Buying His Mate (7 page)

At that moment, from the doorway, Mr. Gramling’s voice said, “Alright, girls, the auction is over. I’m going to read out your names, and tell you who’s bought you. When I’m done reading everyone’s names, you’ll go back into the Hall of Taking and find your new owner, who will give you your first instructions in serving him or her. I’m glad to see you watched the vid about the Taking; that will make things easier.”

His glowing rectangle was in his hand, and now he referred to it and said, “Gretchen with Mr. Lourcy…” Gretchen’s heart skipped a beat. So he
had
bought her! She burned with a strange curiosity to know whether he had had to pay a great many credits, whatever that meant.

“Beth with Ms. Feld,” Mr. Gramling said. Gretchen looked sharply over at her new friend, whose eyes had gone wide with alarm. Unconsciously, she reached out her right hand to take Beth’s left, only remembering at the last moment, with a blush, that that hand had just been between her legs. Beth looked at the hand for a moment as if wondering what it was, then grasped it convulsively.

“You’ll be alright,” Gretchen whispered. Beth just nodded, her eyes still wide.

Chapter Eight

Martin watched the girls come back into the big room, with Gretchen first through the door, feeling a good deal of satisfaction. Gretchen hadn’t, in the end, cost him every credit he had budgeted, despite that moan that had awakened Heather’s and Diana’s interest. Thankfully, as the first girl auctioned, and perhaps also because of the education she had received in the enclosure, which made her unusual and even a little off-putting to some of the elite men, bidding hadn’t been fierce.

With fifteen more girls to auction, Heather and Diana hadn’t put up a fight, especially after Martin had been careful to show interest in three other girls during the inspection, and then to hesitate before his bids on Gretchen. The process had wracked his nerves, yes, as he wondered whether Diana, especially, saw right through him, and knew that at that moment Martin would spend every cent he had to bring Gretchen back to Athena as his property: his wife. But it seemed he had managed to bluff effectively—for once in his life at least. Martin was not a man who kept his emotions hidden very well, but he possessed a self-control that allowed him to keep his face stony when a greater good lay in store.

That greater good walked toward him now, naked and, to Martin’s delight, with a little smile on her face.

“Gretchen,” Martin said. “I am very glad that you are to be mine.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said softly.

He smiled. What would happen now—what was beginning to happen around them even now, as Heather pushed Beth firmly down to her knees with feminine hands pressing on naked feminine shoulders, and Fred pointed to a spot on the carpet for his new girl to kneel upon—did not specifically appear anywhere in Athenian law, but had become customary. Martin had watched it himself enviously on his previous Taking trips, and he had imagined himself doing it with his own new girl many times.

He felt such affection already for Gretchen, though, and such intelligence gleamed in her eyes that at first it didn’t feel like he thought it should, when he said to her, “Kneel down, please.”

As he watched her hesitantly obey with her eyes widened, sure that she could see, off to her left, that Fred had dropped his pants and taken hold of his cock in preparation to present it to the lips of a fellow girl, Martin realized the nature of the difference, and he smiled. When he had watched others perform the little ceremony, he had never considered what it would truly mean to be the man who told the girl to suck his cock, beyond the idea that his desire for mastery would at last find true satisfaction.

Martin didn’t know whether any of his fellow elites felt the same thing he now felt, when he told this specific girl, Gretchen, to kneel for the purpose of yielding her mouth to the pleasure of his hard penis. The feeling, though, seemed so closely related to his secret plan for having a wife that he suspected they did not—that they felt much more the way Martin had expected to feel. They put their cocks in their new girls’ mouths, or held their new girls’ faces against their pussies, as a gesture of pure domination, as if to say,
For the next two years, girl, this is what you are: a cocksucker and/or a pussy kisser. Thus says the law.

But as Martin loosed the drawstring on his pants, and thought about how he would tell Gretchen that she must take him, her new owner, in her mouth so shamefully, he understood that for him that aspect of the affair had receded greatly in importance now that the real Gretchen knelt naked before him. He wanted the pleasure of her mouth, oh yes. And he wanted her to know that for at least two years she would have, as her most important duty, his pleasure in whatever way he saw fit.

