by Amanda Milo
Pants unbuttoned but not pushed down, Ekan starts climbing the foot of the bed like a pretty man-panther. My eyes tap on the band of skin showing at the exposed area of his front before my gaze skitters to his face. His eyes are locked on my boobs, which have been trying all day to escape the confines of this ridiculous top. “How would you like to be wooed?”
Shakily, I manage, “Do I have to have sex with you?”
Ekan stops his progress to sit up and slap the back of his neck, his expression turning wry. He rubs there a moment, before dropping his hand. “Never had a female ask me that.” He scratches his chest and runs a sad look around the bed, like we’re wasting a perfectly good opportunity to romp all over it.
He rebuttons his pants.
I sag in relief. “I’m sorry.” Sleeping in his pants won’t be fun for him. “I hope you’re not too uncomfortable. I know you wear a lot of weapons…”
He smirks. “I’m used to sleeping with a hard weapon, believe me.”
“Right.” I fiddle with the edge of the blanket. “Ekan? Am I your prisoner?”
He drops onto his knuckles, walking forward with them slowly, the bulging, shifting muscles of his arms only eclipsed by the site of his pants-clad thighs as he follows with his knees. “You’re my mate.”
I swallow hard. “Oquilion said something like that.”
“Rut Oquilion,” Ekan grumbles—but then he points his fingers at me. “Not literally.”
Relief that he’s teasing almost causes me to relax. “Will you tell me about this ‘mate’ thing?”
Ekan drops himself carelessly to the bed beside me. “Tomorrow.”
I ease up on my elbows, so I have a little height advantage. “You sound... tired.” I’m more than a little hopeful about this.
He rolls to his back beside me and folds his arms under his head. “I am tired. I worked hard today.”
He slyly darts a look up at me, and I realize he said this to get a rise out of me.
Weirdly, it helps brush out the last of the fear. And it makes me feel a little bit tetchy. He should really stop talking. “I could hit you right now.”
He smiles. “I don’t recommend it.”
I wouldn’t hit him—I hesitate to so much as smack someone in play-affection anymore. Especially men. I’ve learned that it invites them to smack back—harder. But I think he’s actually referring to the repercussions of his luck-thing. Like the carney who he said couldn’t shoot him unless he wanted to pay for it. “You’re trying to save me from having bad luck?”
He nods.
Something occurs to me. “You said you were too tired to have a discussion on mates right now, but you weren’t too tired to have sex?”
His head lifts from his arms and he eyes me like I might be crazy. “I’m never too tired to rut.”
I hold up my hands. “Okay, okay.” I don’t want to push him to where he feels he should prove it to me.
“How do you like my pillow?” he asks me.
I push it towards him. “I had noticed that there was only the one.”
He gives it a nudge back in my direction, smirking. “What’s mine is yours, narra. But since you’ve commandeered it, I suppose I’ll have to find an alternative bit of softness to rest my head on.”
I pinch the blanket and tug it up. “Want to roll this up and use it?”
He smiles at me, head lolling on his crossed arms. “No.”
“You sure?” I needle. “You’re going to chivalrously give up your one single pillow and the use of your lone blanket to the pregnant woman that you’ve worked so hard to sell all day?”
Ekan winces. “Perhaps the female who worked very hard today deserves all the little comforts I can offer.”
I stare down at him. “Wow. Is this really you? Did you really just say that?”
His smile is crooked and his eyes are endearingly soft. “Surprised?”
“Definitely.”
Without a word, he shifts, bringing the side of his fist to the wall, pounding a button which lowers the lights in the room to a soft glow. I don’t know how well he sees in the dark, but this is a nightlight for me, one I’ll almost definitely be taking advantage of if I wake up and have to pee.
Somehow, I doubt Ekan normally sets a nightlight for himself. I think about that for a long time.
“Thanks for not leaving me in the dark,” I finally whisper to him.
His hand lands on my hip, making me jump. But he doesn’t grope me—his fingers spread out across my skirt, his thumb brushing slowly back and forth in a comforting sort of way before he replies, “You never have to worry about being left, narra. And certainly never in the dark.”
