Chapter Four
Ellie was happy to discover that Mary was in a bad mood, since she wasn’t feeling particularly peppy herself. She had woken up with a throbbing bottom and the taste of soap still in her mouth, her emotions bubbling up inside her with the need to escape. Mary, in the past, would play the devil’s advocate when she was in her normal serene mood. Now, however…
“I hate everyone here and I want to go back to Earth!” Mary snapped as soon as Ellie joined her in Mary’s cabin. “They’re all nothing but a bunch of cavemen who need their balls kicked in!”
Ellie plopped onto the bed as Mary ranted on, happy to hear it, although she wasn’t happy either as she knew from Graham that Earth was a two-month journey from their location, and they were traveling in the exact opposite direction from their planet and toward a Swaraan mothership.
Ellie, when given the opportunity, launched into a lot of grumbles about the way she’d been treated. Mary agreed, and just as heartily as Ellie had hoped. “They can’t just beat you like you’re some orphan in a Dickens novel!” Mary huffed. “It’s not right. None of it.”
Ellie gave a nod and complained, “And to add insult to injury, your boy-toy ratted me out. Can you believe it? I wish he was turned into a eunuch. Right now I’m thinking it would have been a good and just idea.”
“That man can be a real ogre,” Mary granted, putting her hands on her hips. “And being among the Swarii isn’t going to help him one bit. I don’t know if the Swarii are like him or he’s like them, but I’m not liking the parallel. He’s becoming more macho than ever.”
“And just when I thought Peyton couldn’t get any more macho,” Ellie grumbled. “If he had any more testosterone oozing out of him, the people around him would start growing beards.”
Mary paced the room a few times, and eventually her breathing cooled down from huffing and she took a deep breath in and out before calming. “You and I know two different Peytons,” Mary finally said. “I know the sweet, kind, caring, thoughtful leader Peyton. You know the brotherly, protective, self-righteous, easily frustrated, hot-headed Peyton.” Mary plopped down and pulled her feet up on the bed so that her back was against the headboard. “I’d been seeing that all along, but I was fine with it because I was happy with the Peyton I was getting. But now that Commander Graham’s in the picture, and Peyton doesn’t have you or the other girls to vent to, I’m beginning to see more and more of the Peyton that you know.”
“Ha!” Ellie gloated in response to this. Putting it that way, she felt like Mary was finally getting a good look into her world. “Well, hopefully the sex is good. That’s all I can say.”
Mary’s face blushed, and presently a small smile crooked the sides of her lips upward. “It’s very good, actually… It was everything I ever hoped it could be.”
“Good. Because the brute is all yours,” Ellie said, rolling her eyes. “Although I’m still going to get back at him. I’ve had it up to here with his disregard for my ability to sit. Not to mention that I have a weird addiction now to an alien’s cock, which just compounds matters. There’s nothing I can do to get away now, and I know it, but Peyton doesn’t have to make everything harder for me. I just wish he’d keep his nose far out of it and mind his own business.”
“I do hope when you get him back that it’s good,” Mary allowed, and then looked her up and down. She reached forward and put her hand across Ellie’s forehead. “You’re still looking and feeling very feverish, Ellie. I hope you’re not catching anything.”
“No, it’s still that Union thing,” Ellie assured. “Supposedly it takes oodles of sex and time to get rid of the fever it causes. That’s what Graham said.”
“So you believe all that now?” Mary asked, but it was easy to tell that Mary wasn’t completely sure of it herself.
“Believe it?” Ellie echoed. “I live it!” Ruefully, she shook her head. “You have no idea of all the weird stuff that’s been going on in my brain. I’m beginning to think that I’m not human, after all. Why else would I be like this? Feeling the way I feel? I have these crazy urges when it comes to Graham that don’t make any sense to me, especially after Graham just spanked me. But it still doesn’t seem like we match up because I’m not even well equipped for sex. I can barely walk afterward,” she admitted, her face heating. “I swear last time we did it, I pulled my groin. His equipment is… like… oversized.”
Mary made a face of disgust at this. “I don’t need that much detail.”
Ellie rolled her eyes in Mary’s direction. “Ah, I see. So, I get all the gory ass-sex details back at the palace, but now that I have a story to share, nobody wants to hear it?”
Mary nodded, but with a slight self-effacing grin. “That’s pretty much right. It’s not easy being Ellie Jonas, is it?”
Ellie shook her head. “That’s putting it lightly.”
Mary looked up at the ceiling. “I graduated first in my class at Harvard Med School. I was going places. I had tons of job offers. I was going to do something. But just like that—poof. That life’s gone, and I’m a slave getting shipped across the galaxy to get bought and sold, then sold again before—”
“Hey, at least you got into our palace at the end. Peyton thinks you’re a goddess. When he first saw you, he tripped over his own feet and fell face-first onto the marble floor. You know what happened the first time I met Peyton? He strapped my ass. I’d just come across the galaxy, got dumped in the middle of the biggest shit-hole in the universe, had never been spanked before in my life, and then whammo. It was a fine how-do-you-do, let me tell ya,” Ellie grumped.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t let people spank you.”
Ellie couldn’t even believe Mary had said that, so she asked, “Did you just say that I shouldn’t ‘let’ them do that? Does ‘let’ mean something different to you or something? Because the way I’ve been using that word sort of denotes that I had a choice.”
Mary didn’t retract her statement. “Well, you do. You should just be firm and more serious. Peyton might talk a big game, but I think we’re both very clear that I simply wouldn’t let him put a hand on me. Don’t get me wrong, you get bullied into it pretty aggressively, but I—”
“‘Let’ is not a word that applies here,” Ellie assured her pointedly. “I’m somehow mated to a seven-foot-tall alien, and you’re married to a six-and-a-half-foot beast. He could eat you for breakfast if he wanted to.”
Mary just gave her a smile as if she was just being silly, so Ellie pouted and got up to stomp out to sulk somewhere alone.
She opened the door and pounded into the hallway. She turned the corner, only to realize that she had rounded the corner too fast and walked right into the wall. She bounced back from the wall, wondering how distracted she had to be to misjudge the distance, when she realized that it was merely an eight-foot-tall alien looming in the hallway’s entrance.
“Hello, little one,” Fie said in his low voice and accent that was very thick and almost hard to understand. “Might I see you for a moment?”
He was so huge and quietly intimidating that she immediately grunted in the affirmative.
“I need a blood sample from you,” he began. His next word was, of course, “Wait—” as she tried to turn and sprint in the other direction. “Please, Eleanor. It’s for science.”
“You’re not getting my blood if it’s about saving creation,” Ellie assured him stubbornly, suddenly not caring that he was a giant. “I’ve put up with a lot from you people, but I’m not going that far. I have limits.”
He smiled very kindly, as if he thought she was just being cute. “Your mate asked me to do a quick checkup,” he explained simply. It was clear that he thought this was going to get her to acquiesce.
She turned and, once again, began to walk away.
“There’s a piece of cake in it for you,” he promised.
He’s lying, she told herself. There’s no cake in space.
Or was there?