But he wanted much, much more from her. Loyalty. Admiration. Adoration.

Love.

Martin had none of that from Gretchen now, nor should he. The look in her eyes, though, seemed like a promise that if he mastered her kindly and firmly, those things might grow between them.

He remembered, suddenly, a discussion session of his culture class. The duty of leading such sessions fell upon the older generations, and this one, about the culture of the novel from 1700 to 2100, was led by a woman of Erika Wendt’s generation, the third generation born aboard Athena. “It seems ridiculous, now,” she said, “doesn’t it? The idea that a man and a woman could be expected to find lifelong happiness in exclusive cohabitation only with each other?”

Martin remembered thinking,
Must we throw the baby out with the bathwater?

“That’s why the early novel,” the discussion leader continued, “for all its pleasures, can never do more than give us an index to how oppressively the patriarchy ruled the lives of its women. It is a fiction—of course—but its charm for us today lies not in the way it can let us escape from the tedium of life aboard a space station as much as in the way it allows us to understand how badly, for example, Samuel Richardson’s readers longed to believe that traditional marriage could bear the terrible weight that society placed upon it.”

Martin remembered Heather and Diana nodding in unison at that. Nor could he deny his own assent to the egalitarian principles that undergirded the relations of the sexes aboard Athena, among the elites themselves.

Those principles would start to apply also to Gretchen after two years, when the term of service Martin had just purchased ended. She would become a free relict, then, allowed to learn and to work as she chose. If she bore four children and passed her citizenship exam, she would become a full Athenian citizen. Why would she want to be his wife when, like other Athenian women, she could choose her own path, in a society where women who cohabited with men could be tried, convicted, and lose their citizenship?

Another discussion session, this one concerning the history of social laws from classical times to the laws of Athena itself, led by Fred Gramling’s father, an aged lawyer, sprang to Martin’s mind as he tried to discover why this moment, with Gretchen kneeling before him, seemed so fraught with meaning and with risk.

“The beauty of the social law,” John Gramling intoned, “from Augustus Caesar’s laws about adultery to our own laws about cohabitation—and even this proposed law for the Taking of girls from Earth to boost our birthrate—lies for me in the way it exposes how very unnatural a thing liberty is. To create the liberty of all Athenians, men and women, to pursue their individual wills, Athenian law does not provide for marriage, and penalizes the failure to maintain separate domiciles. To create the liberty of all Athenians to reproduce, we now contemplate taking young women into sexual servitude—and we promise them their own liberty, as Athenians, if they serve well.”

“But,” Martin asked, “surely now that traditional marriage has not existed among us for hundreds of years, if a man and a woman wished to cohabit it couldn’t harm their liberty, or anyone else’s?”

Old Mr. Gramling chuckled. “A romantic, I see.” The class had laughed. Martin particularly remembered the slightly shrill sound of Diana’s laughter. “Ms. Feld,” he said. “I wonder if you have an answer.”

Heather looked coldly at Martin. “It would certainly harm my liberty, if you told me I needed to move in with you.” A chill of anger and embarrassment went through Martin: he had been sleeping with Heather for a month at that point, and they had fucked wildly, angrily, long into the previous sleep period.

More laughter ensued. “But that’s not the point,” Martin protested. “What if both—”

“Look around,” Heather interrupted. “Do you see anyone who might want to move in with you?”

He and Heather hadn’t slept with each other after that.

Martin looked over to where little Beth had begun to learn how to go down on her mistress. Heather smiled down at the brown-haired girl, and murmured words Martin couldn’t hear, undoubtedly about the Maenad Club and what Beth’s life there would be like. Beth had closed her eyes, and the sight of her tiny pink tongue lapping dutifully if inexpertly at Heather’s pussy made him even harder as he took his cock in his hand and looked down at Gretchen, whose eyes were fixed upon the rigid length of her new master’s manhood.

“Open your mouth, Gretchen,” Martin said softly. All around them now were the soft wet sounds of the relict girls’ first service. The very wealthy men, John Fretter and Jonathan Yan, each had three girls: they were going from girl to girl, calling the attention of the girls whose mouths weren’t full of cock to the finer points of cock-sucking as demonstrated by their fellow relict.

