by Stella Sky
My anger melted away. She was just afraid. I could hardly blame her. The camps were criminally efficient, and once she was assigned to a Thressl’n, that was going to be the end of it.
At least if she was assigned to me, I could see to it that no harm came to her. Most of the men I knew would not tolerate such defiance from a female. I knew it took me everything I had not to put her in her place at times. The others weren’t like me though. They would not see the reason behind her actions. And they certainly would not empathize.
“You owe me nothing. I just want you to know that I have a plan,” I said. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “While you were gone, I had a chance to do some thinking. I think there is a solution that we can come to that will benefit us both. But I am going to need your help. You must become my mate.”
Emily’s face fell. “Is that all you think about?”
The pitch of her voice raised desperately, and I frowned. She looked sexy when she was angry, but it made me feel as if someone had punched me right in the stomach after a morning meal.
“No,” I said. “All I seem to think about is you.”
Emily’s amber eyes widened in surprise, and she fell silent.
“Please, just trust me.”
Emily didn’t speak again, and before I knew it, a bell was sounding. Visiting hours were over.
I bent down close to her face, and I could feel the charge between us. If I could have taken her right then, I would have. But right now I had to play by the rules. Luckily I had been trained all of my life for that.
“I am going to come back here for you every day,” I whispered. Her eyes stared into mine intently, and I could feel her unbridled longing. But she was too angry to give in to it. Too angry at me, and the Thressl’n in general. And perhaps that was the way it was always going to be. “I am going to come here until you are ready to visit my home again. When you do, I will have a surprise ready for you.”
Emily pursed her lips, and it became impossible for me to read her expression. She wanted nothing to do with me, or with any of us. And that is why I had to do the right thing.
The final bell rang. If I didn’t leave now, I would be banished from the camps.
“Just be advised,” I warned before I turned to leave, “that you should return before Zod locates you in this camp. You are not safe. Not anywhere. Only with me.”
And with that, I left.
***
The next week was busy and tedious. I had to wait until the next visiting hours for the females, and in that time, Jennai’k took the liberty of signing me up for courses on breeding with humans. We were put in an auditorium with the most absurdly simple contraption I had ever seen, as images of humans played from the projector and onto a white screen.
Every movie ended in a successful mating, and a discussion was held with Jenal’k’s own love doctor at the end. We were meant to ask questions and discover more about humans. However, the more I sat in on these “lessons,” the more laughable they seemed. It was clear that none of them had ever lived with a human female before.
And I knew, for certain, how to answer questions about sex with a female that the rest of the Thressl’n had no idea about. It often left me with an overpowering longing to have Emily back in my bed, her warm body draped over me or sighing in pleasure against me.
I went back to my empty home every night, with Emily’s face dancing in my thoughts. I would wake up in the middle of the night craving her body, and the only thing that could get me back to sleep was getting up in the middle of the night and taking a walk to my secret underground workroom. I built it as soon as I was granted permission to build my house in the mountains, just a day after the initial home was complete.
Nobody else knew that it was there because it would have been prohibited by the Thressl’n elders. But I had always been a nonconformist, and the only way I could accept my lot in life was to express myself in other ways, whether they were conventionally accepted or not.
But it was becoming more and more clear to me that I couldn’t stay on this planet. I had nothing left for me here anymore. Nobody had ever understood me. Even Absle had mocked my mind as opposed to celebrating it or showing me compassion when I was being unfairly treated by others who were greedy for the credit for my inventions. I had longed to escape for years, and now I had no reason not to.
My plan was more clear to me now than it had ever been before. I would finish a ship. The best and most advanced ship the solar system had ever seen. And I wouldn’t give it to the Thressl’n government. No, it was far too corrupt. I would keep it for myself. And when it was finished, I would do what I should have done many yeas ago.
I would escape. And I would take Emily with me.
Chapter 9
Emily Hart (Director of Engineering)
It had been shocking to see Laike standing behind the burly Thressl’n man who had immediately declared that I was going to breed him a child, preferably a male child. Laike’s gentle voice had sent a thrill of ecstasy through me, as intense as it had been the first time I had felt him push inside of me.
It had left me frazzled and confused during our conversation. It had been tempting to just take his hand and let him lead me back to his comfortable little house, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Everybody just wanted to abduct and mate with me. Who could I trust?
And to be honest, I wasn’t sure whether or not I want to be away from the camp of women. There was something so familiar about being in a room full of other women. I had never liked being around other people much before; my intelligence was apparently intimidating to them. Besides that, it wasn’t particularly easy to relate to others. I don’t know how Laike and I had managed to get on such friendly terms. Most of my relationships were one-sided and never led anywhere.
“Lain, when’s your hottie coming again? He missed the last visitor’s day!”
The tall woman who had led me to the camps had taken quite a liking to me, and since then I’d found out that her name was Heather. She was very jealous of my pairing with Laike, and I couldn’t blame her. The Thressl’n man assigned to her was barbaric.
