Alien Bond Read online

  “I wasn’t plugging along. I wasn’t taking classes. I didn’t have a job. Or a home. Or a family. When I look at you guys, I see why you were taken. You all have something to offer—”

  “My understanding was that they wanted you all for sex?” I put in for clarification. “Surely you are on par with the other women when it comes to…” I allow my words to trail off when I hear one of the women groan and see another rub her forehead the way Mire often does when I am bothering him.

  Reagan laughs ruefully.

  “Reagan—” Mel tries to interject.

  “No, he’s right. The new kid hit the nail on the head. Since I was 16 years old, that’s all I’ve been. Or it least that’s what it boils down to. People only want me if I’m giving it up and even then, they aren’t that interested.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second, Reagan,” Mel says.

  “Doesn’t make it any less true. See, when I was 16, I met a guy, Matt. He was older.”

  “How much older?” another asks.

  “Old enough to buy booze plus a couple years. I felt like the coolest girl in school because my boyfriend could bring alcohol to parties. Too bad it wasn’t cool. I mean, he was older than I am now, hanging out at a bunch of high school parties, trying to get teenage girls drunk—clearly not cool. But I was stupid and I didn’t see it that way at the time.

  “He had a car and slanged weed on the side. By that time my dad had died and it was just me, my stepmom, and her daughters. My stepmom always hated me and when she caught me sneaking out to see Matt…well, we got into a big fight. And not the kind where a parent threatens to ground you. No, she beat the shit out of me and kicked me out. Called me a slut and told me to never come back.

  “Matt was there for me then and I fell for him even more. It felt like he was the closest thing I had to a family since my dad died. So I moved in with him—not that I had any place else to go. And for a while it was okay, but he got weird and jealous about me going to school. He thought all the high school boys were constantly trying to hook up with me—which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but that’s neither here nor there.

  “When all was said and done, I barely managed to graduate with all the absences I had because of Matt and his jealousy. And after that…nothing. I stayed at Matt’s every day and he kept slanging. Eventually he was selling more than just pot. We’d have people coming over at all hours; they’d have guns. It was scary. A couple times we were robbed and after that Matt never wanted me to leave the house.

  “It went on like that for two years. We were living in a fog, disconnected from the real world. Then Matt started throwing parties and all these girls would show up. He’d flash his drug money and they’d be all over him. When he’d come to bed, I’d find hickies on his neck. Or there were times he’d be gone for days and I’d have no way to get ahold of him. My transportation was shoddy and I never had money for gas. Then when he’d come back, he’d be pissed at me, like I was the one who did something wrong.

  “Anyway, there was this one girl, Gina, who would always be around and she seemed pretty cool. She’d tell me that she noticed what a dick Matt was all the time. So finally I confronted him and you know what happened? He fucking laid me out. No lead up or anything. He just hit me, hit me so hard I blacked out, split my lip open too.”

  The room is utterly silent. Everyone is listening intently to Reagan’s painful story. Inside, though, I am fuming. This is not the way a man treats his mate; it is the way a master treats his slave. And it is unacceptable.

  “Would you like Mire and me to take care of him for you?” I offer, breaking the silence in the group.

  Some of the women’s eyes go wide, but Reagan just laughs. “If we ever find a way back to Earth, yes. He’d probably piss himself at the sight of you two.”

  Mel turns to give me a soft smile and I feel proud and rewarded for my input. They should know I would kill anyone who tried to harm them.

  “What’d you do, hun?” Mel asks Reagan.

  “He left and I called Gina. She wasn’t really my friend. I didn’t have any at that point. But she was the only person I knew. She came and picked me up, took me to her place and we started talking…and drinking…and well, uh…one thing led to another and…and then I was staying with Gina.”

  The tension in the room seems to shift and there are a few quiet, “Ohhhs.” I feel as if I missed something.

  “I’m sorry, what thing led to another?” I question, attempting to clarify.

  “It was like a lesbo thing,” Reagan tells me.

