Ro looked around, and she saw his lips move as he licked over his dental ridges. “Choba?” he asked.
Maggie laughed. “Of course. Coming right up.”
Chapter 32
It turned out the nurses were ahead of him. They wanted him to drink four pints of choba that day, because while his body was happy to hibernate through the cold, the choba colonies in him would have died off without being replaced.
When Maggie asked about it, it turned out choba actually was a necessary part of a Teissian diet. It kept their scales supple, so without it, their scales would harden, crack, and eventually peel off, essentially flaying the person alive over a period of months or even years, until they died from infection. It sounded a bit like leprosy to Maggie, but the nurses assured her it was a simple nutritional deficiency with an easy fix. Fatal cases were extremely rare since even a small amount of choba would keep the person going, but the lesions left permanent scars that could affect the person’s mobility as scales never grew back.
Ro told her he had never seen or heard of that happening to anyone since choba grew everywhere on Teiss. When they brought him a plate of colourful velvety cubes for his desert, he was over the moon. The nurses wanted to replenish every kind of choba in his body, and had brought him a selection of every colour. For a Balin, he said, such an array of coloured choba would have been worth a fortune and was a once-in-a-lifetime treat.
He held out the pink one. “This one is mine,” he said, and popped it in his mouth with a wink. The consistency made Maggie think of Turkish delight that had been frayed all over. As he said that, she did think that his colours didn’t look as bright as usual, and his scales looked dryer and ashy, the lines between the individual scales showing whiter. She hadn’t noticed before because of the dim light, and because the change had happened gradually while she had been sitting with him over the past four days.
After he ate and drank and went to the bathroom by himself, stumbling a little in the cold but assuring her he was fine, the doctors risked turning the room temperature up another couple of degrees. His English improved after that, but it wasn’t back to where it had been. He said he had a headache but that it wasn’t bad. He kept drinking his choba, which was delivered barely lukewarm and cooled to room temperature as he drank it, but he said he didn’t mind.
Maggie had brought him some clothes and his toiletries from his apartment when she had first started staying there, so she helped him get cleaned up. He rinsed his mouth out with something foamy, and she took over wiping his scales down with oil when he got tired, letting him slump against her. He sat on the toilet with the lid down and his head against her stomach while she moved the cloth slowly over him, making sure to do a good job, though she wasn’t sure what really constituted a good job. She looked at it kind of like she was polishing him.
He never objected to her touching him, but she supposed it wasn’t anything she hadn’t touched before. She almost half-wondered if he was trying to seduce her into staying with him by having her do this, or if he really was too tired to do it himself. When the only places left were between his legs, she nudged him and gave him the cloth back, leaving the bathroom. She was his girlfriend but not his nurse, and until she knew where they were headed in the long-run, she didn’t want to touch him there. It was too tied up with what had happened. Everything was still too unclear to cross that line, at least for her.
He didn’t like her going home at night, but she wasn’t allowed to stay outside of visiting hours. He clung to her hand and she had to promise to come back. He obviously wasn’t back to his old self, but she knew he needed to sleep. He was exhausted just from the little activity he’d had. They hadn’t spoken anymore about their relationship. Maggie wouldn’t do that to him until he was strong enough to handle it, and he evidently didn’t want to hear it. She was his girlfriend for now, and he was happy to keep it that way. He gave her a list of things to bring from this apartment, including clothes and things to entertain him.
And that was the pattern the rest of his stay followed. Maggie arrived at ten and left at seven. They gave Ro Balin food to eat and lots of colourful choba so he was happy, but he did get bored. They warmed him up little by little until he was back to his old self as far as Maggie could tell, but he still got tired quickly. The nurses asked Maggie to take him for walks around the medical centre, so twice a day they would link arms and take a leisurely stroll around, though the building was small and there wasn’t really anywhere they could go. He wasn’t allowed outside because it was too warm. The doctor insisted on keeping Ro’s room cool to prevent him going into heat naturally, because it would be a stress his body just did not need at that time. 68 degrees was his maximum.
He had to stay in hospital while they monitored his recovery. They wanted to make sure he hadn’t done any permanent damage to his heart, and that his bleeding hadn’t resulted in a clot anywhere. He seemed normal to Maggie, though without his usual bounce, but it always brought her back to earth to hear the list of things that were still wrong with him, and that could still go wrong. Most of the time it felt like they were just hanging out, that they didn’t actually have any problems. The difficult conversations were on hold, that all waited outside. Inside Maggie and Ro could just… be. Like every day at work, together morning, noon and night.
Kez visited every day as well, able to stay longer and longer as the room’s temperature was brought up. He stopped berating Ro, and since Maggie’s party-trick Balin was not good enough to follow or contribute to the conversation, she stepped out and left them alone, getting coffee from the vending machine. Sometimes when she came back to the room she could hear them laughing from outside and it put a smile on her face.