CHAPTER 14—BETH
BETH
I rub my eyes. “Ekan?” Tentatively, I shake his shoulder—but it doesn’t move. It’s like trying to muscle a 32-oz slab of rump steak while it’s still attached to the bull. “I’m sorry; get off me.”
I’m on my side and Ekan’s head is on the side of my stomach. Ekan’s torso is draped on my bottom half like a very heavy heating blanket.
“Ekan?” I call, more urgently this time.
“Hnnh?” His fingers flex, inappropriately brushing contact points at my butt and my front because both his hands are wrapped around my upper thighs like I might otherwise try to escape from him or something. I don’t know at what point in the night he decided to ‘find an alternative bit of softness to rest his head on,’ but in sleep, the way his fingers were kneading me says he’s really digging the substitution.
Heavy and good-smelling, I like feeling Ekan up against me—but he’s going to melt me alive. “You're too hot. Please get off me.”
With a hefty inhale, one that expands his chest against the side of my leg and feels oddly nice, he lifts his head, and I become aware that my skin where he’s left it is wet-damp. He’s drooled on me.
“Ugh!”
Lazily, Ekan swipes it off with his big hand. “I can move. But I like being against you.”
I shove his arm. “Yeah, well I don’t like to be cooked in my sleep. I need temperature control. I have standards for my captivity.”
The nightlight shows his smile as he smoothly rolls off of me and to his back, stretching and yawning like an overgrown tomcat. “Fair enough. I have expectations for my captive.”
He takes ahold of my arm, and after a moment, I see he’s trying to encourage me to move on top of him. But I’m awake now and my bladder is putting out the warning bleep. “I have to go—”
He tugs me down and I land over him with a soft “Oof!”
Something sharp pokes my stomach—from the inside—and I freeze.
Ekan bolts us upright.
We both stare at my stomach.
Ekan whispers, “Did our spawn just…”
I don’t argue about baby ownership or even appropriate nouns when referring to infants. “Baby kicked,” I confirm, my hands shooting to the spot just as Ekan’s hands are covering me.
Another kick, and we both chirp in shocked awe.
But I have a pressing concern. “Okay, seriously—I really have to pee.”
Ekan sits up. “Here, let me—”
“I’ve got it,” I tell him. “Thanks.”
He rises anyway. “And give the others a chance to capture you on your way to and fro from the karzy?”
He steadies my arm as I slip off his bed. “Thanks,” I say. “What’s the ‘karzy?’”
“It’s the room you wash yourself, your outfits, and you take care of your waste needs—waste goes down the cludgie,” he supplies, his eyes on my belly, not my face. He escorts me like I’m in labor, not headed to empty my bladder, and he’s so intensely into escorting me, I fully expect him to wait outside the door until I’m done.
Instead—he walks right in.
“Um,” I start. “Privacy?”
He nods like he understands my concern, and points to the door that’s sliding closed behind us. “The others won’t be able to see you.”
“That’s great,” I explain as patiently as I’m able. “And I would like you not to see me peeing either.”
He looks surprised. “It would bother you?”
I hobble to the toilet, dropping the seat so I don’t fall in. “Do me a favor and amscray. We can argue about this after I finish or I’m going to pee on myself right here in the bathroom.”
“Karzy,” he says like the term bathroom for a bathroom is the height of crazy. “Or cludgie.” But he turns his back to me, and honestly, that’s better than I was starting to hope for.
“Thanks,” I say in relief once I’m done. I head for the sink and wash my hands, passing him as he moves for the toilet. It’s weird, hearing him lift the seat and start peeing with no hesitation, like he’s not self conscious to be urinating in full view of a virtual stranger—and an alien to him, to boot.
He nudges me aside to get to the sink, and when he tries to take my elbow like I might need to lean on him for support, I pat his hand and push it back in his direction. “Babies move. This is new, yeah, but it’s normal.”
When we reach the bed, he won’t let me decline his offer of help to get on, and with his hand boosting up my butt he murmurs, “Lie with me, narra.”
My insides clench at the way he purrs the order so that it sounds like a gentle request. The question is—is he asking in the dozing sense—or the biblical kind?
He climbs up next to me. “Getting hot?” he asks silkily.
