Buying His Mate (10 page)

Martin swallowed. Did it have to be so soon that he be tested this way? “Yes, of course,” he said. He looked at Gretchen, who shot him back a desperate, frightened look. “Be a good girl for Mr. Chang, my dear,” he said.

He watched as his colleague’s fingertips touched the tender cleft that he himself had only touched once, on the shuttle.

“Are you a naughty girl, Gretchen?” Joseph asked, with a teasing air that had no malice in it, but only a little bit of fun.

“No, Mr. Chang,” Gretchen squeaked.

“Are you sure?” Joseph asked, rubbing a little. “You feel warm down here.”

“Yes, Mr. Chang.” She gazed into Joseph’s eyes, her own very wide, and suddenly Martin wondered whether the answer to the riddle of Heather’s words lay in the way Gretchen looked right then. Though he had resolved a thousand times that if he were going to realize his dream of having a wife, he must allow precisely this sort of thing, to prevent suspicion among his fellow elites, the jealousy that spread through his chest at the sight of his colleague and neighbor awakening arousal in his relict girl’s pussy, and even more at the sight of Gretchen’s helpless response, made him wonder whether he had embarked on a very foolish course. Had Heather perhaps meant that he would finally want to send Gretchen to the club because he could not bear the conflict created by pretending he didn’t regard her as precious and special?

“Is your master going to have a good time tonight, Gretchen?” Joseph said with a smile.

“I hope so, Mr. Chang.” She gave Martin a shy look that made his heart melt. How could he do this?

Joseph withdrew his hand, rubbing his glistening fingertips together. “Martin’s a lucky man,” he said with a chuckle. Then he turned to Martin. “She’s really wet for you, man.” He put his fingers to his lips, tasted. “And she’s as sweet as honey. You treat her right, now.”

Treat her right
. The phrase had come into the Athenian vernacular, it seemed, when the very first Taking party had returned with the first twenty relict girls. Elites, both male and female, said it to one another, about their naked relict girls. They said it at the Maenad Club, he knew, and they said it in the workplace when a colleague went home to his relict girl or left a social gathering because he had ‘business’ at home. The expression had become, Martin thought, a way of marking the difference between the elites and the relict girls they used for pleasure and procreation.

For an elite to treat his or her relict girl right meant first that the elite would respect her basic humanity, and their common ancestry in that the Athenians had once been earthlings. Martin would not harm Gretchen, or keep her in a way that didn’t honor her sensitivity and intelligence. He would allow her to educate herself, if she wished, and to seek citizenship eventually.

At the same time, though, treating a relict girl right, for an elite, meant showing her that she must serve her master or mistress’ pleasure. It meant dominating your relict girl thoroughly enough that she understood her subservience and punishing her when necessary, to help her learn to be good. It meant, for Martin tonight, enjoying his girl’s body exactly as he pleased, for as long as he pleased, and ensuring that she understood that his use of her signified that he was an elite and she a relict.

To treat a relict girl right meant to put into practice the theory behind the Enclosure Act and the Taking: at long last, in their time of need, with their own birthrate falling, the time had come for the elites to begin to rescue their relict cousins. They did it as befit the elite, who now finally stood revealed as the saviors of the world: they took what they wanted, by right of needing it in the greater cause of humanity.

Joseph winked at Martin when the elevator door opened on level five, where their quarters were. “Nice to meet you, Gretchen,” he said. “I hope I see a lot of you.” He stepped off the elevator and walked quickly toward his own quarters, one door past Martin’s, about a hundred feet down the corridor.

Thankfully, although allowing one’s friends to explore one’s girl’s body was customary, the loaning of girls—though it occurred with some frequency—was frowned upon because it could result in ambiguous pregnancies that created bureaucratic work for the owner, the borrower, and the council staff. It would not, therefore, be among Martin’s trials that he would have to send Gretchen to spend a night with Joseph. He suspected, though, that Joseph would probably renew his caresses whenever he happened to see Gretchen, and the thought made him wonder again about whether he had doomed himself and his sweet relict girl to unhappiness.

Chapter Twelve

The door opened at Mr. Lourcy’s touch. To Gretchen’s surprise, he stepped aside, and gestured for her to enter first.

