Bebe

by Phelps, Darla

  Bebe could count on one hand the number of times that she had been carried like this, perched upon his hip with her legs straddling his waist as if she were once more young and small. Compared to Tral, she supposed she was still small, but the intimate pressure against her pubis was stroking that nameless pulsing heat and making her intensely uncomfortable. That discomfort increased dramatically when they reached the kitchen table and he set her down again. Bebe shouted, her whole body lurching in pain the instant her feet brushed the floor. Tral grabbed her up against almost instantly and re-deposited her sitting down on one of the chairs instead.

  “Sorry.” He dropped to one knee to lift and look at the bottoms of each foot in turn. “Yeah, you’ve done yourself a real...”

  A funny look tumbling across his features, Tral paused mid-word and sniffed the air. He looked at her feet again. Leaning down, he cautiously sniffed at her foot, his brow turning quizzical. He looked around, hesitantly bending to smell the air around her knees, and then at his own hands. Ducking his head, he looked pointedly between her legs, and Bebe jumped when he reached between them to touch her with the tips of two fingers. They came away wet. He stared at her in no small surprise, then stood up, looking down at himself and, in particular, at the wet spot she had left on the hip of his trousers.

  Heat rose to stain her face as he sniffed that spot too.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, mildly. “I was right; you are in heat!”

  Bebe closed her legs, holding in the uncomfortable ache his strangely impersonal touch had intensified.

  Tral stood there a moment longer, staring at the dampness on the tips of his fingers, his thumb passing back and forth through the moisture while his expression grew stranger and stranger. Finally, he looked at her.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said, taking a giant step backwards. Snapping around, he quickly walked away from her, storming all the way to the kitchen sink where he rapidly and thoroughly washed his hands. “Don’t think about it, don’t imagine it, and definitely don’t act upon it. She’s not a woman, regardless of what she looks like, and you’re not that desperate! Yet.”

  He shut the water off, started the coffee maker, and then stood there at the sink for a long time before, reluctantly, his gaze slid sideways at her again. Bebe wilted in on herself, unsure how to interpret that look and horribly, horribly embarrassed.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he muttered at himself, and continued muttering long after the coffee ceased to percolate. He shook his head, alternately staring outside and rewashing his hands until, by now humiliated beyond bearing and not at all sure what had just happened, Bebe slipped from her chair. The pain collapsed her straight to her knees. She couldn’t walk and so she crawled, back down the hallway until she found the bathroom. Hauling herself up at the sink, she took the pain as her punishment and quickly, tearfully scrubbed herself clean. She washed and washed, but the unrequited throbbing refused to go away.

  She touched herself, rubbing hesitantly, but that only made it worse. Struggling not to cry, she scrubbed herself again and then gasping and choking on groans the whole way, made herself limp back out to the kitchen.

  She must really have disgusted him. Tral was still standing at the window, ignoring the cooling coffee completely. He didn’t even notice that she was trying to walk, though she slowly, agonizingly limped into the kitchen behind him. Hoping to redeem herself, she poured him a cup and very quietly placed it on the counter not far from his hand. She waited, tapping her fingers anxiously, but he never looked down. Not at her; not even at the coffee.

  He couldn’t stand to look at her. She had disgusted him that much. Devastated and unable to bear the scalding agony chewing through her feet, Bebe slid down against the cupboards onto her hands and knees and crawled away. She found her chair through a watery sheen of tears and dragged herself back onto it.

  Still standing at the sink, Tral was once more studying his hand, slowly stroking his fingers together as if still coated in her slick oils.

  The throbbing between her thighs had been completely overwhelmed by the punishing pain of trying to walk, but the humiliation remained. She covered her face with her hands, unable to bear it when he raised his fingers to his nose and slowly breathed in, smelling them. Wishing she could disappear entirely, she didn’t move again until Pani and Bach emerged from the bedroom for the bathroom. The door closed, and a moment later, the shower turned on.