“Not yet,” I answer. “But we’re doing nothing more than sleeping—got it?”
“I hear you, narra,” Ekan replies softly.
He didn’t make me sleep with him earlier, but when he tries to spoon against my back, and puts his hand on my stomach, I can’t relax. This interaction tastes a little softer, but I still have the sense that Ekan’s had his amorousness activated.
This is confirmed when he uses his nose to brush my hair away from my neck, and he starts to nuzzle me.
All of my I’ve-been-craving-sex receptors light up—but my brain says this is such a bad idea. My body might be willing, but my head isn’t ready to jump into bed with an alien.
Um… figuratively speaking.
Before this can get out of hand, I try to engage his upstairs brain. “Being that you’re an alien and all, you’ve never heard the tale of 1001 Nights, have you?”
Ekan pulls his tongue back in his mouth just before it can touch my cheekbone where he’d been aiming it. “I’m intrigued. Go on.” His hand softly strokes my stomach and my legs go weak. If I were standing, this would be a problem. Being that I’m lying in bed being spooned by sex-on-an-alien-stick, this is a PROBLEM.
I cough and catch his hand to stop it from petting me. He may be brushing it over Baby, but all my reproductive parts don’t care. They like his nice touches. Too much. “Can I interest you in laying down a bet?”
Ekan pulls back even more, this time in surprise, clearly happy with this turn of events. “A wager? Oooh, Narra, now you’re speaking my language. I love wagers.” He shifts to rest on his elbow.
“Okay, good,” I tell him. “Because we’re gonna play a game.”
“I love games,” he purrs, and his eyes promise that this is true. In an instant he’s over me fully, his hands on either side of me, the lower half of my stomach lightly bearing the weight of the upper half of his flat, attractive stomach.
This is not an improvement, but my body is a hussy—it wants to wriggle and test the feel of him against all of me. Instead, I manage myself and continue. “I’m going to tell you a story, and if you like the story, then we go to sleep.”
Ekan stops his trajectory towards claiming my lips. “Are you trying to bargain me into not kissing you the rest of this night’s rotation?
“That’s my goal,” I whisper. This close, I can smell his breath. Who doesn’t have funky morning breath? This alien, that’s who. He smells kissable. It’s bad. It’s so, so bad.
He smiles. “What are you offering if I don’t find your story…” his gaze drags down until his eyes zero in on my plumper-than-ever-before breasts. “Pleasing?”
***
We never do settle on what I’d owe him—and I don’t have to pony up a thing because he loves The Dark Knight. I even get into acting out the roles—I talk like tetanus has given me lockjaw for Batman’s voice, and I’ve watched it so many times I can do a pretty impressive joker impression, slicking back my imaginary greasy hair and looking at the world from under my sinisterly set eyebrows. During my performance, Ekan’s attention doesn’t so much as wander once—he’s so enthralled, that when the story ends, he shouts, “You can’t mean to stop there!” and he catches me swiftly by the wrist.
Maybe it’s because it’s unexpected. Maybe it’s because he’s so intense when he does it—but I flinch.
For a second, it almost looks like sadness flickers across his face. His touch, which was already light, turns even lighter. He doesn’t let me go, but he’s making an effort to treat me more carefully. He shouldn’t have to—what he did wasn’t wrong, he’s paying for someone else’s treatment of me. It makes me a little sad, and more than a little ashamed.
Despite the fact he sold me today, killed aliens in front of me (yes, yes, all to protect me—I didn’t miss that fact, but he sold me to them) he has been really nice.
“Automatic reaction. It’s like a bad habit that I can't quite quit,” I offer weakly.
Ekan opens his mouth, his eyes almost a subdued, seafoam grey as they lock on mine—but then he shakes off whatever he was going to say, and it’s like he can recharge himself with excitement. “Please, I want another. Wager me or don’t; narra, I want to hear you tell me another story.”
I should make another bet with him; I should build up all the favors I can with this pirate—but he’s so genuinely appreciative, so earnestly enjoying my delivery, that I’m flattered, and I don’t ask him for anything in return but his warm approbation. I settle on telling him the story of Diehard, and by the end, with my breath heaving like I’ve just crawled through a mile of ventilation ducts, I’m a very pregnant John McClane as I watch Hans drop the thirty-five floors from the top (side) of the Nakatomi plaza (Ekan’s bed).
