by Amanda Milo
She laughs. “I’m not going to fight you on it if you want to help. This meat smells delicious, but it’s like I’m trying to saw through a buttered armadillo.”
I take over immediately, but find that cutting her food has a strange effect on me. A primal one. A male Rakhii feeds his mate. Not because she can’t do it herself, but as another way to reinforce their bond. With Isla, I feel as if I’m doing that and providing for her, and it's a powerful combination that requires me to excuse myself and apply anti-bonding spray like a body freshener before I decide that it isn’t excessive to gargle with it like a mouthwash.
I rejoin Isla, feeling calmer. Less driven by instincts, more rational and in control. She exclaims over the strangeness of the food as we dine together, but in no way is she rude. More as if she’s… surprised. Fascinated. Entertained.
And with her, so am I.
CHAPTER 21
ISLA
Bash serves dessert last. It’s almost like pudding. I mean, before it melts on the tongue it starts out crumbly like feta cheese, so it’s not like pudding at all—but it’s mild and sweet. Tastes sort of like pistachio pudding… cheese.
I lick the last of it off of my spoon—and glance up to catch two green orbs focused on my mouth.
I flush and set my spoon down.
Bash shakes himself and stands, his eyes darting away. “Are you ready to return to the preserve?” Without waiting to hear my answer he starts for the door.
“Darn,” I sigh.
Not looking back at me, he asks, “What is it? What factoid will you fill my ears with now?”
“No factoids. I just realized…” You only brought me here to share an innocent meal. No nefarious motives, no Isla-gets-lucky-with-Bash. Darn. “Just realized our time is up. I’ve had fun with you. That’s all. Want me to help you wash up the dishes?”
“Wash?” He stalks back to me—or to the table, I guess—and blows fire on the plates until the food flakes off.
“Well, okay. At least let me rinse the charcoal off.”
He does let me stay long enough to rinse his burnt-topped dishes, and then he dries them with more fire.
“Gosh, Rakhii are fun.”
Before we leave the kitchen, he collects my spoon, carefully setting it apart from the other dishes. Making sure my alien-touched dishware won’t infect the silverware drawer. If I harbored any hope that we were more than friends, this should set me straight.
He guides me to the doorway where we exit, leads me around the waterfall, and we journey away from his cave.
“I guess this is goodbye,” I tell him.
He shoots me a disgruntled (i.e., patented Bash) look. “I will escort you to the human preserve.”
“Human preserve sounds like we’ve been turned into a jelly or something.”
“Don’t give me pleasant ideas.”
I laugh. He doesn’t.
We walk in mostly silence, which means he lets me talk without contributing more than the occasional grunt as we move under the dark blanket of stars and strange planets overhead.
Uncharacteristically, I fall silent as we trudge side-by-side, heading for the place I’m staying. Where I’ll go to my lonely room with nothing as interesting in it as he is.
Bash doesn’t try to make conversation but he’s strangely companionable anyway, somehow.
At the outer door to the compound, his hand lands on the back of my neck and rests there, lightly. It isn’t a romantic touch. It’s harmony, it’s camaraderie, it's friendship.
And I can live with that.
It’s not everything I wanted, but I’d rather have this from Bash than nothing. This is okay. Am I still a bit down? Yeah, but my infatuation is a me-problem, and I can deal. Bash makes a fine friend, for a slightly malevolent alien. To cheer myself up, I tease, “Glad you're wrapping your big paw around the back and not the front of my neck. I might be concerned you were going to choke me.”
He leans in. “I don’t want to choke you, Isla.”
“Smother me?” I ask, my tone suspicious—but playful.
But Bash must miss the playful part, because his face instantly shutters. He drops his hand from my neck and steps back. “It wasn’t my intent to smother you. Apologies,” he says stiffly before he turns to go.
“Wait!” I call.
Bash slows to a stop but doesn’t turn.
“Did I… What did I say?”
He still doesn’t turn. All his head quills and dorsal spines lower though. Finally, he says softly, so, so softly I almost wonder if I’m making his voice up in my head just so I can have answers, he shares, “I’ve been accused of smothering a female before. And… I was.”
“Whoaaaaa. Hold up!” I’m on him before he can escape. “Where do you think you're going? You can’t just drop something like that and walk away.”
Stiffly, without so much as lowering that chin he’s got jutted up, he speaks like he’s ripping off a verbal band-aid. “I joined the service of Gryfala. I was a fool. A smitten fool who took what we had too seriously. I was young, she was young. I… was not good at sharing her with her hobs. She was in love with her career, and I accepted that. I understood her dedication. ...But when she wasn’t working, I wanted all her time.” He swallows, his features stiff. “I couldn’t have it. Eventually, she accused me of smothering,” he admits.
