Page 6 of Healing the Leonid Doctor's Heart
Although... An older Queen is better than no Queen at all?
Abigail left her own thoughts and returned to the conversation as Kaylie took her arm, the much younger woman tending to cling to her like a little sister—hence their nicknames. “Abi, the male Felids don’t make sperm unless their—” she swallowed and looked around again, “penis is inside of a woman. I mean, a Queen.”
“What? They don’t?” Well. There went that offer. She could have offered Marcus something in return for saving her life. A son. A daughter. But not if...
Her face joined Kaylie’s, both of them blushing. “How do you know?”
“Layla told me! She and Rupex had to do the deed. A lot. The shots make you want to, though, but it wasn’t like it was pure lust. There was a medical reason. The Felids have little rings of spines that swell up and lock into the female, and then the female’s fluids signal the chemical reaction to create sperm, not just seminal fluid. From a scientific standpoint, that’s pretty cool.”
“Agreed! But leaves out surrogacy, I guess.”
Kaylie let go of her arm and started playing with her hair, then the hem of her baggy shirt-dress. “I guess.”
“Unless you were friends with the person. Or wanted to be intimate for a purpose. Some people can do that.”
“Jade. She worked at a Pleasure Park.”
Abigail joined Kaylie in the fiddling, but for a different reason.
All that time you wasted, saving yourself for Mr. Right after Brent was Mr. Wrong. Three times in your life, three “joy rides" so unsatisfying that you actually wondered about going into a Pleasure Park and paying for an escort to teach you what pleasure could look like.
Kaylie’s probably blushing because she’s so young. Maybe a virgin.
I’m blushing because if I wanted to be a late bloomer, boy, did I leave ittoolate!
“Canid females didn’t get sick the same way. Their heat cycles were shorter.” Kaylie got up abruptly, grabbed Goats and Knights, and set it on the table in front of the long, curving red sofas. “They don’t need surrogates.”
“Canids?” Abigail’s eyebrows arched. “Oh-ho. Jaxson?”
“Stop!” Kaylie whipped around, a finger to her lips, moving so fast that tiny electronic goats and the miniature robotic Knights went scattering across the table.
“Sorry!”
“He’s like twenty years older than me. He must be thirty!”
“That would make you ten, sweetie.”
“Okay, then he’s eleven years older than me! I’m a dumb kid to him.”
“You’re a brave, strong, beautiful woman! On Sapien-Three, you were already out on your own, weren’t you?”
“Only just. I stayed in residential care, a ward of the state. I got an extra year because I was taking one of the childcare intern programs, but I didn’t want to be part of it. Not after I saw how useless the training was. None of it was actually about the kids. It was just about the paperwork, the credits, the data tracking. The only useful thing I learned was that there are contract and career matchmaking services for teens in the residential homes if you apply fast enough. No one told me that.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I bet if I ask Layla and her siblings, they didn’t know, either. If the residential directors tell kids, then they’ll use it, and that costs money. Of course, I got grabbed on my way to my first meeting, but...”
Abigail slowly started to pick up the game pieces. “No one looked for you?”
“Nope.”
“No one looked for me, either.”
“Yeah. So. I like it here better. Not just the ship, but being off of Sapien-Three. I wanna see all the different Felid systems, the Leonid System, the Tigerite System, the Sirius Federation, and the Avian Alliance. I want to seeallof the different alien races that avoid us like the plague.”
“Shows they’re smart,” Abigail quipped, and they both laughed.
They set up the game in silence. As the only two without a steady job to do, a steady task to focus on, they were the only ones in the rec area.
