Bound, Spanked and Loved: Fourteen Kinky Valentine's Day Stories (67 page)

“Thanks,” she said, then stood next to the door and gestured for them to leave.

“Are you sure you don’t want to join us for dinner?” Malo asked.

“Positive,” she replied flatly.

“Alright. We’re just down the hallway to the right if you need anything at all.”

“Like some
lovin
’,” Tick apparently couldn’t help but say.

Malo passed him a tired expression but then turned back. “Really, we’re not the worst company.”

“I’m glad you think so,” she replied tersely.

Malo bit his lip slightly, and then turned to go. Just before he left, though, he turned around again and said, “Take all the time you need. We’re just excited to have someone new on board.”

“Very excited,” Tick agreed, waggling his eyebrows. Malo grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him along behind him outside the door. “Kiss goodbye?” Tick asked, pulling against Malo.

She closed the door in Tick’s face and turned back to her apartment. If she was really lucky, she could forget where she was for a couple of hours, she decided, before her inevitable mental breakdown.

*****

“S
he’s been locked up in there for nearly a week. I barely even got to talk to her.” Dax was pouting again as he was programming the flight pattern through the main console and pushing the buttons with an angry fierceness.

“I think Tick did enough talking for all of us,” Malo grumbled, actually deciding that he was going to complain about something for the first time in a long while.

“I was just joking around!” Tick defended himself for the fiftieth time already. “Get over it or at least get a sense of humor.”

“I will, as soon as you get a sense of
timing
,” he replied in a churlish tone. He had never gotten along so poorly with Tick than he had for the last week, even though he was primarily angry with himself. He had no idea what he was thinking by letting her wake up to no one but Tick, especially while the girl was trying to process the mere idea of space travel.

Malo knew that Dax had been overbearing and high-handed as well. Supposedly he waited a whole second before he stormed in there and took the girl out of the humans’ custody. His impatience had won over, while Malo could have been persuaded to stay on Earth for at least an extra day to get her situated to the fact that she was leaving her home planet.

Malo knew that even if one was acquainted with the fact that there was life on other worlds, it would have been nice to get a heads-up that you were leaving everything you had ever known. He, Dax, and Tick had had years to mentally and emotionally prepare for their career. They had put in for it. They had bonded beforehand by living together and meeting with counselors to get them to bond more closely since they would be a work unit for the whole of their foreseeable futures together. The girl, on the other hand, had been thrown into the deep end of the pool on her very first day.

Dax, however, didn’t even see the importance of the years of counseling and team-building exercises the three of them had had to do. He had been clear that he’d felt their friendship would have been just as strong if they had built it together over a barbeque in a single afternoon. Hence it wasn’t that surprising that he was now saying, “We should just snatch her out of there and tell her that she’s not allowed to go into her room until she at least attempts to spend time with us. Right now she’s not even carrying her own weight by helping prepare meals like we’d planned. If we don’t intercede, this could go on for years.”

Malo turned his body so that he could give Dax an exasperated look that would hopefully shame him. All his look did, however, was make Dax throw up his hands and say, “Give me one good reason why not! Things couldn’t get any worse than they are.”

“Hey,” said a sudden, none-too-enthusiastic voice in English at the door. The three males looked toward her like prairie dogs that had caught a scent they liked. She had a jar of some sort in her hand. Without another word, she walked to Dax with the jar filled with red liquid and handed it to him.

He looked down at it. His expression couldn’t possibly hold any more confusion.

“Open it for me,” she ordered, but not in a pushy way. She sounded tired. She didn’t look tired, however; she looked good for someone claiming five days ago that she was extremely unhappy about being kidnapped.

“What is it?”

“A jar with food in it,” she said as if this should be obvious. “I can’t open it, and in the past I’d have gone next door to my neighbors’ house and gotten the husband there to open it. Unfortunately, they’re probably, like, a trillion million miles away by now.”