This is clearly some painful subject matter for him. This is also maybe the most he’s ever said at once. It probably hurt him on more than one level to manage sharing this much. “Thank you for telling me,” I return just as softly as he’s been speaking, and I say it sort of quick because I’m afraid he’s going to leave before I can put the words out there. But I am glad that he’s shared. At the same time, I’m brain-screaming Bash had a Gryfala?! She broke his hearts and threw him away? Did he become closed off and grumpy after his hearts were crushed, or has he always been this way? Oohhhh, I have sooo many questions. “When I said it, I didn't mean it like that. I was joking to test out how close you were to silencing me forever. You know, because I’m bothering you.”
“You aren’t.”
“See! That’s great.”
“I don’t want to smother you to death.”
“Even better, if my opinion matters.”
Bash shoots me a smirk, but it’s not the biting, arrogant, confident smirk anybody would expect from him. It’s small and so… human. Not in the sense that his other-speciesness isn’t glaringly apparent, but more like this sad-cocky expression is so relatable. “Your opinion matters, Isla.”
“Awww. Thanks,” I bump my shoulder into his side. I stare up into his emotion-hooded eyes, and he stares back into mine.
But if I thought this was going to turn into a Hallmark moment where he exclaims, with a ton of relief, that he’s glad he shared this with me?
Yeah, that doesn’t happen. Bash surprises me by sliding his fingers into my hair until he’s caught his fingers in my hairband.
Is he taking my hair down so we can passionately kiss? I’ll help! “Hang on, I can get it out,” I practically pant.
But he pulls it free, letting all of my hair fall loose—and then he turns and starts to walk away.
Okay… so no kiss.
Shoot, I didn’t even get a goodbye hug.
Hey! He didn’t even say goodbye. Clearly my alien needs guidance in decent social mores.
“Goodbye, Bash!” I call out way too loudly and with more effervescence than the situation calls for.
His horns notch up into the air a fraction. That’s his emotionally stunted goodbye. He’s got long alien legs so he walks fast, and this area is flat and allows me to watch him unobstructed. I don’t go inside until he turns his body enough that he can see me. When he does, I think he’s surprised that I’m still here—all of his spines raise.
I put my arm up high and wave once.
Slowly, Bash raises his own arm and waves back.
I turn away first, and I finally head inside. My hair slides over my shoulders,
triggering a realization that has me smiling on the way to my room. Bash took my hairband… and he never gave it back.
CHAPTER 22
ISLA
After our date, you wouldn’t know Bash and I had a date. A day later and we go back to work like nothing happened. A week later and we’re… friending. It’s nice. If I were able to lay it all out there, I’d say I still want more. But this is all Bash wants, and it is nice, don’t get me wrong. So I’m friendzoned. I’m handling it. I like Bash as a friend, I really do. Every day, Bash has his midday meal near me when I break for lunch.
See? Friends.
Gracie sits in his throne, and he’s stopped trying to kick her out of it. Even if he cared—which he mostly acts like he doesn’t—she can only sit for short periods of time anyway before her back hurts so much she has to pace around the throne instead of sit in it. Bash makes everyone work further away so that no stray rocks can land on or in the way of Gracie, proving that he isn’t a heartless ogre.
(That’s what Gracie told him. She said he wasn’t a heartless ogre all the time and thanked him for caring about her. Bash growled at her, and he’s been avoiding her ever since.)
Which is tricky because sometimes I like to take lunch with Gracie. Poor Bash.
He’s leaning against the cool-surfaced rock wall, eating something that has a floppy naked tail and four burned feet. It isn’t a human so I don’t care. I’m freaked out, but I don’t care.
Gracie doesn’t care either, but when he bit into it, she gagged. She was mortified when the scent of whatever he was eating wafted to her. Nobody else was bothered by it, but her stomach went into revolt.
You’d think Bash would be pleased.
You’d think wrong. He gruffly started to move away after he locked eyes with me. But Gracie waved him right back where he’d been. “No, no, I’ll go sit with human people,” she said weakly. “You two kids have fun.” Then she sent me pointed eyes before she had to double over and retch.
“Pregnancy looks fun,” I commented.
“Shut up,” she said.
Bash and I finish eating in silence. I lick my fingers clean (because whatever sauce was used on my meal was finger lickin’ good—even with the bit of quarry dust I couldn’t quite manage to wash off my hands) and move to ball up the biodegradable paper that had wrapped my sandwich. I wave to Bash before walking to the food court area where most everybody else eats, heading for the trash bin to deposit my wrapper.
“I’ll take it,” Bash offers.
I didn’t even realize he’d followed right on my heels. “Wow, thanks,” I start to say—but I trail off when Bash plucks my wrapper from my fingers and stuffs it in his pocket.
