6. I Feel Like a Dairy Cow
I FEEL LIKE A DAIRY COW
I woke to pain.
Not sharp pain; nothing was bleeding, nothing was broken. This was deeper, duller, a heavy ache that centred in my chest and radiated outward. My breasts felt as if they'd doubled in size overnight, swollen and tight, the skin stretched so taut it seemed to hum with pressure.
I lay still for a moment and let myself surface properly.
The dwelling was quiet around me, the warm air carrying that faint organic scent I was starting to associate with Khorreth construction.
The pallet beneath me was soft, piled with furs that held heat, and I was naked under them, because at some point during the night my station coveralls had become unbearable against my skin.
The heat had broken. I remembered that much: the fever-pitch need fading into something manageable, Keth's knot finally softening inside me, the two of us separating with a wet sound that should have been mortifying and somehow wasn't. I'd slept after that.
Deep, dreamless, the kind of sleep you fall into when your body has been wrung out completely.
And now I was awake, and my breasts hurt, and I was alone.
I sat up slowly. The motion made my chest ache worse, the weight of my breasts shifting, and I looked down at myself with a kind of detached fascination.
They were definitely bigger. Fuller. The skin was flushed pink, the veins visible beneath the surface, my nipples swollen and dark. When I cupped one, carefully, so carefully, I could feel the pressure inside, the sense of something waiting to be released.
Milk, I thought. I was full of milk.
The door opened.
Keth ducked through, his horns clearing the frame by bare inches. He was carrying something, a tray, I realised, with food on it, scaled for me rather than him. His eyes found me at once, swept down to my hands still cupping my breast, and he breathed in sharp.
"You're uncomfortable," he said.
"That's one word for it."
He set the tray on the low table near the pallet and crouched beside me, bringing his eyes level with mine. I could smell him now, really smell him, not just the general musk I'd noticed before but the layers underneath. Concern. Warmth. Anticipation.
I could read his mood through his scent. When had that started?
"The production has established," he said. "Your body will fill every few hours. It requires relief."
"I figured that part out, thanks."
"I can help." His voice was careful, neutral. "Or I can show you how to relieve it yourself. The choice is yours."
There it was again. The choice. He kept giving me choices, even when my options were narrow, even when my body was screaming at me to take the path of least resistance. It was starting to irritate me, mostly because I couldn't work out the angle.
"If I do it myself," I said slowly, "what happens?"
"The pressure releases. The discomfort fades." He paused. "But your body will not settle the same way. When I tend to you, your scent changes. Your heartbeat slows. The production comes easier." A beat. "Your body prefers me."
"My body doesn't get a vote."
"It always gets a vote." He reached out, his hand hovering near my shoulder. Not touching. Waiting. "Let me help you. Please."
Please. The word sounded strange in his low rumbling voice, stranger still rendered flat by the translator. He was asking. Actually asking, as if my answer mattered, as if he would genuinely walk away if I told him to.
The pressure in my breasts was getting worse. The ache had sharpened into something that was starting to affect my breathing, each inhale pressing against the swollen tissue.
"Fine," I said. "Help."
He laid me back against the furs.
His hands were gentle, guiding me down, arranging me so I was propped slightly upright against the pile of bedding. The position put my breasts on display, full and heavy, the nipples tight and flushed, and I felt a flush of embarrassment that I pushed down ruthlessly.
This was biology. Just biology. My body needed relief, and he was offering to provide it. Nothing more.
He knelt beside the pallet, his bulk somehow managing to look contained rather than looming. His hand came up to cup my left breast, testing the weight, and even that light touch sent a jolt through me, pleasure and pressure at once.
"Tell me if it hurts," he said.
"It already hurts."
"Tell me if it hurts worse."
His fingers moved, pressing gently against the swollen tissue, working from the outside in. I felt the milk shift inside me, responding to the pressure, and my breath caught.
"Relax," he murmured. "Let your body do what it wants to do."
I wanted to snap at him that my body and I hadn't been on speaking terms for days, but his fingers had found my nipple, and he was squeezing with a slow, steady pressure, and–
Warmth.
Thin and pale, beading at the tip, then flowing in a steady stream as he kept up the pressure. The relief was immediate and overwhelming, the ache releasing, the tightness easing, the pressure that had built all night finally finding somewhere to go.
I made a sound. I'm not sure what it was, a gasp, a moan, something in between. My head fell back against the furs, my eyes closing, my whole body going loose and liquid as the milk flowed.
"Good," Keth said, his voice rough. "That's good. Let it come."
His other hand moved to my right breast, working it in counterpoint to the first, and now both of them were releasing, thin streams running down my skin and pooling on my stomach.
I waited for the mortification, for the part of me that should have been calculating how to clean this up, how to keep some dignity, how to not look like a cow being milked in a barn.
It didn't come. I was floating.
The sensation was like nothing I'd ever felt.
Not quite sexual, not quite not, a deep physical satisfaction that hummed through my whole body, loosening muscles I hadn't known were tense.
Every time his fingers squeezed, another wave of it rolled through me, and I found myself arching into his hands, wanting more.
"Mara." His voice, low and awed. "You're beautiful like this."
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me with that expression I was learning to recognise, the one that sat somewhere between hunger and worship. His pupils were blown wide in the low light of the dwelling.