  Tral glanced back in that direction and stared for a time at the kitchen wall blocking his view. Suddenly noticing the coffee on the counter beside him, he looked from it to the coffeemaker, and then turned to look out at her. His brows quirked closer together as he stared. He looked at the coffee cup again, and then left the kitchen to fetch his medical kit from the top of a nearby box. Opening it on the table, he filled a syringe with a tiny amount of clear liquid. When he swabbed her upper arm, she couldn’t even bring herself to protest. By the time he’d packed his kit away and returned to the kitchen to pick up his coffee cup, the pain in her feet had become a distant sensation. Unfortunately, the brush of his hands against her skin made the throbbing between her thighs return full force.

  From behind the closed bathroom door, Bebe heard soft talking, which became soft laughing, and then even softer moans. Tral finished his first cup and promptly poured himself a second, then began a grudging search through the pantry cupboard and a short stack of boxes set against one wall. By the time Pani and Bach ventured fully dressed into the main room to join them, Tral had a simple breakfast of reconstituted eggs and crackers on the table and Bebe was in tears. She slid off her chair to return to the bathroom, but Tral stopped her.

  “No,” he said firmly, noticing her for the first time in almost an hour. He came out of the kitchen long enough to pick her up and put her back on her chair. “Sit there and stop moving around. Your feet need the rest.”

  And yet as soon as he turned and went back into the kitchen to fetch the coffee and enough cups for their guests, Bebe dropped out of her chair and limped heavily down the hall.

  “Bebe, dammit!” Tral set the coffee and cups on the table and started after her. He came down the hall rolling up his shirt sleeve and dangerous look in his dark eyes. “From now on when I tell you something, you are—”

  Bebe shut and locked the bathroom door before he reached it and then she hobbled to the sink to scrub herself clean again. And scrubbed and scrubbed, and cried and scrubbed some more, while Tral pounded on the door.

  “She locked me out!” he said, stalking back out to the main room. “I can’t believe this. First she opens the doors, now she’s locking them! Where are my tools?”

  So she was in trouble again. Already. And no matter how long or how hard she scrubbed between her legs, the wetness kept coming back and that tingling ache refused to go away. She sat in a heap on the floor, arms covering her head so she wouldn’t have to hear Tral grumbling curses and bumping against the wall as he took the door off its hinges.

  “That’s the last door you ever lock against me,” he growled as he dropped his tools on the counter and picked her up. Propping one foot on the lip of the tub, he threw her across his makeshift lap and rapidly walloped her backside until the bathroom rang with her cries. When he was done, he barely gave her time to compose herself, offering her little more than a wad a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, before carting her out to the kitchen table and dropping her blazing fanny back onto her chair. “Now you sit there and don’t you move again until I tell you,” he told her sternly. “I swear, there really is nothing as bad as human behavior.”

  “That depends,” his uncle said, from where he sat at the head of the table, calmly eating his breakfast.

  Tral glared at him. “On?”

  “On what you did to spark all that.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Tral dryly informed him. “For your information, Bebe is in heat.”

  Bach stared at him for nearly a full minute before dropping his
fork on his plate. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and then threw that down as well. “Come here, Pani.”

  Promptly abandoning both her breakfast and her chair, Pani went to him, allowing herself to be scooped up into his arms. As Bach passed them, he paused to catch Bebe’s chin in a gentle hand, tilting her up to meet his sympathetic eyes. The pad of his thumb softly brushed a lingering tear from her cheek.

  “Good luck,” he told her. “Sincerely, you’re going to need it. And you,” he half-turned to frown at Tral. Shaking his head in disgust, he stormed right past him on his way to the door. “You’re an idiot!”

  * * * * *

  Tral sat at his computer long after Bach bid him such fond farewell. He was at a total loss for to what to do. On the one hand, he was somewhat obligated to submit to his uncle’s whim and study the human left with him. After all, she was here, he was here, and really, what else did he have to do while the snow-level continued to rise towards the rooftop? They were trapped in here together. They might as well get something productive done.

