A Deal Well Struck
Virginity was valuable on Jakku, and Rey had managed to hold onto hers. No matter how desperate for portions, she'd never sold her body. It was less a matter of pride than preference. Plenty of girls opened their legs to fill their stomachs, and Rey couldn't fault them for it. Not when she scavenged wreckage all day, which was even dirtier work and harder on the body.
"Does it hurt?" Rey asked old Kell.
"Shouldn't usually, if it's done right, although the first time's different for everyone." Kell looked up, dark eyes narrowed in her weathered face. "Why? You found some lover?"
Rey returned to scrubbing her freshest find in an acid bath. "Something like that."
Virginity was valuable, the only thing worth enough to pay her passage off of this desert hell, and Rey didn't plan to hold onto hers much longer.
The man's name was Jerim. He was a plain-faced young traveler who was at least looking to pay for a bedwarmer, not a skin-slave. He and Unkar haggled over the price of her first blood while Rey ate a piece of bantha jerky. It was rich and salty in a way that made her mouth water, the best thing she'd ever tasted—a gift from Jerim. She didn't bother listening to the bargaining. The only payment that mattered to her was hitching a ride off of Jakku. Everything else was Unkar's business.
Once they finally settled on a price, Jerim looked her up and down, frowning. "If she didn't have such long legs I wouldn't have paid half that much."
Rey's fingers twitched toward her quarterstaff, but beating her would-be benefactor wasn't likely to accomplish anything except soothing her pride.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Then you travel with me until I'm tired of you. For the price I just paid it's more than fair."
It would be less fair soon, because Rey would make sure any visits to her bed were too boring to hold Jerim's interest for long. When they shook on it, she swallowed down the knot in her throat, smiled her widest smile, and said, "It's a deal."
Rey watched Jerim as he walked back to his ship, the long line of his back, the span of his shoulders. He was neither bad-looking nor good-looking, really, but his body was strong, masculine. If not a pleasure, at least he wouldn't be a hardship to fuck.
Unkar usually doled out water with the same stinginess that he hoarded portions, but he promised to let Rey use the spigot at the outpost tomorrow, to wash the desert off her skin. So she could be clean when Jerim with no last name climbed on top of her to get what he paid for.
I have a bath to look forward to, Rey told herself. A real bath.
And leaving, of course. That's why she was doing this, so she could be free of Jakku.
Rey went home and packed a rucksack with her best toolkit, the ragdoll she'd made for herself, and her flower. The little red thistle was the dearest of her treasures, a small spark of life in this wasteland, nurtured in the shaded guts of this AT-AT. Not that it was truly worth anything. Rey knew her prizes were only junk; all of Jakku was scrapped together from things dead, broken, or lost. It's why she was leaving.
She touched the wall of her ramshackle house, letting her fingers settle over four tallies, four out of thousands. She scraped a final mark upon the scarred metal. One last day.
In her dreams, she was small again, her little arm held tight in Unkar's meaty hand. Overhead, a ship flew up and away, disappearing into a red sun, and all Rey could do was scream.
A man's startled cry woke her. Rey scrambled out of her hammock, grabbed her quarterstaff, and found herself face to face with a boy. He'd drawn a glowing sword—a lightsaber?—and was brandishing it toward her. He was tall and powerfully built, although he couldn't be much older than eighteen or nineteen, same as her. It wouldn't be easy to take him down, not when he was wielding a weapon that could cut her in half.
"Get out of my house," Rey said.
He glared at her, dark eyes bright under the golden light of his saber. "Drop your weapon."
"I don't think so," Rey said. "This is my home."
A smirk softened his full mouth, and he glanced around her AT-AT with such an unimpressed expression that Rey felt herself blush. "Not much of a home."
"If it offends you so much, all the more reason for you to get out."
His smile turned sour. "I'm looking for Tuanul Village. Do you know where it is?"
"Not for free, I don't."
The light of his saber diminished to nothing before Rey could blink, its bright heat snuffed out with one steady hum. It threw her world into darkness, and the next thing Rey felt was her quarterstaff being pulled from her hands and thrown across the room—not by the boy's hands, but by some sparking energy. It filled the confines of her lamed walker, flooding it as with cold water, a darkness well-deep.
Rey stumbled backward, grabbed for the little blue lamp she'd saved from an imperial captain's quarters, and flicked it to life.
The boy stood straight-backed and imperious under the wan light. He grabbed her by the front of her rags and shook her. "I've been wandering this damned desert all day on false information from some junk boss. You will tell me where Tuanul is, or—"
He stopped, his fury snapping as quickly as it had drawn taut. There was something quiet, almost broken, in his gaze. A gentleness that belied the roughness of his hands on her body.
"I'm sorry," he said, then released her. "I shouldn't have—I'll go."
He turned to leave, but Rey grabbed his wrist. Even through the rough weave of his robes, she could feel his heat, so startlingly, brightly alive. His looks were odd and uneven, a narrow face and hawkish nose that shouldn't have fit so well with the lushness of his mouth. Beauty marks dotted his pale skin, a constellation of sporadic stars, dark against a fair sky.
