Here's another chapter to keep things going. I'm glad for all the favorites and followers.
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There is a knock on the door. I stand up from the table where I am polishing my various trophies and open the door. An unblooded hands out an item to me. I take it with a nod and shut the door.
"Alex." I call.
I hear her stir, then the padding of her bare feet on the wooden floor. She stops in the doorway of the entrance room, rubbing her eyes.
"Come here."
She walks up to me and I slip the collar around her neck. The look on her face is disturbing, but I ignore it and say, "You did not have these on Earth, but here, you are a slave. You are my slave. Never take this off. If you are found without this, then you are found without my protection. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
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A few days later, I come home and find the house empty. I glance outside. It's barely midday. Perhaps she found her way to the camp where we keep the unclaimed ooman? No. If she had I'd have heard of it by now.
A feeling of worry settles over me. It disturbs me, but I decide to wait to see if she would return. Even if she had tried to escape, the tracker in her collar makes that impossible. I could just report her missing.
The sun has nearly set by the time I hear an odd noise outside the back of the house. I rush outside.
It's Alex, dragging a carcass with difficulty to a small tree that has something hanging in it. I watch her hook the hind legs of the animal and start pulling on the other end of the rope, straining to haul the animal to a certain height before she ties it off.
She pulls a knife from the bark of the tree. I recognize it as one of mine from the kitchen. She sets to work gutting the carcass.
"What is that?"
Her eyes slide my way, as if just realizing I am here.
"It's a deer. Right now it's food."
"You don't want anything from in the house?"
She has turned back to her deer. "There is nothing in the house."
"You could have gone to market."
"I don't have any money."
I begin to reply, but I stop myself. Of course there wasn't any food in the house. I haven't stayed in the house for more than a couple of days at a time for the last few moons. I usually just grab what I need to eat at the market. And it's my fault for not buying enough for her as well.
Shame burns in my face, but she is turned away and I'm grateful. I go back in the house. It is too late to go to the market today, and she has food for the night. I smirk wryly. She's learning. Or she already knew that the best way to get me to provide for her was to insinuate that I couldn't.
From then on I make sure that the house has a ready supply of food.
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It has been a few weeks since I acquired Alex, and I have found that it is not so bad living with another person.
She already has food cooked when I come in, although the first week where she was still learning how to cook the various species of animals to my liking were rough indeed.
The house is kept clean. There's never dust coating the furniture when I come home.
I find I like her feminine touches too. Flowers adorn various rooms in cups of water, shards of colored glass are hung together where the wind will make them chime, and painted turtle shells either hang from the walls or sit delicately on tables or dressers. She even made me something she calls a dreamcatcher. It is odd, but I find it a comfort when I see it hanging over my head.
Then there are the rocks. There are numerous rocks. Why she's obsessed with rocks, I can't fathom, but I can't complain. She picks them because they are shiny, or shaped oddly, or has a certain color. She arrays them on shelves and around the base of trees, and the two porches have their edges lined with rocks. I wonder how something so simplistic could make her come running up to me, hands full of the little things, to show me something or other about them with a childlike wonder.
I've had to buy her two new dresses. She said she fell, but I think she may have wallowed in the mud in it. I had nearly fainted when I saw her caked right up to her eyes in the brown gunk. Under her nails, in her hair, her feet covered in it. I had drawn a tub of water and threw her in, dress and all.
"Hey!" she had said. "I just got that like I wanted it!"
"You are filthy."
"It's good for the skin."
"Why do this in your new dress?"
"Because your neighbor is a creep that stares at me like an old pervert."
Up went the fence between my house and the creepy pervert neighbor, and I got her two new dresses, with the strictest of orders that these are not to be used in mud baths.
Still, the troubles are worth it. At night she reads to me from books taken from Earth, and she tends to my wounds when I come home injured.
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I need to do more research on ooman females. Or maybe just females in general. Alex did something unusual last night.
I was sitting on my pallet in my room, polishing a skull, when she had come in and crawled into my lap. She was crying silently, and she clung to me. I carefully set my skull down and checked her for injuries, but she wasn't hurt. So I held still and let her stay like that. After a few minutes, she wiped her face and went back to washing the dishes from supper.
It bothers me. She came to me when she was emotional. It's as if she is treating me as her male.
What have I gotten myself into?