Page 32 of Star Season
“I don’t know. No one knows. It broadcasted coordinates and then it went dark.”
“It’s probably better shelter for you than the woods, though,” I said. “It’d take us gesuns to get back to any kind of civilization, and if I’m, um, in a rut, you’ll be running from me as much as from the vvoln, and, uh, at least in the ship, you could probably hunker down?”
“Is there any way we can call for help?”
I shook my head. “No signal out here, shei.”
“Why do you keepcallingme that?”
“I just call women that,” I muttered.
“Have you considered that it’s sexist and reductive and disgusting?” She gestured with both hands.
I shifted on my hooves, clearing my throat. “Uh, sorry, Cypra.”
She turned away from me. “No, it’s… this isn’t your fault. I did this to myself.”
“No, no, you didn’t. It is my fault. I didn’t check the tires—”
“I should probably stop yelling at you if I don’t want to bring down all the vvoln on us, including the pack that we pissed off already, huh?” Her voice trembled.
I sighed again. “Look, we’ll probably only have to sleep outside once and then we’ll be able to make it to the ship. We’ll have a fire, and we’ll be safe from the vvoln. And my, uh, my mating cock should stay inside me for that long, I think.”
“That’s not what I read,” she said. “It could be really soon. It could already be—”
“It’s not.” I gestured to my crotch with both hands. “See? It’s not.”
She bit down on her bottom lip. “So, um, when you said… said ‘brutal,’ um, you have any specifics there?”
I couldn’t look at her.
When I did, her eyes were filling with tears again, and I felt like my heart was getting ripped from my chest, and I went to her. I started to touch her, to comfort her, and then I thought better of it.
I didn’t touch her. My voice was rough. “I will do everything in my power to keep myself from… from any of it.”
“But you can’t control it,” she said, her voice wavering.
“No, I can,” I said. “I’ll find a way.”
She looked away, surreptitiously wiping at her eye.
“Hey,” I whispered. “I promise you.”
SEVEN
cypra
It was strange how all over the place my emotions were about this.
One hisec, I was positive I could handle Holston’s mating cock, mounting me, all of it. I needed to do it for the resistance, so I’d do it, no problem.
Stars, I was even turned on by it.
I had read all the theories about women and why some of them have rape fantasies. And, okay, I was a woman who had occasionally had rape fantasies. I guessed there wasn’t any point in denying it.
There was one theory that women did it because they had been brought up in a culture that taught them to deny their sexual urges and said they were shameful. I knew there were cultures like that out there, but my upbringing as a human woman on the Colony, sex was justpartof being a human woman. So, I’d never felt shamed for wanting sex, not really.
That just didn’t really ring true to me, but I supposed it might for some women’s fantasies. This way, they could indulge themselves but it wasn’t their fault. The man took utter responsibility for all of the desire, and she could pretend she didn’t have any desires at all.
