by Lance Berry
He said he wanted a list, because he wanted her to wear a different color every time she visited him. She was supposed to see him in a couple of days to get the new batch of pills that was to come in, and he wanted the list by then.
Finally, as she finished the list, she felt the familiar rush to her head. She unbuttoned her blouse and stared at her breasts in shame. Why had she been given such large breasts, she pondered. If they were smaller, if they weren’t so attractive, if she wasn’t in such good shape, perhaps Tallworth wouldn’t have taken notice of her, and what he did to her in his office would never have happened. Tears streaked her face as she tickled her brother’s lower lip and he opened his mouth, eager to taste the nourishment that he thought was coming from his mother.
She held the baby close to her, kissing his temple gently, and just let him take what he needed…
Hours later, while Peter was asleep in his crib and Sara was watching tv in the living room, there was a knock on Mara’s door. She lifted her head off the bed, feeling a pang of fear shoot through her heart as the door opened. But it was only her father, home from work.
“Hey, princess,” Mark said softly, a slight smile on his face.
“Sara says you’re not feeling well.”
Mara had to think a moment to recall the lie she had told her sister. It now seemed to her that her world was full of nothing but lies. “Yeah, Dad,” she said in a voice feigning weakness. “I…I just had a stomach ache or something.”
Mark sat on the edge of the bed, feeling her forehead. “You don’t feel warm, so it’s not a virus. Just a stomach ache? Are you sure?”
She stared at him for a second, pondering telling him the truth, as his question had given her the option for an out. But they had finally settled into a good and solid relationship, and she didn’t know if he would think that maybe what happened in Tallworth’s office was her fault. Maybe she shouldn’t have worn the black pleated skirt, showing off her legs, tempting any man who looked upon her. And there was still Peter’s health to think about…
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what it is. I just need to rest.”
Mark nodded. “Okay. Well, don’t worry about anything.
I’ve got the kids, I’ll take care of dinner. Maybe later, we’ll see if you can keep down some tea or some soup, okay?”
“Okay…maybe.”
Mark leaned down and kissed her on her cheek. “I love you,
Mara.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
Mark smiled again, caressed her cheek, and left the room, closing the door behind him. Mara rolled onto her stomach, buried her face deeply in her pillow, and cried for nearly an hour straight.
Kindergarten resumed for the new semester, and so Mara didn’t have to worry about tending to Sara during the early part of the day. She only had Peter to be concerned with, and picked her kid sister up from school at four in the afternoon, which wasn’t bad because she only had to contend with two children for a couple of hours before Mark came home to help.
Mara had tried to wean Peter from her own breast milk onto regular milk, but he didn’t take to it at all. She was amazed he could tell the difference, and so had no choice but to continue taking the lactastisis pills in order to nurse him. And of course, she eventually ran out once more…
“Good afternoon, Mara,” Emily said pleasantly as the teen rolled Peter’s stroller into the waiting room outside Tallworth’s office. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” Mara replied neutrally, unable to force a smile on her face. She sat down in a chair and briefly looked herself over: short black skirt, button down white shirt and mini-stilettos …just like he wanted. She checked on Peter, who was gurgling happily, looking around at the environment with an infant’s wonder, as his brain became accustomed to the surroundings once more.
A magazine caught Mara’s attention from the corner of her eye, and she picked it up. It was the latest issue of U-Front, the magazine exclusively devoted to news on the war and the soldiers who fought it. She leafed through it, reading about recent losses and victories for United Earth Force in distant star-systems, the most recent captains and flag officers to make headlines, and projected upgrades in the next class of Heavy Cruiser: the mile-and-a-half-long behemoths which safeguarded Earth against the Calvorian menace.
Mara sighed forlornly. She missed the Citadel and its disciplines. She missed the friends she had made there, and the courses she had taken in command principles. She had dreamed of becoming a Heavy Cruiser captain one day, taking the fight straight to the enemy and shoving it down their throats. And now what did she have? Two children to look out for, who both were not and in some strange way were her own, and secret moments pleasuring a man she couldn’t stand because she had no choice.
I should never have come home, she thought bitterly.
The receptionist said something, but lost in thought as she was, Mara only caught the last few words. “I’m sorry, what—?” she said as she tossed the magazine back on the table.
Emily chuckled good-naturedly. “I said that it’s a slow day today. Doctor Tallworth should be with you shortly.”