“I don’t know,” I said, though I was wondering myself. I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering back to Laike, and the overpowering electricity that was sparked between us when he had visited the first time. I guess I had gotten comfortable with the idea that he would always come for me, but so far it seemed as if he had completely forgotten I’d existed. I hoped that he was all right.
“Well, he better get back soon. The mating dance is scheduled for next week.”
“The what?” I asked, unable to stifle a laugh.
Heather raised an eyebrow at me with a thin smile creasing her face.
“They seem to think that we need to be danced with before we will be ready to breed. Everything is guesswork with them right now. They want to ensure our fertility before actually engaging in anything sexual with us. They say it’s more efficient, but I get the feeling they’re just scared shitless of us.”
I grinned and shook my head, and Heather was summoned back to her bed by Jennai’k, who had been administering shots to us every week a few hours before the Thressl’n men came into the tents. That was a pretty good indication that it was a visitor’s day.
Sure enough, the Thressl’n men lined up one by one about three hours later, each of them standing in front of the woman he had been assigned to. Once again, I was disappointed by Laike’s absence. What could he possibly have been doing? He had asked me to trust him, but how could I when he wasn’t even there?
***
“Hey!”
I was startled from sleep by an urgent whisper. I opened my eyes and was surprised to find a group of three women crowded around my bed.
“What’s going on?” I asked, my heart racing in panic.
“We had a question,” the first woman said. She was stout and surly looking, with dark brown hair and dark eyes.
“Couldn’t it wait?” I wasn’t
known for being a pleasant morning person; let alone being woken up in the middle of the night.
“No. We were talking about it, and we had to know.”
“Know what?”
“How’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know. Escape and get you some low-ranking sugar daddy who leaves you the hell alone?”
I sighed. They still thought I was some woman named Lain who was supposed to have been an escape artist. I wondered what had happened to the real Lain, and if they were going to keep bothering me about it, I was half tempted to come clean to them.
“Could you just leave me alone? I’m trying to sleep.”
“This ain’t something that can wait,” a gritty woman’s voice said. She was tall and skinny, and her face was gaunt and angry. Her hair was thin and blonde, and I wondered what kind of tasteless Thressl’n jerk had chosen these women to abduct. They wouldn’t make good mothers of human children, let alone Thressl’n hybrids.
“Tell us what you know or you’re going to get it!” the third woman added.
I sighed and sat up, glaring at each of them.
“I got lucky, okay? Now just go to sleep!”
“So that’s how you wanna play it,” the stout leader of the group said, sneering and nodding at me. “We can play too. Come on, girls.”
They turned from my bed and walked away.
“Watch your back,” the third woman hissed.
I laid back down with my heart thudding hard in my chest. I had been stupid to think I might be safe in a camp full of women, even if they were my own kind. I wasn’t safe anywhere on this planet.
I closed my eyes and sighed. All I wanted was Laike. Where was he?
***
Another week passed without any sign of Laike. My whole body was burning with the desire to see him again. When it came time for the second visitor’s day of the week, I stayed seated glumly on my bed.
“Is that any way to greet your mate?”
Laike’s beautiful voice reached my ears, and my heart leaped in my chest. He smiled brightly at me as if nothing had ever happened.
“Where have you been?” I demanded, standing up to greet him.
“I have been very busy,” Laike said. “I had a lot of work to finish.”
“I’m sure it was much more important than me,” I sighed. The truth was that I had taken the fact that Laike was interested in me for granted all this time. Now that I saw it was possible he had lost interest, the weight of despair it made me feel was crushing.
“Nothing is more important than you,” Laike said, his eyes flashing darkly at me. “Look, I brought you something.”
I laughed when he pulled out a bouquet of strange flowers from behind his back and presented them proudly to me. I clutched them close to my breast and stared up into Laike’s handsome face. I wished I could just go home with him. But that wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen here. We weren’t allowed to leave until after the dance.
“I would like to ask you to accompany to the mating dance. It is the first in our planet’s history. I hear they have compiled an impressive collection of media for the event.”
I couldn’t be positive, but I was pretty sure that was Laike’s way of saying there would be good music.
A flush crept across my face when Laike bent down and stared deeply into my eyes.
“You must say you will go with me.”
I was glad that my trembling hands were concealed by the bouquet he had given me.
“Yes,” I finally whispered. “I will go.”
“Good,” Laike said, his handsome face pulling away from mine.
I was shocked by my crushing longing for him as he bowed to me and left without another word.
***
The whole camp was bustling as the Thressl’n women in charge did their best to supervise the construction of the dance. An entirely new tent had been constructed, far larger than the ones we lived in, and we had been ordered to make decorations and hang them.
