Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 101280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
I knew if I gave in and started selling my ass as well as my blood, I could probably afford a much nicer hole. Maybe I could even get an ion shower of my own and a hotplate that had two working burners and a mattress that wasn’t stuffed with hay and didn’t smell like urine.
Yeah, I knew all that, but I still couldn’t bring myself to actually do the deed. It wasn’t just my pride, either—it was the way I felt about Naggian men—or really, about men and sex in general.
See, I’ve never enjoyed sex very much. Or to tell the truth and shame the devil, as my Granny always said—I’ve never enjoyed it at all. Even when I was back home on Earth, spreading my wings in college and trying new things, I just couldn’t seem to find a man who pushed my buttons.
At first, I told myself my sexual dysfunction was due to all the guilt I was carrying from my strict Baptist upbringing, but eventually I had to acknowledge that maybe sex just wasn’t for me. I mean, I could do it—it didn’t hurt me or anything—but it didn’t do anything for me either. I felt absolutely nothing when I was with a man—it was like I was wrapped in some protective insulation that no man I had ever been with could get through.
It was incredibly disappointing for me—especially considering how much my Mama wanted grandbabies. I was my parents’ only daughter and they desperately wanted me to “settle down with a nice boy” and start pumping out the babies. Mama actually cried when I told her I was going into grad school.
“Now you’ll spend all your time getting that fancy degree and you’ll never settle down!” she wailed.
I had tried to comfort her, but the truth was, she was probably right. I had no wish to settle down with some man I didn’t even love. And how could I fall in love if I was never sexually attracted to any man? Come to that, I wasn’t sexually attracted to women, either. I was basically asexual.
By grad school I decided to give up on trying to find someone and just concentrate on my dissertation. Then after that, I could teach at a university somewhere and eventually make tenure—academia, I thought, would be my whole life, since a husband and babies weren’t in the picture.
But once I ended up on O’nagga Nine, I found that my lack of a sex drive was a serious impediment to being a sex worker. It was hard to act sexy and enticing while showing men my wrists when I wanted nothing to do with them. And taking that next step from selling my blood to actually selling my body seemed impossible and more than a little repulsive.
So I stayed in my dingy little hole and made the most of things, hoping and praying to someday find a way back to Earth. It was the only option available to me.
That morning I fumbled for the half-eaten tube of nutritional paste and found there was less of it than I had thought—I must have eaten more than I had meant to the night before. I got so hungry here, though! Being in the constant, biting cold worked up quite an appetite and I craved soups and stews and rich, fatty meals—none of which I could get, of course. The nutritional paste did have a high fat content, but that only meant that it had a slimy consistency and left a greasy film on my tongue. It was definitely subsistence food and nothing more.
I squeezed what was left of the tube directly into my mouth and swallowed with a disgusted shiver, trying not to taste it. Though it was awful, it served a purpose—not only could a very little bit of it keep you going for a long time, but it was also filled with blood-builders and iron supplements. Without it, I would have died of anemia long ago, considering how many men I had biting me every day to drink my blood.
I looked at my face in the rusty metal mirror I’d gotten third-hand from another Blood Whore and touched up my makeup. This consisted of extremely cheap blush and lipstick that could be gotten for half a cred chip each at the bargain market.
I had no need to get dressed—I was still wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before because I had slept in them. The nights were fantastically cruel on O’nagga Nine and I usually had a terrible time getting warm enough to even fall asleep. It didn’t help that there was a vent directly over the lumpy mattress that I didn’t dare to close. If I did, I could die of Carbon Monoxide poisoning, since the door to the hole was air-tight and there was no other form of ventilation. So rather than getting undressed for bed, I usually put on everything I owned before climbing onto the lumpy, smelly mattress.