She spun on her heel, slowly, and looked him up and down suspiciously, miraculously without getting a crick in her neck. “Cake?” she asked, watching his expression. “What kind of cake? How do you know about cake? Why would you keep this from me?”
“Come with me to the lab and I’ll show you,” he promised, nodding in the direction of the lab and then turning and walking that way, leaving her to stand in the hallway.
She followed him, although very slowly and apprehensively, all the way to the lab.
She soon found that she was justified in being suspicious, since Fie had lied. He didn’t have cake, or anything like cake. He gestured her to a seat and gave her a lumpy Frian pastry that had nuts in it. “This is not cake. This isn’t even a scone,” she griped, turning it around in her hands with distaste. “It would have to improve before we could call it a crumpet! I doubt that even peanut butter and banana slices could make this thing edi…” She looked down in the middle of her tirade and saw that Fie had poked her arm and was already pulling out a small vial of blood! When he poked her, she had no idea. She hadn’t felt it at the time, but she didn’t like it now.
“Hey!” She tried to flinch back, but in that moment he got a tight hold of her arm and kept it where he wanted it. “I didn’t agree to that.”
He made a ‘mmhm’ sound, but it was a horrible pretense of being interested in her protest.
When he was finished putting a small patch over the injection site, he finally straightened and lifted his eyebrow in a lackadaisical way. “It’s not like you felt it.”
“That’s not the point! The point is that you came at me like a gigantic bloodsucking mosquito or something!” Although she had been quite surprised that it hadn’t hurt. It certainly had when she was growing up…
“Besides,” she added, “surely you know all about humans. Haven’t you probed us yet or whatever? Isn’t that what aliens do?”
He stared at her with a very blank expression, and for a long moment she wondered if he had heard her at all. “Probe you where, exactly?”
Now she was wishing she hadn’t mentioned that. She frowned, and then rubbed at her arm awkwardly. “You know… everywhere?”
He suddenly looked thoughtful. “Maybe we should change the subject for now?” He then shone a light into her eyes, again without asking.
“Agreed.” She gave a singular nod. She even let him look down her throat, and when he told her to drink something down, she did without too much fuss. “Why are we doing this?” she said, smacking her lips after drinking the sour liquid. “And what did you just give me?”
“Basic routine checkup. It’s very strange that a Swarii would be able to have an actual Union with an Earthen human, so I’m just checking for unique results in your tests that might set you apart. And do you really want to know what you drank?” he asked, his conversation distracted.
She frowned at that question and had to think about it before answering with a simple, “Not really.”
“That’s what I learned about Earthen humans when we were in the mines with them,” he said a little more conversationally, although he didn’t make eye contact. At this point, he was scrawling something down onto an electronic tablet. She tried to look at what he was writing, only to see a bunch of scribbles that she feared was the Swarii’s written language. “They hate silence. They love filling the air with a bunch of questions they don’t want to know the answer to. I’d say that you are all obsessed in one sort of philosophy over the other, but after a week of listening, I realized that Earthen humans are psychologically disturbed. They all have fears, make decisions that don’t make sense based on those fears, and are stubborn about the most random of things.”
“I’m not stubborn!” she argued.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered in his bored doctoral tone. “I need a saliva swab.”
“Not gonna happen, scooter,” she assured stubbornly.
“You wanna bet?” Somehow he said this without looking threatening. He was more matter-of-fact than anything else, as if he had every confidence of getting everything he needed.
“You can’t force anything into my mouth.”
“You want me to force things into other places instead?” he asked serenely.
“You…” She was about to say ‘wouldn’t,’ but she didn’t know Fie that well, and she didn’t actually want to be probed today. She finally opened her mouth, her expression designed to assure him that she didn’t like acquiescing to his desire to examine her.
“Thank you,” he said after taking the swab. “Now, drop your pants.”
She frowned. This was already a long, long day. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“It’s just a skin and tissue analysis. The commander is concerned that he’s surpassing your limits in his attempts to keep you under control.”
“Just take my word for it that he is,” she snapped.
He looked her over, a quick perusal of her person. She suddenly felt just as small as she was in comparison to him. “Would you like to do this the easy way or the hard way?”
She went ahead and chose the hard way. Not with words, but by trying to get up and sprint past him, not realizing that for a man of his size he was actually quite quick.
He grabbed her, picked her up like a rag doll, and took his time sitting down, settling her body over his lap, and pulling down her pants and panties.
She was about to scream from the indecency, but then she realized the likelihood of anyone aiding her even if her scream was heard. They’d probably just sit and stare at this spectacle. So she gritted her teeth and curled her nails into Fie’s hip.
“You aren’t even bruised,” he told her with an unimpressed cluck. She felt something metal slide across her bare bottom and then pinch a flank.
She flushed at his words. “It feels bruised,” she assured him sullenly.
He grunted in a very disbelieving sort of way.
“It does,” she pouted with assurance.
“You could try behaving, then. I’ve never seen anyone speak to Commander Masterson the way you do—well, and live, at any rate. He just lets you walk away most of the time, too. He’s got his work cut out for him.”
“Are you calling me ‘work’?” she asked, prickling.
“Absolutely,” he replied without any apparent regret. He lifted her off his knees and held onto her until she regained her footing on the floor. “I’ll run some of your bloodwork, but so far it seems that you’re hardier than you look.”
That wasn’t the first time she’d been told that. She felt she was tougher than she looked both inside and out; she had to be to survive her family, and she only got tougher after she’d been ripped away from them and made a slave on a backwater planet on the other side of the universe.
That being said, she was certainly glad that this examination seemed to be over. “I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”
“Me too,” the giant alien replied, distracted by something he was reading on the tablet in his hands.
She pressed her lips together, feeling like some of her dignity was also bruised by the whole experience, and marched away.
She knew that the Swarii so far weren’t extremely taken with her, including Graham. It was obvious that they were all liking Mary and Peyton much better than they were liking her.
She was busy grinding her own axe, she told herself. After all, she didn’t want to be here. She hadn’t asked for any of this and she really just wanted to go home, smoke a bowl of weed, and pretend that this was all a very long and horrifically vivid bad dream.
Unfortunately, Ellie knew that going back to Earth was not on the menu. She was away from Jazeel, which was a blessing, but they were heading lightyears in the wrong direction from her planet. It might be many years before she was able to go back home, if she ever could at all.
Still, the idea of having to adjust to living among the Swarii seemed extremely daunting. Ellie didn’t want to do it, although she was already telling herself that eventually she’d have to. Her instincts and hormones were all over the place, still drawing her daily to Graham, and her head was still rebelling against the finality of their relationship.
She really missed the days of just working, being herself, and hanging with her family. She shook her head and tried not to let her throat clench as she thought about everything she’d lost. Would her world ever be anything like that again? Would she ever even see her family again?
* * *
Graham was running diagnostics on the ship’s navigation program when he saw Fie running out of the hallway, his eyes bright with excitement. Graham frowned, not used to the sight. Fie wasn’t normally the sort of man who showed his emotions on his sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” Graham asked, preparing himself to hear something that he didn’t want to deal with.
