Chapter 10
“I’m gonna come,” the spotted bull moaned, bellowing as his horns cut through the air. “I’m gonna come so hard for you . . .”
“You’re the best breeding bull in the stable,” Violet assured the minotaur above her “I’m going to milk you dry.”
The Good Little Cows were, if nothing else, a predictable lot. The bucked and bellowed, stamping and scraping their hooves against the stocks as if they were about to charge, begging to be milked like the cows they were. Of all the things she’d learned about minotaurs in the several months she’d been at the farm, this particular kink was the most eye-opening. She’d begun to wonder, as she moved amongst the different species of employees at the farm and the residents of Cambric Creek, if theyallpossessed different species-specific sexual proclivities.
She recalled a conversation with Geillis, in which the vampire had pointed out the obvious human kink Violet had been ignorant of before taking this job.
“It’s interesting, innit?” the vampire had reflected, inhaling the fragrant steam from her cup. “There’re a fair bit of you bleeders here in town, but it’s all women. You know what that means, right?” She’d had no clue, and Geillis had rolled her eyes. “You’re all just a bit curious, just a little inquisitive . . . come to a new place, try food you’ve never heard of . . . and then you find out that naga who sold you insurance last week has two cocks, andobviouslyyou’re curious about that as well. So then you ride one of those cocks, just to see what it’s like, of course. And then take a turn on the other. And then he slips ‘em both in, and there’s no human with one boring little cock who will ever be good enough again after that, not now that you’ve been dp’ed by a sexy snake man whose name you can’t even say. So then you move to a place like this, and it’s all very clean and respectable and no one ever lets on how horny they are to try something new. And it’s only ever women.”
“They havetwo?!”
Geillis looked incredibly smug as she lounged in her chair. “Mhm. The lizard men too. Big ones, small ones, some with squishy little spikes. It’s always a treat if you’re not expecting it.”
“So you’re saying every human in town’s only here because they want to be dicked down by other species?”
Geillis smiled, showing a hint of glinting fang. “I’m just saying . . . look, you know the one who comes in here every day, the fireman?” Violet bit her lip, flushing as she nodded. The dark-haired man who’d been in front of her in line the very first time she’d come into the Black Sheep did indeed come in nearly every day, at least every day the girls met up, always with that same wide smile and quicksilver sheen in his eye. He was a werewolf, she’d learned, from a prominent, wealthy family. “He’s got a whole lot of brothers and they’reallthat scrummy. The one, he throws these parties, and I’ve heard it’s like ancient Greece. Just naked women getting taken on hands and knees in the grass everywhere, and the closer they get to the full moon, the wilder it is. Humans come from towns away, all over! All hoping for an invite, because deep down, it’s every girl’s fantasy to be fucked by the big, bad wolf.”
“I can’t help but feel like there’s a point you’re trying to make.”
“Has that big bull of yours rutted you yet?”
The elves at the next table turned disdainfully at the strangled noise that had come from her mouth, head dropping to hide in the crook of her arm as Geillis laughed. “I’m going to start keeping an ear to the ground in my complex, let you know if something opens up. Housing market ‘round here is fierce. Because luvvie, once he does, you’ll not be going back to humans, ‘s’all I’m saying.”
She pulled on the bull’s big testicles, spotted like his hide, as the Good Little Cow moaned. The sucking nozzle of the milking machine finished him off, and the light turned green. It had taken her the better part of three months, but she finally understood what Kirime had meant by saying their job wasn’t sex work, not from the point of view of the technician. It might have been in the human communities, but things were different here, and Geillis was right. Different was good.
* * *
“I’m going to have the new girl shadow you for the rest of the afternoon, okay?”
The shift leader called out as soon as Violet entered the employee area, turning into the locker room before she answered. The patterned scrubs were discarded and dropped into the laundry cart, and Violet pulled a fresh set from the rack, solid lavender, before she was able to school her features into a mask of Kirime-like cheerfulness, turning to the shift leader. “Sounds good to me! Will she be with me the rest of the day?” She made an effort to keep her voice even and her tone nonchalant as she gathered up her charts, keeping her eyes averted, her lips pursing when her question was answered in the affirmative.
She didn’t want the shift leader to question why she wouldn’t want the brand new employee to be with her all day; didn’t want her taking a closer look at the charts.