By this point, Ekan’s developed such a man-crush on the mastermind, uber-cool thief Gruber that he’s torn between being outraged and celebratory—because who can stop themselves from rooting for the barefoot All-American cowboy who coined ‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!’?
“That was excellent!” Ekan declares. “Sleep, woman!” he surprises me by ordering, tugging me down and tucking me beside him without feeling me up first. “Get rest. Tomorrow you’ll tell me of this ‘sequel’ you speak of!”
As he hits a square button on the wall of the cubby and the lights wink out—all but my nightlight—I smile into the darkness, feeling like Scheherazade with movies as my modern collection of Arabian Nights. Finally, my obsession for entertainment has paid off!
This pirate just got hooked.
CHAPTER 15—BETH
BETH
Ekan rises from the bed first—though he wasn’t the first one of us to wake up. I’ve been drowsing beside him for what feels like an hour, struggling to get the motivation to get upright. A sleeping Ekan can cuddle—he’s warm, and for the most part, only lightly, unconsciously handsy. Despite this, it’s overall been the most restful night I’ve had in years.
My bladder, though, demands its due. It’s the pregnancy version of the old rise and shine: it’s time to rise and pee. Fun times.
As I groan and try to straighten, my spine does a Rice Krispies impersonation—snap, crackle, pop! For whatever reason—maybe the constant weight of growing a whole other person, if I was asked to venture a guess—my back seems to have formed into a permanent ‘s’-curve. But this morning, I feel like I’m a bent slinky who got kicked down the stairs one too many times. And my throat feels funny.
“Would you like a little help?” Ekan asks in a pleasant, morning-rusty voice, offering me his hand.
I take it, and start to say thanks—but it gets lodged between my tonsils like my words have turned into chunks of Brillo pad. My throat feels like it’s been torpedoed—which reminds me of the movie K-19: The Widowmaker. It’s about a cold war era ballistic missile nuclear submarine with a damaged reactor, where irradiated steam leakage ravages and destroys the crew.
Uuuugh, my throat feels like those poor crewman: burned. Blistered.
This is what I get for growling like Batman during storytime last night.
Ekan hauls me up, but the shift from sitting to standing causes a change in pressure, and this activates nasal stuff: congestion wallops me—it feels like someone socks me in the sinuses. “Ughhhh, crap!” I. Am. Sick.
But hot damn, my sick-voice is phlegm-phenomenal. My voice is low, crazy deep, and seriously smoky. “I sound like the lovechild of James Earl Jones and Jessica Rabbit,” I groan as I fall back on the bed.
“If you’re not ready to get up...” Ekan says—and suddenly his lips brush over mine.
I twitch away, but before I can warn him, Ekan’s putting the morning moves on me, his mouth covering mine, his hands slipping to my boobs until he pulls back enough to finish, “I can think of a few activities we can do right from here—TEVEK!” he shouts.
Because I’ve coughed on him.
“S—” *COUGH!* “Sorry!” *Cough! Cough!* I sound like a Basset hound getting drop-kicked. AaaRUFF! GARFF!
It’s not pretty.
Ekan’s damn near backed away from me like he’s seen the Widowmaker too—and I’m starting to look like one of those crewmen. His eyes move over me and he stares in dismay, muttering, “Krit. This is what they warn you about when you buy from an auction. You risk diseased merchandise.”
“Hey!” I growl—and wowww—if I thought my phlegm-voice was sensual, it has nothing on my sickie-growl. Phlegm-sultry.
Ekan finds it a little less appealing, if his stricken expression is anything to go by. Have I stumbled on an Ekan-deterrent? He responds almost absently, “I wasn’t referring to you directly.”
Like I might disintegrate on contact, he tentatively pets at my hair, which feels like a mussed nest. “You were fine yesterday,” he says in bewilderment. “Whatever sickness has befallen you, it hit you hard and fast...” He jolts and his eyes catch mine. “I could craft a fabulous inappropriate comment out of that. Are you feeling too pitiful to appreciate it?”