It sounded paranoid, but wasn’t--because they thought she was too stupid to figure it out and kept a running commentary going that featured her--as if she was a lab rat they were studying ….
Then again, she thought judiciously, she might have been screwed anyway.
Everything inside of her was fluttering so madly it was creating absolute chaos, making it impossible to pin down the why of it.
Well, she’d definitely felt a little thrill go through her at the thought that Ryne had been looking for her and that he’d sort of smiled as if he was glad to see her.
Well, not really smiled, but … almost smiled at her.
She thought.
And that definitely thrilled her to pieces.
Because he was just an awesome creation of nature.
Actually scared the fuck out of her, too, but the thrill was definitely there.
She didn’t really know how she felt about the discovery that Connor was looking right back at her as if he thought she was staring at him.
Until she calmed down enough to realize there’d been hostility radiating from him--in waves.
Maybe he’d been looking at someone else, she wondered uneasily?
Just because itseemedlike he was staring a hole in her, it didn’t necessarily follow that he was. She wasn’t standing by herself. There’d been other people around her.
Actually, she thought, feeling a modicum of relief, there’d been somebody sort of standing in front of her--not totally blocking her from view because she’d been able to see Ryne, but partly. She didn’t have any clue of who it was--didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman--but that didn’t mean that Connor didn’t.
That was probably it, she decided--no reason for Connor to be pissed off with her. She hadn’t gonenearthe alien man or vice versa. And she couldn’t believe he would know she’d been looking at him anyway. He couldn’t have seen her that well.
And, good god!
Like she wasn’tallowed to look now?
It was none of Connor’s damned business if she looked or who she looked at, damn it!
She sure as hell didn’t find that possessive attitude any more welcome from him than she’d liked it when her other matches acted like she belonged to them.
She thought that was mostly, maybe, the fault of the colony administrators in all fairness. Nobody that she’d noticed seemed to see the seed exchange as anything but breeding--as if they were lower animals instead of intelligent, thinking beings. The bastards were so laser focused on making sure they didn’t ‘contaminate’ their gene pool or over populate, they paid almost no attention to the human factors--hormones and or emotions--apparently considered that irrelevant.
Well, they certainly noticed hormonal typhoons as each generation matured to that stage of development. They guarded the females to make sure only the males on their list were allowed to knock them down and drag them around like cavemen--even before their birth control was removed so that they could breed when allowed to. And that was the only two criteria they focused on--the acceptable partners and the timing in relation to optimizing the colony efforts.
Otherwise, they were free to choose, to experiment as they liked--because they were free.
The girls weren’t supposed to refuse, however--so they weren’t actually free.
She shook those thoughts off because they evoked a wave of nausea and she didn’t want to think about it, following the other workers she’d been standing with as they returned to the area where the public garden had been started.
They were told only a short while later that everyone would have a half day off to celebrate a treaty agreement with the natives.
Belle couldn’t decide whether she was excited about the idea because she was thrilled that she might see the natives again or excited because it unnerved her to realize there would likely be a good bit more traffic between the natives and the Earth village.
It was a good thing, though, she told herself, if it meant peaceful relations with their neighbors, regardless of what it meant on a personal level.
It unnerved her, however, to think it might allow more opportunities for Ryne to pursue a mating if he truly was interested in that.
She was actually pretty convinced he was interested in sex, at least, and that unnerved her even though it also intrigued her just a little. It seemed that that would have to complicate her life even more than what she was going through because of Connor, though.
Of course, as badly as she hated to admit it, she really didn’t fit in anyway. She never had. She never had really understood why she didn’t, but it was hard to ignore the fact that people didn’t just ignore her existence. Way too many actively disliked her for no reason that she could figure out and or disapproved of her--as if she was alien herself. And she doubted they could disapprove of her breathing any more than they already did.