It was a Tuesday, the most unassuming day of the week. Past the Monday blahs and not far enough past the excruciating Wednesday ughs, with several days to endure before Rourke’s standing appointment on Friday afternoons . . . but then Donnaxa had handed off her charts that morning, the purple sticker at the bottom of the stack instantly raising her heart rate and igniting her daydreams. She didn’t know why he’d be visiting the farm so soon after his last appointment, if it was him at all, and the notion of having someone else there to disrupt their time together—disturbing their conversation, intruding on the false intimacy she’d created in her head—was most unwelcome.
She didn’t think it was unreasonable to be upset, learning she was to have a shadow the entire day who would watch as she milked bull after bull, seeing the marked difference in the way she would handle the last client’s cock, the way she would savor the time spent stroking him.Or worse–she’ll be the one doing the milking.Violet remembered her first days of training, the way Rourke himself had been the first client she’d worked on. It was absurd to feel jealous, but her fists balled all the same.
“You’ll get a training bonus to make up for the tip loss,” the shift leader went on, confirming her fears. If you could trade off on every few clients that would be great—let her observe you, then let her take the next couple. Don’t shy away from feedback,” she added, brow furrowing. “This one has technically already had two weeks of training, so sheshouldknow what to do, but I’m not ready to let her out on her own, if you know what I mean.”
She hadn’t, not at that point, but the reasons behind the shift leader’s hesitation were made obvious as Violet observed the girl on the second client of the afternoon. She seemed to have no problem setting up the room, although she audited herself against the checklist infrequently.Not an ideal situation, something that can be corrected with a reminder.Her milking technique, however, left much to be desired. Up and down, up and down, a tight grip with no variation, she handled the cock belonging to one of the Earners with the same energy and excitement that one might undertake forced exercise, and Violet was uncomfortably reminded of her old university roommate’s shake weights, and the way she’d mindlessly jiggle one in her hand as she watched soap operas between classes.
“So, did they tell you during your training that you should be checking the file for every client? You know they have preferences listed sometimes, right?”
The girl shrugged again, loading the used collection tank and tube onto the conveyor belt where it was whisked away for cleaning. “Yeah, I saw it. I was doing it, I thought.”
Violet frowned. The mindless up-and-down motion the new girl’s hands had adopted didn’t come close to being what the client had requested, didn’t even look pleasurable.Maybe she’s just bad at hand jobs . . .wrong place of employment, in that case. Maybe she’ll be better on the next one.One client turned into three, and Violet quickly discovered her optimism was misplaced.
“So, you’re doing a really good job setting up the room,” she began several minotaurs later as the girl executed the clean up protocols. The last two sessions had been heavily reliant on the use of the sucking nozzles of the machine to bring the bulls over the edge, and she knew the girl would not last long with her current method. “You’ve got a good handle on the machines and the process, so nice job . . . did you by chance watch the training videos?”
The girl was another human, something that would have thrilled her three months earlier, a fact that seemed oddly unimportant now. She’d been spending more and more time exploring Cambric Creek, preferring to undertake as many of her chores there as she could. She’d been giddy the first time she went up and down the aisles at the Food Gryphon, finding her own run-of-the-mill grocery items nestled in amongst exotic fruit nectars for moth and bat people, Molt-Ease bath products for those of the reptilian persuasion, toasted kelp crisps, unidentifiable breakfast foods, and bags of “double crunch cicadas in poppin’ jalapeno.”
There had been another human one evening, slowly making her way through the produce section with a tall mothman, absentlymhmingalong to what sounded like a lecture on bees. Her eyes had met Violet’s as they passed on opposite sides of a tower of bananas, and her smile had been kind and conspiratorial, an assumption that Violet was like her—a human who’d successfully broken through the barrier of this mixed-species society, so different from the world they were from.Geillis really does have us all figured out.
“Babe, are you gonna actually voice an opinion on what you want, or just talk about potter wasps all night?”
She had moved too far up the aisle to be able to hear the mothman’s exasperated response, but smiled to herself, imagining passing the couple on another occasion, Rourke pushing the cart as she picked out pricey organic fruit, nodding to the other human over the bananas and sharing her conspiratorial smile, an acknowledgment of a club in which they were both members.