Even so, she left the bathroom and went directly to stare out of what she was now certain was a porthole not a window.
The planet Jupiter had diminished since she’d last looked—which meant she’d slept longer than she thought or they were moving way faster than anything humanity could manage.
But then they’d have to have capabilities that left humans in the dust, wouldn’t they?
She wasn’t floating. They knew how to manipulate gravity or simulate it. They had the capability of traveling from one planetary system to another—or possibly one galaxy to another. She didn’t have a clue of where he was from.
Or what he truly was—and what he truly looked like, she thought abruptly, feeling the fine hairs creep up along her spine.
She paced for a while, thinking, trying to make sense out of a lot of information that didn’t seem to.
Trying to decide if she felt threatened, in danger.
She answered that fairly quickly. The idea of being on a ship bound for god-knew-where was terrifying.
But she wasn’t afraid of Garryk.
She loved Garryk.
The persona he’d created was part of her love for him, but it was more complex than purely physical or purely emotional.
It was everything about him!
She’d never in her life felt more … connected, more bound to another being, not even Lawrence at the time they’d married—before her illusions had been shattered—in fact at any point, even though she’d believed at one time that she loved Lawrence completely.
She realized wasn’t angry with Garryk for not telling her the truth because it wasn’t the least bit reasonable to think that he could have.
In any case, the truth had been there the entire time—staring her in the face. She’d seen what she’d expected to see, heard what she’d expected to hear. She’d dismissed all of the little ‘hints’ dropped along the way, anything that didn’t fit her preconceived notion of who and what he was.
She was as guilty of fooling herself as he was of deceiving her.
Maybe more guilty.
Because he couldn’t have carried it off without her complete cooperation.
Beyond that, she knew it had to be true that the deception hadn’t been conceived for her—or not for her alone, certainly. That had been executed when he’d arrived, when he’d been her student so long ago—or posed as her student.
So she wasn’t furious and unforgiving that he’d deceived her—because she realized she’d never been completely duped and also because she knew the charade had been set up to protect him, not to take advantage of anyone—her included.
She realized she also wasn’t especially angry with Garryk about whisking her away without even discussing such an important issue with her—the issue of whether to live on Earth or move to another planet!
She didn’t have to look far to know why.
She’d felt very, very threatened when the Feds had burst into her home and hauled her out like a common criminal. She had felt—still did—that they had something really unpleasant in mind for her—which threatened her baby indirectly.
And she totally believed it would have been a direct threat to the baby if they’d discovered she was carrying a little half-alien.
She wasn’t ready to go there yet, though, so she swept that thought to the back of her mind and addressed the confession Garryk had made that that was one of the main factors in his decision.
She hadn’t told him she was pregnant. He’d pretended he hadn’t noticed anything, but she realized that was clearly a pretense.
He hadn’t just been posing as a doctor. He’d told her he really was one and his people were far more advanced and she thought that probably meant he was more knowledgeable than human doctors.
So he could easily have figured it out from her symptoms and just thought he’d let her tell him when she was ready.
Or it hadn’t been an accident.
He’d set out to get her pregnant so he’d been watching for symptoms.
She thought.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to confront him about that. She didn’t know his motives if he had set out to make her pregnant, and if he hadn’t …. Well, she hadn’t been very responsible or he couldn’t have gotten her pregnant.
Maybe it would be better not to point fingers?
But it did occur to her that, if he’d planned it, and he was a doctor, then he knew the baby was fine even if it was half human and half whatever he was.
He wasn’t human and she thought that part … unnerved her.
It was all of the unknown factors that frightened her, she realized, and she didn’t think anything Garryk could say or do was going to erase those fears and doubts or even ease them appreciatively. Only time, and facing the issues, was going to prove she had reason to be afraid or that she didn’t.
And meanwhile, she was scared—angry and, although she didn’t really want to face it, had been trying very hard not to think about it at all, she was grief stricken at losing her baby.
Forever.
She tried to tell herself that Garryk had had to go or die and that she was glad he’d wanted to take her because that was the only thing about the situation that could be called ‘choice’.
He’d cared enough about her to take her to protect her and their unborn child even though she could see he’d been worried it would destroy what they’d had together.
And she realized she truly did love him and believed they could surmount the odds stacked against them.
She would’ve been heartbroken if he’d left her. She knew without any doubt that it wouldn’t have mattered that he was alien if he’d abandoned her. She would’ve been desperately unhappy to lose him.
That realization went a long way toward acceptance of the situation, but she was still too torn to feel any happiness about it even if there’d been no anxiety about living with an alien on an alien world—a colony world, at that, which suggested that it was at least somewhat primitive.
She tried to convince herself that she’d lost Larry a long time before takeoff and that she’d known, deep down, that there was very little chance he’d ever come around.
But there’d been a chance and now there wasn’t one.