Dax opened it without any effort at all before handing it back to her. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“Or
me
,” Tick added, his words filled with meaning.

“We’re glad to see you out of your room,” Malo admitted, speaking cautiously like he would to a frightened animal.

She looked over at him, and it was apparent that she was far from frightened. She looked weary and resolved. “Dinner in my apartment in thirty minutes,” she sighed, then turned to Tick. “Don’t say anything creepy when you’re there. Bring a beverage—hopefully something that will get me either high or drunk. I’m not picky.” After that, she turned and went back the way she came.

There was a long silence during which the men just stared in the direction she had gone before Malo broke the silence. “Well, I’m suddenly feeling very optimistic about things. All we have to do is go and act like whatever she’s making in there is the best thing we’ve ever eaten and compliment even the smallest things she’s doing, and supposedly everything will go well, according to the human female handling instructions I read.”

“I don’t know if I trust what you read. I think she’s proved she’s a bit of a wild card. The most we can hope is that she’s calmed down and accepted some of this.” Dax gestured to the spaceship around him.

“We might be getting laid tonight!” Tick hooted excitedly, throwing his hands in the air as if victorious.

Dax frowned. “I really doubt that. We’ll be lucky to make it through the night without her dumping dinner on one of our heads,” he replied pessimistically.

“Well, I don’t exactly think she’s ready for that type of intimacy,” Malo agreed. “But this is a good first step. She might actually even be relaxing and settling in,” Malo said, getting up from his chair. “I think I still have a bottle or two of the Analayan wine their king gave me a few months ago...”

Tick finally popped up from his chair. “You’re right. Get her drunk as fuck and then we can start sexy time,” he said, clapping his hands together.

“Relax, Tick. Remember, she’s new to all this and she’s pissed about it. Coming out of that room was probably a major effort.”

“Nervous?” Dax asked, looking over the console at him.

Malo shook his head. “Only if Tick talks more than is necessary.”

Dax nodded. “Same here.”

Tick frowned and looked back and forth between the two before snorting and crossing his arms in front of his chest, grousing, “I’m always getting shit on for being the loveable, entertaining one on this ship.”

*****

C
hloe was quickly regretting going out to the men and inviting them to dinner. First of all, she was running low on spaghetti and she would be surprised if she could find that anywhere else in the universe. She might never eat it again, and the fact that she now was going to share it was painful.

But most of all she couldn’t believe that she was actually considering talking to those assholes. She’d attempted to sit and watch movies until she died, but she bored of that after only a few days, and thumbing through her collection of both porn and romantic chick-flicks just made her feel horny and lonely. Now that she’d been propositioned for sex, she was beginning to realize that it’d been a couple of years since she’d even had a guy ask her out. She hadn’t noticed because she hadn’t been so lonely on Earth.

She hadn’t thought about it before, because her little black book was actually a very
empty
book, but she had still been around a lot of people all the time. She’d woken up at three o’clock every morning for the last couple of years since she’d started running the bakery, and she had a couple of employees and a lot of regular customers. She was constantly talking or dealing with people all day long, and normally much more than she’d like. All the silence and free time was strange.

None of this was fair, and she didn’t believe that she’d ever come to be happy about the huge turn her life had taken, but she had just watched
Aliens
,
Independence Day
, and
District 9
and had come to realize that the aliens she was stuck with were less like aliens and more like some annoying group of guys with brightly colored contacts, broad shoulders, and black fingernails. She could have been stuck with worse—at least they didn’t have tentacles or weren’t gray willowy aliens with bald shiny heads and black beady eyes like she had originally imagined they’d be. Hence the sudden move to invite them to dinner.

She wondered if they would think this was a date. Although the idea of having extraterrestrial sex was alarming, and not something she had exactly dreamed about, she was quite aware that they didn’t share her qualms.

“This is going to be an interesting night,” she said aloud to the pot of noodles she was standing over. “At least I can cook,” she added with slight optimism. “Because I would have seriously killed myself if I was stuck eating astronaut ice cream and drinking Tang for the rest of my life.”

