Buying His Mate (8 page)

Mr. Lourcy took her hand, then, and Gretchen looked up into his face. “It won’t be long until we take off, now,” he said. “Make sure you look out the window. You won’t see much to start off, because we’ll be headed almost straight up, but when we turn to approach Athena you’ll have a wonderful view.”

“Yes, sir,” Gretchen said, turning to look out the window, where the darkness of the enclosure’s hangar now suddenly gave way to the bright sunshine of the spaceport’s long, flat runway, where the shuttle had landed the evening before and from which it would take off only twenty-four hours later. Her seat began to shake as the huge rocket engines came to life. In an instant, they were traveling so fast that Gretchen couldn’t even make out individual trees in the forest that surrounded the spaceport as well as the enclosure, from which the Athenians’ machines had carved the space for both in a single day, ten years before.

Gretchen remembered the sound, which she and her mother had heard from five miles away, in the broken-down house where her father had hidden them, the mysterious, enormous crashing and rumbling of something different, in a world where all seemed the same and entirely hopeless since her father had gone hunting and never come back. Now, with a sound even louder, of the shuttle’s engines, the hope had taken very strange form indeed.

She remembered her father telling her about the sky-star. “People live up there,” he said. “The sky-people. They left us, and some folks say that they were wrong to do it, but my dad always told me that the sky-people tried as hard as they could to get everyone else to think about the way they were letting the people who had a lot just keep getting more, and not taking care of the land and the water and the air.”

“Will they come back, daddy?” Gretchen asked, her eyes fixed on the shiny, impossibly distant object that hung twinkling in the twilight.

“I think they will,” he father finally said. “Maybe after I’m gone; maybe even after you’re gone. They need to wait until they know how to make things better. But I think they’ll come back.”

And they had, but not because they wanted to make things better on Earth, really; they had come back because they needed Earth girls to make things better on Athena. How did she feel about that?

Why did it matter what she felt, naked relict girl, strapped down by her master into this seat that felt like it would shake the life out of her as the shuttle picked up speed so rapidly that Gretchen’s shoulders were pressed back hard against the firm cushioning, until at last, with a sickening, unnatural motion, the front of the cabin tilted upward and they were shooting up into the sky?

Mr. Lourcy had told the truth: out the window all Gretchen could see was sky, blue and then, very rapidly, purple, and finally black. Suddenly the engines stopped, along with the shaking and the rumbling, and instead of being pressed back into her seat, Gretchen felt strangely light. She looked across Mr. Lourcy to where Beth sat on the other side of Ms. Feld. To Gretchen’s surprise, Ms. Feld had her hand between Beth’s thighs, and seemed to whisper in her ear as the brown-haired girl gazed out the window. Beth’s chest heaved with quick breaths, and her skin seemed flushed.

Mr. Lourcy said quietly, “Having a climax in low gravity is a special feeling.”

Gretchen looked up at him. “Sir?” she asked.

“Ms. Feld is making her new girl come. Would you like to come, my dear?”

Now Gretchen saw that in the row behind Ms. Feld and Beth, one of the male elites had ordered his new girl to take his cock in her hands and stroke it tenderly. The dark-haired girl did it with a look of apprehension on her face, as if very anxious about whether she might be punished if she failed to please her master.

She looked up again into Mr. Lourcy’s eyes. “I think you should come, Gretchen,” he said. “Spread your knees nice and wide, and I’m going to show you what a good girl gets.”

Gretchen felt her eyes go wide as she realized her master must intend to do to her what Ms. Feld was doing to Beth.

“You just look out that window, Gretchen,” Mr. Lourcy said, a note of command coming into his voice. He reached out his left hand, and Gretchen trembled as he laid it boldly on her lap. “Spread these legs for me.”

Her master’s fingers pushed downward, and enforced his will. Gretchen gave a little gasp and a tiny whimper, and obeyed, feeling suddenly that the pleasure she had denied herself in the entertainment room would now befall her, and that though she thought perhaps she
should
mind it, she didn’t, really. Mr. Lourcy had spanked her, and he had put his cock in her mouth, but not roughly the way she saw some of the other elites doing.

