by H. E. Trent
Jasper grunted weakly and covered his eyes with his forearm. “And brought a spectator to witness my pathetic writhing, huh?”
Sera closed her eyes and idly rubbed her thumb against the strap of her sling.
Men.
Just when she thought she was starting to grasp their idiosyncrasies, there was some disruption that made her realize that she truly knew nothing at all.
Or maybe they were the ones who didn’t know anything.
“We need to discuss some things,” Sera said pointedly, opening her eyes. “I don’t see where us dancing around the subject would do any of us any good. As we’ve already established, I’m not going to stand idly by and be the quiet Jekhan woman who simply lets things happen around her without having any input.”
“So, should I speak my piece, or—”
“No,” she interrupted, lifting her chin and locking Jasper in her gaze.
He closed his mouth like a good little invalid.
“I’m going to talk.” She nudged aside the pile of clothes on the chair near the bed and sat with her hands folded atop her lap and legs crossed at the ankles. She stared at him brazenly and waited for his eyebrow to drop. “I think your wager pool is disgusting.”
“Shit. I don’t have a good argument for that.” He rubbed his neck and stared at the ceiling.
“Nor should you.”
“I never even thought of what I would say if any outsider ever caught me. Never crossed my mind. And I guess, I figured if I wanted any shot at all with finding a partner around here, then I had to do what everyone else was. If everyone else is involved in the scheme and they’ve got claims on every single woman in town, the people who aren’t in on it are going to get cut out.”
“Did you not think that, perhaps, approaching the women you were interested in, pool or no pool, would have gotten you the same results?”
“That’s the thing—I wouldn’t have. I would have been cut off at the pass by the other people in the pool if they’d seen me approaching any of the women.”
She closed her eyes and rubbed the lids. The scheme was insanity. He had to understand that. “But, you do understand that Marco wasn’t involved and yet…”
“Yeah. He got the scoop.”
“So, you see where my logic is going.”
“I do.”
She opened her eyes in time to watch Marco set a shredded pork sandwich and a bag of root chips in front of Jasper.
“Eat a few bites and then get your medicine caught up.” Marco’s voice was stern, yet gentle. A teacher’s voice.
Jasper’s gaze darted from the food, then briefly to Marco before he tentatively pulled the corner of the sandwich wrapper.
“No arguments.” Sera wagged a finger at him. If he were going to behave like a child, she had no problem with scolding him as though he were one.
“I’m not gonna argue. I don’t feel good enough to argue.”
“Silly man.” She clucked her tongue and rolled her gaze to the ceiling. There were a couple of tiles askew, likely from Edgar doing work above. “I’ll never understand why men work against their best interests.”
“I think testosterone’s probably to blame.” Marco sat on the bed’s edge and leaned his forearms onto his knees. For a while, he sat quietly, tenting his fingers and staring down at his hands. The line between his brow furrowed, and she wanted to kneel and smooth it out. She’d prefer to see the sweet divots in his cheeks.
“I don’t want there to be any hard feelings,” he said finally. He was looking at Sera, though, not Jasper, as though her word was law.
It wasn’t. She was no better off than him—trying to advocate for herself and so fearful that she’d hurt people in the process.
“I want us to be friends,” he said. “If I’m a pussy for saying so, then whatever. I used to tell the kids in my classes that their words were important. So what if they didn’t say the ones folks expected so long as they got the feelings out.” He grimaced. “I try not to be a hypocrite.”
“Yeah. I try to do the same.” Jasper nodded slowly, his focus intent on chewing the sandwich that had been in the basket.
Does he like it?
She hoped he did. She didn’t want to feel like such a freakish aberration for enjoying the new Terran foods as much as she did. Simple things made her giddy with enthusiasm.
Erin and Courtney had been toiling over the meat all afternoon. The recipe was perfection, though Sera suspected that she would regret having eaten hers on wheat bread. Jekhan digestive systems weren’t fond of Terran grains, but Headron’s honey-wheat loaves had smelled so divine that she’d taken the risk.
Jekhans loved to share food—loved to consume the reactions of the people they gave it to. Feeding was an intimate thing.
And her fingers were suddenly beside his mouth where he’d smeared barbecue sauce, her thumb nudging away the stain.
Wrong. Wrong.
She pulled her hand away and nested it between her legs. Touching had become so reflexive as of late. She craved the sensuality of flesh on flesh, and exploring the skin and warmth of others. Her father had always done that. He’d been a toucher, and Sera had been, too, until some old lady in town had scolded her and said that she’d need to learn to refrain. Women always refrained, but that seemed wrong. If people needed nurturing, it didn’t matter who was giving the affection.
“Hey,” Jasper said with a dry chuckle. The haunting desolation in his dark eyes had receded somewhat. He didn’t look so bleak.
Good.
“Your left fingers are moving,” he said. “He pointed to the hand dangling from her sling. “You’re moving your fingers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you move them that much.”
“Oh.” She straightened the digits and peered at them. “I suppose I have been moving them more. My forearm doesn’t throb quite as much when I do.”
“Muscles are getting stronger,” Marco said.