Mara nodded absently. “Okay…”
Emily stared at her oddly a moment. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Before Mara could begin to form a reply in her head, the door to the exam room opened, and a young woman stepped out, holding the hand of a sniffling four year-old boy. Tallworth followed her out, patting her on the shoulder. “It’ll be fine.
Just give him the pills twice a day, and it’ll clear up in a couple of days—the end of the week, at the very most.”
“Thank you very much, Doctor,” the woman said gratefully, then gently nudged her son along. She tossed a casual “how do you do” smile at Mara, who barely had it in her to return, and then left the office.
“Ah, Mara…come on in,” Tallworth said genially as he opened his door wider. Mara stood and pushed Peter’s stroller forward, avoiding Emily’s eyes as she followed Tallworth inside…
“My, my, you are looking very fine today honey,” Tallworth said as he made sure the door was closed firmly. He walked up behind her and placed his hand on her waist, bidding her to halt. She avoided his gaze as he said, “What does a good girl say when she’s paid a compliment?”
Mara had to force the bile in her throat back down as she answered tightly, “Thank you.”
“Good. Good girl,” he said, and casually lifted the rear of her skirt. “Nice. Black, just like I told you. You are my perfect little girl.”
Her lips curled downward angrily, and she snapped her head around. “I’m eighteen. I’m a woman.”
He smiled, amused at her attitude. “Of course you are,” he said condescendingly. He turned her toward him and now lifted up the front, taking a long lascivious look.
Mara glanced back at Peter, who was looking around the exam room wide-eyed, amused by all the gadgets and cabinets towering far above him. She had to remind herself why she was allowing this man to touch her.
“What do you want from me? What do you get out of this?” she asked him, trying to make sense of it all.
He let go of her skirt and placed his hands lightly on her waist. “I get to be with you, that’s all. Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy it, just a little bit. You did have your first orgasm with me.”
She felt tears rising, but fought them back. How she wished there were a scalpel nearby…she would grab it and jam it hard as she could into his eye or his throat! Yes, she had shuddered forcefully at his touch, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had been raised a good Catholic girl by her parents, and knew that touching oneself was a sin, so she had never done it. She had heard of orgasms before, but didn’t know what one actually was, until Tallworth forced one upon her.
“I didn’t enjoy it,” Mara answered him truthfully.
Tallworth shook his head as if he didn’t believe her, and caressed her sides with his hands. Her skin crawled at his touch. “Well, today we’ll see if we can get you
to loosen up a bit so that you can.” He moved forward to kiss her, but she put her hands firmly against his chest, holding him off as best she could manage. He was a tall, strong man, and she knew he could overpower her if he wanted.
“Don’t touch me again.”
Tallworth kept one hand on her waist and with his other reached into his pocket. He pulled out a bottle of the lactation medicine she needed. “I like spunk only so much. You’d better remember why you’re here, little one.”
She ground her teeth together so hard she feared a molar might snap, so she stopped. She looked at him, anger burning in her eyes, refusing to fully douse her defiance. “What do you want me to do today…Dan?”
All the way home, his taste remained with her. She felt her stomach heave on several occasions and thought she would throw up, but it didn’t happen. Finally she arrived home, locked the door behind her, and burst into tears. She covered her mouth for fear of waking Peter, who had fallen soundly asleep in his stroller on the way.
She rolled him into his room and left him there, then headed into the bathroom, closing the door most of the way behind her.
She looked at herself in the mirror, and was disgusted. She spat at her reflection, the saliva drifting slowly down the mirror as she shouted, “You’re a whore! A dirty, filthy, disgusting, slutting whore!”
She felt nauseous again, but nothing happened. She decided to finally force it in order to try and get that nasty saltiness out of her mouth. She kneeled in front of the toilet and plunged two fingers deeply into her throat. For the first time in her life, she was grateful to be vomiting, as the acidic taste of bile did in fact cover up the remnants of what she had done when she knelt in front of Tallworth. She vomited so hard that she thought her innards would fall out in the torrent, then curled into a ball on the hard tile floor and cried for a few minutes.
Finally, Mara literally dragged herself across the bathroom floor and into the hallway. She managed to get to all fours and crawled to Peter’s room to check on him. He still slept soundly, and so she braced herself against the door frame and willed herself to her feet. She stumbled, pinballing a moment from wall to wall, and finally made it into her own room. She searched through her dresser drawer and found the crucifix she had discarded when her mother passed away…it seemed that through some unspoken agreement, the family had abandoned God when Gloria died, much in the same way it seemed He had forsaken them by taking her. But she needed help now, and felt in her heart that only one person could aid her.
