Buying His Mate by Emily Tilton

slipped out of the club, his cock very hard and his mind very conflicted.

Chapter Seven
     
     
    Fifteen naked girls now waited in the entertainment room, as Gretchen began to think of it. They had started the vid about the Taking again, once it had finished, because the girls who had come in after Beth wanted to see it. Beth and Gretchen sat in a different part of the room from the view screen, flipping through the books they had found in another chest and talking from time to time about the very different lives they had led—at least since Jerry had taken Gretchen and her mother to the enclosure.
    “So,” Beth said, “you can use the water without boiling it? So you don’t need to keep a fire going all the time?”
    Gretchen explained patiently, once again. “We don’t have fires at all. The power comes from the sky-people’s compound, to cook and wash and even to heat our houses.”
    “But how do you know who’s in charge, if it’s not the man whose woman keeps the fire?”
    Gretchen laughed. “In the beginning it was a tribe chief the sky-people chose, but after that the adults elected a council, and the council chose a president.”
    Beth’s mouth opened wide. “Like in the old days?”
    Gretchen shook her head. “Jerry—that’s the man who brought us here—says that it just means the person who presides, and that just means someone who sits in front.” She could tell that she had utterly lost Beth, for whom the word president must mean a legendary figure who made the world run right, in the lost golden age. “Can you read?” she asked, changing the subject.
    Beth shook her head, looking down at the book she had chosen, which consisted almost entirely of pictures and must be there, along with others like it, precisely for the use of girls who couldn’t read. Gretchen had caught a glimpse of the title: A Relict Girl Comes to Athena . There seemed to be a series of titles in the series, much like the series of vids the other girls were watching, and Gretchen found to her surprise that her heart had started to beat faster as she wondered whether any of them covered the part of a relict girl’s life that, when the vid brought it up, had turned her face scarlet.
    She herself had chosen Pride and Prejudice because it was familiar, and she wanted Beth to see that she knew what literature was. With a little embarrassment, Gretchen realized that the proud—she smiled, thinking of Mr. Darcy—attempt to make herself feel superior was utterly lost on Beth, who must only see something inexplicable and incomprehensible.
    On the view screen, the vid about the Taking had just reached the embarrassing part. Gretchen saw that Beth had turned her attention back to it, and she couldn’t help also hearing the calm narration, and then turning to watch the screen again.
    “According to the provisions of the Enclosure Act, we are required by our laws to tell you that the act specifically calls for the use of your body both for reproduction and for sexual pleasure.”
    The screen showed a naked girl, lying on a nicer bed than any Gretchen had ever seen, in a bigger bedroom than she had imagined a person might ever inhabit. A long viewport above the bed showed the Earth going by as the space station rotated. Gretchen tried again to grasp the idea that she would soon be on Athena herself, and failed. Still less could she seem to understand that she must share the fate of the girl in the bed, who wore a resigned expression that included a little smile as if she knew she must be pleasing to whomever entered the room.
    A door slid open, on the screen, and a man entered, wearing the clothing of an elite.
    “Oh, he’s handsome,” said one of the girls who had recently come through the door, and another giggled. Gretchen looked at her uncomprehendingly. How could any girl take this so lightly?
    As the man in the vid smiled at the girl in his bed and began to undress, the narrator said, “Most relict girls belong to men,