Authors: Emma Taylor
When the container-throwing game was over, he made her get down on her hands and knees and scrub the same section of floor for two hours: the same square meter of already-clean floor. The rag she used didn’t accumulate much dirt. The floor was already clean. But he made her scrub it anyway, as the children squawked with birdlike laughter and the wife grinned the grin of an abused woman who sees that the abuse has been transferred: a third relief, a third sick pleasure, a third empathy.
When will this madness end?
Rosy thought, as she scrubbed the floor.
I should be in the office now, sifting through the slush pile. I should be finding the next Hemingway to make my name. I should be finding a bestseller, and going to the boss with it, and pushing for it. And reaping the rewards. I should be having coffee and cake and, and—not this
.
Eventually, after five hours, Raben either ran out of arbitrary tasks for her to do or got bored of her. She was sent back to her bedroom. She lay on her bed, buried her face in her flimsy robe, and wept bitterly.
***
In the middle of the night, she was using the goggles and gloves, losing herself in movies that had been with her in childhood: movies about princesses and beasts and warriors and love. Then she felt the bed compress a little near her legs. She took the goggles off and looked up. Elion sat at the end of the bed, his legs outstretched. She chewed his lip and then looked at her. “We must be quiet,” he said. “If Father hears he will be angry, and he will take it out on you.”
“Why are you here?” Rosy said. “Why the
hell
are
you
here? You just left me in there. Do you realize how humiliating that was? Do you realize what that did to my sense of self? He can make me do
whatever
he wants and there’s
nothing
I can do. And stupid person that I am, I thought because you were nice to me you might speak up for me. But instead you just run away.”
“I couldn’t watch him torture you like that,” Elion said. “And I couldn’t do anything to stop him. The only choice was to walk away.”
“And what will tomorrow bring?” she said. “Tell me that.”
“He will make you do more things like today,” Elion said. “He is cruel, though he is unlikely to harm you physically. That is not in his nature.”
Rosy tried to come to terms with this: that tomorrow she would wake up and be subjected to the same humiliation. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t help but think that her life was over in a big way. Things had become irredeemably bad. She wanted to stay mad at Elion.
He left you, he left you, he left you
. But what could he have done? Plus, he was her only ally in this place. If she shunned him, she would truly be alone.
“Tell me something,” Rosy said.
“Pardon me?”
“Tell me something,” she repeated. “Tell me something that will take my mind off all this.”
He rubbed his head, and then said: “In the North, there are animals that are made mostly of fire. Long ago this planet began to boil with heat, and most animals in that region were killed because they could not adapt, but this animal, somehow, grew
with
the heat. Now there are constant fires, always burning. And these animals have developed glands that are
flammable
, but the flames do not kill them. Instead, they act as a kind of shield against insects and other irritants. The benefits of being afire outweigh the danger.”
Rosy closed her eyes and tried to imagine this flaming beast. She was successful for a few moments, and then Raben’s sneering face came back into her mind. She fiddled with the goggles and gloves for a few minutes in silence, and then Elion said: “Tell me of your planet.”
At first her memories came slowly, but as she coaxed them out she began to
see
what she was saying in her mind, and it became easier. She told him of her parents, of the farm which they’d lived on until she was ten years old. She told him of movie theaters and books. She told him of pop music and America. She told him about the dolls she’d had as a girl, and her efforts to learn guitar, and her brief phase of skateboarding. She told him all these things as though he wasn’t even there. She was reliving more than telling, and when she was done her eyes were tired and her body felt drained.
Elion, without talking, came and sat at her end of her bed. He put his hand on her hand. It was warm and soft and welcome. “Sleep,” he said, in a soothing voice. “Just sleep.”
And she did.
*****
For the next two Earth-weeks (not even a full
week
on Ka-ta, which she’d learnt was the name of this planet) she was Raben’s slave. He never struck her and he never made her do anything sexual, but she still felt besieged. Each morning she had to wake up and do
exactly
what he said when he said it. There was no escape for her. She just had to
do it
. He would make her walk around in circles in one room, and pop his head in every so often to make sure she was doing it. Once he had two jars of bean-like objects: red and green. He mixed them together and spilled them upon the floor. He made her sort and collect the beans. It wasn’t too tiring, but it was humiliating and mind-numbing.
The only thing that got her through this, as Earth became more like a faded memory than something real, were her nighttime meetings with Elion. She had hidden the goggles and gloves in the rollout section of her bed, rolling them up each morning. And in the nighttime she would watch movies and read books until Elion came into her bedroom. They would always whisper, even though Raben and the rest of the family slept on the other side of the house.
One night, Elion walked into the room and sat next to her on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. He had been doing this more and more lately, touching her in friendly way. She didn’t know what to make of it. She knew it was wrong, but at the same time, something about him was attractive to her. He was tall and muscular, and looked and sounded human enough. He was compassionate and kind and seemed to care about her plight.
Hold on,
she thought, as he shifted on the bed.
You’re not becoming
attracted
to this alien are you, Rosy dear? Do you realize how crazy that would be?
You’re not even the same
species
! Plus, he’s the
son
of your torturer! You’re living in a dreamland if you think being attracted to this non-human is okay.
And yet, as his hand rested on her shoulder, she found herself looking at his shocked white hair and his high-cheekbone face and being thankful he was here, and being more than comfortable with his hand on her shoulder. He kept his hand on her shoulder for a few minutes before sliding down onto the floor and leaning his back against the rollout bedframe.
Rosy lay on her side. “It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, staring at the wall. “It has, hasn’t it?”
