Chapter 2
TWO
ANDREA
He passed out again.
This time he missed the bed entirely.
I wiped the spit from around my mouth with the back of my hand as I stared down at where he was splayed out on the floor, the thick log between his legs still standing upright.
It was beautiful, just like the rest of him.
His shirt was pushed up so I could see the hard lines of his cyan abdominals along his bright teal skin.
There was a patch of pink scales instead of hair where his happy trail should be, matching the soft, flexible fin-like spikes that covered his head.
When I had run my hands along his happy trail, the scales had felt soft and supple against my fingers.
I wanted to get going deep enough so my nose would hit them, but he had passed out before I managed to work up to that, and I obviously couldn't continue once he was unconscious.
I just wished I could finish him off before he passed out. If I got him there all the way, then there was no way he would ever want to go. I could have an alien male all to myself.
Having a man to protect you and keep you safe was a basic need that any woman had, and it just wasn't fair that Adesewa and some of the others had landed guys already.
I let out a sigh.
I didn't know what I was doing wrong.
Women like Adesewa always seemed to get guys without ever getting bruises on their knees, and I didn't understand it.
Men didn't just love you. My stepdad always said a man would fall in love with a croque-monsieur if it could give him kids.
He would say that a man's job was to protect his woman, and why would he bother doing that if she made him feel bad?
A woman's worth was how she could make her man feel, how well she could serve him.
At least this Big Guy enjoyed my mouth so much it knocked him unconscious.
I took the blanket off my bed and covered him up.
If this was anything like the last time, he would be asleep for a few hours at least. When he woke up, I could ask him what I could do better so I could finish him without him passing out.
I needed to secure him before any of those other salopes got their hands on him.
The first step was getting him away from them, the second, giving him a term of endearment because both Adeswa and Mei's men had taken on the names they had initially given them, and the third was showing him just how good I was with my mouth so that he'd never want to go anywhere else for satisfaction.
My stomach rumbled.
I needed to feed him too; that was an important part of keeping a man satisfied, so I left him there and headed out to the common room.
It was a large bowl-like room, with the main floor of the space below the rim where all our bedroom doors connected to the space.
It was too early for Noelle to be cooking breakfast, if you could call it that.
She was just experimenting in mixing together different flavored cubes to make more interesting meals, but in the end they were still the same cubes we had been eating while in that one room cell with the automated voice that encouraged us to work out in return for the reward of slightly better flavor.
I spotted Mei across the large room.
I quickly ran halfway down the large steps that made up the stadium-like seating around the edge of the room, then back up to catch her before she stepped into the maze of hallways that never seemed to lead anywhere but back here.
It had stopped shifting around so much, but when we first escaped from the one-room cell, it had taken us a while to realize that the entire thing was changing.
"Mei, you're up early!" I called out, and Mei stopped to look at me. She had that look I hated, that one of mild annoyance that was covered up with a bland smile. She didn't like me, but I didn't care. You didn't have to like a bitch to be her friend.
"Just out for my morning walk," Mei said.
"Guess what I just did!" I said. It was important that I mark my territory so that the others knew he was mine.
"What did you do, Andrea?" Mei asked.
"I just gave the Big Guy a blow job!" I declared.
As soon as he had appeared in the common room, I realized I needed to make a move before anyone else got to him, so I had gone over, grabbed his arm, and ushered him into my bedroom.
"Congrats, I guess?" Mei said.
"It was so good that he passed out," I whispered.
It was weird that it happened twice, but Adesewa's guy had passed out after she kissed him, so maybe it was a normal thing with these aliens.
"I'm happy that you're happy about that, Andrea," Mei said. "Maybe you should go check on him to make sure he is okay."
"I can wake him up with another one!" I said. "I wonder how long it takes his species to get ready for another round?"
"Only one way to find out," Mei said.
I watched her hurry down the hallway, a bad taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the residual taste of my man and everything to do with feeling like there was something more I wanted from the interaction, and couldn't quite get.
I followed her down to a four-way junction, watching her as her steps sped up like a woman who was out on a mission instead of a morning stroll. She was up to something; that was obvious, but it wasn't like she was going to tell me if I asked her.
Other women were always like this, always disinterested in what I had to say or whispering about me behind my back. I knew they were just jealous bitches, but it still stung in those moments where I could see the connections that some of them had, connections that I never seemed able to form.
Not all women though.
I heard the humming before I saw the bright blue hair in question. Lyssa's roots were showing, of course, as to be expected without access to any tools or dye, but the moment I found what I needed, I was going to fix that.
I was going to fix all of their hair.
Except for Adesewa, of course. That salope wouldn't let me touch her head, even to braid her hair.
I had taken a specialization in braids in school, and it was utterly infuriating that she let someone with no experience, Saoirse, work on her head just because my Orí wasn't maintained.
I didn't even know what that meant! The translator we all had implanted didn't translate that word for me.
Saoirse explained that it was something similar to internal energy, like chi or vibes or whatever.
The reason was stupid; that was all there was to it, so I'd taken to putting my hair up in an elaborate crown, Dutch, and French braids so she could see the talent she was missing out on. Even if she begged me, I wouldn't touch her hair.
"Hey Andrea!" Lyssa gave me a big smile, and I couldn't help but smile back, even though she was pushing a floating cart with a large male body on it. "Out looking for hair dye again?"
"Out finding corpses again?" I shot back.
"Finding, not looking," Lyssa said. "Seek and ye shall receive."
"I've received something I wanted," I said, ready to try again to share my fun news with Lyssa.
"Found yourself that big strong man you've been looking to ride?" Lyssa asked, giving me a wink as she lifted her arm and flexed her formidable bicep.
"I did," I said. "And I gave him head so good he passed out."
Lyssa let out a whistle. "Damn girl. That's impressive. Where did you get such mad skill?"
"High school, obviously," I said. "I was very popular. Well, at least I was until I got suspended when I got caught practicing."
Lyssa's smile fell on the edges. "Did the guy you were with get suspended too?"
"Why would they?" I said with a laugh. "Boys will be boys."
"Those fuckers," Lyssa snapped, her anger startling me. "If I could go to your old school and punch those administrators in the face, I would."
"They were just doing their job," I said, confused by her reaction.
"Their job was to make sure the school was a safe and healthy learning environment for all children, not to protect boys from the consequences of their actions and punish girls for the same," Lyssa said.
"But those boys had a promising future," I said.
"A future that was warped by avoiding consequences," Lyssa said.
"If you raise a man to believe that his actions will be ignored, then one day he'll do something truly terrible that can't be ignored.
Protecting a boy's future involves enforcing consequences when he is younger so that he doesn't ruin his own future later on. "
There was a strange twisting in my belly, a knot of unease I didn't know existed until Lyssa's anger put a light on it.
"I never thought about it like that," I said. "But you don't need to get all angry about it for my sake."
"Has anyone ever been angry about it?" Lyssa demanded. "Or have they only ever been angry at you?"
Her words left me speechless.
My mom, my stepdad, the school, they had all been angry at me. The whispers at school were about me, not the boys. If I hadn't been so close to taking my Bac, I might have been expelled.
I shook my head.
I didn't need to think about any of this.
I had a man waiting for me in my room, a man I needed to please. I had to go figure out breakfast for him so that when he woke up there was food waiting.
"I need to go," I said. "The Big Guy is waiting for me."
"Andrea!" Lyssa called after me as I hurried away, but I didn't stop.
This was why I needed a man. If I had a man, I wouldn't have to worry about what other women thought about me. I could just worry about him.