Finally, Ro was deemed well enough to leave. Kez had passed a message to Vig to get Ro’s apartment isolated from the climate control system for the rest of the building and instead set to 66 degrees, where Ro was ordered to keep it for the next three months. After that he had to come back to be checked over, and only then would he be given the all-clear to go back to work. If his test results came back good enough, he would be given an appointment with the endocrinologist to discuss managing his heat cycles in future. They weren’t sure how his body would react to the hormonal changes after what he’d been through.
Maggie helped him pack up everything she had brought him from his flat, and all the medication and leaflets he had been given, ready to go. She felt better knowing that the medical centre was less than a ten minute walk from Ro’s building. Nevertheless, they both knew what was supposed to happen once they got back to his flat. Ro sat on the bed and watched her as if he didn’t want to leave. Maggie avoided his eyes, unable to push away everything she had to say to him anymore because she knew she was going to need those arguments soon. She didn’t want to fight and she didn’t want to break up, but they needed to be honest with each other, and she didn’t know if he would be.
When she was finished, looking around the room and sticking her head into the bathroom to check for any forgotten items, Ro stood up and took the bag off her, shouldering it as if it was nothing though it probably weighed more to him than it did to her after his week of bed rest.
She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but he looked like he was heading down death row.
“Come on, let’s go say goodbye to the nurses,” Maggie said, and they left the room behind them.
They both thanked all the staff who had looked after them, and asked for their thanks to be passed on to Dr Wen who was with another patient at the time. When they pushed through the doors into the outside world, the difference in temperature hit them. Maggie knew to expect it, but Ro staggered.
“You okay?” Maggie checked.
Ro nodded, and she held back a sigh. If he shut down again, and shut her out, there was only one way this conversation was going to go. They went back to his apartment in silence, Ro following her which seemed out of order, but she had been coming and going from there a lot more recently than he had.
She hadn’t been back to her own apartment in almost a week, and she still had his keys. She unlocked the external door and summoned the elevator, and he didn’t comment.
She turned on the switch next to the elevator to activate the motion-sensitive wall sconces, and made her way to his door. She no longer had to look at the numbers as she passed or count doors. She got the door open and flicked on the lights, dim as they were. Ro was wearing his lenses for the journey over from the medical centre so they wouldn’t bother him.
He closed the door and threw the bag onto the sofa, looking at the floor. She leant against the wall, facing him.
“So,” she began. No sense pretending it wasn’t coming. “Why did you do it?”
Ro sat on the sofa. “You know why,” he replied.
“That’s not good enough. You can’t give me any half answers this time. I need you to tell me the truth,” Maggie said. She was surprised by how much anger she still had in her.
Ro sighed deeply. “I took it because you wanted to have sex when I wasn’t able.”
“So Kez was right, it’s my fault?” Maggie felt hollow.
“It was my decision,” Ro said.
“Because you didn’t include me in it!” Maggie found herself shouting. “It was a decision we could have made together!” She needed him to understand what it had done to her to be locked out of everything he was thinking and feeling and doing. “I asked you a dozen times what was wrong with you!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t just say you’re sorry! God, can’t you see what you did? You almost died! In my arms!”
“Maggie,” he stopped her, his voice deep and calm and defeated as he looked at her. “If you’re breaking up with me, I don’t need to be yelled at first. I get it. You can just go.”
It was like a slap to the face. “Don’t you care?” she asked.
“Of course I care. I love you. But I’m not enough for you and now you know it. I’m never going to be able to change that. So… I don’t see what I can do. What’s the point of this fight?”
“I’m giving you a chance to explain.”
“I explained.”
“I’m giving you a chance to change my mind!” she wailed, striding to the couch and grabbing the arm next to the empty seat, looking at him. “I want you to change my mind.” She felt like shaking him.
“How?” he said.
“Was it really just for sex?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“I never asked you for that! Ro-” She cut herself off, pushing her hand through her hair. “I didn’t understand, okay? I know what I said that time, before you started taking it, but I didn’t know… I didn’t know you can only have sex when you’re in heat. I know it was stupid and I should have realised but I didn’t, okay? I only got it when you were already in hospital, Vig explained it to me. But you didn’t tell me!”
“How was I supposed to tell you that?” Ro almost yelled, finally showing some emotion. He didn’t get up but he turned to her, one hand on the cushion between them. “You thought you had a full male, I was supposed to correct that? Say ‘No, sorry, actually you have to wait?’ As if you would have done that! This planet is full of human men you could have gone to instead of me. I had to do something.” His hand brushed over his crest quickly before he made it into a fist and lowered it to his lap. “I already can’t give you children,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
Maggie’s jaw dropped. That had come out of nowhere. “You don’t know if I want children. You never asked me,” she said, but she sighed. It was an important point and she shouldn’t brush it off. “I’m not thinking about kids, Ro. If we want them later, we can talk about adopting or something. But that’ll be in ten years’ time, not now. And you should have just told me how you felt,” Maggie replied, quieter. “You didn’t have to drug yourself. You’re wrong about me. I would have waited. I wouldn’t have gone to anyone else. I want you, you are a full male.”
