Chapter Four
Hours after our first time, we lie together in the bed we vacated. He has massaged me into a soft, floppy state of relaxation, which combined with long awaited post-coital bliss leaves me relaxed for the first time in years. There is no tension in my body until he runs his hand across my bare belly with a dreamy motion.
“You may already be pregnant.”
“I’m not.”
He doesn’t listen. He’s caught in his own thoughts and he doesn’t understand.
“Likely not,” he agrees. “You will not be in your fertile period for another week or so. Then you will be properly bred.”
His words send a pang through the very core of me. The tender relaxation evaporates as my temper flares, and with it my determination to escape.
“In another week I’ll be so far from here you’ll need a dick the length of the Milky Way to fuck me.”
“You have an amusing grasp of your language,” he says, deadpan. “But you will not be going anywhere.”
“So I have no choice in this.” I look into his handsome, brutish face.
“What choice do you need? What choice is there? Nature does not give us choices. We are made for procreation.”
He’s an alien, but he sounds like every asshole male since the beginning of time. I can’t believe I was letting myself think that he was anything less than an utter monster. I push his hand from my belly and curl away from him, thoroughly expecting to be punished.
Instead, he lets out a chuckle and pats my rear gently. “You are in denial of so many things, my little human.”
I grit my teeth and lie still as the bed shifts beneath me. He stands up, pulls some light pants on, and leaves me alone. I wait until the bedroom door closes before burying my face in the bedding that smells like him and letting out a sob. I am so very frustrated, sad, and alone. He is alien. He does not understand. He has a single desire and a single goal and he intends to use me to achieve it. I have to get away from here. I have to escape.
I cry for what feels like hours, but is probably a fraction of that time and when my tears dry, I am more determined than ever. He thinks I’m a piece of fuck meat. Fine. That works for me. If he underestimates me, it will make it easier to escape.
As I start to feel better and stronger, I get out of bed and go looking for him. A sheet provides me with some modesty as I pad into the room where the stars spin slowly across forever. He is sitting on a couch, a tablet in his hand.
“Feeling better, little human?” He must hear me behind him. His senses are very acute.
I ignore his question and ask one of my own. “What are you doing?”
“I am studying your culture.”
I look over his shoulder to see that he is watching footage of a man putting glow sticks into a blender and turning it on. It’s from 2007, only forty years ago, but it seems like an eternity. I watch over his shoulder with a growing sense of nostalgia. I wasn’t even born when that man pureed a handful of glowing plastic and liquid but I feel connected to that time. Those were the last days of true humanity, a heyday they didn’t know enough to appreciate.
“Your species wastes a great deal of time in superfluous activities. You could have been conquering the stars had you not spent your days blending household items and…” He flicks between video feeds. “Using pressing machines to flatten balls of rubber bands. So much human potential has gone wasted for so long. Did you know that the Rathkari evolved ten thousand years after the first modern humans? Your species could have superseded ours easily. I could have been your prisoner, had your ancestors not wasted time on superfluous notions. By our estimates, humanity has wasted a combined total of more than a million years on mere entertainment.”
“That’s all you care about. Conquest and procreation.”
“It is not all I care about, but our species has goals. Goals every member understands. I do not work for myself. I work for those who will come after me, the millions of Rathkari souls yet to be born. My labors are in their service. Every hour I rest is one that will never be reclaimed.”
“What about the time you’ve wasted on me?”
He doesn’t look up from the screen as he answers. “Time spent on you is not time wasted. You will be the mother of millions.”
I turn away from him. He is so incredibly wrong.
* * *
I can hear her flitting around in a temper. If she keeps it up, I’ll give her what she needs, but for now I’ll let her have her little moment of churlish display. I keep a quiet eye on her as she approaches the large windows and sits beside them, staring out into space. As she looks, the tension drains out of her body, the clenched muscles of her jaw and neck slacken. She draws her arms around her knees, rests her head on the translucent panel, and settles down.
My affection has grown for her so quickly I have to work to contain it. It has been a matter of days and I find my every thought being of her. It was her fragility and beauty that drew me at first, but every hour that passes I find some new facet of her personality to fascinate.
She has a capacity for wonder that melts me. Since I found her, she has been nothing but a prickly little wretch, fighting me, fighting her own needs, refusing to acknowledge that I may have helped her in any way. I had already begun to love her for her strength, now that I have seen another side to her. The first time she saw the view she was utterly transfixed. I know what she was feeling. It was what I felt the first time I was taken into space, the first time my home world dropped away from my feet and I realized that we all truly live in absolute infinity.
She has a greater capacity for feeling and understanding than I had imagined she would. Humans are sentient and technically intelligent, but they are not our equals. That is what our species analysis strongly suggests, but sometimes she shows capacities that I think might even exceed ours. When she looks at me, I see depths to her gaze. There is an entire world behind her eyes. She arouses my curiosity almost as much as my lust.
I turn my eyes back to the tablet. Many species are difficult to learn about, but humanity has always had an exhibitionist streak so it seems, and they have recorded much of their recent history in text, image, and video records, everything from great events such as the first rocket to leave their atmosphere, to minutiae like eggs on bread. Nothing seems to have been too irrelevant or too mundane to document. Their libraries are incredible, numbering writings in the millions.
We have disrupted their world most terribly, and as I sweep through images of their cities, I feel a pang of an emotion I have not felt in quite some time. Guilt. It sits uncomfortably in my belly. It is not the mission of the Rathkari to preserve other worlds, but this one was quite unlike any other. If the invasion had not been left to the jumped-up son of a bureaucrat, more might have been preserved.
She rises from the window and comes toward me, not directly, but walking in a wide sweeping motion that takes her around the couches and back toward me from the side. I am being flanked by a very cute and still pouting young woman. I do her the service of pretending I don’t notice as she sidles toward me. I keep my eyes on the screen as she sits, at first a few feet from me, then closer and closer. Finally, her curves find my body, curling up against me as she keeps her head away from mine, as if she is in denial of the fact that she has come to me of her own free will and cuddled up like a domestic cat.
I lean over and drop a gentle kiss on her forehead, as a new feeling swells through me. Contentment. I do not know that I have ever felt it so fully before. With Era by my side, all is well.