  I shoot my gaze to Mel, still not comprehending. She leans over to whisper, “Same-sex partnership.”

  “Oh! Like Mire and me?” All the females chuckle into their cups and Reagan laughs out loud.

  “I didn’t know you boys were that close,” she says smirking.

  “Oh, we are very close,” I assure her. “Like you and your Gina.”

  Mel covers her mouth and I can see her shoulders shaking with laughter.

  “Well, come to find out, we weren’t all that close. Because Gina had a girlfriend she’d forgotten to mention and after a week of staying with her I woke up with a gun pointed at my fucking head. Gina’s old lady was crazy—freaking tattoos-on-her-face, just-got-out-of-prison crazy. She threatened to kill me and clocked me over the head with the gun. For the second time in a week I was knocked out and when I started to come to, I could hear Gina and her girl talking. They thought they’d had killed me and were trying to decide how to dispose of my body.”

  The females all gasp in shock and my jaw tightens. “I jumped up and ran as fast as I could. My head was bleeding. I got in my old clunker of a car and got the fuck out of there. It was a miracle the thing even drove. It was running on fumes and I didn’t get far. I ended up parked in a Costco lot because I didn’t have anywhere to go. I was there about a week before I woke up on the Ju’tup ship.”

  “Getting taken was like a blessing for you,” one of the females puts in. “An opportunity for a fresh start.”

  “Yeah, you know it should have been. But I just keep feeling like I’m fucking it up. Everyone is finding their place here and I still don’t even know who I am. I tried to jump back into that old routine of finding a lover to take care of me. And look how it turned out? Reagan picked another winner.”

  “Rad?” I ask, remembering her short-lived romance with Kellan’s half-brother. He turned out to have a mate and young ones on another planet, but perhaps even worse than that, he was one of the UPC agents involved in the human slave trade. He and his friends kidnapped Kye Amara and brutalized many of the women here now.

  “Fucking Rad,” Reagan agrees.

  “Why do you think you did that—repeated that pattern?” Mel questions.

  Reagan shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m stupid and it was the only thing I could think of.”

  “Try again,” Mel tells her, looking unconvinced.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs, searching the room for the answers only she possesses. “Maybe I’m afraid of being alone, because if I am, I’ll have to really take a look at myself. If I tie myself to someone, especially someone shitty, I’ll have an excuse to fail. Plus…this new world was scary at first. The idea of having someone to care for me the way that Rennek cares for Kate…well, I’ve never had that before.”

  “Are you still scared?”

  “Not of this world…only of me. Scared that I won’t ever be anything more than what I was.” Reagan falls silent and takes a long drink of her ceata. “Who’s next?” she asks suddenly, sniffing loudly but shedding no tears.

  The other females still seem hesitant.

  Mel reaches over and grabs my wrist, turning my personal comm so that she may view it. Any other time I would thrill at the contact, but with all that is being discussed, her touch brings about something more potent—a fiercely loyal instinct stirs inside of me. Instead of feeling heat pooling in my cock, I feel it deep in my soul. The importance of my missi
on here crashes over me like a wave. Something powerful is happening and I am proud to be a part of it. Holly was right to warn me of the seriousness of this group. “We have plenty of time,” Mel says. “Do you want to go?” she asks me quietly.

  Only one person has spoken and already I have been thrown for a loop. I am unsure if I have anything worthy of sharing. While this group is clearly important, it isn’t what I expected it to be. “I am still learning,” I whisper so that only Mel can hear.

  She nods and pats my hand. She is so intimate, making everyone feel as if they are close to her, valued, and important.

  “If there are no other takers, I’m going to go for it.” Mel says, looking around the room.

  “Okay,” she sighs. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Gary lately.”

  The group collectively groans.

  “Who is Gary?” I ask. What a stupid name, I think. But I do not say that out loud. Gary.

  “Gary was my soon-to-be ex-husband,” Mel tells me. “Er, ‘ex-mate’ as you guys would call it.”