“I finally got your mate’s bloodwork tested,” Fie replied, sounding slightly out of breath, like he had run all the way there from the lab. “Commander, this is incredible. You were right.”
Graham’s eyebrows furrowed with concern. “About what?”
“Eleanor’s not fully human.”
* * *
“Then what am I?” Ellie asked, trying to swallow down her fury about all this. She knew it was some serious news since Graham and Fie had approached her with unreadable expressions.
“You’re one quarter Swarii,” Fie replied, looking like he would stake his life on the fact. His shoulders were squared back as if for argument.
She blinked. “How convenient,” she huffed. “One quarter Swarii, my little white ass! All the creatures in all existence and all the way across the universe from Earth and I’m one of you?”
“Fie was pretty excited about that discovery,” Graham said, gesturing to Fie. He seemed calm, but apparently he’d had half a day to digest all this information. Ellie couldn’t even wrap her head around it yet.
“How would that even be possible?”
“Sixty years ago, there was a scientific expedition to your planet. Most of them died from a virus, and after a period of quarantine the uninfected ones returned home. According to their logs, there was one infected male that hadn’t died yet, but he was severely ill and was left for dead, since the others didn’t want to become ill as well. What might have happened is that he recovered and found himself stranded. He must have blended in and mated with the locals. The result being your whole family.”
Fie cut in to add with fervor, “It’s extremely rare to find something like this in nature—two different species similar enough to breed. Not only to breed, in fact, but to breed a fertile generation. I’m guessing it had to have been your paternal grandfather, looking at your test results.”
She blinked, and then her stomach flipped as if she had just dropped twenty feet. She had remembered sitting on her grandfather’s knee, pressing her hand against his large hand and marveling at the extra finger.
She pressed her hand to her forehead. Duh! Her grandpa hadn’t even fit in well! The whole town thought the guy was from a different planet—figuratively, at least—but he was so useful as a mechanic that the town just accepted him as one of their own. He had died when she was about five, but she remembered that he was even taller than her dad—when meant he might have been as tall as Graham. After that, he’d become yet another subject her family never talked about.
“Grampa Shel.” There was a long silence where the room looked pointedly at her for explanation, even the couple who didn’t speak her language. She slowly dropped her eyes to the floor, feeling numb. She shook her head. “I should have fucking known. Tim used to say that for a first-generation American, the dude didn’t ever bore us with tales about the ‘old country.’”
“You met him? You met a Swarii and you didn’t even know?” Peyton asked, amazed.
“So he was tall!” she replied defensively, leaning toward him just so he could see her eye-rolling. “Did you play twenty questions with your grandpa when you were little? Because I didn’t. His memory sucked at the end, anyway. He couldn’t remember what he’d eaten for breakfast.”
“That’s actually not odd at all. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did,” Fie admitted, shrugging his large shoulders. “Earth is not friendly to our species. We have to eat certain vitamins that aren’t grown there. You probably need them, too. Our brains need Ribon to thrive, or else they will eventually deteriorate.”
She rolled her eyes toward Fie and said wearily, “One thing at a time. This is not a time to add alien words into my lexicon.”
“Look,” Graham said, adjusting himself in his seat and then leaning toward her to put his hands on her knees. His thumbs began to rub circular patterns on her skin, apparently in the hopes of calming her. “This explains why you and I are together. Why we mated. You have Swarii genes. You and I must be a good genetic match, after all. Humans are one of the most contagion-reluctant species Fie has come across,” Graham continued. “If your kind had been hit by the same plague that had hit mine, you probably wouldn’t have even gotten a headache. You have all the antibodies necessary to resist that virus.”
“Genetically speaking, your children will be extremely hardy and resilient,” Fie added, and Graham nodded to this like he was relieved to hear it.
Suddenly, the fact that she’d had all the sex she’d had for the last week was extremely jarring. They hadn’t used a stitch of protection, and she wasn’t on the pill. Honestly, she hadn’t even thought about this before, since pregnancy wasn’t a worry on her plate back on Earth. She had been so stupid!
She was on the cusp of freaking out when Fie distracted her by saying, “She just needs to be kept on a strict rest and food regimen and an injection of Ribon every month until her levels straighten out, and she’ll be as healthy and strong as any female of ours—she’ll still be far below average height, but…”
Whether it was the care instructions that were just given to Graham or the mere word ‘injection’ that was worse, she wasn’t sure, but it certainly snapped her out of fretting about what she’d done or who she was.
She shoved herself out of her chair and pointed at Fie. “Let’s get one thing clear—there will be no injections,” she informed. “And don’t talk about me like I’m a pet or something!” She looked at Graham challengingly and he sat back, lowering his shoulders and looking like he was trying to be a relaxing influence. She wanted to fight with him right now—fight with someone!—but he apparently was far from taking the bait. It was extremely frustrating, and so she glared at him, and then at everyone else, before she felt keen to stomp off.
“Ellie, wait…” Mary called from behind her somewhere. Ellie didn’t look around as she continued her march down the hall. It wasn’t as if Mary was going to make her feel better. How could she even relate to what was going on? Mary was at least a full human. Ellie wasn’t even that. She felt unsettled, as if Earth wasn’t her home anymore; her whole species lived under one roof.
As soon as she settled in the engine room, hiding and picking machines apart one by one, Mary eventually stepped in and plopped down in front of her, sitting Indian-style. “Whatcha doin’?” she asked casually.
Ellie shrugged. “I’m doing what a ‘Swarman’ does best, I guess,” she grumbled.
“Is that word supposed to be a clever mix between human and Swarii?” she asked, looking like Ellie had just served her a big bite of Spadooki on a spork.
Ellie snorted. “It sounds dumb to me, too,” she assured, but it is better than ‘Humarii’ or anything else I’ve come up with so far.”
“Look, Ellie, when you think about it, this isn’t the worst thing. It explains a lot, actually. You told me a million times that you and your family never seemed to fit in except with each other. You were just more right than you could have guessed. I’ve found that often it’s comforting just to know ‘why’ something is, and that it’s not your fault. This is just you. It’s not like you’ve been changed, though. Remember—this has always been your identity. You just didn’t know it. But now that you know, you get to really figure out who you are and what you’re capable of. You’re not defined anymore by the people around you. You get to set all new standards. I mean, you get to blaze this trail! Fie’s already up there talking about this finding being revolutionary; that this might change history. Hell, Human-Swarii relations might become extremely common in the future, especially if the next generation is as strong and as smart as you are.”
Ellie thought about this quietly as she worked. She knew Mary was blowing a lot of smoke up her ass at the moment, but she found she’d liked that sensation. And in fact, as she looked Mary over, she could see that she was clearly rather excited. “You’re not going to want a blood sample next, are you?” she asked with a wary side glance.
“Of course not,” Mary said, waving her hand, but then added, “Fie will let me use the samples he collected—no need to do it twice.”
Ellie looked up at the ceiling and shook her head.
“Hey, I’m a doctor, and this is a whole new field. Don’t ruin this for me,” Mary said with a smirk, jabbing a playful elbow into Ellie’s arm.