She looked out the window, into the blackness that she suddenly realized had a studding of stars so much brighter than she had ever seen the stars before that she gasped again, more because of the beauty of the sight even than because Mr. Lourcy had touched the place at the top of her pussy where all the pleasure seemed to lie. “Do you know what this part of you is called?” he asked softly in her ear, as he rubbed it gently in little circles, and the sight of outer space and the lovely feeling of her master’s fingers and the pleasant sound of his voice all blended into a pleasure beyond anything of which she had ever felt her body might be capable.

“N-no, sir,” she whispered, knowing she should keep looking out the window at the stars, because he wanted her to see the beauty out there. At that moment, though, Gretchen could not feel the change in the shuttle’s direction in her body at all, the way she would feel it on Earth if someone had turned her to the side, the view in the window altered, and there, impossibly distant, was Earth, below them, like a disc of blue and green and white.

“It’s called your clitoris, Gretchen. Or your clit.” He pushed on it, caressed it, even pinched it a little until Gretchen gave a whimpering cry. Then, “Come for me, now, you sweet girl,” Mr. Lourcy said, increasing the speed and the pressure of his fingers on her pussy, up and down, with a firm rub of her clitoris each time.

The shuttle turned again, and now Gretchen could see Athena, hanging like a brilliant silvery wheel, there against a backdrop of stars, before another adjustment must have put the shuttle on a course straight toward her new home, and out the window, once again, there were only stars. In the quiet of the shuttle cabin, so strange after the noise of the takeoff and ascent, Gretchen’s moans joined the little sounds from other rows, of other girls made to feel pleasure and of the elites who had conversely commanded pleasure of their new relict girls.

Gretchen heard Beth cry out, and the lewd sound, as if Ms. Feld had forced her new girl to feel a pleasure so extreme that it became a kind of punishment, made Gretchen’s pussy clench, and then she understood why Beth had cried out that way. Gretchen’s limbs seemed, in the strange, floating lightness of the shuttle, to dissolve from one another, and the pleasure of the climax to fill her entire body, from her curling toes to the little fists into which she balled her hands, to the eyes she couldn’t help squeezing shut so tightly as if that would stop Mr. Lourcy from seeing the embarrassing effects of his caresses.

“Good girl,” he said softly, still caressing Gretchen between her legs, but more gently now, so that she giggled with the aftershocks of the enormous climax. She opened her eyes, and saw that he was looking at the way his hand possessed her. She too, couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off the sight of her master’s hand there, making his ownership tangible, and so very pleasurable.

“Sir?” she said hesitantly.

“Yes, my dear?” Mr. Lourcy asked, not ceasing to play in her pussy with his delicate fingertips.

“What will it be like, in your… in your quarters?”

“What will you do all day, you mean?” he asked. “Since you know what you’ll do all night, don’t you?”

He gave her pussy a slightly firmer rub with that, and Gretchen blushed. To have him just say that, about what she would do all night, seemed so humiliating, even though of course she
did
know: she would be having
sex
all night, because that was why Mr. Lourcy had bought her.

“Well,” she said softly. “I guess I don’t even know what that will be like… the nights, I mean.” She looked up at him, and he lifted his eyes from his caresses to hers.

“I will teach you how to please me,” he said. “I know you’ll learn quickly, and when you show me how well you can pay attention, I will reward you, as I just did.”

Gretchen blushed and looked down again at the strong masculine fingers that still fluttered against her little clitoris. She realized to her surprise that she had started to yield her warmth and wetness again to her master’s hand.

But he withdrew it, making her give a forlorn whimper and look up into his eyes to see if she had done something wrong. He smiled, though, and said, “During the day, you will do as you like. You’ll spend some time exercising, of course. You may attend classes, or you may go to the vids, or the game rooms, with friends.”

“I’ll have friends?” Gretchen asked. It seemed strange, all of a sudden, to think that she would be allowed something like a normal life.

“Of course,” Mr. Lourcy replied. “The relict girls usually stick together, but as you understand more about Athena I have a feeling you’ll also become friends with Athenians, too. Remember that you may well be an Athenian yourself, someday.”

“Four children,” Gretchen whispered, turning back to look out the window, where she could now see Earth again. It seemed such an impossibility: to bear children, and spend the rest of her life in space. Would she come down in a Taking party, someday, and buy a girl of her own? She shivered at the thought.