  “You were mated?” I am shocked. Most who are broken from mating bonds are left husks of their former selves. Such a bond should never be broken. Yet, Mel seems so vibrant and full of life.

  “We got married really young,” Mel explains. “It only lasted a couple years.”

  “Because he was a piece of shit cheater,” Reagan puts in.

  Mel nods slowly, but does not add to Reagan’s comment.

  “I do not follow.”

  “It means he mated with another female while they were still bonded to one another,” Alessandra tells me.

  “No!” I gasp, horrified by the thought. Again I am filled with a protective rage. This is another man I would love to kill, if given the opportunity. It is unfathomable that someone would treat a woman like Mel with such disrespect. Were she my mate, I would honor her above all else.

  “Yup,” Mel confirms the atrocity.

  “That’s not even the worst part,” the one called Lo adds. “He did it right after her mom died!”

  “Hey, whose story is this?” Mel laughs.

  “Sorry, but I don’t know why you’d waste time thinking about that pendejo.”

  “Okay, let me fill in the blanks for you,” Mel tells me. “Gary and I had dated for two years before we got married. About a year and a half into our marriage my mom got sick. She went to the doctor one day and found out she had stage four breast cancer. She only had a few months to live—”

  “He didn’t even let her mother move in with them,” Lo hisses.

  Mel rubs her forehead and offers an explanation for this Gary. “My mom had lots of medical equipment she needed in those last few months, there were nurses and hospice was coming and going. Gary was worried about the wear and tear on our furniture and the house. He just thought it made more sense for me to stay with my mom at her place in those final days.”

  “Fucking scumbag,” someone says from across the room.

  “I agree, he sounds like a bag of scum,” I tell them, still trying to make sense of this Gary’s actions. They are unconscionable to me.

  Mel laughs, “Yeah, well anyway. After Mom passed I was really out of it. I had to take a leave of absence from work and I just couldn’t crawl out of the hole I was in. The only thing I was doing for myself was attending a grief support group. One night, I came home from group and Gary was sitting there at the kitchen table. He told me we needed to talk, said he felt like he didn’t know me anymore and didn’t like the person I had become and perhaps most importantly, he said he was leaving me for a woman he worked with named Leslie. From the time my mom got diagnosed to that night at the table, all of five months had passed. I guess it was too long for him to wait.”

  “Fuck that, he shouldn’t have been waiting for you. He should have been right there with you, holding your damn hand,” Reagan asserts.

  My brow furrows as I take in Mel’s story. I cannot fathom why these men would treat their mates with such disrespect. Above all else, family is a precious thing. One should honor it wherever it can be found.

  “I must say, I agree with Reagan.” Beyond that I am speechless. I want to tell Mel, to tell all the women, of the Sovolian code of honor. When Mire and I decided to come here, we honor bound ourselves to this place and all the people here. I would fight for them, I would die for them, until the end of my days, no matter where this life takes me, these people are my family, these women are my sisters. With the exception of Mel, of course. I plan to make her my mate.

  “Why are you even thinking about that douchebag?” one of the other females asks, and while I do not know what a douchebag is, the question remains—why waste time thinking of someone so unworthy? I must help Mel shift her thoughts to a more productive endeavor. Soon I will replace this Gary in her mind and she will have only happy thoughts to carry her through each day.

  But Mel does something unexpected. She stifles a laugh and hangs her head, trying to keep her mirth at bay. It does no good and soon the laughter bubbles up. “This is going to make me sound like a horrible person,” she laughs, “but I just keep wondering if Gary and Leslie are in prison, charged with my murder or something?”

  She’s laughing so hard now, tears are leaking from the corners of her eyes. “I can just picture them in an interrogation room with detectives pounding on the table, demanding to know where they hid my body.” She doubles over, holding her sides, trying to bottle up the comedy she sees in this.

  “Whoa…you think? That’s probably exactly what’s happening,” Lo marvels.

  “It would serve them right,” April asserts.

  “Karma,” V adds.

  “But the question is…how do you feel about that?” Reagan asks in a feigned baritone voice.

