Misconstrued, p.6
Misconstrued, page 6
When I tried it, the sink worked, flushing the toilet seemed to work.
“This is really nice,” I murmured.
They just looked so pleased with themselves that I couldn’t help but smile. They were all still standing there looking at me. I shifted awkwardly. If this was my room now, I wanted them to leave. I was more than a little afraid of the idea that my having the master bedroom meant that I had to share. Okay, time to think strategically.
I could fake yawn, but I had no idea if they would take the hint. Of course no one had actually said this was my room now, only that they wanted me to see it.
I cleared my throat. “Um, is this my room? Am I expected to share that bed? Or are you just showing off your skills before I go back to the garage? Because I realize this could go either way.”
Tybalt surprised me by getting the hint. “Your room. We leave.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
They did, and as the hallway cleared, I realized none of them had been in the room with me. They had all been watching from the doorway. That was very interesting. Tybalt was the only one left watching me as I thought about that.
“You keep being nice to me and I keep waiting for the not nice to start.”
Tybalt frowned a little. “Have to be nice. If not nice, someone else take you.”
“Who?”
He shrugged. “Someone nice who you like better.” He was still and quiet. “A human male. Or the one you said was helpful. Maybe. You gave him to Erika.”
I tensed at that. “Is he going to be nice to her?”
He just looked puzzled. “Yes? Not many women talk to us. No one wants to make you stop.”
I looked around the room again. It was a human bed, a queen sized. “You wanted me to sleep in your bed instead of here. Why?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “This—” he gestured, indicating the whole room, “not mine. Everyone helped. Gift from everyone. I want you to have my gifts. I want you to be mine more than everyone’s.” It was a quiet speech with him addressing his boots rather than me.
“Is that why you said no when I asked if Romeo, Mac, and Iago were your friends that first day?”
He nodded, still not looking at me.
“But I spend a lot of time with them,” I pointed out.
He sighed and flopped his head back to look at the ceiling for a moment, before suddenly startling me with eye contact. “Not important enough to pay for your food alone. Not … rich or …” he shrugged helplessly, “not wanted enough to—” he stopped abruptly.
I sat on the bed. “Why don’t you come in and explain it to me?”
He shook his head. “Your room. I stay out until you choose me.”
“I’m inviting you in.”
“No. You don’t understand and I don’t take.”
I just stared at him. “You’re right. I don’t understand. So help me.”
He nodded. “I like you. If I do nice things, maybe you like me back.”
I considered that. “Is this like dating? Or like feeding a stray?”
He just looked confused.
I sighed. “Am I here as a person or as an animal?”
“Person!” He blurted out emphatically. “If you like me, maybe as husband?”
I blinked stupidly at that. “You want to get married? But I just met you!”
Tybalt nodded. “I do nice things, you see if you like.”
I considered that some more. “But … this isn't like dating. Not with four of you.”
He pulled something that looked like a circle of plastic out of his pocket and poked it a few times, then nodded. “Yes. Orcs different, have many husbands.”
I thought about him and Mac. “I think this is a lot more complicated than I was expecting.”
Shrugging, he said, “Not complicated. You see if you like how we treat you. If you do, you keep us until you don’t.”
- - - -
Erika was at breakfast the next morning. With Mr. Helpful.
“Holy shit! What are you doing here?” I asked, feeling flabbergasted.
She laughed and patted my cheek. “I wanted to see you so I told that guy that if he arranged for me to have lunch with you, I would look at his dick—”
“Erika!”
She grinned. “What? I said look not touch. He seemed pretty happy with my offer, he didn’t even wait for lunch. What’s his name anyway? I can’t get him to tell me.”
“We can’t pronounce their names, you’ll have to pick one for him,” I explained.
Mac and Romeo were glaring at him, but it was Tybalt who added, “Name is worth more than breakfast. Looking is worth more than lunch.”
She and I exchanged a look. Nameless just seemed embarrassed.
I was still struggling with the idea that giving someone a name was a service that had value.
“You could name him Dipshit!” someone a few tables over suggested. People laughed. Mr. Helpful suddenly looked dangerous for a moment. Erika noticed too and shifted away from him. As soon as she did, I could see him force himself to relax. That was interesting.
She sat next to me. Helpful-possibly-Dipshit sat next to her, giving her a bit more room after Romeo said something. It was almost funny. They were all squished tightly together to try to give us as much room at the table as possible.
