“We do without them entirely on my planet,” she told Lan’ara. “And believe me, dearie, nobody misses them in the least! Big, hairy, stupid beasts that they are. I wonder that the Goddess even bothered creating them in the first place!”
Lan’ara told herself she agreed with the Med Tech. And she was grateful—that at first—she didn’t feel any touch cravings or the need to be filled. The hungry flower inside her seemed to have furled its petals and gone to sleep, which suited Lan’ara just fine—at least during the early days of her new life.
However, as the days and weeks wore on, she couldn’t help looking at Need, sitting on the opposite end of the table from her during meals. He never said a word but sometimes when she looked up unexpectedly, she caught the big Kindred studying her with an expression of fierce regret on his face. He always looked away quickly and sometimes Lan’ara wondered if she’d imagined it. Sometimes she even wanted to confront him about it—to demand why he kept looking at her.
But that would mean initiating a conversation with him which might lead to other things…things she would do better to not think about, Lan’ara told herself firmly.
After a solar month or so, though, she found she was thinking of them—quite a lot. Because at that point, her body seemed to reawaken.
Lan’ara blamed it on the stupid wash blossoms, which inhabited every bathing tub on the ship, including the one in the tiny bathroom of her new cabin. For a long time, she forced herself only to take sonic showers in order to avoid them. But though the sonic blasts were bracing and powerful, they didn’t leave one feeling truly squeaky clean like a real soap and water bath did.
At last, one night when she couldn’t sleep, Lan’ara allowed herself to take a hot bath to relax. She told herself she would only take a quick dip—so fast that the wash blossoms wouldn’t have time to bother her. But she was reading an interesting novel from the ship’s romance section on her tablet and before she knew it, she was lost in the world of the book and had forgotten all about getting in and out of the tub in record time.
She came to a particularly spicy scene and became so engrossed in the narrative, she didn’t notice anything else. It wasn’t until she started to feel a soft, warm, pulsing pleasure at the tips of her breasts and between her thighs that she realized the wash blossoms had found her.
Lan’ara thought about trying to get them off, but what they were doing felt too good to make them stop. They reminded her of the way Need had gone down on her—lapping her pussy until she moaned and gripped his hair, riding his tongue as he made her come again and again…
No, she told herself hazily. No, don’t think like that—don’t remember the past. No matter how good what he did felt, he also hurt you. Remember that, Lan’ara—remember the bad things he did! Always calling you “girl” and pushing you away in the morning and selling you to Pouncenblast…
But somehow the bad things wouldn’t stick in her mind while the wash blossoms were working on her. All she could think about was how good it had felt to be held in the big Kindred’s arms and how he loved pleasuring her with his tongue…
She spent a long time in the bath that night. And a long time every night afterwards, too.
It was after that first bath, however, that her problems began in earnest, Lan’ara thought. The hungry flower inside her—which had been content to sleep for the past month—had now awoken and it was clamoring to be fed. She began to have the touch cravings again, and the needs to be tasted and held and filled weren’t far behind.
Lan’ara began to feel irritable and moody. She told herself it was only her body, reacting to the Lust Bacterium still in her system. She even looked through both the ship’s library and Laxah’s medical books to see if she could find a cure for the symptoms they caused. But the only mention she found of them was an article stating that they were a proprietary strain of bacteria grown exclusively by the Twyleth Tigg Corporation with no mention of how to overcome their effects.
At last, she began to feel desperate. She was having dreams about the big Kindred and taking long baths with the wash blossoms every night which only made the ache inside her deeper and hotter. She was at a loss to know what to do…until she ran across an article in the library that talked about Kindred males and their physiology.
“The Kindred are well known for their love of pleasuring their females,” the article read. “They have a genuine biological need to taste their mate’s juices and suffer deeply if they are deprived of them.”