* * * *
There was no question about who was the door when the knock came. Beyond the fact that she recognized Garryk’s forceful demand for entry, she was pretty sure there wasn’t another soul on the ship.
She couldn’t imagine he’d taken a cruise ship to Earth.
She also couldn’t imagine that he’d had anything like a starship to command—even though he’d mentioned a mother ship.
She got up and went to the door anyway, opening it herself rather than calling out permission to enter.
Garryk scanned her face—the only indication that he’d been doubtful of his welcome.
“Hi, mom.”
Chelsey’s attention instantly snapped toward the sound of the voice she immediately recognized. She stared at Larry in shock.
“We’ve been waiting on you to eat and I’m starving. You comin’ or what?”
He didn’t just look like Larry. He sounded like Larry—from the voice to the way he talked.
“Larry?” Chelsey gasped in shocked disbelief, tearing her gaze from him to glance at Garryk questioningly—and with dawning outrage.
Garryk frowned at the boy and nudged him.
“Oh!” Larry surged toward her and gave her a rough, brief hug. “Ain’t this cool? I can’t wait to see the colony. It just sucks that I can’t tell anybody.” He glanced from his mother’s face to Garryk’s. “I’ll wait for you guys in the gallery.”
“Galley,” Garryk corrected absently.
“Kitchen.”
Garryk lifted a hand in a defensive gesture. “Don’t clobber me! They’d taken him into protective custody like they were trying to do to you. I thought he’d be alright, but I figured I might as well at least ask him if he wanted to come with us since I went to so much trouble to get i
n there.”
Chelsey gaped at him, feeling her anger subside so swiftly she felt curiously deflated. Doubts flickered through her mind, but she banished them almost as quickly as they arose.
For one thing, she trusted Garryk, she realized, and she believed him.
Secondly—well, she couldn’t imagine the Feds not picking up Larry—or in fact anyone they thought might have been close enough to Garryk to give them any information.
Or talk.
She frowned. “And he actually wanted to come?”
Garryk grinned. “He punched me in the gut and demanded that I cough up his mother.”
Chelsey gasped, covering her mouth. “Seriously?”
His expression became wry. “Yes. They’d already debriefed him, apparently, said enough he had a good idea of what the situation was anyway.”
She frowned. “You didn’t have any trouble convincing him?”
He lifted his brows questioningly.
“That you were a space man.”
He chuckled. “I think beaming in pretty much did that.”
Chelsey looked at him questioningly. “You can do that?”
Garryk scooped an arm around her shoulders and urged her out of the room. “We—we’re a ‘we’ now—a family—fellow colonists. And I’m with Larry—I’m starving. Let’s eat. I’ll fill you in over dinner, lady.”
Epilogue
It was strange how much living on Barcque, the colony world Garryk took her to, was like living on Earth.
And how different it was at the same time.
The gravity wasn’t the same—because it was a larger world—but by the time Chelsey was ready to give birth she’d grown accustomed to the stronger pull, more muscular, and that difference ceased to concern her at all.
It had six moons and Chelsey didn’t think she would ever get used to that. She always felt like she was living in a dream-world when she watched the parade of the moons at night.
She’d actually felt that way—as if reality had been permanently suspended—from the moment Garryk tried to tell her he was an illegal alien—to the world, not just America. She’d calmed enough when she discovered he’d collected her son for curiosity and wonder to exert itself, to be distracted from her sheer terror at learning Garryk wasn’t who she thought he was, to allow healing and acceptance to set in.
She’d calmed enough to begin to absorb what Garryk had said to her and actually believe he meant it—that he loved her, wanted her for his woman, and he would do whatever it took to protect her and their unborn child.
She couldn’t say that she’d enjoyed the ‘voyage’ in the truest sense—it had been far too unnerving for any sort of relaxation—but her amazement had preoccupied her until her psyche had adjusted and calmed enough to allow her to think without hysteria blocking logic.
And there was one thing, she realized, that superseded the lies Garryk had lived. In all the time since he’d returned to Earth, he’d shown her nothing but love. She couldn’t doubt that it was true that he’d come back for her—that he was willing to go beyond the ends of the Earth for her.
She also didn’t doubt her love for him. It hadn’t changed at the discovery that he wasn’t human. He was still the person she’d fallen in love with.
Naturally, she allowed him to sweat over it for a while before she agreed to begin to consider forgiving him, but in spite of everything it was hard to think of Garryk as being anyone but Garryk. And that being the case, impossible not to forgive.
She loved him.
He adored her.
And they both worshipped their little bundle of joy.
The only shadow on her horizon was the loss of her home world and the people she’d left behind, but Garryk promised her a trip to Earth as soon as he could save up the money to lease another mother ship.
And with that promise her cup overflowed.
The End.
The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition Page 21