“Sir?” she asked. “I am to go in before you?” It wasn’t the way Ms. Trainor had said in orientation. Elites went through doors first; relicts second.

“You are,” Mr. Lourcy said softly.

But Gretchen stood there uncertainly, knowing he would see the fear in her eyes. Truly, to have her pussy touched by the pleasant-looking neighbor, Mr. Chang, seemed much easier than to have her master do something so unexpected as to order her to go through a door first.

He gave her a smile that seemed a little sad, though, and said, “Alright, my dear. Let’s do it the way we’re supposed to, and then I’ll explain, inside.” He stepped through the door.

Gretchen breathed a little sigh of relief and followed him. Ms. Trainor had said in one of the orientation sessions that they would be nervous all the time, in the beginning, but that the training they received in orientation would serve as a reassuring guide. To have her master, kind as he seemed, take that away made her feel not just nervous but positively frightened. To have him acknowledge that there was a way they were supposed to do things made her feel better, at least a little.

But as she took in the main living space of her master’s quarters, with its grand, turning view of the brilliant sun through glass darkened to allow the eye to look upon it, and its elegant, very old-fashioned–looking furnishings, she turned over in her mind the way he had phrased the reassuring thing:
Let’s do it the way we’re supposed to
. If he had said
Do it the way you’re supposed to
or even
I’ll do it the way I’m supposed to,
it would have seemed more natural to Gretchen.

To say
we
seemed to her to say that Mr. Lourcy saw them as a… a unit? a team?… somehow. Everything she had seen and heard in orientation seemed to contradict that: her master was elite, and she was relict. Her master had sex with her, punished her, and told her what to do during the day. Mr. Lourcy was
supposed
to master Gretchen, and Gretchen was
supposed
to serve him and to please him. There shouldn’t be a
we,
should there?

“Your room is to the right,” he said. “You’ll find some clothes on your bed. Please put them on, and then come back in here.”

“Clothes, sir?” She had heard that some girls would be given clothes to wear at home, depending on their duties. She hadn’t expected she would be one of them, because Mr. Lourcy hadn’t said anything about those sorts of duties: cooking and crafting were the two Ms. Trainor had mentioned.

Mr. Lourcy’s face seemed to grow a little stern. “Gretchen,” he said, “do as you’re told, please. When I want you in clothing, you will wear what you are given, or you will be punished until you learn to obey me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and turned to see the door to which he pointed, open and leading to a room so lovely she actually gasped when she entered it and saw the furniture that looked like it had come from the olden days: a four-poster bed with a pink coverlet, a little writing desk with a wooden chair in front of it, and a chest of drawers.

On the bed she did find clothing. Even the sight of it made her blush. She had seen things like it in an old, old magazine once, and the picture had fascinated her. She remembered thinking as she looked at it,
Nothing could ever make me put those things on
. Well, now something had: Gretchen had a master, and he would spank her, or even do one of those other things in the vid from orientation—use the paddle, the cane, the strap, or even the bottom plug—if she did not put them on.

Did Mr. Lourcy have a bottom plug like the one in the vid? Gretchen felt a little faint, remembering the way the vid had shown the big black thing had gone into the girl’s anus, making her cry out in discomfort, the way her mistress had said, standing over her relict girl’s backside and pushing the plug into it, “I want you to think about this, the next time you consider staying out in the park when you should be here getting dinner ready.” Then the vid had shown how the girl had to wear the plug while she was cooking, and the way the black plastic showed so shamefully, holding her creamy pink and white bottom cheeks apart as she worked at the counter in her mistress’ kitchen.

Gretchen had only seen lace in pictures and, once, as a tiny strip that had perhaps been torn off a comforter or the hem of a dress, in an old house. She chewed the inside of her cheek as she realized that the amount of lace covering her between her legs would not be very much more than she had found on the floor in the corner of the abandoned bedroom, whose furnishings weren’t even as nice as the ones in the room that she could now, apparently, call hers, here on Athena.