Ellie groaned and combed her hand roughly through her long hair. “I still have a feeling that this is not going to be as awesome as you’re painting it. They were already talking about injecting me with shit. I just want to clarify—at home, my parents didn’t even get me vaccinated. This is a little too much.”
She squinted at Ellie. “What, were your parents hippies or something?”
“No, they were just lazy. And my uncle had this thing with the town doctor… Long story. Noses got broken, the police got involved, and now there’s this restraining order… They’re not the type that would take us all the way to Medford for something they didn’t give a shit about…”
Mary put up her hand in a ‘halting’ motion and said, “Never mind, I recant the question.”
She often said that when Ellie opened up about her family. Ellie hadn’t really thought about how amazingly imperfect her family was until she listened to the way Mary was raised. Mary was raised in a world of regattas, summers on the lake, winters on the slopes, ballets, and private schools. She wouldn’t have lasted three minutes into a Jonas Sunday morning pancake breakfast without her head exploding from all the fart jokes.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Ellie conceded, looking back down at the small motor she had taken apart. “It is what it is.”
Mary nodded and clapped her playfully across the back. “Make lemonade out of lemons, Ellie.”
* * *
“Fuck your goddamned lemons!” Ellie screamed down the hallway in the general direction of Mary’s room the next day as Fie threw her over his shoulder. He had finally caught her after a very long and unwelcome game of hide-and-seek that had begun as soon as he showed up outside her room with a syringe. “Keep that thing away from me!”
Mary and Peyton both stuck their heads out from their doorway, looking like they had been naked for their own purposes. They gawked as Ellie disappeared around the corner, each wearing identical confused frowns on their faces. “It’s worse when you resist,” Mary told her, stepping out into the hallway. “Let it happen!” Before Ellie was carried around the corner, she flipped Mary off. That was easy for her to say; Mary wasn’t being used as a guinea pig or a pincushion!
She struggled again and tried to kick her legs against Fie’s chest, which was quite an exerting task, but it seemed to annoy Fie. “If you don’t stop being ridiculous,” Fie threatened her between gritted teeth, “I’m going to tell your husband how difficult you’re being.”
“Yeah? I’m shaking in my boots,” Ellie spat in reply. She’d been spanked by Graham a couple of times, of course, and she would rather not be spanked again, but she had a feeling that an eight-foot-tall giant like Fie wasn’t going to go crying to his commander because he thought dealing with her was too hard.
“You are the sassiest little creature I’ve ever come across in my life,” Fie muttered, shutting a door behind him and inclosing them in the small, sterile room before setting her down. “It’s gone far beyond ‘colorful.’”
“Gee, thanks,” Ellie replied crisply, putting her hands on her hips to begin her final stand-off.
Fie merely gave her a sidelong glance and straightened before turning to a table near the door, the top of which was at her eye level. She couldn’t make out what he was doing, but then she heard him snapping on gloves. She frowned and then began to inch toward the door. When she was close enough, she launched her whole body toward the opening mechanism, only to hit the door with her full strength when it didn’t open. After crashing against it with a ‘thump,’ she fell back onto the floor. Fie stared down at her through this, looking bored and annoyed. “If you were my mate, I would make sure you never sat comfortably again,” he told her with a grumble. He shook his head. “And I used to think my sister-in-law was a troublemaker. You have singlehandedly raised my standards on what hard-headed means.”
“I don’t feel very hard-headed,” she wheezed, rubbing her hand against her forehead, which had hit the door along with her chest. After she stopped seeing stars, she remembered to be indignant at his mention of how she needed to be spanked. Her cheeks then burned. “And just so you know, I think the fact that I’m physically forced to do anything is a shit deal. It’s unfair, and I think you all know it, but don’t care.”
“I don’t even understand your complaint,” he stated. “Your role is very simple, little one, and you are very advantageously mated. Commander Masterson will be admiral of the fleet one day in the not too distant future. On our planet, he is famous! He is very popular there, and very wealthy. You’ll have every comfort through your life, and every privilege. Most females pray daily for such a mate.”
She considered this, a strange, unpleasant feeling going through her chest as she felt jealousy of any woman who ever wanted him as well as some sort of pride that he was important. And then she dismissed both of those emotions, which she told herself were merely hormonal, with a wave of her hand. “Well, then he should have mated one of those females,” she finally said with a haughty wag of her chin. “Would have saved me a lot of trouble.” She scuffed her toe against the squeaky floor beneath them. “And role? What role?”
“Your role is to be supportive, obedient, to satisfy him sexually, and to bear him children,” he replied without emotion, his eyes on whatever he was doing at the table.
She took a deep breath, but the extra oxygen didn’t make her feel any better about his response. “Yeah, okay,” was all she could say to this painfully chauvinistic explanation. At least Graham hadn’t come out and told her what he expected of her so bluntly. She hoped that her tone explained what she thought of that statement when she said, “Can I go already?”
“You haven’t even received the injection yet,” he stated, and then held up something long and thick. So long, in fact, that she couldn’t quite place what it was until a liquid squirted from the top, and then it struck her. “You’re sticking that in me?” she cried, taking three steps back. “That’d go through my arm and punch a huge hole in it!”
“It’s not for your arm,” he sighed wearily. He turned to her. “Take off your pants and bend over.”
She crossed her arms and made a serious effort to remain calm and communicate clearly. “Not a chance in hell.”
“We can do this the easy way or—” he began.
It looked like the only two options were to square off with him or bend over and try to get things done with as quickly as possible and to move on with her day. The fact that those were her only options was extremely annoying to her, and she squared her shoulders and prepared to choose the hard way. “Somebody’s gonna get bit in this room, and it’s not gonna be me,” she warned.
“Please,” he said, pinning her with an ominous glare. “Please bite me. I’d love that.”
She pursed her lips and they continued to silently glare at each other for a long moment as she tried to decide on an escape plan. They were distracted from their silent cold war when the door behind Fie beeped and then slid open. The doorway filled with Graham’s form.
Immediately reading the situation, he said, “What’s going on?”
“I’m thinking how high I’d have to jump to be able to kick both of you in the nuts,” she snapped, spinning in his direction. “This is not happening, Graham! Read my lips! Not. Happening.”
Graham seemed less than concerned by her proclamation. He took a deep breath and said, “Really, Eleanor, wouldn’t the easy way be better for everyone here?”
“Better for you!” she argued.
He looked up at the ceiling and then stepped further into the room. He waggled his fingers at Fie after the door closed behind him. “Well, get to it, Doctor.”
Fie reached out and grabbed her around the waist while her jaw slackened at Graham’s lackadaisical disregard for her wishes. When she snapped back, scolding herself inwardly for being surprised that Graham was a giant dick from which there was no escape, she began to fight against Fie. But, brute as he was, she was bent far over his knee with her nose nearly hitting the floor and the bottom of her legs captured by his knees before she could say, “Get your Sasquatch hands off me!”
He did not get his Sasquatch hands off her, however. She felt one gigantic hand grab both her pants and panties and yank them down below the bend of her knees in one quick movement, and then she jerked her head toward Graham and screeched, “Graham! Tell him to get off of me!”