“Perhaps so. I don’t know if I’ll ever have full use of my arm again, but being able to grab things in both hands will be useful.”
“How’d you get the injury?” Jasper asked.
She curled her fingers into a fist and let the sharp sting of her nails chase back the returning bullet of dread. Closing her eyes, she took a breath. She hadn’t let herself think about that day, because whenever she did, the horror lingered, and there was only so often she was willing to lay her emotional burdens on her sisters. They shouldn’t have had to relive the trauma again and again, either.
“Hey…shit,” came Jasper’s words spoken around a mouthful of food. “Sera, I’m sorry if that’s not something you want to answer. Believe it or not, I haven’t spoken with all that many Jekhan women since I arrived on the planet. I don’t know what’s allowed and what’s rude. If I’m out of line by asking, I apologize. I just—”
“No.” She shook her head, opened her eyes, and took a seat at the edge of the bed. “Don’t apologize.”
She stared at her numb fingers and let them curl naturally atop her lap. Once so dexterous and nimble, she had to work twice as hard to be nearly as productive as she’d been as a young girl. She’d been her sire’s best helper, and now she had to resort to setting stupid goals for herself to feel like she was still useful for the job she was meant to do.
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t ask,” she said quietly. “I simply don’t know how to answer.”
“Sera…” Marco said, just as quietly. “You don’t have to if you’re not ready.”
“But I need to. I’m tired of keeping the story all to myself, or burdening my sisters with it. They’d witnessed the horror, and had endured much of their own.” Even if they didn’t have the same sorts of visible scars to go along with their histories.
“Elken was around eighteen months old,” she started, and massaged the webbing between her left thumb and forefinger. “We’d all been recently sold. Not only my sisters and I, but most of the Jekhan women in the lot. The group had been more or less intact for ab
out a year. The men who pimped us weren’t during that time period interested in outright sales. They wanted to earn their investments back first, and then sell us off one at a time.”
“Sounds like they were treating you more like real estate than people,” Marco said. “Letting equity build without making any improvements.”
He was seated on the bed, too, leaning back on his forearms, crowding Jasper’s bum leg behind him. Jasper didn’t seem to mind. His dark gaze was fixed on Sera, his sandwich poised halfway between mouth and wrapper.
Comfortable. They were comfortable like that, and she wondered if they realized how near they were to each other. Wondered if they minded, because looking at them both at once wasn’t any kind of hardship. The sight of so much reclining masculinity verged on being sinfully decadent.
If they were like that all the time, I’d…
Well, she was greedy. Although Jasper had used a disgusting scheme to get access to her, she’d probably like having him in her little harem of sorts. Those kinds of thoughts could get her into trouble. She already had more than she’d ever hoped.
Averting her gaze, she dragged her tongue across her lips and moved her massage on to between the next two fingers. “Most of the time, we were on space stations, but in spite of how disreputable many are, they tend to have strict regulations about documenting the cargo that’s brought onboard. For all intents and purposes, sex slaves are considered cargo.”
“Like cattle,” Jasper said.
“Yes.” Her mouth had suddenly gone very dry. Swallowing was a chore. “The owners that we had at the time, for whatever reason, didn’t want the lot of women fully catalogued. He said something about needing to launder the list.”
“Same old shit,” Jasper said.
“What do you mean?”
Furrowing his brow, he brought the sandwich to his mouth, but didn’t take a bite. “I’ve heard of the scheme before. Lil had me and Salehi track a lot of the space pirates in hopes we’d root out some information about where the Jekhan women were being held, and a lot of the time, we’d find that they’d dump their ships and stocks somewhere and pick them up later. They change their identities and ship names. We’d lose the trail and would have to start over again.”
That’d been Sera’s experience quite a number of times, so she nodded. Happy, in a bittersweet way, that they’d been on the right track, even if rescue had been long delayed. “All the pirates had little moons or hard-to-access planetoids they used to stow their ships. My sisters and I had been more or less ignored in favor of younger women for many months, but we knew that trend wouldn’t hold up. We were stunned that we’d lasted so many years without getting separated, or that no one took Elken away from me after she was born. Many times, they took the babies.”
“What did they do with them?” Marco asked. “I can’t imagine there was a huge demand for Jekhan infant adoptions amongst the colonists.”
“We never found out what they did with the babies, but my sisters and I suspect that the pirates may have been selling them to the Tyneali. The possibility hadn’t dawned on us until Ais told us her story.”
“Damn,” Marco murmured.
“Another thing to have Lil look into when she checks back in,” Jasper said. “That’ll keep her from retiring for a while longer.”
“Who knows how long?” Marco murmured. “There’s no way of knowing where those children are now, if they’re even alive. She’d have to start an investigation from scratch knowing that many of the players have scattered into the winds.”
Sera nodded. “It’ll be difficult, yes, but perhaps as we get our fleets back into space, we’ll learn more about what transpired during the disruption years. That is my prayer, anyway. As I was saying…” If she got distracted, she’d pull away from the story. She’d leave the whole truth unsaid, left to fester on her psyche. Pinning her in the same endless loop of despair she’d been stuck in since arriving on Jekh. “We were being held on a small planet. Very dry and sparse. No foliage worth mentioning, and the fauna was rarely larger than a dog. The planet was undeveloped, of course. The air was quite thin there. I don’t think any of us ever adjusted to being so lightheaded all the time, and I think that was what our holders wanted. Of course, they had masks to help them breathe, but the women went without.”