There was a knock on her ‘door,’ which looked a lot like the old entrance to her apartment until she hit the button to open it, after which light seemed to split a tear into the fabric of the optical illusion around her. She had quickly realized that she would have really been in a blank white room with a bunch of her stuff strewn everywhere if the computer program hadn’t been running.

She wiped her hands clean with a kitchen towel and said, “Come in,” as if she expected it to be the neighbors at her old apartment. The illusion tore near the door and the three larger-than-life males stepped in.

She looked over and blinked at them. They were slightly more attractive than she had remembered. Malo wasn’t dressed in a suit anymore, but in a black shirt and pants like the other two. All their shirts fit their forms well, and they were all in shape. Tick had a bit of a paunch, but he also had a bit of a baby face going on. Malo reminded her of a protagonist from a 1940s romance movie and Dax was just a tall, well-featured man who looked older than the other two because he was mostly silver-haired while Dax and Malo had darker hair.

“Hey, kidnappers,” she greeted with deadpan coolness. She jerked her head toward her kitchen table. “Go ahead and take a seat.”

Malo lifted a bottle that looked like it was made of stainless steel. “As you requested,” he told her, offering it to her.

She grabbed hold of it, surprised at how cold it was. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a type of wine, I suppose. Instead of being made out of grapes, however, it’s made out of a fruit native to the planet Analaya. It’s pretty potent—to be drunk with small glasses.” As he was saying this, she turned and saw Dax looking through her cupboards, finding shot glasses very quickly. Apparently, he had been the one to transport and arrange her kitchen.

“Sounds good,” she approved. “Get out some water glasses then. We can just get shitfaced.”

The men now looked at each other, exchanged knowing glances, and laughed to themselves. “I don’t think so,” Dax chuckled finally, shaking his head as if she had said something extremely cute and even more naive.

“If you thought the last week was depressing for you,” Tick added, sitting down at her table, “go ahead and drink too much of that. Tomorrow you’d wake up and wish you hadn’t been born. Trust me on that, I’ve been there.”

She raised an eyebrow at him and then walked back to the stove to begin straining the spaghetti. “So what have you all been doing all week?” she asked, trying her best to be conversational as Malo and Dax busied themselves with pouring the drinks. “Like, how do you fill your time up here?”

“We’re a representation unit,” Malo replied simply. “We’re charged with going to sister planets and working through problems, treaties, representing our planet in important occasions or ceremonies, and occasionally making initial contact. Whatever the situation requires. The paperwork, reports, and studying take a lot of our time. At least for Dax and me. Tick mostly just makes sure everything works and our ship stays in one piece. We tend to be away from our planet for years at a time and so we need a specialist on hand.”

“Years?” she echoed, and then scrunched her nose. “You’re on a spaceship for
years
?”

“No,” they all replied in unison.

Malo was quick to explain, “We have many, many stops along our journey. We rarely spend as long as a month on the ship. And they’re not all on planets who are keeping extra-planetary life a secret like Earth does. The desire to keep such secrets from the general public is rare, especially for planets like Earth that have been visited by representatives of other planets for decades.”

“If you come out of your apartment every now and then, you can come with us to some pretty glorious events and do things your people haven’t even dreamed of yet,” Dax assured her, pressing his back against her pantry cabinet. “You could live a very wealthy lifestyle.”

“Shh—” Malo said, with a ‘shut up’ gesture to Dax.

Dax, confused, said, “What? It’s true. She could. We get treated extremely well most places that we go.”

“The handling instructions said not to mention money,” Tick mentioned, picking up a knife and looking at his reflection in it. Malo sent him a piercing gaze. “That’s right. I read them. But I don’t think they have this girl figured out.” He pointed the butter knife at Chloe.

She blinked at him. “What handling instructions?”

“You know, how to get girls and understand women. That sort of thing,” he responded innocently.