Graham, for a husband who had painted himself as her ‘protector’ several times, seemed less so at the moment, because he just crossed his arms and watched. “I hate you!” she screamed, and then as her hands were pinned behind her back she turned her head up toward Fie and demanded, “Put me down!”
“Need any help?” Graham asked Fie conversationally over her shrieks.
“No, I got this. Don’t—” he suddenly said, jerking his leg as Ellie closed her mouth around his calf. She froze as his palm covered the whole of her bottom in warning, “even think about it.”
“Eleanor, if you don’t start behaving this moment, I will assume that you’re ready to begin your anal training. And that’s after I make you a sorry, red-bottomed little girl. Now stop fooling around.”
Her cheeks burning and her stomach churning with butterflies at the sheer mention of anal training, particularly around anyone else, she thought better of biting Fie.
“Okay,” Fie said as soon as she forced herself to stop struggling. His tone was now much less threatening and much more clinical, as it normally was. “This is very small. You’ll feel a little tiny stretch, maybe, but it’s not anywhere near an anal sensitivity test or a plugging. I’m going to apply something to make it slide in as easily as possible.”
She didn’t like the sound of any of that. “You’re putting that thing in my ass?” she asked with incredulity. Inwardly, she knew she shouldn’t be surprised. She had known as soon as she saw ‘the injection’ that it was going to go either in her vagina or her bottom. She had been hoping more for the former.
Although maybe not. She didn’t like that she was somewhat aroused. She hated herself for it, but Graham was just beyond her reach and watching this with… a hard-on? That rat bastard.
In any case, she hoped neither of them noticed that she might be a little—or more than a little—wet between her legs. It was humiliating, and the last thing she wanted them to think was that she was enjoying this on any level.
“Yes, now here we go,” Fie said, his tone flat. Her thoughts all ceased as she felt some sort of greasy lube applied to her bottom by Fie’s finger and then something hard and the width of her own index finger pushing inside of her.
“Whoa!” So this was the probing. It did push her anus open more than she would have liked, but the sensation seemed to send a bolt of arousal straight to her loins. The stretching burned slightly, but then it subsided within a few seconds. Eventually a small, creamy slush coated the insides of her bottom. The texture, warmth, and feeling made her blush as it brought the memory of the way Graham’s seed felt inside of her.
Oh, so slowly, Fie began to pull the probe out of her. “Just let it sit there for a moment,” he told her. “It has to absorb into the walls of your rectum. I know it probably feels weird, but the sensation will subside within five minutes.”
Her cheeks were now so hot that they were paining her. Perhaps that was because her head was upside down, but she worried the sensation was from the crippling amount of mortification. She decided it was time to start to stare at the floor and imagine that she was all alone, or better yet, that she was still back in her bed at home and she’d wake up any minute.
Time couldn’t be moving any slower, and after she caught Graham—the evilest husband ever—adjusting his crotch, he seemed to want to fill the air by talking to Fie in Swarii.
Her blood was boiling. If they had any difficulty being fluent in English, perhaps she wouldn’t have minded them switching into Swarii whenever they wanted. However, they spoke English with obvious ease. Jio, who hadn’t even known a word of English, was already beginning to pick it up himself, sometimes conversing in whole sentences already. It made them speaking in their own language around her annoying and rude in her mind, and she had let this be known.
She stopped herself before she chided them on acting like she wasn’t there, since she remembered that she didn’t want to be there either. She didn’t even want to be looked at right now, and at least the light and nearly musical tones of their language made her forget her own arousal. She felt like she was quickly getting control of herself. Yet as long seconds ticked into even longer minutes, she began to lose that sort of wisdom. “Why am I still here?” she whined.
“Give it another few seconds and then I’ll stand you up,” Fie replied simply.
“Just relax, Eleanor. It’ll be over in a moment,” Graham chipped in, waving his hand as if she was just being hypersensitive.
“Every moment I’m forced deal with shit like this,” she told him, “is another moment where I am plotting my revenge. It will be swift,” she assured, “and it will be terrible.”
“I have no doubt,” Graham said, but with an annoying pedantic tone she didn’t appreciate at all. He and Fie exchanged a few words then, and blessedly, Fie finally released his hold on her.
She stood up very slowly, reaching back for her pants at the same time and clumsily trying to pull them up. Not that it mattered, she knew. They probably had seen everything she was now trying to contort herself to hide.
“Believe it or not,” Fie said with an aloof air that she felt lacked apology, “you’ll be glad you took the serum in just a day or two.”
“I bet,” she seethed. “Can I go now?” she then demanded, wanting to burn the place down.
Graham gave her a chiding look, but then stepped aside from the door. “Sure. You know, if you’d like, I have a couple of hours before I take the helm if you’d like to—”
“Kick you in the nuts better be the end of that question. And yes. I would like to do that!” she bristled, unable to even conceive of how large his balls had to be to think she’d fuck him right now. Not that she wasn’t in the mood—her hormones were her worst enemy nowadays—but she would easily deal with that if it even brought the tiniest amount of displeasure to him.
She pushed by him, pointing up her middle finger as she went.
She heard Graham’s footsteps behind her soon afterward. He walked slower, but his gait was so long that it didn’t take many steps before she felt him grab her upper arm and spin her around to look at him in the hallway. “For the record,” he began, his voice crisp and his face pinched with frustration. “I don’t care that you didn’t like that. It was necessary. I have had to deal with your attitude for the last couple of weeks, trying to please you, but your determination to not make any aspect of our relationship smooth for me is becoming daunting. Why can’t you just learn to cope with things? Why can’t you even try to meet me halfway?” He gave her a little shake. “You’re not stupid. You know how to make things go more smoothly, but you seem to want to pretend that I mean nothing to you and I’m forcing you to be here against your will.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she returned stiffly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. After all, you’ve been kidnapped, molested, then forced into some sort of cosmic marriage with someone nearly two feet taller than you who loves to chastise you like a child in public or wherever he wants and forces you to do things you don’t want at every turn. Especially with the stress you might be feeling over your identity and trying to cope with your physical reaction to someone you wouldn’t even have had a second date with if you had your druthers.” She tilted her head to the side and said, “No, wait. That was me.” And then she spun back around to continue stomping off.
He turned her back around and he wasn’t quite as cowed as she hoped her set-down would have made him. “You’re not the only one with a story. You’re not the only one forced into this relationship!” he hissed. After he said it, however, regret filled his face and he softened his tone. “And we’re not the first. Lots of people have trouble adjusting in the first year. We’re getting used to each other, and we’re bound to be one of those couples. We came from very different lives and have had very, very different experiences. The Union will tie us together in the end, and sooner if you let it.”
“It would help if you stop being a pompous, overbearing dickhead!” she snapped.
“And it would help if you stop being a whiny, belligerent, dramatic brat!” he shot back.
Then once again, the heat swirling from her loins to her chest, their bodies slammed together and she was pressed up against the wall with her arms and legs wrapped around him, her fingers digging into his hair, and their tongues warring against each other, in the span of a second.
There really was no getting away from this asshole.