  “But on the other hand, how does one go about proving a human is sentient?” he grumbled out loud. He tapped a finger at the keyboard, but he’d long given up trying to fill out his daily reports. So far, he’d glossed over the human attack on his old station house, minimized his uncle’s involvement and turned the rescue of Bebe into the kind of grandiose battle that might hopefully be deemed worth all the tranquilizers expended. At this point, the last few days read less like his factual life and more like a work of complete fiction. It wasn’t even good fiction, but give him a long enough winter and enough revisions, he fairly sure he could whip the tale into something halfway believable.

  “I might even publish it,” he mused, tapping at his keyboard with one finger. “I could have a sterling career as an author when they throw me out of this one for being a crackpot zoologist.”

  Sitting across the table from him, Bebe looked at him. She’d stopped crying about an hour or so ago. Now she just sat there, blinking at him with those impossibly blue eyes of hers and never so much as cracked a smile.

  And why should she, really? Tral sat back in his chair, one elbow propped on the table, chin cupped in the palm of his eyes as he studied her in return. “She doesn’t know what humor is, she can’t understand a word you’re saying, and she’s about as far from sentient as Lazonian dart beetle.”

  Pani understood what people were saying, a part of his brain tried to argue.

  “But then Pani is older, whereas Bebe—” She perked a little when he said her name, her small hands coming up to grip her edge of the table in a look that was at once both reserved and vaguely hopeful. “Bebe is much younger and probably nowhere near as clever.” Two idle fingers tapped at his mouth as he eyed her critically. “Because that’s what humans are, aren’t they? You’re all clever little mimics. Bald little parrots who worm your ways into our hearts and homes because you also happen to look like people.”

  Her brows quirked slightly as she watched him. Her head tilted to one side as he aimlessly traced along the curve of his lower lip.

  “Yes, I know.” Tral frowned, thinking. “It’s all very puzzling. How am I supposed to confirm whether or not the human animal is, in fact, a species of people? Particularly when the world already knows said animal can be exceptionally clever and that I am the blood relation of a man with an agenda.” He tapped his mouth again. “We, at the bureau, refer to thissort of task as an impossible endeavor.” He thought about it. “Or top secret. Or grunt work, come to think of it. Which is probably how it landed in my lap.”

  Watching him closely, Bebe slid off her chair. Tral came quickly back to himself when her face underwent a myriad of tiny gasping, wincing expressions, but she turned and limped heavily from the table anyway.

  “Bebe, get off your feet,” he called sharply after her, but she vanished into the kitchen and out of his limited range of sight anyway. “Bebe!”

  The pantry cupboard opened and, frowning even more disapprovingly when he heard her begin rummaging through it, he got up from his computer to go and get her. Already his hand was itching to roll up the cuffs of his sleeve, but he only got halfway around the table before she reappeared in the open kitchen archway. Her fingers nervously tapped at a package of freeze-dried vegetables.

  She must be hungry.

  “See what happens when you don’t eat your breakfast?” he said, and took the package when she held it out to him. He ruffled his fingers through her hair to show he wasn’t quite as irritated as he sounded and slipped past her. “Go sit down.”

  She followed him a few steps into the kitchen instead, fingers tapping quietly away as she watched him pour the package into a bowl, add a little water and then set it into the wall unit to cook.

  “Someone must want another spanking,” he warned, leaving the vegetables to cook. He picked her up and carried her back to her chair. “Get down again and you’ll do the rest of your sitting today on a very hot, sore bottom.”

  The wall unit beeped. Leaving her there to absorb his warning, he went to get the bowl. “Hot,” he told her as he set it on the table in front of her. Handing her a spoon, he then went back to his computer. His work of fiction wasn’t going to write itself.

  He sat down with a sigh and stared at the monitor some more. Tapping uninspired at the keys, he glanced up when he noticed Bebe wasn’t eating. She simply sat as he’d left her, the bowl cupped between her hands, if anything looking more perplexed than before.

  “Suppertime,” he told her and gestured to the forgotten spoon. He didn’t think he’d given her enough of the painkillers to put her in a stupor, but the way she kept staring at him had him reaching across the table to check her pulse anyway.

