Chapter 2 #2
I answered the remaining questions with impatience.
What pastimes and personality traits did I hope to find in a mate?
Fuck if I knew. She could do what she wanted with her time.
I had the money to fund whatever hobbies she enjoyed.
As for personality traits? She had to have courage, honor, and a willingness to break the law.
I couldn’t put that last part into the system, though.
Open-minded? Adventurous spirit? But that was probably a given with all of these females.
They were born on a Class Two world, and they were willing to leave it for the unknown.
Would I do the same to find a mate? Maybe, but only if D'vinda was the alternative. There were a few questions about physical preferences, which seemed outrageous. In the Bion system, males take what they can get and like it. That’s not to say our females aren’t beautiful.
They are. But there are no males here being picky about hair color or the size of a female’s breasts.
I almost answered no preference when I thought of the file of human art on my nexus core.
Pinup girls, they called them. Hand-drawn renderings of human women wearing short skirts, skimpy dresses, or less, twisted into teasing, taunting poses to tempt the viewer’s thoughts.
I thought of the shapely calves, thick thighs, and rounded hips, the full breasts somehow defying gravity, and the artistically styled hair in swirls and waves.
Were there actually human women who looked like that, or was it only some male fantasy?
I thought it might be a fantasy of mine.
I selected full figure as a preference, but left most of the other options empty, and when asked how much physical traits mattered in my preferences, I marked low to moderate.
I mean… it wouldn’t hurt for Zacal’s second in command to have an extraordinarily beautiful mate.
Just having a mate was a status symbol; anything else was just a bonus.
With all the questions answered, it only took seconds for my nexus frame to fill with images and recs of potential mates, called “brides” by Bion Marriage Match.
My translator told me it was a word for female mates, with husband being the male equivalent.
The concept wasn’t foreign. Daernir had similar mating contracts to the human tradition of marriage.
Skimming over some of the brides’ preferences and requirements, it seemed like the bar for a suitable husband must be quite a bit lower on Earth.
I saw several profiles that stated any potential husband “must have a job!” I wanted to send a mass message and tell them there were no males without jobs on this network.
The credits it cost just to sign up was high, but worth it.
And every message we sent to a potential bride would cost more credits if she answered.
I swiped through pictures and recs until my eyes were tired.
Either the algorithm wasn’t doing its job, or there were a lot more young women looking for off-world matches than women closer to my age.
There were plenty of attractive females, and maybe that was the problem.
It was overwhelming how many there were.
All of them with enticing recs, telling me what good brides they would be and their many qualifications.
Apparently, to Earth women, that meant cooking, child rearing, and housework, chores that were primarily left to males in Venastea and most other worlds in the Bion system.
I would never admit this to Evik, but I was almost nervous to message any of these women.
There were hundreds of thousands of males searching this database on Venastea alone.
Every female with an active profile was probably receiving more messages than she could respond to.
What could I say to stand out? Sure enough, the first profile I selected to send a message to disappeared before I could think of an opening line.
A notification flashed across my frame with the joyful message that “This bride has found a match!” Well, good for some other bastard, I guessed.
With a sigh, I kept swiping, the faces blending together until I thought I’d seen them all before, the same female with dark hair or light, blue eyes or green, pink skin or brown.
There were so many of them, and yet none of them stood out to me.
This one had a pretty face, but her smile had a cruel slant that I recognized well from my line of work.
It was the kind of smile I gave my enemies.
The next female had uploaded a rec to introduce herself, but I could only stand to listen to a few seconds of her nasally voice.
Another had four dependent sons and clearly stated that she had no intention of having more children.
I even saw one in ugly brown clothing with a profile dedicated solely to listing the reasons “alien beings” should stay on their own planet and leave humans alone.
A headache was starting in my temples, and I was fucking starving, but just before I stopped my search I saw her.
My wife.
A tight skirt wrapped her shapely hips and thighs, hugging all the way down to her knees.
Her collared shirt opened just enough to show a peek of cleavage, and on her feet were shiny black shoes with small, raised heels and pointy toes that put her ankles and calves on mouthwatering display.
But what stopped me, what grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, were her eyes.
Rimmed with sweeping black lines, they glittered blue-green.
They reminded me of the waters of my lagoon at sunrise, refracting light like scattered gemstones.
Most of the other females on BMM shared images and recs of their smiling and seductive faces.
This female—my wife—didn’t smile. She looked straight through the Nexus and right into my soul. Some instinct sat forward inside me and said mine. My chest tightened as I opened her profile and sent her a message before I even read her name.