaf ears. “Well, seeing how I don’t have family, that situation doesn’t apply to me.”
If she hadn’t been trapped in her seat, she would’ve punched Dallas in the back of the head.
No, better yet. As soon as I get the chance I’m going to punch him in the throat. Two finger throat punch.
She’d done that to Luxo once and the way he’d grabbed his neck and choked and gagged had been well worth being chained to the stake and left to the harsh elements outside and going without food for a week. Every time her stomach had growled and her insides turned into itself, she thought about the look of panic on his face and giggled to herself.
Dallas wasn’t the first free human she’d met. Not everyone had been sold into slavery, just the unfortunate humans like her. But he was the first she’d met who’d actually worked to return runaways slaves back to their owners. There was something oh so wrong about that.
But at the moment she didn’t have time to delve into Dallas’s mind to sift through all the messed up shit that was going on in there and try to psychoanalyze him. She had her own pressing problems to handle.
Luxo.
She couldn’t go back to him. She didn’t fear that he would kill her. He would do something much worse. He would keep her alive. Make her suffer.
And Dallas didn’t give a damn.
Tina looked from him to Grekon.
Now that she was close up to the alien she was sure that she’d never come into contact with his species before. Even under the artificial lights, his dark golden skin seemed to glow with vibrant energy. She also realized that his stark white hair really wasn’t white at all, but had been dyed. His roots of light gold were beginning to show.
Grekon was humanoid which made what she thought about doing much better. She’d had sex with non-humanoids before and besides Luxo, those encounters had all been on her terms. The only difference between Grekon and Dallas was Grekon’s coloring, the sharp features of his face, and the brightness of his eyes that didn’t seem quite real.
She scraped at her fingernail in thought. She’d done what she had to do to get off of Gospuko and escape Luxo. She wasn’t proud of it, but it needed to be done to save her life. What would be the difference here?
“Grekon?”
In the mirror, he frowned at her. “Are you speaking to me now?”
She cleared her throat. “Where are you from? I don’t think I’ve ever come across your species before.”
He went back to staring out the window. “You probably haven’t. I’m not from this part of the galaxy.”
“What’s your species called?” she pressed.
“Laconian.”
“Nope. I don’t think that I have.” She tilted her head to the side. “Tell me about your planet.”
He sighed. “Why?”
“Because why not?” she said slowly, trying not to lose her patience. “It’s not like I’m ever going to get there or anywhere else now that you’re taking me back to Luxo. It would be nice to hear about another world. Is it nice?”
“Not really.”
She waited for him to say more but he didn’t.
Well, this plan is a major fail. She threw up a hand then slammed it on her armrest. “Well, damn. With companionship like the two of you, I might welcome the opportunity to go back to Luxo. Sheesh! How long until I return back to captivity?”
“That’s the spirit,” Dallas said. “Gospuko is a three day trip from our current position. You might as well get comfortable.”
She dropped her jaw. “Wait. You can’t honestly think to keep me locked in this seat for the entire time. What do you expect me to do?” She tried to lean forward, but the harness bit into her chest. Fuck me sideways. She wanted to scream. Instead she dug her fingers in the armrests, trying to keep her composure. “Run. Away?”
Grekon stood and stretched. “I’m going to the back to rest. She can come with me.”
“At least one of you has some common sense,” she muttered.
“Your problem,” Dallas said.
“Your problem,” she mouthed back at him.
Dallas chuckled. “Real mature.”
She rolled her eyes at him again. While Grekon unfastened her, she sat calmly. After she was f
ree, she stretched as well, working out the knotted muscles in her arms and neck. “Thank you,” she said as nicely as possible. She still had a chance at this.
Grekon peered down at her. “If I have any trouble out of you, I’ll have no choice but to strap you down again.”
Ugh. He is not making my seduction easy. She gave him her sweetest smile. “Like I said. What am I going to do, escape out into space?”
That was enough for Grekon. He stepped away, allowing her to stand. Before she left she stuck her tongue out at Dallas. He smirked.
Motherfucker.
She’d turned friends against each other before. Albeit it had been in high school, but the logistics should be the same. She smiled to herself. Easy-peasy.
She followed Grekon into the back compartment where there was room enough for two lockers and a bed big enough for four people.
Room to spare.
He motioned toward the bed.
She crawled across the mattress, making sure to take her sweet time. She moved as seductively as she could. Her shorts rode up her ass, her butt cheeks visible. The ribbon around her breasts was a blink away from falling completely off. When she lay down she propped herself on her side, inviting him to join her.
Grekon hardly paid her any attention as he kicked off his shoes and rolled onto the bed, presenting his back to her.
She stared at him. I’m throwing myself at him. Does he need me to spell it out?
He snored lightly.
Guess I do.
She took one piece of the ribbon and pulled, undoing it. Her breasts sprung free. She slid closer to his back, pressing against him.
“Mm, you smell nice.”
He stiffened. “You better have a good reason for touching me,” he ground out.
She snuggled against his neck and trailed her hand along his side. “I do.” She moved her hand down his stomach, feeling the ripples of muscles.
“Stop.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Dallas doesn’t have to know what we’re doing back here.” She went to his crotch to grab his cock. She searched. “It’ll be our little secr—”
Grekon grabbed her hand, gripping it tightly. “There’s nothing there for you to touch.”