The holographic woman is beautiful, but in the manner of women who can look good while driving a railroad spike through your head. She casts an accusatory and condescending glance in my direction, and then smiles very slowly and asks me something I can’t understand.
“Are you one of Griffin’s friends?” I ask, noting she’s pale and dark-haired like Griffin. Maybe she’s one of his relatives? His father’s secretary?
“Friends?” she repeats, and I hear a loud garbling noise as her mouth continues to move. Then I can understand her. “I am Mali, the Queen President-to-be, Griffin’s future wife, and, one day soon, the mother of his offspring. Who are you?”
The crazy fiancée? This is the crazy fiancée? I’m in huge trouble now.
“My name is Daisy Kirkwood, and I’m helping Griffin win his bet against his father,” I say, in as brave a voice as I can manage.
If Griffin could face down my evil boss for me, I can face down his evil fiancée.
The evil fiancée raises one thin, black eyebrow. “Griffin will return in two of your days, marry me, and take his rightful place as Emperor President-to-be. And someday, maybe, he will even be worthy of his title.” She smiles at me, even wider this time. “Now, run along and find him, will you? Since he’s clearly not standing here with the two of you, he must be preoccupied with some other similarly useless female he’d like to waste his seed on.”
I know enough about this woman to already hate her, but seeing her and interacting with her calls for a bit more useful actions than just standing by and glaring at her.
“You shouldn’t talk about him that way,” I say, stepping a bit closer to her flickering, ghostly visage. “Griffin’s a better person than you or anyone else on your planet deserves. He cares about your people enough that he’s planning to come back to you, even when he could stay here and be… be adored by everyone! And by me.”
She remains silent for a long few seconds, considering me. “By you? By a dull-minded, lower lifeform? Aww. Don’t you know nothing ever holds Griffin’s interest for very long? As soon as he’s had his fun experimenting with you, he’ll run back to his father and say he’s made a tremendous mistake. And then what? He’ll go back to wasting his days with the only true love of his life—Dev.” She pauses, for effect. “Or did you think he might actually care for you?”
“He does care for me,” I say, although my voice shakes. “And he loves his people.”
“Griffin hasn’t the faintest idea what it means to be a leader. Leaders don’t love their people. They protect them, and many times, they protect them from themselves. Has he told you anything about our world? Has he mentioned that we have very little left in the way of natural resources? Did he mention that our last war wiped out more than half of our population? Did he mention that infertility has prevented us from rebuilding as we need to? Or did he just tell you how much he loves his people? How he pours over everything he can learn about your stupid little planet, in hopes that he might get to wear costumes, dance around, and make everyone magically happy?”
“He has compassion. And he’s brave. And he does make people happy.”
She shakes her head. “You poor little thing. It’s very dangerous to fall in love with an Emperor President-to-be,” she quietly says. “They don’t tend to live very long, especially the foolish ones.”
The bathroom door creaks open. Griffin has barely stepped into view before he sees the holograph and runs forward, scooping his phone-device from the floor. He says something to his fiancée in their native language, but she just laughs and points in my direction.
“Too late for that, Griffin. I’ve already spoken to your little human toy. She’s fiercely devoted to you, this one. However did you manage that? Did you snap your fingers enough times?”
Griffin stands up a bit taller, his shoulders rigid. “I’d never do that to her.”
“No, I suppose you don’t even need to. She’s not as bright as your other lover was, just by heritage, so controlling her wouldn’t be difficult.”
“Don’t talk about her that way,” Griffin says, and I can feel static in the air around him, buzzing dangerously.
“Well, I suppose we’ll see if she’s as good as your other girl at giving away all of your secrets,” Mali says. “But then, I don’t know if we all need to hear the details of your skills as a lover again, do we?”
Dev emerges from the bathroom, taking his place by Griffin’s side. “You’re not supposed to contact Griff until we finish the wager,” Dev says in an even, reasonable voice. “You know that.”
“I heard you might not be alone out there, and I wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Why do you care?” Griffin says. “Whether I’m dead now or after I marry you, it’s the endgame, isn’t it?”
“Your paranoia concerns me, Griffin. Perhaps we should talk to a doctor about that when you return.”
“Seeing as Griff and I will return soon to collect our winnings from his father, it might be the Emperor President and you who will need to visit the doctor. The shock of losing might prove too much for you,” Dev says, and then he smiles. “Goodbye now. We have work to do.” He snatches the device from Griffin’s hands and switches it off, effectively making the evil fiancée disappear.
No one says anything for a long, painful few seconds.
“She’s unpleasant,” Kammie says at last.
Griffin sighs, rubbing his face. “She’s bloody insane, is what she is. I have to win this bet against my father. Why don’t we all get some sleep now? Tomorrow’s a big day.”
Dev opens his mouth, and maybe he means to argue, but then he just nods and reaches for Kammie’s hand. “We’ll see you in the morning, Griff. And if you need me, just call, okay? I’ll only be in the next room.”
