Page 44 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER FIVE

Ellie

I wake with an ache deep between my thighs like I’ve never felt before, Anghar’s words echoing in my ear.

Drive you wild with my tongue. Lick through your folds until you squirm, tease at your entrance.

I nearly groan as a hot pulse of need goes through my core.

Instinctively, I want to touch myself, want to reach down and slide my fingers through the wetness I know I’ll find.

But I’m flanked on both sides by sleeping bodies and I don’t think they’d appreciate waking up to that.

Instead, I get up, picking my way past everyone else until I’m back on the sand, then walk a few laps round our little camp, stretching out my stiff legs and back, distracting myself with other aches until the one between my legs calms down.

But as the physical noise retreats, the mental noise starts up. Conflicting thoughts and feelings spiral round in my mind, and I take a seat down by the ocean, pull off my heavy boots and socks, letting the waves rush up over my sore, blistered feet, as I set about trying to untangle everything.

Anghar.

I confess, I have been much occupied with wondering how you taste.

Just the echo of his words sends another shiver through me - that simple shiver more pleasurable by far than any other encounter I’ve had with men.

And if I was furious in the dream when he reached for me, it’s only because I was afraid of how much I wanted him to touch me.

Not just touch - my dream alien is interested in doing a lot more than just touching.

Which, because I’ve invented him, means I’m interested in doing a lot more, too.

As if my soaking panties didn’t say that loud and clear.

I’m going to chalk this one up to survival instincts. Humans are just animals, after all. When you boil it down to its most basic parts, life is about living long enough to procreate. Feeling like you’re going to die probably gives the libido a massive kick up the backside.

Plus, there are the drugs Mercenia gave us that I’ve probably just about detoxed by now.

It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the cocktail of things they laced our bottom tier food with was some sort of sexual suppressant, and now that I’m not on it anymore, parts of me are sitting up and demanding attention.

It’s just a natural, physical response that I could no more control than pain or hunger.

I look down at my toes as another cool wave of water rushes over them.

When it retreats to the ocean, it sucks some of the sand with it, pulling it round my feet, tickling at my sensitive skin.

I wriggle my toes, sinking them into the squelchy sand.

All these sensory inputs I’ve never experienced before.

My body is awakening to the fact that it’s designed for more than just the pain of an aching back after a long, hard day at work, the discomfort of constant hunger.

Sure, the hunger is still there and my body aches from my long walks looking for food, but there’s also the pleasure of the morning sunshine, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves.

Even the sand, which has been getting all kinds of places I’d rather it didn’t, can create a pleasant sensation against the skin.

I close my eyes, run my hands over my arms, imagine it’s someone else’s fingertips trailing over my skin.

Okay, I imagine it’s Anghar - his big hands gentle on me as he touches me with the reverence I’ve seen him looking at me with.

Because he’s imaginary, so I can imagine that those looks aren’t a ploy.

They aren’t honed and practiced over many years, and many different girls.

They aren’t bait to get me close, a lure to make me think I’ve fallen.

I remember Neris warning me about this early in my days at the slaughterhouse.

There were supervisors there barely older than me.

Or, at least, they looked barely older than me.

With their flawless upper tier skin and bodies not ravaged by the hardships of work, it could be hard to estimate their actual age.

It didn’t really matter. They looked young and handsome, and some of them liked to make a sport of getting na?ve bottom tier girls to fall in love with them.

There was one circling me, flattering me with compliments, giving me little tokens - biscuits, a pretty piece of ribbon. Tiny things to him, but treasures to me. Neris cornered me before it got too far.

“I need to show you something,” she said, beckoning me away from whatever thing I was doing at the time.

It was dangerous to leave your post as a bottom tier worker.

If a supervisor caught you slacking, you could have your rations docked, or a beating if the supervisor was feeling particularly bored or vindictive.

But there was an unspoken understanding in the slaughterhouse that if a girl was missing from her post, she was probably with a supervisor somewhere, doing the other kind of work required of her.

It meant we had a little freedom to move around, as long as we were careful.

Neris guided me to a section of air vents.

We had to crawl inside them sometimes, clean them out.

It was a job given to the younger girls, purely because they were smaller.

I’d done my fair share of crawling through those dark, dusty spaces, but they were already getting a bit tight for me.

Neris, being only a tiny little thing, had never grown out of doing it.

I followed after her as she climbed up into the vent, crawling through the network of tunnels.

Neris took turns at junctions without hesitation - the years she’d spent doing this had built a perfect map of the vents in her head.

She guided me through them until we were over what looked like a supervisor break room.

She tapped a finger to her lips, then pointed down through the grate.

Beneath us, four of the younger supervisors - including the one who’d shown interest in me - were sitting in comfortable looking chairs, eating their upper tier food. The smell permeated even the musty air in the vents, making my mouth water.

But the conversation soon turned my stomach.

They were discussing the workers - who they were stringing along, how far they’d got with them.

Bad enough that they used derogatory language, showing their disregard for the girls they were stringing along.

The bastards even had a points system. Five points for a blow job, ten for full sex.

Groping only got you one point, but two if she groped you back.

But the words ‘I love you’ were the real prize - a full twenty points.

Apparently, the one circling me was the reigning champion.

“Dahlen knows exactly how to win a shiny’s heart,” one of the others said, laughing.

Even in that vent, having just listened to everything they’d been saying, my stupid fifteen-year-old heart still hoped he would say ‘no, this one’s different.’

“The trick is picking the right one,” Dahlen said. “You need to look in their eyes and see which ones are desperate to believe it. You don’t win the race if you don’t pick the right horse.”

My whole body went so cold, I don’t think I could have moved if Neris hadn’t prodded me, urged me to follow her.

Once we were out of the vents, she enveloped me in her arms.

“Don’t get sucked into their games,” she said. “All upper tier men are bastards, there’s no exception. They’ll take from you. I can’t protect you from that. But don’t give them something as precious as your heart.”

I saw her give this speech to others through the years.

Watched as other girls like me railed against what they had seen.

He was just doing it to save face in front of his friends, he was different this time, he really cared.

Neris just watched them with sad eyes. There was nothing more she could do.

Me, I made sure that asshole didn’t win the race the year he picked me.

I find it strange that my subconscious is so determined to convince me that Anghar is real. I don’t want him to be real. Real guys like Dahlen only ever wanted to use me. The only good guy is an imaginary one. There’s something wrong with my head if I’ve forgotten that.

And that makes a horrible thought occur to me.

What if this is a sickness? What if I’m infected by some spore or germ and it’s attacking my brain, feeding me these dreams, eroding the logic and reason.

There are diseases like that which affect cattle, then affect the humans who ate them or got exposed to them in other ways.

It makes a cruel sense. If it was purely something I’d eaten, surely other girls would be experiencing the effects. They’d be talking about their weirdly realistic dreams of home or the future, or whatever it is that preoccupies their subconscious minds. But it’s just me.

I touch my hands to the scratches on my face.

That bird got me good, and what if it was carrying something on its claws that’s now in my bloodstream?

My heart starts to race. This is a whole new planet, and there are bound to be diseases and poisons and other things we’ve never come across before, that our bodies have no defence against. Especially now all the drugs we’ve been fed all our lives are out of our system.

I feel a tremble starting in my hands. Because I know how diseases like that go.

I’ve seen it in the restricted areas of the slaughterhouse.

The side where the contaminated cattle went.

The workers over there were criminals, people caught breaking Mercenia’s oppressive laws.

Their sentence - exposure to the contamination.

I saw the jerky manner of their movements, heard the irrational outbursts they used to make.

Saw them taken out strapped to a gurney when the deterioration had finally gone too far.