Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“So your entire species reproduces artificially because the females got tired of the harassment.”
“Even when they lived on the same planet, the females lived separately, sometimes in larger groups with one male, but quite often living with their female kin and going off to find a buck when they were ready to be mated.”
“They don’t want to mate in person anymore?”
“Some of them do. They come here as courtesans and brides, but as you can imagine, the imbalance of genders has only made it more difficult for a female to live on her own terms here.”
“And you blame me for wanting to put an energy bolt through anybody who gets close to me? You’ve just described this planet as a kind of male-dominated gang bang.”
“I don’t know what a gang bang is,” he says stiffly.
“Yes, you do. The silver thing translated it.”
“Jem…” he says warningly.
“Gruff,” I growl back at him, because he doesn’t scare me. I can say gang bang if I want. “Gang bang. Gang bang. Gang bang.”
Not being privy to my thought process, Gruff is momentarily confused. He works it out, though, because he’s smart.
“What the… you are so disobedient. Even the suggestion you behave yourself is met with rebellion. What happened to you?”
“I survived a world of men. And I intend to survive this world of… bucking aliens too.”
“You have me,” Gruff says, rubbing my head in a way that is probably supposed to reassure me, but only messes up my braid.
“I have myself.”
He looks at me with that piercing green gaze and I wonder if I have offended him. I was trained to be independent, to not need any man. All my training was geared to help me survive in the wilds of any planet, anywhere. I don’t need him. And I’m not going to depend on him, especially not now that very dark thoughts are starting to assail me.
I turn to him with a question. “So, you have space flight, then. You have cities and high technology. You are an advanced civilization.”
“Well. Advanced enough,” he shrugs.
“So me being sent here was no accident. They wanted to land me among hordes of sexually ravenous males. And they sent me with a little goat, basically blood in the water to your kind, like sending someone into shark-infested waters with an emotional support bucket of chum.”
I can’t ignore the very obvious conclusion. I was betrayed. I was abandoned. I was left not only to die, but possibly to be ravaged to death. They knew, and they sent me here anyway.
“I need to get off this planet and back to my station,” I tell Gruff. “I need to get my revenge on them. I never did anything to deserve this. Sure, I might have been a pain in the ass, but I never…”
“What would happen when you got back to your station?”
“I would report them.”
“And they would be punished.”
“Yes. Maybe. No? They’d probably say it was an honest mistake.” I am verbally working through the plausible deniability of what was done to me. I thought we’d reached equality among mankind. But the men who run the EET are just shipping difficult women off to planets that make humanity’s tendency to patriarchy look like… I’m lost for similes. Basically, they’re consigning us to a fate worse than them, and that’s pretty fucking bad.
“You want revenge, but you won’t get it. You’ll get more pain.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because that is what vengeance always leads to. Revenge doesn’t really exist, Jem. It’s a concept the hurt strive for and imagine might satisfy their wounds. It doesn’t. Never has, and never will.”
“So I just let them hurt me? I let them get away with what they’ve done? I let them, and these wild things destroy everything I’ve ever worked for and I what… shack up with you and live happily ever after?”
“Sure,” he says. “Why not.”
“You’re here,” he tells me. “You can live here. With me. I can keep the males at bay. Of course, there may be understandings. Trade-offs.”
“What kind of trade-off?”
“They might, perhaps, like to watch us mate.”
I can’t believe he would say such a thing after the revelations that have just unfolded. I tell him that everybody I’ve ever known has fucked me over and he suggests I fuck for the public? His timing is atrocious, and so very male. He’s not thinking about my feelings. He is thinking about my form.
“I am not putting on a sex show for your desperate friends, Gruff. If you knew me better, you’d know not to so much as suggest such a thing.”
“You can act as offended as you like,” he says, “but you were soaked when Piam’s sons came. You dripped with lust. I think you would have given yourself to them if they had not left. He knew it too. That is why they departed so swiftly. We sense the chemistry too, Jem. You are not the only one who feels the heat.”