She shouldn't. Jerim was it, her best chance to leave Jakku. To finally start her life, instead of waiting around for her family to come back, but—
This boy was far more handsome than Jerim the traveler. Taller and broader too. Rey wondered if he was big everywhere, then ducked her head.
"Junk boss, you said? Big squashy alien who looks like a filthy, fat fish out of water?"
The boy nodded, frowning now. He was even prettier when he was puzzled.
"That's Unkar Plutt. He stands to make a hefty sum off my sale tomorrow. Unless I show up without a flower between my legs, he'll be handing me over to some traveler to pluck." Rey bit her lip. It was close enough to the truth. "That man's going to take me away. But if somebody else got there first—"
"Don't lie to me," he snapped. "That traveler—Jerim?—he won't force you. That isn't what he's after. So if you want out of it, why not just renege? You don't need—" His white cheeks flushed a furious red, and he looked all around her home, licking his lips. Anywhere but at her.
Rey stepped backward, reaching for the quarterstaff that wasn't there. This boy, somehow he'd read her thoughts, sifted through her memory and picked out her lies like it was nothing.
She told herself that it didn't matter who he was, or what. He was young and handsome, in his strange way. Delivered right to her doorstep when she needed a man.
"I do, though. If the deal is still good tomorrow, I might take it, and…" Rey looked to the wall, the record of her endless days on Jakku. Days that would be worthless if she left now. "And I need to stay here."
The boy shook his head, still not looking at her. "I can't. I'm a Jedi. Or, I'm trying to be anyway, and we're not supposed to have attachments—"
"Attachments?" Rey laughed. "I'm not asking you for anything besides a fuck. How does that lead to attachments?"
The boy finally glanced at her, his soft mouth half-open. He wanted to. She could see it all over him, the angry jolt of his lust, so quickly stoked. What a hot-tempered thing. Not a bit like the Jedi legends she'd heard.
He looked her up and down, and Rey wished that Unkar had given her a chance to wash today. It had been weeks since she'd had anything besides a sand bath. She must stink of grease, sweat, and steel, must be the image of the junk rat she is. Not that it seemed to be dissuading the boy's interest. He looked at her like he'd enjoy licking her clean, dirt and all.
"My name's—"
Rey held up her hand. "It's not your name I need."
She didn't want to know anything about him. She'd rather not think of this boy ever again after this was done.
He crowded her against the wall until she had a lifetime of tally marks against her back. "Fine. If that's how you want it."
Rey breathed through her fear and said, "It is."
He fucked her on the floor. Rey insisted that he make it quick, no need for niceties, but when the boy had her on her back, his cock sliding into her with little wetness to ease the way, it took everything in Rey not to cry. Maybe it was better like this. The more it hurt, the more she'd bleed, and the better rid she'd be of the bargaining chip between her legs.
He groaned, rocking into her harder, deeper. Each thrust stung, made her feel stretched and raw, exposed to the heaving stranger on top of her. "Is that—is it good?" he asked.
Rey turned her face away. "Yeah."
It didn't need to be good. Just thorough.
The boy stopped moving. Rey didn't want to look up at him, because she knew if she did—if she did—
He kissed her cheek, mouthed at the tears there, and Rey shoved him, clawed at his bare chest. Only the scratches turned into clinging, and then she was kissing him through her sobs, kissing this boy. She just met him, and he was inside her, tongue and cock and the resonance of his voice when he moaned. All of it, all of him, inside her.
They went more slowly after that, rocking together carefully, gently, until Rey felt a spike of heat thrilling low in her stomach and down her legs. The boy looked down at her with hungry reverence, like he'd been starving for this moment, for her, even though they were strangers.
He reached between them to touch her, rubbing swift circles while he propped himself up on one arm, taking her higher with each thrust. It made her gasp and whimper, crying again, because it felt good now, so good that it hurt more than the pain had.
"I'm Ben," he said, and Rey hated him, because now he'd never fade, nameless, to the back of her memory. Time might take his face, or the feel of his body over hers, but she'd remember Ben forever.
He'd undressed, even though Rey refused to. Now they lay together on a pile of Ben's clothes, side by side in silence. She reached for his hand, then pulled away before they could touch.
"Do you regret it?" he asked.
"No," she said. "Do you?"
He was quiet for a long while, and when he spoke, she could hear him looking away from her. "I made you cry."
Rey turned onto her side, hiding her face when she whispered, "It was more than I thought it would be."
"Yeah." Ben was quiet, choked, the roundness of his voice now jagged. "For me too."
In the morning, Rey gave Ben directions to Tuanul Village. He looked like he might try to do something stupid, like kiss her, so she put her fingers to his lips and shook her head. "Just go."
He left without saying any kind of goodbye.
Come back, she wanted to say. Please come back.
Instead, Rey scratched another tally onto her wall.