* * *
As Graham kissed his little mate for all he was worth, it did strike him with a bit of shame that she knew exactly where his buttons were already. She was already getting foul-mouthed again, and he was just letting it happen. It seemed like there was always so much to fight her about.
But even fighting her was sexy. He couldn’t exactly explain it, because he didn’t understand it himself, but when she was arguing with him, he normally got as hard as a rock. This was no exception. And now, when he should either be taking his belt to her sassy rear end, or at least pulling his own hair out by the roots with frustration, he had her up against the wall, was between her legs, and had started grinding his hardness across her belly.
He could blame this urgency to be inside her on the sickness, but he was sure that it had already passed. This passion was going to be, God help him, their new normal.
“You drive me out of my mind,” he growled at her.
“Is that why you are how you are?” she asked breathily between deep, tongue-twining kisses.
“A-hem.” Graham and Eleanor turned toward the direction of the forced cough and noticed Braum standing in the hallway, a tablet in his hands, looking at them expectantly.
That was when Graham realized that he was going to mount her in the hallway. Graham grumbled, grabbed Eleanor by the arm—none too gently—and strode down the hallway until they reached their room. He pulled her inside and, as soon as he shut the door behind him, grabbed her and half-carried her over to their unmade bed.
She was still angry with him, if her expression meant anything, but she kissed him back anyway. When thrown down on the mattress and covered with his body, she still spread her legs apart to accommodate him.
After a moment lost in each other’s heated embrace, he pulled himself up and flipped her over. She gasped at the suddenness, and then tried to get up on her elbows as he quickly tried to get himself out of his pants.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as he pushed her chest down until her cheek was pressed against the mattress, then pulled her pants and panties down to her knees. Her bottom squirmed around like it was shy, even frightened of him.
He grabbed her bottom gruffly with his hands, splaying his fingers across it easily. He then pressed his thumb against her bottom hole, causing her to hiss. One day he was going to be inside of her right there, he promised himself, pounding his whole length into that tight little tunnel. Some women had to be stretched before that, and she was surely one of them, but he had no doubts that she would give him plenty of reason to stretch it over the next few years.
He grunted with excitement, grabbed his length, and guided it to her little cunny, which was warm, welcoming, and practically dripping. She might have not gotten along with him very well, but her womanhood didn’t know that.
As soon as he touched his length to her wetness, she moaned. He ground it into her little pussy and then aimed and pushed into her with a hard thrust.
“Fuck!” she groaned, her head bobbling slightly with the power of the thrust. “Graham, Jesus. You’re so fucking deep.”
“I need to wash your mouth out again,” he said, and meant it—although he had no intentions of doing anything right now except fucking the stuffing out of her.
She growled at him, but he grabbed her hips, hoisted up her bottom, withdrew almost all the way out of her, and then quickly drove his hard rod all the way back in again.
She let out a half-moan, half-cry and tried to get up on her hands. He pushed her upper back until her face was again on the mattress, her bottom up where he wanted it. Then he fucked her, as long and hard as he wanted, and she held her grip on the sheets and took what he gave her.
She was moaning loud and he was grunting with effort, humping her like an animal, like he’d wanted to do the first moment he’d touched her. Nothing seemed more soothing or cathartic than this. This is exactly where he wanted to be, and what he wanted to be doing.
He could feel her body tense up, and he gritted his teeth. He gave her a firm smack on the ass and she responded with an angry “Grah!”
“Don’t you dare come yet!” he said firmly. “I’m not done yet!” The pressure was mind-boggling as she came anyway—of course she did. He fought not to come with her. He didn’t want to stop, so he rode her out like she was a bucking stallion, holding on.
This actually made her louder; her moans were echoing off the walls, her bottom was meeting his thrusts. He grabbed a fistful of her long copper hair and rode her faster than ever. “Grah-ah-am!” she cried, and then she began to tense and tighten more than before.
This time he couldn’t hold on. He groaned as if he had been holding his breath, and as her greedy loins squeezed his cock, he flooded the well-fucked channel with his seed.
Afterward, he practically fell on top of her. They were both panting until she said in a smothered whine, “You’re heavy.”
He exerted himself enough to pull out of her warm wetness and then lay down next to her. They were both exhausted, but he was surprised that, despite how roughly he had claimed her and how angrily they argued before, she still turned into him and put her head on his shoulder.
“You’re sweaty,” she commented flatly.
“Yeah,” he panted in agreement. He put his hand on her bottom and pulled her even closer.
“Was that hate-fucking?” she asked, her tone simple.
He’d never come across that term. He couldn’t think of one like it even in Swarii. But he shook his head adamantly. “Of course I don’t hate you. Believe it or not, you are not the first argument I’ve ever had. That wasn’t even the first time someone called me pompous and overbearing.” He closed his eyes, feeling exhausted. “It did make me feel better about it, though.”
He thought about apologizing for the rough, passionate, angst-filled lovemaking, but then didn’t. He wasn’t sorry, and she didn’t sound like she thought he should be either. He felt her eyelashes blink against him, and he thought she had fallen asleep until she spoke.
“I don’t feel properly satisfied at all,” Eleanor pouted. “Now I really want cake.”
* * *
There were a couple of good things about being an alien after all, Ellie concluded, eyeing the hovercycle she’d just put together using foreign parts, foreign tools, and an old tweaky tablet with plans written in a foreign script. And one of the good things was that apparently aliens were able to put things together quickly. Language had seemed to be one of those things.
She hadn’t been there when Graham, Thorton, Fie, or Braum had learned English. They had been holed up in a cave for six months with humans, however, which she figured would be enough time to really learn a language. But Jio, who had never even heard a word of English before meeting her, had asked if she would like to split a dessert package with him the other day. She had been extremely surprised that he could put a whole sentence together and even understand her response, especially since he must have been learning English in the most casual way possible.
But then, just a couple of days after getting her ‘injection,’ she suddenly realized that she understood something of the electronic tablet she’d been fooling around with. The language was beginning to make sense, and she was beginning to remember a lot of the words she’d learned and been exposed to. A week later, she found that she could now also piece together strings of Swarii words into a sentence, however choppy that sentence may be.
And that wasn’t the only thing that was getting weird. She was also getting… smarter. Oh, she always knew she kicked ass in putting just about any machine back together, but she had never experienced clarity of thought like she had now. Things just seemed too easy now. She could almost feel her brain working at full speed.
Her workspace was beginning to look more like a mad scientist’s lab than anything else. She had half-built machines lying around, tablets hung on walls and open to a variety of images and words. Tools were strewn about and black and blue grease stained the floor and walls.
Now, it was time to test the hoverbike. She was excited about it, although the seat sat so high that it was practically at her head. She pulled a chair next to it, hoping to climb on it that way. If she was reading the manuals right, then it should work, and work well. Just in time. She was hoping to be able to use it when they made it to the space outpost where they were going to sell the ship. Supposedly the outpost was about the size of a small moon, and they were planning to find a buyer while they waited to be picked up by a representative from a Swarii mothership.