He snorted, looking away. “Alright, you would have waited. How long? A week, two? A few months? Balin heats are once a year, or they’re meant to be. You’re telling me you would have been happy with that? Satisfied?”
“Maybe, if you had given me the choice. We could have talked about it together. And I can’t believe you think that about me. I would never have cheated on you. I care about you for more than just sex. I love who you are.”
“Maybe you would have done it, but you wouldn’t have been happy, not forever. You would have looked at me like I was an invalid and I don’t need that from you. I lived my whole life that way and I came to this planet to escape that.”
“So you thought killing yourself was going to make me happy?” she said, amazed. “Really?”
His mouth tightened. “I thought I would have more warning when it was too much and I would be able to stop in time.”
“Well, that didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t.”
For a moment neither of them knew what to say next, they just stared at each other.
“For the record, I hated what you turned into when you were on that stuff. You were a real dick,” Maggie filled in.
“Noted,” he said. “I don’t think you have to worry about that now.”
Maggie let out a long breath and moved to sit on the coffee table next to where his legs stretched out. “Ro, do you want to break up?”
“No!” he said, his hand snapping out to grab hers.
“Me neither,” she replied, turning her hand to his. “But I need you to understand what you did to me. I can’t be with someone who lies to me, okay?”
“I-”
He looked like he was going to deny it, and Maggie shot him a look.
“Okay,” he folded.
“You have to be honest with me. You have to include me. No more hiding things you think I’m not going to like, okay? You clearly don’t know me as well as you think you do if you think I’m going to want to change you. Give me a chance to prove that I really do love you just as you are,” she told him, bringing the back of his hand up to her cheek.
“Okay,” he said, but she could tell he wasn’t all-in, he didn’t believe her.
“I’m going to prove it to you, Ro,” she insisted.
“How?” he asked, his eyes flicking between hers, trying to get to the heart of her.
“Time. Just time,” she said. “But if you ever self-medicate again, I’m gone. I’m out the door the same day. Anymore of that stuff, risking your life, trying to make yourself better, and I will leave you. I’m not kidding. Okay?”
“Yes, no more,” he agreed.
“And no more secrets. Those are my terms.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She let out a breath, the vice around her heart releasing. “I’m sorry I made you feel inadequate. You’re not. It was an accident and a mistake and I take back anything I ever said or did to make you feel that way. You’re perfect. You’re the best man I’ve ever met. You make me so happy, and if you can’t have sex all the time, we’ll work around it. I don’t care as long as I have you. It would break my heart not to be with you.”
She looked at him to see how he was taking her words, and he opened his arms for her. She gratefully moved onto his lap, his arms feeling so good when they closed around her. She felt like she was finally safe again.
“Thank you,” he said.
She hesitated, but it was only fair. “Do you have any terms for me? Anything you want me to do or not do? Anything you want to change? Remember you’re being honest now. If you have a deal-breaker, I can handle it.”
“Hmm…” He thought about it while Maggie waited in suspense. “Just come to me first,” he said. “Give me a chance to do something about it if you’re dissatisfied or upset. Let me know.”
“I can do that,” she replied. She wrapped her arms around his neck, one hand stroking the back of his head. She tucked her head into his neck and he pulled her closer. “I was so scared, Ro. Really,” she whispered.
>
“I’m sorry,” he whispered back, kissing her hair.
She pulled back enough to look at his face. “Are we alright now?” she murmured. God, she wanted the answer to be yes. She just wanted to go back to how they had been, put it all behind her and forget it had ever happened. She didn’t want to be angry or upset anymore. She just wanted him to make her laugh while they cuddled in front of the TV watching cooking shows.
“I hope so,” Ro replied, looking at her as if it was her decision.
“Good,” she said, kissing him lightly. “Welcome home. I missed you.”
She kissed him again, letting him rock her as their lips learned each other all over again.
Chapter 33
Three Months Later.
Maggie and Ro sat in the waiting room at the medical centre. Ro’s last appointment had confirmed that all signs indicated he was back to normal. His choba colonies were all replenished, which was a visual Maggie didn’t want to dwell on for too long. He had the doctors’ permission to turn the temperature in his apartment back up if he wanted to.
The appointment they were waiting for now was with the endocrinologist. They wanted to see if the drug had done any lasting damage to his hormone centres, but they only way they could test that was to turn the heat up and let him go into heat naturally. The fact that he had a human girlfriend who wanted to share his heat with him made things a little more complicated. Maggie could be at risk if his hormones had been screwed up and went into overdrive, making him aggressive again. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her – he hadn’t after almost a week of poisoning himself – so she was pretty sure the doctors just didn’t want to be liable if she got hurt.
They wouldn’t be doing any tests today. They were just there to talk about their ‘options’. As far as Maggie understood it, Ro could keep the heat down, get signed off work for another three months, and not trigger his heat; or he could turn the heat up and trigger it on purpose; or he could do neither, go back to work and put his apartment back on the building’s climate control, and see what happened.
The New Guy (Office Aliens Book 2) Page 27