“Fucking savages,” Jasper muttered.
She didn’t disagree. They were. “Occasionally, other ships would land at the base. Our holders would trade supplies with them, pass messages, and so on. Occasionally, they’d offer hospitality to their guests, which included their pick of the women.” She scoffed. “Apparently, there’d been some sort of dirty deal, and there was a fight. The visitors had claimed that our owners had left without paying for us, and that they’d needed nearly a year to catch up to them. While our holders were distracted with the fight, some of the men corralled the slaves, and I don’t know what happened. There might have been gunfire or someone might have shouted for us to run, but there was a stampede.”
“No. You’re not telling me the other women hurt you like that,” Marco said.
She shook her head vehemently and flexed her fingers. “Oh, no, not at all. They were like sisters to me, and tried to help me. They were pulling me along. I was holding Elken, you see, but I wasn’t moving fast enough. I got separated from my sisters because I was slow, and I remember hitting the ground and that someone scooped up Elken and kept running. I put my hands over my head as a reflex, like we all always did.” She demonstrated with her good arm, covering her face with her forearm and ducking her head. “I stopped counting blows after twenty. I kept wishing I would pass out, but I suppose part of me wouldn’t let my body shut down until I knew where Elken was. I saw Valen holding her when I was dragged onto the new ship. They were all in a big cage, and they tossed me in, too.”
“With no medical treatment,” Jasper said.
She dropped her arm and pulled in a deep breath. If she kept breathing, she could keep talking. “If I got any, I don’t remember. The last thing I can recall was Ara putting my head on her lap and the ship rumbling because the pilot was about to take off.”
“The men who took you then,” Marco said, his tone dark. “Were those the ones at the station where we found you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they now?” Jasper asked him. His voice was laced with a thread of abject hostility and anger Sera had never heard from him before, not even when he’d been arguing with Marco. The “cop” voice. Edgar had one, too. Rarely used, and that always made her feel all the more unsettled when she heard that tone of voice from them. They had smiles like angels, but there was no question that the men were dangerous.
But maybe that’s not bad?
If the “other” side had dangerous men, then they should, too. That was fair. Sera felt good about fair things.
“Some of them were brought here on one of the four ships that came back and then taken into Buinet,” Marco said. “I don’t know what the provisional government did with them.”
“I’ll find out,” Jasper said. His expression relaxed a bit, almost passable for his usual casual pleasantness. “I’ll get in touch with Lil and make sure the bastards are hurting right now.”
“That’s kind of you,” Sera said, “ but I don’t think that’ll make anything better.”
Jasper chewed his sandwich contemplatively, his dark eyes intense and focused on her as if he really saw her the way Marco did. As if he understood there was a creature with feelings and a personality inside the shell of her.
Could two men really care for her in that way?
An interesting situation for sure, considering that weeks ago, she hadn’t even wanted to deal with one Terran man. Now she was devoting serious mental energy to running scenarios about having two.
“You’ll feel better knowing they’re not happy,” he said after a while. “They did a cruel and nasty thing for a lot of years, and they’ll probably never show a shred of remorse. The very least that sho
uld happen to them is that they’re miserable and maybe even scared and worried. We want to make sure they never get to see Earth again, and that if they’re allowed to be in the company of women again, they would be scrubbing the floors the women walked on.”
“Give them a taste of hell here so they know what they have coming to them,” Marco said.
“Exactly. But maybe hellfire and brimstone isn’t enough, either.”
“True. I’m Catholic. I’ve had a few old ladies in the family who threatened us kids with some very creative everlasting punishments. How’s cyclical dismemberment sound?”
“Not sure if that would hurt enough.”
Sera dug the pad of her right thumb into her left palm and rubbed, smiling, in spite of the fact that the men were being quite morbid. “You’re kind to say that.”
“If you think that,” Marco said, “you’re far too forgiving for your own good.”
“I don’t think I am forgiving.”
“Yeah, you are. You may hold grudges, but I don’t think you actually want to hurt anyone, even if they need to be.” He leaned over and gave her knee a gentle caress. “You’re not a bad person if you want people who hurt people to suffer for what they’ve done. That’s normal. I think even my priest back at home would tell you that.”
“Not a turn-the-other-cheek kinda guy?” Jasper asked, chuckling.
Sera liked that sound a lot more than his cop voice. She’d been conditioned into believing that something bad was going to happen to her soon after a man laughed, but that mindset was changing. Good things happened when Marco laughed. The same could happen with Jasper.
“Nah. He was an Army chaplain for a lot of years,” Marco said. “I think he would have been the last person to advocate that particular credo. He was too practical.”
“My abuela would have liked him, then. She and the local clergy didn’t have the best relationship. She was too outspoken, too opinionated. Damn, I miss that old broad.”
Of course he did. He didn’t have anyone.