"Among my people," he said, "an omega who produces is the highest gift. The most sacred thing. You are–" He hunted for the words. "Irreplaceable. Holy. Mine."
Part of me wanted to argue, to tell him I wasn't holy, wasn't sacred, wasn't anybody's. But his hands were still working my breasts, still drawing out the milk in steady streams, and every squeeze sent another wave of that bone-deep relief through me.
"I don't feel sacred," I managed. "I feel like a dairy cow."
His tail flicked, that motion I was starting to read as amusement.
"A dairy cow," he repeated. "I don't know this word."
"It's – an animal. On Earth. We bred them to produce milk for us. That's their whole purpose. Just... producing."
"Ah." His fingers shifted, working a new section of tissue, and I gasped.
"Among the Khorreth, an omega who produces is not reduced to a purpose.
She is elevated. Without her, there is no future.
Without her production, there is no bond, no family, no continuation.
The producers are–" He searched for words. "The reason everything else exists."
I stared at the ceiling. The pressure in my breasts had faded to something manageable, the ache replaced by that warm, loose satisfaction. His hands had slowed, gentling, no longer squeezing but simply holding.
"That's a lot of pressure," I said finally.
"It is a lot of honour." His thumb traced a slow circle around my nipple, and I shivered. "I know you don't feel it yet. I know this was not chosen. But you will learn, in time, that what your body does is–" He paused over the word. "Precious. To me. To my people. To yourself, eventually."
There was nothing in me to argue with. My brain was still too fuzzy, too flooded with whatever chemicals the milking had let loose. I lay there in the warm quiet, his hands on my breasts, my skin sticky with drying milk, and tried to find the outrage I knew I should be feeling.
It wasn't there.
"Can this get me pregnant?"
The words came out flat. Practical. I'd been lying in his arms for the last hour, letting him hold me against his chest while the last of the heat-fog cleared, and the question had been building the whole time.
The heat. The knotting. The fact that he'd come inside me more times than I could count, and I'd been too far gone to think about it.
He went still against me.
"Yes," he said.
I'd expected that answer. It still hit hard.
"The serum," I said. "It made me – compatible. For breeding."
"For bearing." His voice was quiet, careful. "Yes. Your body is now able to carry Khorreth young. That is–" He paused. "That is part of what the serum does. Part of what it means to be omega."
I stared at the ceiling. The weight of it settled over me, not panic, not quite, but something cold and heavy in my chest. My body had been rewritten.
Redesigned. Turned into something that could carry alien children, that could produce milk for alien mouths, that could slot into a role I'd never asked for.
"Among my people," Keth said, "a bearing omega is the most sacred thing there is. The highest status. The most protected."
"You keep saying that. Sacred. Precious." I kept my voice even. "What if I don't want to be pregnant? What if I don't want to – to bear?"
His arms tightened around me, just slightly. His scent shifted; I could read it now, could pick out the notes of concern beneath the warmth.
"Then we will be careful," he said. "There are ways. But Mara–" His hand splayed across the small of my back, warm and steady. "It is what your body was built for now. What the serum designed you to do. You may find the wanting comes whether you choose it or not."
I thought about that. About my body, already so far beyond my control. About the milk I was producing, the heat cycles I couldn't stop, the way I answered to his scent and his touch and his presence.
"That's a hell of a thing," I said finally. "To have your body want something you haven't decided to want yet."
"Yes." His mouth pressed against my hair, warm. "It is. But I will not rush you. Whatever comes, it will come when you're ready. I will wait."
I didn't believe him. Not entirely. But I was too tired to argue, and there was a small, worn-out part of me that wanted to believe, wanted to think that someone, anyone, might actually wait for me to be ready for something.
At least I didn't have to worry about disease, I thought distantly. Different species. And the Khorreth clearly had medicine sophisticated enough to rebuild my entire biology; if there were any risk, they'd have dealt with it already. One less thing to think about.
I let it go.
We lay there a long time.
The light in the dwelling shifted slowly, whatever passed for daylight on this planet, filtering through high windows I couldn't have reached even if I'd wanted to. Keth held me against his chest, his hand tracing slow patterns on my back, his tail draped over my hip like a warm weight.
I should have got up. Asked for food, for water, for some explanation of what my life was going to look like now. Started planning, the way I always planned, the way I'd survived nine years of relay stations and bad postings and too little sleep. Instead, I stayed.
His scent settled over me, that warm, particular smell of him I was learning to pick out from the ambient smells of the dwelling. I could read him now. The contentment under the warmth. The satisfaction. The edge of protectiveness that never quite faded.
He was happy. Just lying here with me. Just holding me.
I'd never been held like this. Not really. Not by someone who seemed to want nothing more than the holding itself, who wasn't waiting for me to get up and do something useful, who wasn't keeping track of time or obligations or what came next.
It was dangerous, I thought. Getting used to this. Letting myself want it.
I stayed anyway.
Longer than I needed to. Longer than the milking required, longer than the post-heat recovery justified. I told myself I was tired. Told myself my body needed rest. Told myself it didn't mean anything that his arms felt like the safest place I'd been in years.
But when I finally did move, sitting up, reaching for my discarded coveralls, starting the process of being a functional person again, I noticed the reluctance.
I noticed that I hadn't wanted to leave.
And I didn't quite admit to myself that I'd stayed on purpose.