Diana had two pretty brown-haired twin sisters, whom Fred had decided must be sold as a pair. She offered her pussy first to one, then to the other, resting her hands gently one on each head and instructing the girl who wasn’t currently kissing her between the legs to watch very carefully.

Only Sam Zachary hadn’t bought today. He sat, as Martin had sat the four times he had come to an auction and not bought a girl, absorbed in the readout on his handheld. If he was like Martin, he was trying desperately not to look at the abandoned scene of oral sex all around him, though—as Martin had, in his place—he refused to turn his back upon it.

Heather had bent her knees and spread her thighs. She held Beth now around the back of the head and enforced the pleasure of the girl’s mouth that way. Martin read Heather’s lips:
Good girl. Good girl.

Gretchen opened her mouth and closed her eyes. Suddenly Martin wanted to change the way this scene would play out. He would change their script: he would show that although they had done their best to make the Taking a cold transaction, whether for procreation or for sterile pleasure, it had a potential perhaps only Martin Lourcy could see.

“Have you ever had a penis in your mouth, girl?” Martin asked softly.

Gretchen’s eyes opened, and she looked up at him, startled. “No, sir,” she whispered.

“Are you ready to learn to please me?”

“Yes, sir. I—I th-think so.”

“I’ll try to be gentle with you, at first, my dear, but you must do as you are told. Do you understand?”

Some part of the alarm in her face softened at that—perhaps
my dear
had done it. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“Ask me to put my penis in your mouth, now, my dear.”

Gretchen’s brow furrowed as he looked into her eyes. He could see there a curiosity about the nature of what Martin now did, with these strange words—a command that she must make a request. Then that curiosity seemed to change to a kind of excitement, and she compressed her lips for just an instant and murmured, looking into his eyes, “Please, sir, may I suck your cock?”

“Open your mouth again, my dear,” he said, loving the way a little term of endearment could reassure her, even as he was on the verge of claiming one of her virginities. She obeyed, still looking up at him.

“Stick out your tongue, and curl it over your teeth.” He smiled to see the questioning look in her eyes as she obeyed.

Then, slowly, he lowered his rock-hard erection onto that adorable pink tongue. Around him now both male and female elites were coming on the faces of their pretty new relict girls, with grunts and cries of satisfaction.

Martin played his scene differently. “Gretchen,” he said, as he pushed into her little mouth just until the head of his cock disappeared from view and he had the lovely sensation of a plush, moist place for thrusting, along with the even lovelier sight of himself engulfed in a girl he owned, “you belong to me, now.”

Chapter Nine

Gretchen sat by the window of the shuttle, with Mr. Lourcy in the seat to her right. He had strapped her in, as she blushed at the way his hands lingered on her body, as he smiled down at her. Something in that smile, though, seemed to make her fear melt away—though not her embarrassment, for ever since he had spanked her it seemed like the touch of his hands made her nipples hard and sent the warmth rushing to her pussy.

Having his cock in her mouth, after watching the girl in the vid do the same lewd thing, had seemed, to her astonishment, not only natural but also somehow right. She could not have imagined that morning, she thought as she watched Mr. Lourcy fasten his own safety harness in the seat next to hers, that to have in her mouth the penis of a man she had never seen before, and then to be strapped down, naked, by him, could ever seem like a marvelous adventure, but there it was.

Nothing about the Taking bore the slightest resemblance to anything Gretchen had ever known. To suck the cock of the sky-man—the Athenian, the elite—who had purchased her for the pleasures of her body and the chance to put a baby in her womb seemed if not natural at least fitting, given the way all the relict girls around her knelt to do the same thing for their new owners, too. And Mr. Lourcy had said he would be gentle, which seemed a great deal more than Ms. Feld would give Beth, in the way of reassurance.

She looked over to the two seats on the other side of the shuttle in the same row, where Ms. Feld had strapped Beth, her eyes still red-rimmed from the hard service she had provided between Ms. Feld’s thighs. She saw Beth look back at her and give her a tentative smile, as if despite the forceful way Ms. Feld had introduced the brown-haired girl to her service, Beth still thought life on Athena would be worth the trials they must endure.