“If you’d asked me a month ago – an Earth month – what I’d be doing, I don’t think I would’ve guessed this in a million years. It’s the craziest thing I can imagine.”
“Rosy,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Rosy, it is a nice name. It is a flower, yes, a rose?”
“Yes,” Rosy said. “You like it? I’ll show you one, if you want.”
She retrieved the goggles and gloves, quickly found an image of a rose, and then handed them to him. He smiled as he looked at the rose, the corners of his lips lifting upwards in a beautifully human display of emotion. He reached out his hand. She went to him and put her hand in his, interlocking the fingers. Her pinkie dangled over the side of their interlocked fingers, as he only had three fingers, but for some reason this didn’t frighten her. She felt comfortable in his presence, even with his non-human hands.
He stared at the rose for a little while longer and then took the goggles off. He looked awkward, suddenly, like he didn’t know what to say. This was strange, because usually they were comfortable being with each other but being silent; they had seemingly skipped the awkward conversation-filler stage, and Rosy was glad for it. But now he opened his mouth, closed it again, opened it again, chewed his lip, and then finally stared down at his hands.
“What is it?” Rosy said. “You want to say something but you are scared to say it.” (She found simple exposition worked well with Elion.)
“I have heard that human women can experience immense pleasure if touched in the right way,” he said, and looked up at her. “I wish to make you experience immense pleasure. You are upset. Perhaps if I give you this pleasure, you will feel better, at least for a small amount of time. As I understand it, if I rub your clitoris and touch your body, you will experience an orgasm, much like the Ka can experience orgasms. Is this correct?”
Rosy’s skin turned the same shade of red as Elion. “Yes,” she said. “That’s correct.”
“Would you let me?” he said, and rose to his eight-foot height. “Would you let me do that for you?”
Rosy didn’t know what to say. She knew what she
should
say. She should scream at him and tell him to leave and tell him that she wouldn’t be used by
two
aliens. She couldn’t let him
touch her
like that. She would
never
do that. What did he think she was? And yet—she looked at him for a few moments, to see if
it
was there, that heated, urging feeling. And, to her semi-surprise, it was. She found that she
wanted
this red-skinned, white-haired, eight-foot-tall alien to touch her: to make her come.
She cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said.
***
Elion leaned over her on the bed and put his hand on her leg over her robe. She felt something move through her, not quite pleasure, but something
pleasant.
She moved his hand further and further up her leg, towards her vagina, towards her clit. The whole time his eyes were trained on her, locked on her breasts and her legs. He moved his hand higher and higher until it was next to her naked vagina.
“Do you want to be touched?” he said.
“Yes,” Rosy said, without hesitation now. “Yes, do it.”
He put his fingertips on her clit, brushing them at first, and then he pressed his forefinger down on it like it was a button. She hadn’t realized how horny she was, but when he pressed his finger down she felt a jolt of pleasure move through her like electricity. She bit down and grabbed his wrist and moved his hand faster, harder.
“Keep going,” she moaned. “Don’t stop.”
He moved his hand faster and faster, as the moonlight from three moons bathed the room blue. She heard rather than felt her breathing get quicker: high-pitched, ecstatic breaths. She gripped his forearm, which was all taut and ripped muscle. She gripped it hard as he moved his fingers quicker and quicker on her clit.
This is an alien doing this, Rosy,
she thought, amidst the pleasure.
This is an
alien.
How can you be doing this? This isn’t right!
And yet it felt
so
right.
She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling the tight, powerful muscles. She felt completely at the mercy of this man, and she loved it. She wasn’t normally that sort of girl, but now something emerged in her. She could feel the wetness between her thighs, the wetness that poured out for him. He moved his hand forward and then slipped his finger inside of her.
“Is that okay?” he said.
“Just rub me in there,” she sighed, moaning. “Just keep rubbing until I come all over your hand.”
He said nothing more, just moved his middle finger around her sweet spot in her vagina, fucking her with his finger. She gripped down on his shoulders even harder, and now the pleasure was rising. Everything was becoming more intense, harder to think, to feel: just that heat, rising. She closed her eyes and saw blue-red.
His finger was moving so fast within her that it just felt like some kind of hot engine vibrating within. She bit down, and then everything broke within her, and the orgasm washed over her. She bit down harder to stop herself from screaming. “Fuck, fuck,” she whispered, as she came on his hand. “Fuck, yes, fuck!”
Elion kept moving his fingers, and then when she was done he fell back and regarded her. “You liked that,” he said.
She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”
*****
But no amount of pleasure from Elion at night could make up for being Raben’s slave during the day. For the next three (Earth) months she worked under his watchful gaze. Sometimes, he would invite guests and she would be forced to perform demeaning tasks like wiping the slobber from his chin. She was sure he dribbled on purpose, just to make her wipe it off in front of his guests. Instead of being disgusted, as humans would be, the guests seemed to love it. (Only the Ka’la’tek family bothered to wear Translators, and so Rosy could not understand the guests.)
Other times, Raben would make Rosy take orders from his young child, Flybesh. Flybesh was a vicious little animal-like thing with long rat-like hair and pinched, hateful eyes. In many ways he was worse than his father. He would make Rosy stand on one leg for hours on end. If she refused, she would run to Raben and he would punish her by not feeding her for a few days. When this didn’t work – Elion would simply sneak her food in the nighttime – he would lock her out of doors in the daytime. The heat was intolerable, and made her break out in blisters. She learned to listen to Flybesh. (She had learnt, too, that that gray material was anti-heat, naturally cooling, which was why it was colder in the house.)