Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
I slipped out from under the radar and put a spotlight on myself. Normally, I was quiet, shy, and I generally dressed to camouflage. But you can’t exactly blend into the furniture when you’re dressed as Jessica Rabbit from the Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie. It was our Looney Tunes themed library staff Halloween party, and that got me noticed like crazy. I am only five foot one, but I have large breasts. With my red hair, a strapless long glittery red dress with the slit up the side and what Maeve did with my makeup? I drew attention.
She tricked me into it by telling me she had my costume covered, to just show up, and that it’d be a surprise.
It was a surprise all right! I was so mortified looking in the mirror that I almost went home instead. She straightened my hair, gave me a sexy side part, put shimmering red lipstick on me, and fake extra-long eyelashes before shoving me out of the bathroom and into the crush of people with their spiked punch glasses in their hands.
An hour and a half later, Mr. Derringer, who’d previously treated me as if I was invisible, cornered me by the bathroom and got handsy asking if I was naughty or just ‘drawn that way’.
I panicked and ran out of there.
The next day, despite my shapeless maxi dress and the tight bun in my hair, his pursuit of me began and it was rather relentless and more than a little bit creepy.
The girls at work saw what he was doing, and they encouraged me to report his behavior. He was determined in his pursuit of me, and it wasn’t just harmless flirting. It was skeevy, the way he looked at me, the lewd way he’d lick the rim of his coffee cup with his eyes on me. Gross.
The girls had seen how he was being around me and dragged me out to lunch, inviting the new HR shark lady, and then they nudged me to talk to her about it. They did this in front of her and she pushed. I hesitantly spoke up.
That, added to the near miss with a sexual assault when I was a teenager when I’d gotten locked out of our apartment and accepted the invite to wait inside a trusted neighbor’s apartment? I’ve always been shy around most men and some men make me downright afraid.
And now, here I am. And I have no idea what happened to the HR lady. Last I heard, she was on the eleven o’clock news, reported missing by her fiancé.
Yep… here I am. A 26-year-old shy virgin librarian who is on another planet. I have three days to have sex with an alien otherwise I will catch whatever illness killed off most of the planet’s women.
The pink gemstone high up on the ridge of my ear is supposed to turn blue when I get vaccinated and then I’ll know I’m safe.
Vaccinated. What a word for it.
“I wonder if they have big cocks,” one of the girls had mused when we were in the lunchroom, after the first big reveal of where we were going and why.
“The planet sounds like a phallic symbol. Is it shaped like a giant dick?”
“Maybe they’ve got two cocks,” someone suggested, cheekily. They mused about possibilities, using humor to deflect fear.
And I held it in, but was absolutely stuck in my head for the balance of the journey that felt like a week, but that we’d just found out was actually a forty day trip where we were occasionally woken to eat and bathe and get spoon-fed small tidbits of information about our futures, our futures with aliens who had been without women for more than four years.
During that time, I started out as frightened. Really frightened. That turned to anger, anger at myself at first because my speaking up for myself had singled me out and gotten me sent here. And then further anger that I had again tried to chastise myself for actually defending myself. But I didn’t show it. I’d already been sent away, had known Marsha from HR had disappeared, and I was keeping my mouth shut. For sure.
I retreated into myself, was quiet, figuring things out, as I tended to do. I was angry at the ones who sent me here. And who maybe hurt Marsha. I didn’t show that anger. But, then something strange started to happen and it started with a dream I had on the way here about living in a beautiful place and feeling happy, safe, and I started to think “what if?”
What if I could be someone new in this new place? Not the quiet, shy librarian who hid off in a corner with her nose in a book even if she maybe wanted to try something besides reading.