As breakfast was wrapping up, Erika asked, “Where are you going next?”
I shrugged. “Wherever they send me, I guess.”
She turned to the closest one of my orcs, who happened to be Romeo, and asked, “Can Mina hang out with me today?”
He blinked, then nodded.
“Okay! I need you to kick my ass and make me do yoga. I haven’t since you left.”
I grinned at that.
“Right after we look at this gentleman’s junk,” she added.
My three looked alarmed. The gentleman in question looked offended. The peanut gallery laughed.
“Not junk!” he protested. “Nice dick.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be the judge of that,” she declared with a straight face, as though this was a perfectly normal way to pay for breakfast.
Which, now that I think about it ... In theory, they were a different species. I should be as objectively attractive to them as an orangutan was to me. The problem with that theory was the couple of half-orc babies in the camp.
One of the fundamental qualities of speciation, as I understood it, was the inability to cross breed. These guys had arrived on space ships. How in hell were half-orcs even possible? Parallel evolution is one thing; this was something else. Either way, the end result was that I was not inherently safe.
“Show me,” she announced, waving a hand to indicate he should proceed as she spun around on the bench.
Mr. Helpful/Dipshit looked really uncomfortable but slowly got to his feet. He stepped back a little and reached for his fly. Someone laughed.
“How about we do this somewhere with a little more privacy?” I suggested. My three didn’t look pleased with the suggestion. “Like the medbay,” I added.
That was how I ended up sitting on a chair with Erika on one side of me and the medic on the other. The poor orc dropped trousers and stood there awkwardly, not sure what to do with his hands.
“Huh,” Erika remarked.
“Yeah. That’s a penis alright,” I agreed.
“It’s not as … big as I thought it would be,” Erika mused.
I managed not to laugh, but my cough wasn’t subtle. She gave me a playful shove, which had me crash into the medic.
“He might still be a grow-er not a show-er,” I pointed out.
“Well, yes, but I was expecting a total horror show. I’m sure there were toys bigger than that.”
The medic just sounded confused when he asked, “Do you want to see if it works?”
“No!” we blurted out at the same time. “I think that’s enough for one day,” I added.
Erika was fighting not to laugh. The poor guy just looked horrified. “Well done soldier, you can put your pants on now.”
His cock twitched when she said that.
“Right! Now that that’s over, yoga?”
“Awesome sauce!” Erika replied.
Everyone else in the room looked completely confused. The orc getting back into his pants hesitantly asked, “You want me to—”
“Nope,” I interrupted. “As you were. We’re just leaving.”
Mac walked us out to the school yard, and just before we got to the doors, he blurted out, “Mine has these,” and fingered his neck piercings.
I blinked. Erika said, “Huh.” Mac held the door open for us.
- - - -
I made it through most of a sun salutation before I blurted, “Now I’m wondering what the rest of them are packing, damn it!”
“I know, right?” Erika agreed. “I don’t necessarily object to looking at dick. I would check out all of them to get to eat real food again.”
“I didn’t sleep in the garage last night,” I confessed. Erika fell out of triangle pose. “Not like that! They fixed up a room for me. I think it was Iago’s idea, but I haven’t seen him since before I got my own room.”
“You better damn well say thank you!”
I nodded, tears coming to my eyes. Erika hurried over and hugged me.
“It’s just a lot.”
“I know,” she replied, rubbing my back.
“I have a queen bed, I wish you could come and stay with me.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I’m pretty sure that costs more than just naming someone.”
“I don’t know,” I sniffled. “They haven’t asked me to do anything yet.”
“Yeah, they have. You just don’t notice because you aren’t like that. You named them, you explained a butt ton of stuff to them. You taught us how to use the showers after they suggested it. You are a good person, Mina. What did you do pre-contact?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “I was a maintenance worker.”
“Huh. I have a hard time seeing it, to be honest. Where?”
“Siobhan Hall. I got a job there in high school, but it paid really well and I didn’t need to get a student loan to keep it, so I just stayed on.”
“Wait! That creepy cult building?”
“Erika! It isn’t a creepy cult building! We hosted wedding banquets there!”
“Big stone building on Central? Metal roof? Mechanical metal shutters? Freaky high wall around the grounds?”
“Ugh!” I scrubbed my hands over my head. “How is it that we have been invaded by aliens and I still have to talk about how all of that stuff was put up to prevent vandalism? Which we wouldn’t have had to worry about as much if people stopped calling it the creepy cult building!”