She had to put on the lacy things, though she did not even have names for them: the thing that went around her sternum and had the cups to hold her little breasts and the thing that went around her waist and between her legs and made her hairless pussy feel so strange and sensitive, with the very little bit of slightly stretchy fabric that ran back between her bottom cheeks and didn’t really cover them at all. Why did she feel more naked after she had put them on than she had when she wore nothing at all?

She emerged from her little room to find that Mr. Lourcy sat in a big, comfortable-looking chair, gazing out at the sun and the stars. He turned his head and smiled at her, which brought the blush back to her cheeks full force. Gretchen held her hands at her sides balled into little fists, feeling that she might try helplessly and vainly to flee even with nowhere at all to go and the prospect of the terrible punishments she knew relict girls got for refusing to please their masters and mistresses. Something about the scanty clothing he had commanded her to wear seemed to make her feel a shame she hadn’t felt since she had to take off her dress for the inspection back in the Hall of Taking in the enclosure—and not even then, really, because everything had seemed so strange and unreal that day.

Now, the Athenians had spent a full week of orientation to make sure that she understood exactly what it meant to be a relict girl: how thoroughly she belonged to Mr. Lourcy. He commanded her body so completely that if he wished to cover it, so that he might enjoy it better that way, according to his own pleasure, he would now simply tell her to go to her room and put on the lewd things he had laid out for her there.

Distracted by the crowding-in of these thoughts and feelings that made her tremble, standing there just inside the living room and looking at the man who would now, she knew, take her virginity and have sex with her as much as he wanted—deep into this night, Gretchen thought with a strange leaping of her heart, and then, if he wished, every night—she noticed that Mr. Lourcy had placed a piece of furniture in the center of the carpet that she hadn’t seen when she first came in. It seemed like a table, but narrow, and covered with padding.

“That’s your lesson table, Gretchen,” Mr. Lourcy said. She looked back at him, and saw that he had noticed her looking at the thing in confusion. “In a little while, you’re going to get up on it, and I’m going to inspect you, and then I’ll teach you a lesson.” He must have seen how her eyes went wide with alarm—she hadn’t done anything! Why was her master going to punish her? He smiled reassuringly and continued, “Don’t worry, my dear, it won’t be a disciplinary lesson. I promise you’ll find it very pleasant. It will also get you ready for sex, and at the end of your lesson I will bring you back to your room, and make a woman of you, as they used to say.”

Gretchen’s breath came more and more quickly. So. Not only the time for her to be deflowered, as the old books called it, was appointed, but also the manner. It would be in the pink-covered bed, after a time getting ready upon that
lesson table
. Gretchen shivered to think of what the phrase meant. How many lessons would she have atop that table?

“First, though,” said Mr. Lourcy, “I want you to come kneel on the floor in front of me, so that I may tell you about your new life. There are things that I want you to learn that are different from what you learned in orientation.”

A little mystified, but also reassured by her master’s kindly tone, Gretchen walked slowly over to his chair and sank to her knees, looking into Mr. Lourcy’s light brown eyes that seemed like milk chocolate, a treat she had only had a few times in her life.

“Good girl,” he said. “You may sit back on your heels.” Gretchen did, wondering why it felt so comforting to have her master praise her, and command her in his strangely polite way.

“Gretchen,” he said, “do you know what a
wife
is?”

Gretchen felt her brow furrow. Of course she did—you couldn’t understand practically any book from the old times unless you knew about marriage. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“What is a wife?” He seemed so very serious that Gretchen began to cast her mind about to try to understand why he would ask that sort of question. Marriage, and husbands and wives, were part of the past. The elites had specifically abolished it when they founded the community that built Athena and then withdrew there—here.

“It’s… I mean, she’s…” She felt herself start to panic a little at the strange questions and not being able to answer as she wished. Something about kneeling before this man seemed to take her wits away. Perhaps the reason was that he would soon have sex with her because that was how he wished it, and her opinion on the matter didn’t play any role at all. Perhaps it was because Gretchen’s back was on the one hand to the enormous window with the view of the sun, the stars, and the planets, and on the other to the strange lesson table and the room where the sex—Gretchen’s very first sex, which she could not help fearing because she knew that pain and blood were a practically essential part of the experience—would take place.