  Mel’s laughter slowly dies away and she wipes her eyes, but her smile doesn’t fade. “Honestly? I feel better about it than I’d like to admit. I shouldn’t want bad things to happen to Gary. I shouldn’t even be thinking about him. It’s a waste of my time—of my life, really. Like you said, Reagan, I’m a billion miles away from them, what does all that baggage have to do with me right here and now? Thinking about them at all makes me feel like I’m still stuck in that hole, trying to claw my way out.”

  “I get that,” V says quietly from across the room.

  “It’s just…I’m ready to be happy again. I want to leave the past where it belongs. Sometimes I think that maybe I’d have been able to figure out how to do that if I were still back on Earth. I’d at least have had some type of a road map on the things I should be doing. But here on Elysia…it’s not like I can dive into my career or join eHarmony. All I can do is shuck pompaya and that doesn’t exactly breed joy.”

  “It was the same for me early on,” Alessandra shares. “I didn’t feel like I had any skills that were applicable out here. I was struggling and had no clue what to do with myself. Eventually it came down to the little things. Back on Earth, singing always brought me joy. Whether it was with my family or even alone with my radio turned up. It gave me a sense of peace. You have to carve out your own slice. I mean, sure, we have all the artsy stuff and the yoga. But if that’s not you, it isn’t really worth a damn. You’ve got to rediscover what is important to you and dive in.”

  “Exactamente,” Lo agrees. “It’s like that old guy from City Slickers, you have to find that one thing.”

  “Oh my God, that’s such a random reference,” April laughs.

  “For reals though!” Lo defends. “You remember that, right? That’s how he got so old, he had like one special thing.” Some of the women laugh and others groan good-naturedly. The conversation moves quickly and I struggle to follow some of the things the women say.

  “Did you have any hobbies back home?” Alessandra asks.

  Mel shrugs. “I was social…I’d have friends and family over a lot. That was my thing.”

  “Well, I’d say you’ve already checked that box,” Reagan points out, gesturing around the room.

  �
�I agree with City Slickers over here,” V says with a teasing smile.

  “See, she knows,” Lo huffs at the others as if V’s approval confirmed her point.

  “You’ve got to find something that brings you that sense of peace. For me it was something brand new,” V continues. “Leaving Earth, it put a lot in perspective. Out here, priorities change. So much of my effort used to go into my education and working towards my career, but here…all you have is yourself and happiness takes on a whole new meaning.”

  Mel nods knowingly. “I suppose it’s just a road I’m going to have to travel. What’s the saying—time heals all wounds? Eventually I’ll get there, but until then I’m glad to be able to talk about it. Admitting that something is missing lessens the ache, you know? Keeping it bottled up was making me feel like I had a dirty secret. Thanks, guys.”

  “And here’s to hoping that Leslie dumps Gary because she suspects he’s a murderer,” April says, raising her glass of ceata.

  “Hear, hear,” Reagan cheers.

  “Who wants to go next?”

  V steps up after that and spends time talking about the loss of her grandmother some years ago. The others listen and console her and I grow more confused. Another woman talks about being teased as a child, and another about how her parents favored her older sister. All the while I am confused why we are talking about such things. It isn’t until the very end, when all the women rise and begin to tidy Mel’s room, that Gabby finally speaks about something current.

  “Look, guys…weeks are starting to turn into months here and I can’t relax without some answers.” Her tone is demanding and she cuts her eyes to me. “I’m tired of the pacifying bullshit. I want to know where Val is.”

  “Which one is Val?” I whisper to Mel.

  Everyone shifts uncomfortably on their feet. “Now’s not the time, Gabby,” Lo tells her friend, her eyes darting to me.

  “Then when? Are we just going to forget that she ever existed? Was she the price we paid to come here, to be somewhere safe?”

  “Look, Kate’s not lying when she says she doesn’t know. Not even the Red King’s people know where he’s at. What do you want them to do, start combing the whole freaking galaxy?” Reagan asks defensively. I frown, assessing the sudden tension in the room.