But CAREFULLY.
Don’t overreact, Jack Ol’ Boy, he thought in near panic. You don’t want to frighten her, and you DON’T want to take advantage of her high spirits and gratitude; that way lies serious trouble!
“We’ve had our own invasion nightmares, S’leen,” he softly rumbled since her big, translucent ears were so close to his face, “and due to our naturally violent nature our nightmares have most likely been a lot worse than yours. The potential for us, ANY of us, being invaded by hostile aliens is still very real, but the more friends we make out among the stars the better chance we’ll all have of surviving such an encounter.” He gave her a quick, gentle squeeze. “That is, if such a thing even happens. We’re hoping it doesn’t.”
He noticed that he was sweating again. Must be all that warm fur, he thought wryly, then released her after a light, parting squeeze. “There are things we both need to do before it gets much later,” he said after a deep breath, “and the most important one on the list is to EAT. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had much of anything to eat since breakfast,” he looked at his watch, “and here it is already three o’clock.”
“It has been such an exciting time,” she said, smiling, “that food was easily forgotten. But I, too, am now feeling the pinch of hunger.”
“Before I can eat, though,” Ross said, backing farther away from S’leen, “I need a bath and some fresh clothes. Civilized humans bathe regularly, and as I told all of you this morning I purposely refrained from my normal bathing schedule to make sure everyone got a strong sample of my scent. It’s reached the point now that I’m offending myself, so if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes I’ll take care of the problem.”
She protested that his scent was not offensive but he just laughed and told her to look around the house. “There’s nothing here that’s off-limits to you EXCEPT the antique weapons you’ll see displayed in some of the rooms. I have several modern firearms in my bedroom; you’re not to touch those either. We’ll have a gun safety class after you’ve settled in.” When she looked apprehensive about the thought he stated, “We live in dangerous times and I’m licensed to carry concealed weapons; you saw one earlier when I thought we were being attacked. Guns are nothing more than tools, Dear, and by themselves they’re not dangerous. PEOPLE shoot people, and NOBODY lives in this house without knowing how to handle them safely and effectively in an emergency. Not even you.”
He left her standing mute in her room as he headed toward his bathroom.
* * *
Thirty minutes later a much cleaner, considerably better smelling and far more casually dressed Ross emerged from his room. He had checked his computerized voice mail from his bedroom terminal and returned two brief work-related calls. One of the seven other calls on the system had been from Teddy Shapiro; replying to that one could wait. After listening for a moment at the head of the stairs but not hearing any activity, he headed down to see about preparing a late lunch/early supper. As he rounded the corner at the foot of the stairs on his way to the kitchen, he came to an abrupt halt; the tableau he saw was like something out of sheerest fantasy. S’leen was sitting in a living room chair near a window, enjoying the pastoral view as she watched an energetic pair of gray squirrels squabbling over acorns on the grass near the driveway.
Shades of ‘Alice In Wonderland’, he thought with a wry smile. Here’s an intelligent, charming “house rabbit” being entertained by a couple of tree-rats out on my lawn. A moment later she took notice of him, and he grinned, saying, “Chowtime, kiddo!” Heading through the open doorway into the kitchen he commented, “I think I can scare us up some—” He stopped, amazed at what he saw already waiting for him. “Well! Guess I don’t have to worry about going hungry, huh.”
That was an understatement. Properly arranged on the little breakfast nook table next to a cheerful kitchen window were two superb, large garden salads with fresh garlic and herb dressing, two large glasses of white wine, a plate of cheese and crackers and the correct silverware to deal with the occasion. Indeed!
“S’leen, honey, where did you learn to set such a table? I’ve eaten enough meals on your world to know that your dining customs are a lot different from ours.“
She laughed as she joined him at the table, and he found he really liked the sound. “Despite not knowing about your automobiles, Jack, I am not an ignorant peasant. Besides the formal schooling every child on my homeworld receives I have taken postgraduate training on daily life here on your world. Also, the five days I spent at Patrons were filled with training on the things they thought we needed to know to survive in your society.”
“And nobody ever thought to tell you about our cars,“ he muttered darkly, then suddenly smiled, saying, “Dear, you certainly appear to have stayed awake in class. Let’s sample your first project and see what kind of grade you’ve earned.”
They sat down to dine, and for the next half-hour they enjoyed both the food and each other’s company. Ross was secretly relieved to see that she ate her salad with a fork; she also seemed to relish the crackers and cheese. At least, he thought with amusement, she follows the philosophy that milk is good for more than feeding babies.
When the meal was finished he wouldn’t allow her to help clear away the dishes. “You prepared the meal, I can at least clean up the mess.” When she protested he said, “Dear, I didn’t go to Patrons to find a servant, I wanted a companion.
Until the day our marriage ended my wife and I shared responsibilities whenever possible; even our kids pitched in and helped when they were old enough. I’ve brought you here to share my life, and I hope you find the experience a worthwhile one.”
She looked at him with one of her unreadable expressions, and after a few moments of silence she ventured, “You told us that you and your wife ‘dissolved your marriage’. Does that mean you are divorced?” When he nodded she carefully added, “Am I permitted to ask why you divorced?”