Griffin hugs his friend and quietly says something I don’t understand. He turns back to me, leaving Dev and Kammie to slip off to the other room. “Dev told me about Twitter,” he says, squaring off his shoulders and raising his chin. “He doesn’t think I should see it, but I want to see. Will you show me?”
I hesitate, but the determination in his eyes says it’s useless to argue with him.
“It’s stupid,” I say. “They’re just… people are stupid when they’re online. They think they can say whatever they want, because it’s not in person, and they have this false sense of security and bravery.”
“Show me, Daisy. Please.”
I pull up Twitter on my phone, glancing through the most recent interactions first, hoping that maybe they won’t be so bad. Much to my relief, the negative tweets are scattered with happy tweets from fans. As I scroll, however, I spot several especially incendiary ones, including one that says, with no context, “Kill yourself.”
Griffin holds his hand out for my phone, and I reluctantly hand it over to him. He scrolls through the tweets for what feels like forever, silently, and then hands the phone back to me.
“Do you need help packing your things?” Griffin asks in a very quiet voice.
“No, it’s okay. It’ll only take me a minute to pack. You know… it’s okay to be upset about this, as long as you don’t let it stop you from your mission.”
Judging by the downward tilt of his mouth and less vibrant color of his eyes, he’s upset, but Griffin propels himself around the room, gathering items and pushing them into bags. Just when I think he’s not going to say anything at all, he turns back to look at me.
“This happened to Ziggy Stardust, too, didn’t it?” he whispers.
“What?”
“It all went wrong.”
I’ve never really thought deeply about Ziggy Stardust as anything other than a classic rock album from a really cool musician. In fact, I’m not sure I even remember the story behind the album.
“He got caught up in himself.” Griffin seems as if he wants to say something else, but he thinks better of it. Instead, he crosses the room to me and places his hands on either side of my face, his skin colder than usual. He looks
at me imploringly, brushing our noses and leaning in closer until I think he wants me to look into him again. “Even if nothing else happened, even if the concert had gone all wrong and everyone in your world hated me, I would know that I was supposed to come here and meet you.”
Maybe it’s the dark energy crackling around him like a near-silent symphony, or maybe it’s the strange depth of his eyes, or just the softness of his words, but I feel as if we’re alone in the room, alone in the world… alone in existence for a few seconds. I slide my arms around his neck, and Griffin presses a gentle kiss to my lips.
“But the concert was great,” I say. “You did it; you totally pulled it off. And tomorrow, you’re going to find out everything you need to from the Origin Collective.”
He shakes his head, dropping his gaze from mine. “I wish I had more time, Wanda, all the time I needed to know every secret of your body, every keyhole, every pressure point and switch, the same way I knew your mind when I looked into you,” he whispers, his voice breathy with melancholy.
I settle my arms around his waist. “Well, you have tonight.”
Griffin’s eyes flutter closed and he kisses me again, this time with an element of desperation I wasn’t expecting, his mouth coaxing my lips apart without hesitation. A deep growl emanates from somewhere in the back of his throat, sending shivers chasing through me, and he bites my lower lip just hard enough to hurt. We stand together for a long time, until he quietly tells his security team to wait outside, and he leads me across the room to the bed.
When Griffin’s helped me out of my dress and I’ve helped him out of his jacket, he leans over me on the bed, tracing one warm finger over my shoulder.
“You wore it, finally,” he says, slipping a finger under my bra strap. “Do you like it?”
“Oh yeah. It’s not every day I get to wear a bra that costs as much as my rent for a week.” I pause, thinking. “Well, back home. In New York, my rent would be a lot more than one Victoria’s Secret bra a week.”
He smiles, but I can tell he really has no idea what I’m talking about, so he just kisses my shoulder instead, kisses my chest, kisses me all over.
I hold to him tightly, as if I can keep him here, and beg my memory to hold on to the sound of his breath against my neck, his fingertips ghosting across my hips, the union of our bodies, and the heat of his mouth against mine as he exhales my name.
“Let me see?” he says, breathlessly, and I let him look into me again. This time, I can almost feel him sorting through me, drinking in as much as possible, and I seek him out as well. I glimpse flashes of memories and emotions, much like last time, but this time, the greatest intensity of emotion seems to revolve around disappointment and hope in turn.
Griffin’s faced crowds and crowds of angry citizens, he’s faced humiliating arguments with the recurring tall, authoritative figure that can only be his father, he’s faced a crushing realization that a lover had revealed the details of their time together to the public, he’s struggled to find his way here, and he has been bodily dragged into a crowd and almost beaten under the fists of vengeful, hungry, and exhausted men and women back home. And yet, through all of that, I can hear a resonating admonishment… don’t give up. Don’t give up, my little one. The voice must have belonged to his mother, and the memories of her light up around his mind like sparkling lanterns.
She must have been his friend and muse as a child, gentle, curious, and enthusiastic about life, showing Griffin reasons for hope and challenging his thinking.