Mara fell to her knees at the foot of her bed, kissed the crucifix once and held it close to her heart as she prayed:
Momma…it’s me, Mara. Please, please help me. I need you, I need God, but I don’t know how to ask Him to help me with what I’ve done. I don’t see any way out, and I can’t keep doing this. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry that I whored myself. I started to do this to help Peter, but I don’t know what’s going on anymore. Please, Momma, please help me…please talk to God, ask Him to help me. Please…
And as she finished, she got to her feet once more and set the crucifix back where it had always been before, on the nightstand next to her bed. She stared at the little silver outline of Jesus, and felt her heartbeat abruptly slow, calming down.
She wiped away her tears and exhaled heavily, the action seeming to dispel the tension in her body. She went to Peter’s room, surprised that her legs could so steadily carry her once again, and gently lifted him out of the stroller. He did not wake, and she brought him back to her room. She sat on the side of the bed and kicked off the heels she had bought exclusively because Tallworth had told her to do so.
“Ugh,” she said aloud, but then felt her eyes drawn to the cross once more. Her eyelids fluttered, and she lay down, settling Peter gently across her chest. The baby shifted once, contentedly fitting himself into a curled sleeping position, and she kept one arm wrapped securely across him.
She drifted off to sleep, and had no dreams or nightmares.
And Peter did not need to feed again the entire day…
Chapter 6
“…and so then the Calvorian says, ‘Suck? I thought in your language, that word meant duck!’”
The five officers in the central office of Alpha Base Security laughed at Mark Elliot’s joke with genuine joviality. They had served with Mark long enough that there was no need to shelter his feelings, if the joke had been bad. But Mark had always been good at telling jokes, something not many who knew him only in passing would have believed, had they not been present to witness his timing.
As the laughter began to subside, Casey Park, one of the newer officers, turned from her position at the com-desk.
“Captain, there’s a call coming in for you. Says it’s important… and private.”
“Okay. I’ll take it in my office. If the place starts to burn down while I’m inside, at least knock on the door to warn me, okay?” he tossed off at one of the others as he headed to his semi-secluded office, set at the rear of the main room.
“No promises,” the other officer replied with a good-natured laugh.
The door slid shut behind Mark as he entered his office and sat at his desk in front of his com-screen. He briefly glanced at the two photos on his desk—one of the whole family before Peter was born, and one of his wife—and held in a sigh as he tabbed a panel on the device. The words ‘transmission standing by’ were replaced by a decently attractive woman with shoulder length curly blond hair.
“Captain Elliot?”
“This is he. How can I help you?”
The woman seemed to be in an office of some type, and she leaned a bit closer to the screen, speaking in a slight whisper.
“My name is Emily Avern. I work at Doctor Tallworth’s office.”
Mark caught the name immediately. “My son’s pediatrician.
Is everything alright?” He said this last with some concern.
Peter was in Mara’s care, and although his daughter was quite responsible, if something unforeseen had happened.
Emily quickly glanced behind her before replying, “Your son’s fine. Look, I can’t stay on long. There’s something I need to tell you, but keep in mind that I don’t know if this is actually happening. It’s just…well, it’s just a feeling I’ve had…”
The five officers in the main office were chatting lightly among themselves when the door to Mark’s office slid aside, the captain barely giving it time to open all the way as he stepped out sideways, his mouth curved into a severe and furious scowl.
The upbeat mood in the room came to an abrupt end as the officers took note of their leader’s countenance. “Chief? Is everything alright?” Casey asked.
Mark stopped abruptly, his eyes moving from side-to-side as he seemed to be considering how best to reply. He turned to Jake Takashima, his second, whom the others had dubbed “Sumo” for his massive muscular bulk at only five feet tall. “I’m heading home,” Mark said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, if at all today. Jake, signal the troops; I want all patrols stepped up, and I don’t care if someone is littering with a chewing gum wrapper—anyone caught making an infraction of any lunar law is to be brought in hard! Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Jake replied with a salute. The other officers came to attention as well, seeing the dark embers burning within Mark’s eyes. Mark returned the salute and rushed out into the base’s central promenade.
“Daddy,” Sara said happily, running to her father as he silently came in the front door. “What’re you—” she instantly fell silent as Mark put a finger to his lips. He waved her forward, and she obediently came to him. He gave her a hug and kiss, then asked softly, “Where’s your sister?”
