by Magan Vernon
I nodded, thinking about what he said. I thought he got special treatment (like not getting deported back to Circe for killing the alien that attacked me or all the breaking and entering we did), but I never thought of it as anything other than the fact he was royalty.
"Do you plan on ever going back to live on Calta? Like after I'm gone or something?"
Ace frowned. "I don't plan on going back home for a long time and I don't plan on losing you for any reason."
"But then how are we going to explain why I have the hot, young husband when I'm an old lady? What if you find some new young human girl to go after?" I sat up on my knees, staring at him and blinking slowly.
Ace wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me toward him. "Alex, you really shouldn't go on with such foolish talk. There is no way that I would ever leave you for anyone else. And I should age, eventually. If not, we have makeup artists who will make me appear older for public appearances."
"For real?" I asked, looking up into his statuesque face, never aging just like all the stone monuments.
Ace smiled. "Yes, Alex, how else do you think so many aliens are able to walk among you for years? The invention of plastic surgery helped us explain some celebrities being ageless, but for others we just used special effects makeup artists to help the aging process a little."
"Does this mean I can meet Michael Prince?" I asked.
Ace raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure what you mean."
"I know you said that Circe killed him off, but I would really like to see you in that Army Air Force uniform again." I ran my finger down the center of his chest, brushing my nails against his temperature control suit.
"I think I can arrange that," he said before he leaned over and kissed me, making me forget all about Michael Prince and just focus on my favorite alien.
Chapter 26
"Hey, what was in that package your mom sent you?" Lucy asked.
Ace was back at Circe, and Riley had some papers to grade, so we sat on our beds watching an old Cary Grant movie. Lucy wasn't as big of a fan of older movies as I was, but she tolerated it.
"Just some old pictures and wedding magazines," I said not looking away from the gorgeous black and white Cary Grant. What could I say? I had a thing for older men as evident by my choice in fiancés.
"Can I look through some of them? Maybe tell you what dress I will not be wearing?" Lucy laughed.
I looked over to see that she was already bent over the box that sat beside my desk.
"What? You don't want to watch any more Mr. Grant?"
Lucy continued digging through the box. "No, he's cool. I'm just seeing what you got." She pulled out a small blue box that I didn't even notice under the magazines. "Your mom sent you tampons, too?"
I paused the movie, got up from the bed, and crouched down next to Lucy at the box. "Huh, I guess she did. I didn't even notice."
I was too busy freaking out over the pictures of 1940's Ace, but I wasn't about to tell Lucy that.
"Tampons, chocolates, wet wipes…is your mom trying to help you out with your lady time or something?" Lucy held up the stash that was hidden underneath the magazines.
I stared at the bar of chocolate. Was my aunt flo due for her arrival? Oh crap, I was late!
"Heh, must be just trying to help." I tried to hide the nervousness in my voice, but it had to be squeaking. I did a quick calculation in my head and realized that I was due for my aunt flo three days ago, and I was never late. Never.
"Well, instead of fondling your gifts here, I'm going to just look through some of these magazines," Lucy said and picked up two from the top and headed back to her bed.
I felt like I was in a daze. I couldn't be pregnant. Nobody gets pregnant after their first time; that just happens in bad TV shows. And if I was, what would I even be carrying? Would it be some sort of a half-alien and half-human hybrid that came out with a full set of teeth and spoke in Latin? I shook the thoughts out of my head and went back to my bed to sit down. I turned the movie back on, but suddenly Cary Grant didn't seem as attractive. Who could I talk to about this? What would I do?
"Hey, Lucy?" I said and looked over at her.
"Yeah?" She didn't even look up from her magazine.
"So what does one do if her period is missing in action?"
Lucy put the magazine down, her mouth wide open. "Are you serious? Are you trying to say you think you might be carrying a little spiky-haired baby?"
"Lucy," I whined. "It's not funny."
"I know, I know." She held up her hands and stood up. "Well, you should probably take a pregnancy test if you think that is the case."
"I'm not just going to go buy a pregnancy test. What if someone that I know sees me? Why don't they just carry those things in bathrooms like they do for condoms at truck stops and bars?" I asked.
Lucy wrinkled her nose. "Would you seriously want to pee on something you bought from some sleazy truck stop?"
"Good point."
She came over and sat on the bed next to me. "So what are you going to do, then?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess go talk to Ace about it."
I looked down at my stomach. Could I possibly be carrying a human and alien hybrid baby? What would that even feel like? Would a baby be cold blooded like Ace or would I have one of those experiences, like in the movies, and have a rapidly growing baby that ate me alive like a parasite?
"Do you think you may be overreacting a bit?" Lucy asked.
I looked over at her. "You are just saying that because there is no way that Riley could knock you up."
Lucy rolled her eyes. "Don't try using the you're-a-lesbian excuse on me. This is not about me. You seriously just lost your virginity a few days ago; there is no way you would know if you were PG by now."
I nodded. "You're right." I forced a smile.
Maybe Lucy was right. It hadn't been that long, so I wouldn't know if I was…unless of course I was carrying a rapidly growing, half-alien parasite baby.