He smiled, but the cautious H’kaah dutifully noted that there was no humor in it. “It’s no big secret,” he began as he scraped the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. “My wife was a successful businesswoman, and she had her circle of professional and social friends the same as I have mine. Unfortunately, they were different circles. After the kids (we had the socially-correct two) were finished with college and out on their own Maureen and I realized that in the last years we’d just…just drifted apart.” He looked so forlorn that S’leen regretted the inquiry. “One morning s-she told me she wanted a divorce,” he added, “not because of anything I did or some new ‘studmuffin’ in her life; she, uh, just didn’t love me anymore.”
His voice had gotten husky and S’leen realized he was struggling to retain control. Still, she thought, trying to ignore the instinctual warnings screaming in the back of her mind, this may be something I need to know.
“When we divorced it was done on ‘friendly’ terms,” he continued as he put away the last items and sat back down at the table. Before she could stop him he refilled their wine glasses and took a deep drink from his. “She took only what she felt was rightfully hers; part of our investment savings, her clothes, personal effects and her car. We agreed that I would keep this place and a mountain vacation cabin to balance out some other co-owned properties she wanted. She didn’t want any part of the automobile dealership I inherited when my parents died in a cruise ship fire, even though I had run it since before my parents’ death. She didn’t even want any alimony—that’s monetary support for the ex-spouse—since she made as much from her mortgage brokerage firm as I make from my dealership.
“She…she just wanted out of the marriage.”
“You seem to speak of her always in the past tense,” S’leen softly stated. “Do you ever see her?” As soon as the question was out of her mouth she sensed that she had made some sort of blunder. She braced herself for an angry storm, but what she got was far more terrifying than a scolding.
“I—” Ross was fighting hard to ho
ld himself in check, to not lose control of his seething emotions, but handicapped by the wine’s effects he was slowly losing the battle. “I—speak of her in the past tense because two years ago she…she was murdered by a dirtbag who broke into her office late one night and…and—” Ross was almost to the point of no return.
Almost.
He took several deep breaths, clamping down hard on his emotions. “He was a heroin addict; heroin’s a type of drug your people don’t have—yet. Like all shithead dopers this one needed more money to buy more drugs. Maureen’s office door didn’t have much of a lock and he quickly popped it, stormed in and was all over her before she could call the cops.” Ross paused to take several more breaths and another drink of wine, his rage becoming more frightening as the struggle to contain it progressed. “He…he cheerfully confessed to the murder after the cops caught him the next day; he told them everything in explicit, obscene detail. Why should he care, he reasoned, since all he had to do was plead ‘drug addiction victim’ and he was sure our suck-ass liberal judicial system would give him free medical care and nothing more severe than a slap on the wrist.” S’leen fought hard to hide her shock at how quickly Ross’ emotions and overall demeanor had hardened. She was seeing, first hand, the ugly, dangerous side of a predatory meat-eating species.
RUN! her instincts kept shrieking, while at the same time another inner voice said, FREEZE! Logic told her there was no place to run to, so she did what her lapin ancestors have done for millions of years when confronting death in all its horrible faces; she didn’t move, she barely breathed, her nose didn’t twitch, she didn’t even blink.
“But our knife-happy boy royally screwed up,” Ross snarled, oblivious to the effect his story was having on his companion. “You see, during the last few years that our little druggie roach was happily mainlining himself into doper Nirvana the mood and tone of our judicial system underwent a fundamental change, and we finally reversed the generations-long practice of cherishing our social sewage. Early last year he received a brief trial—remember, he had already confessed to killing my wife—and no appeal was permitted due to his ‘voluntary admission of guilt’.” Even though Ross wasn’t looking directly at S’leen during most of the story she saw that his eyes had taken on an incredibly cold, feral look. Despite her lush fur and the balmy springtime Florida weather she felt a bone-deep chill, and contrary to her instinctual paralysis she began to tremble in earnest.
“For the cold-blooded murder of my wife he was given the penalty of death,” Ross hissed, viper-like. “Also, due to those radical changes in our judicial system brought about by the recent planet-wide social upheaval (a gift from the jumperdrive, you see) I, as her former husband in good standing with the court, was allowed to choose the method of his execution. The court even allowed me the privilege of being his executioner.”
He swung his icy blue gaze around to stare directly into S’leen’s huge, liquid eyes, and she unconsciously pushed back in her chair—but she still didn’t run. Somewhere deep in her instinct she understood that the threat was in no way directed toward her.
“He slashed her throat for a lousy fifty dollars,” Ross stated in a perfectly normal tone of voice, yet one completely devoid of emotion. “The court let me cut his for free.”
She realized with another hard chill that Ross was someone she did NOT want to have as an enemy, but as yet another terrified shiver ran through her body she saw him take a deep breath, slowly blink—and change. In a literal ‘blink of an eye’ Ross reversed the personality metamorphosis that had, moments earlier, transformed him into the terrifying monster who executed his wife’s murderer with his own hands. Within seconds his eyes lost their burning, deadly glare, and that was when he realized that the inner beast all humans keep chained deep inside themselves had once more slipped its bonds, if only briefly.