  Nope. Steady and just slow enough that, were it his heart, he’d be rushing for the nearest hospital. On her, it was perfectly normal.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Tral asked, a little irritated. As if she could answer him. He shook his head, this time at himself, and tried to refocus on his job. His real job. The one that kept him in this very nice prepaid-for station house with not so nice prepackaged food for the table. “You asked for it, now eat. We don’t waste food here.”

  The matter settled, he shifted in his chair and settled himself to doing his job while he still had one. Stifling another sigh, he cupped his chin in his hand and studied the screen. God, he hated filling out these useless, senseless, unending forms. After a moment, he tapped at his mouth with one finger again.

  Bebe pushed her untouched bowl of vegetables towards him.

  “No, thanks.” He pushed it back at her. “I ate my breakfast, so I’m not hungry. Stop your dawdling and eat. It’ll be nasty when it gets cold.”

  She blinked those big blue eyes at him uncertainly, then slowly climbed back down off her chair.

  “No, Bebe,” he said, straightening in his chair as she limped back into the kitchen. “I said, no! Bebe, don’t you ignore—she’s ignoring me. She’s absolutely ignoring me.” Tral got up when he heard the pantry cupboard open again. Prepackaged containers crackled as she shuffled through them. Truly annoyed now, he started after her, rolling up his shirt sleeve as he muttered, “It’s got to be some sort of congenital human defect. Something that makes it impossible to understand the word No unless it’s accompanied by a smarting bottom.”

  There were tears in her eyes as she held out a container of dried fruit just as soon as he drew close enough.

  “This is not a restaurant,” he told her, taking it from her. “You haven’t even touched your—”

  She took out another package without even taking her eyes from him to see what it was and handed that to him now as well.

  Tral stopped and stared at her, at the tears slowly spilling over her lashes to slide down her cheeks, at the trembling in her nervously tapping fingers, and in particular, at her thoroughly confused look. Then he glanced down at both the fruit and the small box of crackers in his hand, and then backed up half a step to star
e at the bowl of rapidly cooling vegetables sitting neglected on the table.

  It couldn’t possibly be that simple.

  “If it is, I’m an idiot.” Turning his gaze back to her, Tral shuffled the packages into one hand and quite deliberately tapped his mouth.

  Reaching into the cupboard, Bebe handed him a tin of ground meat.

  Barking laughter, Tral threw his hands up in the air, very nearly throwing the crackers and dried fruit everywhere. “It’s sign language! Bebe, you’re a service pet!”

  Tossing food packages onto the counter, Tral stopped all over again, his smile fading as he snapped around to look at her again. He frowned, his eyes narrowing as he considered the broader ramifications of that discovery. If Bebe could sign, then unlike Pani, she wasn’t bound by the physical constraints of an inferior throat.

  Had anyone tried talking to a signing human before? Not just commands—fetch this, fetch that—but actually talk to one. Unfortunately, he didn’t know word one in sign language. Well all right, apparently he now knew 'food', but one word hardly a useful conversation made.

  All at once, Tral turned to stare straight out through the kitchen doorway at his computer. He might not be a genius, but at least he wasn’t a complete idiot.

  Picking her up, he carried her back to the table and set her firmly on her chair. “Stay here,” he told her, pointing for emphasis. “Stay. I mean it, stay!”

  He waited to make sure she would, then dashed back into the kitchen to gather up an assorted armload of whatever he could grab before rejoining her in the next room. He dropped everything on the tabletop, quickly shuffling through the pile to set items upright and arrange them into a half-circular mess in front of Bebe. She looked for them to him, not just confused now but also somewhat concerned.

  “I’m fine,” he assured her, dragging both his chair and his computer over to her side of the table. He sat down directly across from hers and adjusted his monitor so that he could better see the screen. It took a miniature forever to locate an adequate file on sign language, one that possessed detailed instructions, both written and artistically drawn, on exactly how to hold one’s hands to form the simplest of words.