***
Since I couldn't get the whole MIA period out of my head, I decided to call Jen and see if she'd take me to Circe. I would have called Ace or my dad to pick me up, but that would have been one awkward car ride. I wanted to prolong the talk with Ace as long as I could.
Jen drove away from campus, and I watched the dorm disappear out the back window as the landscape became more and more mountainous the closer we got to Circe.
"So why is it again that you couldn't have Ace pick you up?" Jen glanced at me out of the corner of her obnoxiously large sunglasses. I swear those things probably had one-hundred percent UV protection, and she would have a giant sunburn around those things while her eye area stayed white.
I flinched, hoping she didn't notice. "I just didn't want to bother him. It takes too long for him to have to ask for a Circe vehicle, and I still feel bad about the fact that I wrecked a car that was technically his." Good save, even though it was technically true. I'd never had so much as a parking ticket and I wrecked a car that wasn't even totally mine, stupid deer.
"I guess that makes sense. You're just lucky I wasn't working on something important," she said.
"It's Saturday. Don't tell me you still spend your Saturdays in the lab. I know you have to find some time to spend with Malcolm."
She giggled like a little girl. It always amazed me, ever since I first met Jen, how she was this blond bombshell who laughed at every little thing, but was probably the smartest person I'd ever met. She could recite the entire periodic table from memory and graduated at the top of her class from UCLA. I guess it goes to show the world that the blond stereotype is way off. Jen told me she used to hate it when she would go in for job interviews and they would pass her up because of her wavy, blond hair, but was lucky that Circe saw pass that.
"Alex, I do find time to spend with Malcolm, trust me. We just aren't hanging out until later because he and Justin are paintballing with some new arrivals from Saturn," she yelled over the wind rushing in from her o
pen window.
"Paintballing, seriously?"
She shrugged, holding her arm out the window. "It's a boy thing. Sometimes Ace even goes with them now."
"Ace? Paintballing with people?" I raised my eyebrows.
When I first met Ace, he was a loner. He barely talked to anyone around Circe. I knew he was at least friendly with some of the other residents, but I never thought he hung out with them outside of work unless I made him.
Jen laughed again. "Believe it or not, our boys do have a life outside of us and Ace is really good. The other day he and Malcolm went out and Ace didn't have a single mark, but Malcolm and the other guys had giant welts all over."
I tried to hide my smile. It wasn't funny that Malcolm got beaten up by paint bullets, but it was pretty cool to have my guy be the one who came out victorious.
We pulled up to the Circe mountain range. Jen pressed a button that looked like a garage door opener, and a small pocket opened on the ground in front of one of the smaller mountains. She maneuvered her car toward it and inside, down a ramp that lead to the underground parking garage. The garage held every Circe vehicle, but not the spaceships. Those were in the hangar where Malcolm worked and on the other side was an area where all the incoming ships from other planets went. Circe had restricted air space so the only things that were ever in the sky for miles were ships going into Circe. I was always surprised that there weren't more alien sightings reported in the area, but I guess people were too busy watching the skies around Area 51 to pay any attention to a mountain range in Arizona.
Jen jumped out of the car. "So are you coming to hang out in my room for a bit or are you going right to Ace's?"
I felt like my feet were glued to the ground. I would have loved to just hang out with Jen and pretend like my giant red dot had arrived, but I had to suck it up and admit to Ace that something was missing.
"If it's alright, I think I'm going to head to Ace's room. Maybe we'll stop by later?"
Jen nodded, and I followed her to the elevator. "That's cool. Just text me before you come by. Hopefully Malcolm didn't get too beat up during paintball, and I won't have to spend my night babysitting a wounded human."
As I walked down the long hallways toward Ace's room, I silently prayed that he would actually be there. No way did I want to go searching for him and run into every single alien I knew on the way. It was hard enough not to tell Jen that I was worried that I might be harboring a half-alien bun, and I didn't want to have to worry about blurting it out to anyone else.
Finally, once the temperature dropped so low that I could see my breath, I knew I had made it to his wing. I got to the large metal door that looked like the one in front of meat lockers and knocked twice. He opened the door wearing just his temperature control suit and grinned from ear to ear.
"Well this is a nice surprise," he said.
"I think I'm pregnant."
Chapter 27
I couldn't believe I blurted it out! The whole way to his room, I mentally rehearsed how I would bring it up to Ace and exactly what I would say. But once I got there, it was like word vomit, and I just spit it out.
"What did you just say?" Ace tilted his head, staring me down while I walked into the room. He shut the door behind me.
"I'm late!" I threw my hands in the air and paced the short distance from the doorway to the window. "I could be carrying the next prince or princess of Calta! If a half-human could even hold the thrown. Oh God! What if this starts another conflict?"
The ideas were racing back and forth in my head. How would we tell my dad? What would this do to the contract with Circe and Calta?
Ace grabbed my shoulders and pulled me to a halt, forcing my arms down. He made me face him and finally I shut my mouth. He stared at me with his eyes dark and serious. I guess he should have a chance to talk as well.
"Alex, listen to me," he said, enunciating every word. "There is no way that you can be pregnant."
"How do you know?" I snapped.
