Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Then, my father turns to me. “Do you know what changed—why was he so enraged?”
“You’re asking me?”
Didn’t he always say he asks a woman for nothing?
“Who else am I talking to?” my father demands.
In the doorway, Charles snickers.
I’d like to wipe both their faces of their ignorance and arrogance. Instead, I settle on confusing them. Or rather, just my father. Charles isn’t that important.
“I think he’s angry that I can’t help him,” I say honestly.
And that no one can help me, I add silently.
As expected, the answer isn’t what my father wants because it doesn’t fit whatever agenda he has in his own mind about Bothaki and his appearance on earth. He leaves me alone to my writing, still raging about the alien downstairs and how he’s played nice for long enough.
Those last words of my father’s, and what they might mean, make me shiver.
Charles follows my father not long after, but not before stopping to lean into my bedroom so I could hear him loud and clear as he tells me, “If you’re not careful, General Lockett might start to think you like it when the alien touches you, Selina.”
Those words make me feel something else entirely.
And yet again, all I can think about is Bothaki.
It’s far later that night, when I’m alone in my bed and I’m sure everyone else in the house is asleep, that I allow my mind to go back to that place. In the darkness of my bedroom, there isn’t a soul on earth that could see my hands sliding lower under the covers to where I can grab the skirt of my plain black nightdress to drag it higher. There’s nothing slow or careful about my movements.
I rush because I want it.
I’ve wanted it for hours.
My fingers dig into my thighs as I hurry to pull the dress up, and they aren’t the ones I want biting into my body, but the heat spreading through me is unbearable. I know how to fix that problem. Discovering my body was the best gift no one but me controls.
I’m hot and wet between my thighs when my fingers finally find paradise. Shamelessly so. I can tell by the damp gusset of my panties that my pussy hasn’t forgotten even a second of my time with Bothaki. Slick and throbbing, I shudder out breath after breath as I slide into myself and then out again, bringing that wetness up to my clit where I rub fast, hard circles.
My eyes stay shut, but that’s only because it’s easier to picture the face of the man I wish was the one bringing me to ecstasy. It’s not hard to imagine the look on Bothaki’s face—how I fantasize he would look exploring my body.
If the way he looked angry and ready to do violence could turn me on enough to finger myself in my bed in the middle of the night, I can only dream about what having him taste, touch, or even fuck me would do.
Never mind, what I would do for it.
And I believe that, wholly. Entirely, as I come around my own fingers making wet sounds against my body, I believe that I will do anything to have exactly that.
To have my mate with me.
But how?
NINE
“We’ll bring your mother out in just a few,” an attendant says.
He gives me a tight smile and I return it because I know he’s one of the attendants who’s nicer to my mother. Although, anyone else knowing that information could have him arrested. No one is supposed to be nice, and certainly not gentle, to the people locked away in the sanitorium. They, the women, anyway, are here to be corrected. Brought from disobedient and ungrateful to subservient and humble. Re-educated on the tenants of The New Order, until they embody them, until they never forget them again, or the ways used to teach them. To be shown the error of their ways, whether that was daring to deny their husbands a request, not strictly controlling and raising their children, or simply not dressing appropriately.
My mother was sent here for interfering with my father’s discipline of me. A very high offense within The New Order, to come between a father and the way he sees fit to shape his children into productive members of society. The only warning she or I had that further punishment beyond the savage beating he gave her was coming were his ominous words. What use are you to me if you cannot be of benefit to The New Order?
If one cannot benefit The New Order, then they do not deserve to have a place in The New Order. We were all taught that. My father locked her away, in the basement of all places, the very place he kept animals and the other humans he despised, to break them, to pick them apart. I cried at the basement door for her until my father had one of the servants lock me in my room. My mother and I were both his prisoners.