“Aww, S’leen, I’m sorry! I scared you again and I didn’t mean to, honest.” He wiped his eyes and sniffed, which seemed to break the last of the spell on her. As quickly as she had come to fear him she also came to understand that while there were things about this human that would forever remain alien to her, she was actually beginning to understand him. True, he was an eater-of-flesh, a creature her deepest instincts said she should mortally fear, yet on another instinctive level she felt she was completely safe in his company. Quickly forcing her overt fears into submission she slid her chair back farther, then stood and moved to embrace him. Ross also had stood and was holding out his arms for her, both people wanting nothing more than to undo the harm they feared they had done to their budding relationship.
“Jack, I am sorry I asked you to open old wounds,“ she stated.
While at the same time Ross said, “Dear, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”
They reached for each other and Ross suddenly barked a humorless laugh that was, in reality, much closer to a sob. He dropped his arms and stepped back from the embrace, a move that caught S’leen completely by surprise. “This…this must look like something from an old “B” movie,” he husked, ”and I know you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about.” An incredible look of sadness washed over his features and he sighed, then continued, “Still, I…I guess it was best that you learned about that grim chapter of my life before you got too deeply involved with me.” He swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a Greyhound bus, then he coughed and added, “I’ll, uh, have Patrons send over a car to take you back to the office, and…and I’ll square things with Teddy Shapiro so this mistake won’t be counted against you.”
That was entirely the wrong thing to say! “Stop that!” she yelled angrily, her short, delicate fingers curved into sharp-tipped claws. “We both have a lot to learn about each other,” she declared, working hard to bring her voice back to a more normal tone, “and because we are of different species there are bound to be details that neither of us will like. That doesn’t mean I will run screaming every time—” she hesitated and Ross suddenly found that he had to fight to hold back a smile, “—you do or say something that upsets me.
“Jack, if what many of your scientists claim about H’kaah origins is true, your ancestors ATE my ancestors.” Ross cringed, knowing that what she said was, indeed, all too true. “And with your admitted fondness for animal flesh I…I have no doubt that you personally have eaten my modern-day primitive relatives.” True again. While on covert missions he had more than once dined on roasted rabbit. “We H’kaah are struggling to accept the terrifying concept of having to share the universe with intelligent flesh-eaters, and we are not alone in our struggle.
“All of the sentient vegetarian species you humans discovered have struggled for thousands of years against animal predators. Just because we H’kaah survived doesn’t mean we easily conquered the flesh-eating monsters on our world, either. Time after time on many worlds it was a close battle, and the mere thought of having to face flesh-eating monsters again gives most vegetarian species unspeakable nightmares.
“Several other species whose apparent racial ancestors your people currently eat are experiencing the same kind of cultural shock as we H’kaah. And then there are those so-called ‘civilized’ species on other worlds that even now look upon my people as…as FOOD!”
Ross made sure his arms stayed at his sides. He feared that any overt move by him at this emotionally charged time might appear to be threatening, and he certainly didn’t want to make matters worse. Perhaps if he just stood quietly—
S’leen, too, didn’t know which way to jump. She still wanted to hold Ross, to offer comfort and apologize for the pain she had caused him, but she also didn’t want to make him angry with her. She feared she had far overstepped the bounds of discretion when she reminded him of how upsetting his species’ dietary practices were. Yet in her heart her fear wasn’t so much of him but of his species in general, and of the horrible things she felt they were capable of doing to nearly defenseless vegetarians.
Ross stood very still, determined not to furthe
r spook the one person his life was now centered on. Time passed, mere moments really, but it seemed like eternity to both people, and S’leen slowly relaxed, her own frustrated outrage having passed. Reaching up a still trembling hand to his face she carefully wiped at the sparkling tears that had tracked down his cheeks. Bringing her hand back to her abbreviated muzzle she touched a dainty pink tongue to her fingers—brine, just like her own. She realized with a start that despite his physical and cultural differences he was more like her kind than not, yet she felt it had no doubt taken an extraordinary amount of courage for Ross to ask her to be his companion.
At that moment she believed she would stay with him at least for the duration of the Patrons contract.
Maybe longer.
S’leen stepped closer to Ross and slowly, carefully embraced him. After his shower he had donned a pair of faded blue Bermuda shorts and an old white cotton t-shirt, leaving his feet bare since most rooms in the old house were thickly carpeted. She was surprised to find his earlier rank human scent so greatly subdued, and as her hands soothingly stroked his back, shoulders and arms she noted that he had hard, ropy muscles beneath the thin layer of fabric and relatively furless skin.
He gently folded his arms around her lushly furred body, careful to restrain his own hands from their natural tendency to explore her female human-like body. Her muted natural lapin scent had a spicy musk undertone that he found surprisingly pleasant, and before he realized what the scent, along with her exotic presence, was doing to him he felt a responsive stirring in his shorts.
S’leen felt it, too. Her soft breathing suddenly stopped momentarily, and she tilted her head up to find him looking down into her surprised expression.
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