“Yes,” Mr. Lourcy said slowly. Something in his voice, a troubled note, made Gretchen turn to him again, to see that he had a very serious expression in his eyes. “And the examination.”

“Oh, I was very good at school,” Gretchen said proudly.

A little smile crossed Mr. Lourcy’s lips. “Did you read in school,” he asked, “about what families were like before the collapse?”

“Living in houses, you mean?” Gretchen asked. “A mother and a father and their children? Like in the novels from the 1800s and the 1900s?”

Mr. Lourcy nodded. “Did you think that sounded odd?”

Gretchen nodded back. “But… well, I kind of wished things were like that in the enclosure, sometimes.”

The smile returned to Mr. Lourcy’s face. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Very glad.”

Chapter Ten

Beth awoke and looked across the room illuminated only by a dim nightlight. She and Gretchen had shared a room in the orientation facility for the past seven days. Today all the relict girls would go to their owners’ quarters, except for the two, Yolanda and Jane, who Ms. Trainor, the head of orientation, had decided needed more time in the facility.

Gretchen was awake, looking back at her. Beth smiled.

“Today,” Gretchen said softly.

“Mm-hmm.” Beth stretched her arms lazily up to touch the ceiling of the little sleeping nook in which her mattress lay. She had nearly gotten used to sleeping in an enclosed space rather than on the floor of the big room in the old factory, where her whole tribe had used to sleep close together, for warmth in the winter and protection all year round.

“Are you nervous?” Beth heard in Gretchen’s voice the kind tone of one who knew that she herself had nothing to worry about, but knew that her friend’s road could well be a harder one. Ms. Feld and Ms. Renton had told her that even though it looked like Gretchen would have an easier life with Mr. Lourcy, Beth and the other club girls were the ones truly to be envied, since they would have the best of everything, and not have to keep house or worry about getting pregnant. Beth had kept that to herself, sure that Mr. Lourcy, when he came to visit, probably told Gretchen the opposite.

“A little?” Beth said. “You?”

Gretchen shook her head. “Mr. Lourcy is so kind to me. I know I have a lot to learn, but he’s so patient, even when he has to spank me.”

Beth giggled. “Has to?”

Gretchen pursed her lips. “Well, there are so many things to remember, and it’s only right that he should help me learn. You got punished too, didn’t you?”

Yes, Beth and the other club girls had been punished, but that was different. “Ms. Renton says that club girls need to be ready for a spanking or a whipping whenever a member wants to give it to them,” Beth said a little primly. “They call it punishment, but really it’s just a different kind of pleasure.”

“And you have to accept it because you’re a relict girl,” Gretchen said. “I don’t think that’s really any different, except that Mr. Lourcy tells me the reason.” Then she blushed and gave a nervous little giggle.

“What?” Beth asked.

“Well, he, um, well… okay, he also said that sometimes he’ll spank me for no reason.” Then Gretchen seemed to turn a little defiant, and rolled over onto her back, looking up at the ceiling of her sleeping nook. “But actually that means that we’re just the same, right?”

“So how is Mr. Lourcy
patient,
then?” Beth asked, suddenly genuinely curious, because it did seem there was a difference between the way Gretchen’s master treated her and the way Ms. Feld and Ms. Renton treated the club girls, but it also seemed like that difference didn’t only have to do with what different elites wanted relict girls for. Sometimes it seemed like Mr. Lourcy and a few of the other elite men and women who had bought girls in their group of sixteen wanted not just a pussy to enjoy or a womb into which to put a baby, but a sort of companion to guide and to keep—to be
patient
with, maybe.

But the question received no answer, for the bell rang that meant the time had come to rise and wash, and then to go to morning meeting.

* * *

Morning meeting happened every morning, in the room that Ms. Trainor called the conference room, though Beth had no idea what a
conference
might be. The first morning, all the relict girls, still naked—as they had been and, Ms. Trainor said, would continue to be unless their owners decided to clothe them—had introduced themselves, going around the long table at which they sat—a table so big that Beth found herself wondering whether it would float. She and her brother had talked many times about building a raft and trying to go downriver and see if there was a better tribe, or if maybe there were others like them who wanted to know more than the elders did about the old times.