She was excited. Even as she climbed clumsily on it, she felt like she was a badass. It brought to mind her brother and cousins, just because she was sure that they would be mad jealous if they saw what she was sitting on. The only thing missing from this experience, she decided, was a pair of shades, a leather jacket, and the song ‘Bad to the Bone’ playing. She frowned as a sudden nostalgia hit, but she hoped that once she turned the hovercycle on, all bad feelings would go away.
She was wrong. Instead of the ‘vvvr—vrrooom!’ sound she was hoping to hear, all she got from turning the ignition was the sound of a plane roaring to life. It wasn’t exactly what she was going for; it hurt her ears, and the longer it was on, the louder it seemed to be. She rushed to turn it off, planning to continue when she’d found a pair of earplugs. But instead of turning it off, a button was slightly pushed by the side of her hand and the hovercycle lurched forward. It hit the wall at full force, sending her flying off.
People were running into the room, she distantly noticed, as she was seeing stars and trying to assess if she’d just broken herself. Thorton and Graham were the first at the scene. They took less than a second to assess what to do before Thorton launched himself at the hovercycle, which was still trying to speed through the wall, to turn it off, and Graham was at her side on his knees, looking her over with startled concern. He was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make it out over the roaring from the machine.
“Eleanor!” he shouted as soon as the sound turned off, which was as sudden as a light switch.
“What?” she shouted back, reaching up to rub her head.
“Are you alright?” he asked her, his voice now much quieter, but he seemed much calmer than he had before she reached up to assess herself.
She didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t feel okay. Slamming into the wall knocked the wind out of her, and she hurt everywhere. “I don’t think anything’s broken,” was her optimistic but pained reply.
When she looked up at him, she saw him searching around the room, seeming to take everything in. He had the expression of someone who discovered their friend had built a pool of jello in their bedroom. “Is this what you’ve been doing for the last few weeks? What is this place?”
She looked around but didn’t see anything interesting except Thorton pulling her hovercycle back to standing with surprising ease. “What do you mean? It’s my workshop.”
“With…” He picked up his hand and seemed incredulous to find that his palm had been stained with bright blue machine grease. “What—How—Where—When—Why—?” he stuttered, starting a singular sentence as many times as possible. “I can’t…” he grumbled and, looking down at her, he pulled her up to sitting and said, “Did you make that or carry it from somewhere?”
“That thing weighs at least five times more than I do,” she replied flatly, already feeling a headache coming on. “What do you think?”
He gave a thick, exasperated sigh and began to gather her up into his arms.
“Is she okay?” Thorton asked, coming up behind Graham.
“I’m taking her to bed. Get Fie to come to our room,” Graham ordered him.
“Urgh,” she groaned. He lifted her body and held her against his chest as they left the room. “I don’t need Fie. I’m fine. I just—”
“Put together a hovercycle and then tried to…” he paused, searching for a word for a moment then wincing with confusion, “ride it? In a room the size of a closet?” He shook his head. “I feel like I should be impressed, but you ruined that for me.”
“I was making sure it worked,” she assured, also feeling exasperated. “I wasn’t going to ride it. I was going to wait until we got to the space station tomorrow.”
“Listen, I’m going to be very clear on this,” he said after a long pause. He opened the door panel with his elbow and took her inside. “There is absolutely no reason in existence for you to step foot outside of this ship when we land.”
Aghast, she began to whine, “Why—?”
“There are so many reasons why,” he cut her off, “that I don’t even have time to get into it. Even if the space station was safe, and filled with cuddly creatures or something of that sort that could pose no threat to you, Mary, or anyone else, it would still be near-freezing, uncomfortable for you, and you’d slow down our mission drastically.”
Her eyebrows instantly narrowed. “You’re taking Peyton!” she exclaimed, incredulous.
“And if he slows us down or gets in our way, I’m sending him back to the ship. His safety isn’t exactly my priority, in any case. He’s not a female, and he’s not my mate. What he does is completely up to him.” By the determined frown on his face, he seemed to think that she should be used to decisions like this, like it was obvious.
She distantly wondered if this had been what it was like growing up as Penny. Her smaller cousin had always been treated differently just because she was a girl, whereas with Ellie, they had always just conveniently forgotten what sex she was. It felt just as unfair as she had imagined.
“Do you listen to yourself talk? Or do you just repeat what comes out of your ass?”
Graham clenched his teeth, and she saw a vein in his neck begin to bulge. Graham, she had long recognized, probably wanted to throttle her at least half of the day, but luckily the other half wanted sex, which seemed to keep him just sane enough not to. Every now and then, however, she did worry that he was going to lose it. “I am tired of this, Eleanor. Whether you respect me or not, you’d better start at least acting like it or I don’t care if you ever sit again. And if you think I’m not making a very literal threat, then think again.”
She worried, for a moment, that he would be upset with her enough to actually start ‘putting his foot down,’ and so pouted, “I’m injured, and you’re threatening me?”
His eyes narrowed, filled with suspicion. “Only because you were building something you knew I wouldn’t approve of,” he replied, although from his frustrated tone, she could tell that he wouldn’t ever spank her when they were waiting for the doctor, at the least. As much of an asshole as she thought he was, she decided that he wasn’t a malicious asshole. He was just unbearably stubborn with an added ailment of being intolerably responsible. The fact that he was the one of the youngest commanders in his fleet, from what she’d been told, she found unsurprising: he didn’t seem like the type of man who liked to have a boss. He was the type who thrived on being the most important person in the room.
She was positive that, if they had been on Earth living in the same town and on the same street, they still wouldn’t have met. Their lives and mannerisms were so completely different that they probably wouldn’t survive being in the same line at the grocery store. Yet here they were—annoying each other, and eternally bound to one another.
“If I worked in the private sector,” Fie said conversationally as he walked inside the room without knocking, “I’d be making a small fortune from you, Commander.”
Graham’s frown lines all deepened. In the fluorescent lights in the room, she felt like she could witness him aging before her.
With a mighty sigh, Graham explained what he had walked in on.
“I’d heard from Mary that you were working on a secret laboratory in the engine room,” Fie admitted to her as he shined a light into one of her eyes without further prompting. “I thought she was exaggerating. Humans do that, you know—they are the universe’s greatest storytellers.”
“Thanks for putting that stereotype out there for me to enjoy,” she said dryly.
Fie shrugged without apology and then, after looking thoroughly over her neck and back, claimed that she only had a few bruises on her neck and shoulders, but luckily no concussion or anything else that a couple of days wouldn’t cure on its own.
“She’s lucky,” he said to Graham, although more as if it was an explanation for why she wasn’t hurt than an observation. He then looked back in her direction and raised an eyebrow. “How did you put something like that together without any directions or anything?”
“I had directions,” she replied.
“Not in your language,” he reminded.
She shook her head. “No, but I’ve picked up a lot of your language,” she replied haughtily, puffing out her chest a little bit with unhidden pride. “You don’t need a big vocabulary to read directions.”
Graham said something to her in Swarii immediately after that, and she couldn’t catch a word. After a moment of looking at him, she turned back to Fie. “Well, it’s easier when reading.”