I see just enough of his memories of her death—a brute of a man pulling Griffin from his mother and hitting him, threatening to slide a blade across his eyes and then shove his eyes into his mouth to shut him up. Griffin’s father arriving too late and sending his son away in favor of falling down beside his dead wife—to feel his long-held pain, but then, I can’t look anymore. It seems too intimate, more so than any of his other memories, even.
And then I see something else, something familiar and surreal… I see myself from outside, at the concert, and though I look harried and a little scared, the overwhelming sensation surrounding the memory is one of amusement, rampant curiosity, and fondness. And something else, something like a deep despair, a sensation you only feel once you’ve had to say goodbye to someone you desperately love.
When I ease back into the present, Griffin and I are floating in the air, about a foot off the bed.
“Griffin!” I say, which snaps him out of his heavy-lidded trance. “Griffin, we’re floating.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
We fall back to the bed, a tangle of arms and legs, and I can’t help laughing at how red his face turns. “You made us levitate, like the aliens always do in the movies,” I say.
“We… we do that often, back home.” He sits up, running a hand through his heavily tousled hair, hair that I’ve just messed up several times in my electric-charged enthusiasm.
“I’d like to see that,” I say, before I can stop myself, “So why don’t you take me back to your planet with you? Take me in your spaceship!”
Griffin frowns. “Spaceship? We didn’t travel in a spaceship, Daisy.”
After setting our alarm for only a few hours from now, I pull the bed blankets back and slip under them. No use taking a chance in someone busting the door down again and finding us in a compromising position. “Well, how did you get here then?”
“Dimension doors, and space walking.” He pauses, as if about to explain, and then shakes his head. “Dev understands the details better than I do. I’m not really the science-y one.”
Oh. What if he doesn’t want me to come back with him? What if the evil fiancée was right… and I’m just a fun phase he’s going through? What if he plans to go home and forget about me? Am I his Earth vacation fling?
“Alright, well, is that a no?” I ask, my voice shaking a lot more than I’d like to admit.
“I’ve never tried traveling with anyone who doesn’t know how before. It’s quite strenuous. Dev’s real good at it, for some reason, the little bugger, but I always get sick from it. There’s no telling what it’d do to you.”
“Well, what’s the worst that could happen? I’d disintegrate? Get put back together wrong on the other side?”
“We can ask Dev.”
“You didn’t tell me those weren’t possibilities, so now I feel a bit nervous about the idea, but sure. We can ask Dev if I’m going to blow up, fall apart, or arrive on your planet in a new body.”
Griffin moves closer to me on the bed. “You’d really like to do that, though? Come back with me?”
I shrug. “I don’t want to get messed up on the way, but otherwise… I could try. We could go on a few dates over at your place. But only after you win your wager and get to return home triumphant. I don’t want your evil fiancée having any more excuses to make your life miserable.” I pat the pillow, and he stretches out beside me. “Do you want me to come with you, though?”
“Of course I do! I don’t want to leave you.” He’s struggling now, his normal articulation lost in favor of nervous spluttering. “But what if they… what if they wanted to hurt you, because of me? Because of you being a stranger? What if they wanted to… to…?”
“Like your mom?”
Griffin nods. “As the Emperor-President-to-be—”
This time, I’m the one to cut him off with a kiss. “I saw, Griffin. I saw your mom; I saw what happened. I have no idea how something like that would feel, to have a loved one taken away like that, but you’ve become a brave and good man. I’m sure she’s very proud of you.”
It seems as if his eyes shine with tears, but by the time he drops his gaze from mine and looks at me again, I can’t be sure. Even so, this is a very different being than the one who first bossed me around in SoHo. This is a being who I’m quite certain very, very few souls have ever seen. “I would do my best to keep you safe, of course,” he whispers. “But it is dangerous. Life with me is dangerous. And sometimes, it’s boring
—horribly boring.”
“If we’re comparing notes on boring, my life has been pretty dull up until this point,” I say, reaching over and brushing his bangs back from his forehead. “As for the dangerous part, I’m not a cool superhero in a cat suit. It does sound scary, but I think for right now, you should go to sleep, Griffin. You have a big day tomorrow and a bet to win against your dad. We’ll talk about the rest of this later, okay?”
Even as I say it, I know that ‘later’ isn’t all that much later now. By tomorrow, I might say goodbye to them forever, depending on what happens.
“Have you ever looked into her?” I ask. “Your evil fiancée, I mean.”
Griffin shifts closer to me and shakes his head against the pillow. “No. Sometimes you don’t need to, because someone wears all of their secrets on the outside.”
“Good. She doesn’t deserve to see your memories, anyway.” I close my eyes, but I can’t help asking one more thing. “But you know, sometimes, even if you saw everything inside of someone, you’d still want to ask them questions or hear them say something aloud, wouldn’t you?”
He nods, and I lean my forehead against his.
“Even if it means flying halfway across the galaxy,” I say, “I don’t want to say goodbye to you, Griffin Valentino.”
Dating an Alien Pop Star Page 27