Ace sighed, dropping his hands and standing upright. "Because we aren't genetically similar enough for me to get you pregnant."
"What?" I asked, practically shouting. "We had sex! You have a doohickey that you put in my doohickey and stuff happened!" I threw my arms in the air, again.
Ace laughed, really laughed. How could he laugh when I was freaking out? When his laughing fit was done he took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before he spoke.
"We aren't genetically similar enough to make an alien-human hybrid baby. There have been plenty of aliens that have tried those sorts of things and there haven't been many to succeed."
"But, but," I sputtered. "What about all of those mammals that create hybrids like lions and tigers making ligers? And you told me that humans and aliens weren't supposed to be together, so how would anyone actually know?"
Ace shook his head. "I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but there was a lot of experimentation done in the seventies in which aliens would abduct humans to try and see if they could procreate and none of them ever succeeded. After Circe outlawed alien probing they did some research, like what Jen does, and found that most aliens are such higher life forms that we aren't compatible to make children. It is literally like an ape and a human or even a dog and a human, not compatible."
I wrinkled my nose. "Did you just compare me to a dog?"
Ace shook his head, pulling me toward him, and I dropped my arms down. "I'm not calling you a dog. I'm saying it's similar in that we are a different species; two things that can't create children."
I looked up at him. "Is that another reason the queen didn't want us together? Since we can't produce heirs?"
Ace's smile returned. "I'm male, Alex. Only women can rule on Calta, and I have two older sisters. I would only get the chance to rule if something happened to both of my sisters, their husbands, and their children."
He let go of me, sitting on the bed, and I took the spot next to him. I usually only got tiny glimpses of life on Calta and that was from my own research, what Jen and Malcolm had told me, or when I was getting attacked by an alien.
"It's kind of like Earth's ancient Egypt in which women did have the power. That is why the ancient Egyptians built their empires as a matrilineal society, because of Calta. It's also why they favored eyeliner so much."
"Wait." I held my hands up. "Are you saying all those shows about aliens helping build the pyramids are true?"
"Well, now we are really going off topic, but yes. A lot of my ancestors did come to help build the pyramids. That was back when Caltians really communicated with earthlings. After the fall of ancient Egypt, a lot of Caltians lost faith in the human world and it took hundreds of years for anyone to return." Ace said it like it was common knowledge, which maybe it was on Calta.
"So all Caltian women are leaders like Cleopatra and such?" I asked.
Ace nodded slowly. "Yes, they usually only marry to have a strong king by their side to aid them. When they think the king has served his purpose of helping them rule and produced enough heirs, they usually kill or eat him."
I widened my eyes. "You're joking, right? Is that why you didn't want to marry Simone? So she wouldn't eat you?"
Ace let out a small laugh. "I wish that were the only reason. My former promised Caltian was a little crazy, even before she hunted you down and tried to kill you. I just didn't have any desire to stay on Calta once I found out about the wonders of Earth, and I'm perfectly happy being here with my human mate."
He took my hands in his and looked at me until his dark eyes met mine. "I love you, Alex. Not because I want to escape any Caltian women, but truly love you. I know that we will never be able to produce children together, but I hope that doesn't turn you away from me."
I swallowed hard. In all the turmoil of thinking I was pregnant, I never thought about the opposite end. How would I feel if I was never able to have children of my own?
"I guess we could always adopt," I said. "If we wanted to. Jen told me that women o
f Mars have, like, eighteen kids at a time."
Ace arched an eyebrow. "You want to adopt a Martian puppy?"
I let a mischievous grin plan on my lips. "If I can't have a spiky-haired little Ace then I at least want a red headed little one. Then we'll really get our future neighbors talking."
"Neighbors?" Ace asked.
"Unless you plan on staying at Circe forever. I hope that maybe we could move to a house someday. Even if it is still in Arizona, I'd like to have a house with a yard and Martian puppies."
Ace nodded slowly. "I think I would like that, maybe minus the Martian puppies."
I leaned in and kissed him. Finally, I could breathe a sigh of relief knowing there wasn't an alien hybrid baby cooking in my stomach.
Chapter 28
I got back to my dorm early Sunday. It was nice to sleep alongside Ace, but I didn't want to run into my dad at breakfast and have to tell him that I spent the night. After Ace dropped me off, I quickly crept into my dorm room, hoping not to wake Lucy.
Well, my roommate was sound asleep in her bed, but Riley was awake, sitting on the bed next to her and watching a game show on our TV.
"Morning, Alex!" She beamed.
I returned the smile and plopped down on my bed. I was still wearing my clothes from the day before but Riley was clad in a pink tank top and pair of shorts that I recognized as Lucy's. Must be nice to be able to share clothes with her significant other.
"Hey, Riley, good to see I didn't wake you up."
I remembered how I used to have to tiptoe around Riley when we were at Circe. Maybe there was something to this new Riley.
"Yeah," she said with a slight laugh. "Sleeping Beauty, here, might be able to doze the morning away, but I just can't lie there and do nothing for as long as she can."
I peered over Riley's shoulder, wondering if Lucy heard any of it, but Lucy just lay there on the pillow with her mouth wide open, and her butt in the air like a baby.