Fie looked at least slightly impressed by this. “That’s excellent. You understand shal’ta, so you can communicate a little that way. You can at least understand what others are saying to you if they use it. If it wasn’t for your endless stream of antics, I’d say you’ll be able to integrate into our planet’s society like a fish to water.” He looked up at Graham and added, “Braum told me to inform you that we heard from Mothership Starscape 5-13. It’s meeting us at the rendezvous.”
Graham’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and then she saw a definite wince. “Five-thirteen?” he echoed, a groan escaping his tone.
Fie nodded, but she came alert at Graham’s expression. He suddenly seemed very tense. “What’s so special about that ship?” she asked.
“It’s under Admiral Masterson’s command,” Graham replied, his throat sounding dry. This wasn’t surprising, then. She had heard of Admiral Masterson from the others. Graham’s men used him as a ghost story. Apparently, the admiral was a cranky old asshole that expected the impossible and crashed down hard on everyone who couldn’t give it to him.
These stories, of course, meant nothing to her when she heard them, but then she frowned, something tickling the back of her head. Finally, she realized that the last name was similar to Graham’s, but she wasn’t sure about that. She had trouble pronouncing Graham’s surname correctly, just like she had some trouble pronouncing his real first name correctly—although she had long given up on that—but it was possible that this Admiral Masterson had a name only similar to Graham’s. Like Smitt and Smith or Johnson and Johnstone.
“Ah,” she said, and nodded like she knew why Graham was tense. “So? It’s not like you did something wrong on your mission.”
“Except now he’s going to try to criticize my matehood and how I handle you,” Graham grumbled, standing up and pacing to the window.
She pursed her lips at this. “Well, tell him it’s none of his business.”
“He’s my father, Eleanor. It’s unlikely that he’d view it that way,” he sighed as he reached the window that merely showed a lightless, empty darkness with a few white specs out in the far distance.
Ellie snapped her neck in Fie’s direction, but he didn’t look interested in her surprise. He was reading something on the undersized tablet in his oversized hands with deep concentration. So she just sat there, feeling stupid with nobody to confide her surprise in. Maybe she should have figured it out. She had heard Thorton refer to Graham’s father as being an admiral, but then Graham had always talked about Admiral Masterson as ‘the admiral’ or ‘Admiral Masterson.’ Not ‘my old man’ or ‘Pops’ or even ‘Father.’
Fie excused himself now, saying that he’d check back later, but all his absence did was compound the silence in the room. “So you think your dad wouldn’t like me, I take it?” she assumed, deciding to restart the conversation.
“I have no idea what he’ll think.” He turned around, his hands behind his back. “But I want you to stop your fool-play right this very moment, Eleanor. No more secret laboratories. No more accidents. No more fights. No more attitude. It stops. It must stop. We should have adjusted to each other’s temperaments much more over the last three weeks. You can’t keep speaking to me with disrespect, and you have to stop being belligerent and poking around at things that aren’t any of your business.”
“Hey, just stop being an asshat and making asshat requests of me and we’ll be dandy as candy,” she shot back, trying not to let his demands raise her pulse.
What Graham wanted wasn’t exactly rocket science. It had taken a little while for her to really learn what his culture wanted in a mate, but then she realized that what the ‘Swarii normal’ was, was also exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t a trendsetter. He wanted someone meek, biddable, even maternal, who would take his guidance and protection with beauty and grace.
Instead he got a scrappy, saucy little half-breed. She understood his disappointment because she had really wanted to marry… well, a dildo. Unfortunately, she ended up getting a man who had opinions that she would have to consider or resist with an unbearable amount of whining.
Still, when Graham punched the wall suddenly with a hard, thundering ‘bang,’ she was startled. “Call me an asshat one more time. Because I’ve put up with enough from you. Start acting female, already!” he boomed, his tone calm and his voice loud and threatening. “That’s an order.”
She felt her shoulders pinch with tension and she was holding in breath, which she let out slowly and calmly, telling herself that Jonases don’t get intimidated by anyone. “Are you seriously trying to order me to stop working?”
“On machines? On parts and in dirt and…” He bit his lips and took a deep breath as well. “Yes! I am ordering you to stop working.”
She felt her throat constrict, and was unable to swallow it back open. Trying to fight the feeling, she choked, “I’m good at it.”
“You’re good at doing what you shouldn’t do and being where you shouldn’t be and touching what you’re told not to! You’re going to hurt yourself if you continue on this path. I have no time to argue with you. You’re going to start following orders. Today. Right now.” If he did notice her having a mental breakdown, he didn’t react to it. He merely walked to the door and stomped out. She imagined if he could have slammed the door, he would have done so.
She sat there in the emptiness of the room, listening to her heart beat and trying not to cry. She stabbed her fingers through her hair and then pulled her knees to her chest and looped her arms around them. The mere notion of not working on things was making her stomach churn. If she thought of her future, she was always working in it. Now, when she tried to think of herself actually obeying Graham, if only because even she believed that there was an amount of spanking that would make her be agreeable, then she couldn’t think of any reason for her existence. Where was the purpose of living without work and problems to solve? Even when she had first been abducted, she had been problem solving escape plans and trying to figure out Frian technology.
Her eyes darted around the room, trying to let her gaze settle on something, anything at all, that would help her clear her thoughts, but she couldn’t find anything soothing. So she thought of her family, trying to remember some funny memory to keep her panic from rising in her chest, but then she just thought about what they would say if they were there.
They would all just snort and tell her to tell Graham to go fuck himself. Her big brother would look for something clever to say and fall short. “You don’t have to do shit except eat, sleep, and die.” And then her cousin, Tom, would probably add something that he thought was deep like, “What’s he gonna do for an encore? Tell a bee to stop fucking harvesting and hive-building and start acting like a fly already?” And then Tim would probably add, pulling his lips from a bong, “Did you guys ever watch the Jeff Goldblum version of The Fly? That was some fucked-up shit.”
And Penny? Penny was young, and not wise, but she called it like she saw it. She’d probably just say, “The sex better be amazing if you’d rather have that than your identity.”
The problem was, it wasn’t just the sex. There was a strong part of her that called her to be with Graham, but that was beginning to make her wonder if he felt the same way. If so, why wouldn’t he meet her halfway?
Surely, if she figured out something amazing—invented something that the Swarii really needed—then Graham would have to let her keep working. If he had to trade his comfort for his people’s good, he’d do it. He’d been tortured for his people, he’d die for them. He could certainly be an asshole, but at the end of the day, he was a good leader.
“Okay,” she told herself out loud, and it felt good to hear herself let out a calm breath and stop the stifling stillness around her. “So, I just have to do something nobody’s done before and do it before Graham sees me or knows what I’m doing so he won’t stop me.” He wasn’t going to like that, she realized. She wasn’t just going to have to do something genius—she was going to have to pull it off smoothly without a hitch.
Pulling things off without a hitch was the problem. She normally always hit a hitch or two. She was going to have to recruit someone smoother, wiser, and generally more well-liked than she was to give her some space, time, and ability to pull this off.
She smirked. Luckily, she had an ally nearby who fit all those requirements. All she needed to do was talk her into it, then start planning whatever impossible thing she was going to do next!