She’s damp from the shower, and re-dressed in her spacesuit. It suits her very well, but I want to get her something prettier. Shorter, perhaps. A skirt, maybe. I wonder if she’d enjoy such trappings, or if she’d prefer something she could do things with. A little shuttle, when she is trained and I can trust her not to take off and escape.
“Eat up, pet,” I say.
She frowns a little. “Still on the pet thing?”
“Still on the pet thing?” I sit down across from her. “This is not a thing.”
“You don’t even remember my name, apparently,” she says.
She’s right, but I don’t need to remember her name when I can feel all she is in her mind.
“It’s Mara Bennett,” she says.
“Cute name,” I reply. “Would you like me to use it instead of pet?”
She shakes her head without responding. I can feel her mind. She wants to say yes, but she doesn’t entirely mean it. She likes the way the word pet makes her feel.
I, for the moment, let her think she still has her mind to herself. It won’t be possible to keep that illusion up forever. I’m not good at keeping my abilities secret, and it’s best she knows everything I can do sooner rather than later.
“I like the term pet, Mara, but it is what you are. I am going to keep you confined until I am sure that you have not run away. Humans bond through intimacy, so I am sure that you’ve already started to feel a closeness to me…”
“That’s so calculated!”
“It sounds that way,” I admit, leaning over her, grazing my teeth against the side of her neck. Her soft skin bears a series of small puncture holes where I bit her before. “My desire for you is anything but calculated. It’s pure instinct.”
I watch her shiver, and I breathe in the flush of pheromones released when she hears my words.
“And you want me the same way,” I tell her. “I know you do. You belong to me, pet. You have from the moment I pulled you out of that cracked egg of a ship, dripping wet and wide-eyed and ready to be taken.”
She mumbles into her toast and gives up some of the fight. She doesn’t want to win it anyway. She just can’t accept her place yet. I can feel her confusion, the warring impulses, and the anxiety about the important thing she’s thinking about on a deeper level almost always.
* * *
Mara
I don’t know why I am arguing with him. He’s a mind-fucking Psyon. I’ve heard rumors about how they are capable of getting into people’s minds, and moving time, and doing all sorts of fuckery. He calls me pet because I’m not his equal in any way besides the flesh. I kind of get it, even though it feels like a slight as well as something kind of sweet and very hot.
There’s something about breakfast the morning after the night before that’s giving me big walk of shame energy even though I am not walking anywhere.
Fortunately for my growing sense of blushing awkwardness, there’s a knock at the door.
Freak answers it. Someone is looking for Caducaeus Stendate. Freak goes out into the passage to speak to the man. I bet we’re about to be kicked off. Or maybe the researchers have traced him here and found him, and they’re going to drag us both off, and then I’ll be experimented on…
I am catastrophizing at full speed, and things are getting worse by the moment. Mostly imaginary things, but with the recent events in my life, I feel as though freaking out is probably the right thing to do.
I don’t want to be kidnapped by an alien who tells me his name is Freak and everyone else that his name is Caducaeus. I don’t want to be an owned pet, even if the sex is hot. I’ve got stuff to do. I have an important mission to complete.
Now that Freak isn’t in the room with me, my head is starting to clear. I could blame him for messing with my mind, but I think I let my mind mess with me enough that he doesn’t really have to do anything special and alien to me. I got all swoony over him. I got distracted by how hot and advanced and mostly naked he is. I have control over my own mind. He might be able to read it, but he’s not making me do anything… is he?
Then again, something definitely happens to me when I’m in his presence. He swept me out of danger on my ship and now when I am with him, I feel a kind of safety I’ve only been able to imagine of late. I used to know it, but then it was taken away from me.
Whatever the reason, now that he’s not bewitching me with his golden alien eyes, I feel more like my usual self—and myself doesn’t wait in rooms while aliens hold her captive and wait for her to accept that she belongs to them as her pet.
I sneak up to the door and listen. I don’t hear anything. I crack the door open, and I don’t see him either. They must have gone off somewhere to do something.
We’re well underway on this voyage, but I may be able to find a life pod and make an escape that way.
I pad away down the hall, heading toward what I hope is an emergency exit. A ship like this can be labyrinthian.