“Jeez! Sorry, I touched a nerve.”
“It was a good place to work, and I was happy there. I miss my job and my friends and I was never so rude as to ask about your life pre-contact.”
That made her look uncomfortable. “I was a receptionist at a car dealership. I didn’t like my job and my coworkers were a bunch of misogynistic pigs. And if any of the female staff had been comfortable with losing their jobs, we would have reported them years pre-contact.”
I nodded, “I get it. I was lucky to never have to deal with that, aside from the occasional drunken guest. I had a reasonably good life.”
“I heard that place locked up tight as soon as the orcs arrived.”
“Someone, some human, hopped the wall shortly after the news of their landing broke and torched the orchard. We closed up tight to try to prevent any additional damage. I honestly thought it was a hoax and we would be up and running in no time,” I admitted.
Erika nodded sympathetically.
I felt the need to change the subject. “So, note to self, do not use the phrase ‘awesome sauce’ ever again.”
Erika burst out laughing. After a moment, I joined in.
“Seriously though,” she wheezed, “if you ever want to do penis parade, can I watch? I’m so curious about what Mac is packing now!”
I laughed and got up to try to get back into triangle pose.
- - - -
Erika and I were pulled out of the lunch line. We sat with Nameless and the three of mine that were still around.
“Where is Iago?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him around in a while.”
They all looked at me.
“Hunting,” Tybalt said slowly.
I tensed. “Hunting what?”
Suddenly no one wanted to look at me.
“Bad people,” Mac finally answered.
“Bad humans or bad orcs?” Erika asked softly.
The silence went on too long.
“I need you to answer that,” I finally insisted. “I don’t know where my family is and I need to know if Iago is out there running them down.”
“Bad orcs and bad humans killing everyone. Iago going to make them stop,” Tybalt whispered.
“How does he know if they are bad humans?”
Mr. Helpful, who had been gritting his teeth, finally said, “If hurting women and children, then bad humans.”
I relaxed a little. I had managed to avoid a few human traffickers while I was living rough. It wouldn’t bother me if they were … stopped. They were still watching me to see what I would do.
Shit.
What should I do?
“I bet I don’t get to know the details of that, huh?”
Slow head shakes.
I blew out my breath. “That’s going to bother me, not knowing if he’s killing people.”
The room went quiet for a moment. I knew that the surrounding tables listened in on our conversations, but it was still unnerving when they responded to what I said. Time to change the subject. “Can I show Erika my room this afternoon?”
“Oh yes please!” she agreed.
There was a shared look followed by a hurried discussion that I couldn’t follow.
“After dark,” Tybalt suggested.
“I don’t want her walking around the camp in the dark,” I mumbled. “We can try some other time.”
Erika and I spent the rest of the meal talking about how people were really starting to use the showers and wondering how much extra laundry we were making. We laughed about how it might turn out the port-a-potties also had a laundry function.
The orcs at our table didn’t say anything else for the rest of the meal, and the rest of the room was unusually quiet. I don’t think Erika noticed, but I did.
- - - -
My room might have had a door, but it didn’t have a lock, and I had no idea if it had surveillance cameras. That afternoon I had a nap in my old tent and was prepared to either eat rations or get pulled out of line again.
It turned out to be rations.
Erika went off to visit with other people. I walked the fence line again, counting the guards, again. After a couple of laps, I settled in under the tree towards the back of the school yard. It was peaceful to just lay on the ground and watch the stars. Pre-contact, I had never seen so many; they had always been washed away by the light pollution.
I wasn’t really tired. Instead of trying to sleep, I found my mind drifting back to the idea that Mac had piercings in his dick. The ones on his neck, swirled in a line into his collar. I wondered where else he had them.
I wondered what they would feel like if he …
I wondered why the hell I was thinking about that. And why was my brain suddenly volunteering the Harkness Rule? This was not the sort of thing I did.
Christ.
What I needed to do was go back to camp, find some halfway decent-looking guy and …
And pray that I didn’t end up like Miriam, to be honest.
I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until I became aware of an orc leaning over me. I shrieked and scrambled away before I realized it was Romeo. He went very still and just waited for me to stop panicking.
“Hi,” I finally gasped out.
He nodded. After watching me for a moment, he tilted his head in the direction of the school.