To my surprise, Laike had been put in charge of doing the lighting for the event, and every once in a while he would catch my eye from across the room and smile. It would never fail to make my body respond, even though in my mind I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. It made sense. We had sex once, and now I was addicted to the danger. It didn’t mean I had feelings for Laike. I couldn’t. Not for someone who thought he could own me.
Still, the sparks between us couldn’t be denied. Even Heather had noticed, and raised her eyebrows suggestively. It was embarrassing, but my body had needs that I couldn’t deny. And right now, Laike was the object of them.
I needed to get away from him, get some air so that I could think straight.
“May I please go back to my bed? I have an idea for a decoration and would like to look at the fabric,” I lied, fixing pleading eyes upon Jennai’k.
She sighed.
“Fine.”
I ducked out of the tent, casting one last, secret look at Laike, who was bent over a device I could only assume was a speaker. He looked handsome from afar, especially when he was consumed in his own mind. He wasn’t trying to pretend that he was simpler than he was. He was fully in his element, and his element was sexy.
“Ugh,” I sighed, gripping the bridge of my nose as I tried to fight away the image of Laike.
“Oh no, the poor little princess is having a hard time working with her handyman.”
I groaned. The three women who had harassed me in my bed had cut off my descent to the camp. They were holding long metal rods that the Thressl’n had declared we use to cut shapes out of foam-like paper for decorations.
“What do you want from me?” I exclaimed. None of the Thressl’n women who ordinarily oversaw us were near enough to help me. That was probably just what they were counting on.
“I’ll take your man, for one!”
I cried out in surprise when a metal rod came flying at me. I dodged it just in time, but two more came at me and connected with sickening thuds.
“Cease!” Laike’s powerful voice thundered.
The women surrounding me all looked up in terror.
“If you harm a single follicle on my woman’s head, so help me, I’ll—”
Lake started menacingly toward the women, and suddenly Jennai’k was intervening.
“What is the trouble here, Laike?” she asked, her tone warning.
“These three are attempting to harm my female,” Laike said, his fists clenched into balls. The three women cowered together behind Jennai’k.
“Help us! He came at us for no reason!” one of them cried out.
Jennai’k’s face tightened, and she turned toward the women.
“I do not advise lies in this place,” she said darkly. The woman who had spoken paled. “There is a punishment suitable for you three. Come with me.”
A surge of satisfaction filled me as I watched Jennai’k lead the three women who had been harassing me away.
“Are you all right?” Laike asked, his hand gripping me lightly on the shoulder. My whole body buzzed in desire at his slightest touch, and I turned to face him. The sight of his handsome face so close to mine, with nobody else around to stop me, brought me to the edge of my self-control.
“Please,” I whispered. “Take me out of here.”
***
I followed Laike’s long strides through the foliage of the same forest I had fled from his home in, until he finally stopped in a small clearing.
“We can’t stay long,” he said, his face drawn. “The only way my plan will work is if you come home with me after the dance. Otherwise, they will ask questions.”
I didn’t care. I just wanted to be back at Laike’s house, with permission to be as close to him as I wanted to be whenever I wanted to be. Whether I could trust him or not was a different story. But what my body wanted wouldn’t change.
“Emily, I should tell you—”
But I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear why
he had been ignoring me. Why he had left me feeling as if I had been abandoned on this terrifying planet by the only man I wanted anything to do with. All I wanted was him.
“Laike,” I said, touching his broad face and staring into his eyes. “Just shut up.”
A muffled cry of surprise was cut short by my lips against his. Laike resisted for a moment before surrendering to my touch, his strong arms lifting me from the ground and holding me steady against his groin as we kissed. I could feel him growing hard against me, and a thrill filled my body.
All logical thoughts left my head as Laike’s hands roamed over me. It was exactly what I had been wanting for so long, and my body was on fire from every slight movement of his body against me.
“Are you sure?” Laike asked, breaking his mouth away from me and casting a worried look toward the camp.
“What did I tell you?”
“Shut up?” Laike answered, a sexy grin lighting his face.
I nodded, gasping in surprise when Laike’s mouth began tugging at my neck. Heat filled my body, and I pressed myself firmly against the mound of Laike’s groin. He swiftly stripped the undergarments off from under the gown that the Thressl’n women had demanded I wear in return for my tainted Earth clothes and I roamed my hand down his thigh to grope his member in my hands.
It was an impressive size, and I closed my eyes as I shuddered in pleasure. When I opened them again, Laike was smiling at me and warmth filled my breast. I wished so badly that I could give my all to him. But right now, all I could give him was my body. That would have to be enough, for the both of us.
I gasped as Laike’s member found its way against my middle, pressing gently into the most sensitive part of me. Pleasure coursed through my entire body as he worked his way inside of me, and soon I was filled with the hot pleasure of Laike’s member inside of me.
I gasped softly against his broad chest as he moved carefully inside of me. I could feel Laike’s gentle eyes on me as I pleasured myself against him. He was patient with my slow movements until my heavy breathing made him swell inside of me.