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“It is the same word for both, and I can see how this would be confusing,” Maldek says, giving my question more consideration than any guy I ever met before would have. “But to raskarrans they are the same thing, in a sense. We do not mate,” he catches himself with a grin, “we do not share in physical pleasure with another who is not our mate, the one we are supposed to spend our lives with, who shares in dreams with us.”
Surprise startles me out of my embarrassment for a moment. “You mean you’ve never…”
“I have never put my cock in another’s cunt before,” he says, and fuck that crude bluntness sends a shock of heat through my core. “I have never desired to before I saw you.”
That heat is back in his eyes, and part of me wants to just melt into it. But other parts of me fight it, insist I’m misinterpreting him still.
“Guys don’t… Military tier women like me, we don’t…” I curse my stammering, try to find some of his bluntness in me. “I’m ugly. I know that. I’m too tall, too muscular. They weren’t considering our faces when they chose who to pair with who in the breeding program. I’m not pretty and feminine like other women. Like Sam. And that was okay, because I never wanted to be desirable. I wanted to be a good soldier. Being tall and strong allowed me to be that. Everything else didn’t really matter.”
Maldek stares at me with utter confusion. “You think you are undesirable?”
The ‘are you out of your mind?’ rings clear in his tone, and I hate myself a little for how much of an ego boost that is.
“Look at me,” I say, gesturing towards my soldier’s body. Bred for fighting, not for beauty.
“I am? You are not like the other females. This is true. Khadija might learn warrior skills and Ellie might shoot well with a bow, but even they do not come close to your abilities. You have a warrior’s heartspace and a warrior’s body to match. You think I would not find this pleasing?”
Words stick in my throat, so I just show him, summoning the memory of my fellow soldiers with middle tier women, their wandering, grabby hands and obviously sexual attentions. I show him me and the other military tier women overlooked, stared at. I remember jeering comments thrown at me by other tiers and fellow soldiers alike. And then Brannigan pushing the packet across the table to me.
“The drug they take to… facilitate. You could take them too.”
I realise I’m standing, facing her, back in the memory. Just after she asked if I was aberrant, she reached in her drawer, pulled that packet out.
“I do not understand what she is saying,” Maldek says from right behind me.
“It’s a drug, a medicine. In the breeding program - someone in military tier, or perhaps one of the science tiers, pairs soldiers together based on their characteristics. So they pair a woman and a man who they think will have strong children. But the men don’t like us. We aren’t what they find attractive. This drug - it helps them to perform.”
“You mean it makes them want to put their cock in you, even though they did not before?”
“Yes.”
“But what about what you want?”
I give a hollow laugh. “Mercenia has very little concern about what we want when it clashes with what they want.” I gesture to the drug. “That’s why Brannigan is offering that to me. If I take it, it will make me want to have a cock in me. Enough to make the whole situation a bit more tolerable, anyway.”
“For when you are serving them on your back?”
It sends a visceral thrill through me how disgusted he sounds. The thrill only deepens when he wraps an arm round me from behind, drawing me into his firm chest.
“You have been made to feel that you are not worthy of a mate. I understand this, linasha. I have felt this also. After I failed to protect Sam, I struggled to understand why Lina would bless me with a mate, especially one so magnificent as you. But as you have shown me that I was wrong to blame myself for what happened with Sam, I hope I have shown you also that you are worthy. That my admiration for you runs deeper the more I learn of your strength and courage. That I find you the most beautiful of all the females, and I consider myself far more blessed than I have ever thought I deserved to be able to call you mine.”
My whole body thrums with the heat his words spark.
“But as I have said, raskarran and human headspaces do not always align. Perhaps you have seen something else in my actions. I do not act like those human males, touching and grabbing without first being sure that is what my female wants. That does not mean I have not wanted to touch, to squeeze, to taste.”
His lips brush over my neck, so hot it makes me shiver.
Before us, the scene changes, this time cycling through his memories of me. Us in the corridor of the Mercenia base, that first night in the dreamspace, coming up behind me as I faced off against the merka beast, getting washed in the stream. In all of these memories, I look different. Not in any physical way. I just… glow.
I’m seeing myself how he sees me.
Then the scene shifts again to him cutting my hair, and I see a new perspective on him, one I couldn’t have seen before with my back to him as it was. How delighted he looks to be close to me, helping me shave my hair down to the fine fuzz that was regulation for military tier men and women. Another one of the ways I’ve always thought myself ugly, but he’s beaming as he cuts away my longer locks.
“Back home, a woman with a shaved head is ugly,” I say.
“I liked your longer hair,” Maldek says, lips still pressed close to my neck. “But I like your shorter hair better.”
“Really?”