I wave to the recycling receptacle. “You don’t have to keep it in your pants. I could just—”
“Eavesdropping is AWESOME,” Gracie teases from the next table over.
“It is entertaining,” Dohrein agrees.
“Ditttto,” Angie sings from not far enough away.
I laugh. “Buzz off, all of you. I’m trying to help my alien,” I say, gesturing to Bash.
Bash’s body snaps taut. “‘My?’”
I hold up my hands. “Don’t freak out. You don’t have to worry about a horrible human tying you down.” Sadly.
Everyone is staring at us, and it’s making Bash bare his teeth, so I tell him, “Come on. Let’s work over there. I think I see a freshly emptied wagon, just waiting to be refilled.”
Bash nods down to me and shadows me like if he doesn’t stick close, I’ll get mugged. I don’t know why he’s acting clingy, but I like it.
I fill his ears with all sorts of useful babble, like the fact that leopard frogs from Earth shove food down their throat with their eyes.
Bash tosses a boulder into the cart. “By blinking?”
“Yeah!” I smile back at him, adding my own pebbles to the cart. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“Nothing at this point would surprise me about that backwards hovel you came from, but that trait is not so strange. The Aneark eats the same way.”
“You mean Pasutha? Ella’s mate, right?” I lean around the wagon hoping to catch a glimpse of the semi-aquatic alien at one of the lunch tables, but I don’t see him.
“You won’t find him eating. He sits with his mate while she eats, but he consumes his food in private. His species is very shy. He feels too much the spectacle among land dwellers.”
“Crazy that an alien feels like an alien here.”
“You should know,” Bash murmurs. “You are the strangest alien of them all.”
“Hey now, you’re lucky I’m not offended by that.”
Bash scoffs. “As if I’d care if you were.”
I smile, because he so would care. If my feelings were hurt, it would matter to him. We drift a little apart as more people join our area, returning to work now that the lunch break is ending. I dump my handful of stone pebbles into the cart and swing around to find my next rock—when out of the corner of my eye, I see Bash approach the cart. If it were anyone else, I’d have stopped watching and gone back to collecting my next haul. But it’s Bash, and sadly these days all of my attention goes straight to this alien without my conscious consent and I don’t have the wherewithal to stop.
As I’m searching for my next pebble, Bash is reaching over the side of the wagon, where he wraps his hand around a stone—mine, the one I just put in there… and he lifts it and starts to carry it away.
I stop searching for a new rock. I turn around fully. I call the crazy alien’s name. “BASH!”
His ears swing back so I know he hears me, but that’s all the reaction I get.
“Did you just take my rock out?” I shout to his retreating back.
Bash freezes.
I trot up to him, rounding him because he still hasn’t turned. “Why? Do you have a problem with the size I grab?”
“No,” Bash answers, his eyes locked on mine. And he’s looking… weird.
Almost… uncomfortable. Like a little guilty and a little contrite.
“I’m picking them too small, aren’t I?” I blow out a breath and shove my overgrown bangs behind my ears. “You won’t hurt my feelings if you tell me when I’m not measuring up to a two-handed person’s abilities.” I meet his gaze. “But it does make me feel bad when people tiptoe around me and don’t tell me when I need to improve.” I swallow, my glance swinging around the quarry. “If nothing else, maybe put me at a station where you know I can meet the standard. What about the tile—”
“Isla, it isn’t you. You’re perfect,” Bash rumbles.
It makes me feel a little better to have him say it, but only a little. Everything feels dimmer now that I know I can’t keep up with everyone. And to think that I’ve been at this job for how long and he never said anything… It feels good, and it feels bad. For Bash, that’s really nice of him not to point it out. But… I hate, hate feeling like someone is making concessions for me because of my situation. Here I thought that we could use the little rocks I’ve grabbed—but if this whole time, mine are getting chucked out because they’re too small?
“Isla.”
I’ve been busting my butt to manage what I have. But it isn’t just me that I should be thinking about; have I totally been wasting everyone’s time? Surely somebody is on the other end of the line, wherever they’re unloading the rocks, and they curse the unknown woman who’s been tossing all the littler stones in with the rest. It’s… this doesn’t feel good.
“Give me your attention,” Bash commands, and the order has my eyes jumping up to his. Seeing that he has what he wanted, two tiny little smoke trails ease out of Bash’s nose. A Rakhii sign of stress or emotion, or at least this Rakhii’s sign.
“I collect your rocks,” Bash says. “I… desire to keep them.”
I blink up at him. “For the building—”
“For myself,” Bash says.
“You’re a rock collector?” I ask.
“It’s a newly acquired
hobby,” he mutters.
“Oh, man, whew!” I sigh, relieved. “Okay, that’s better. Weird that you’re stealing my work, but as long as I’ve been measuring up okay.” I straighten and bite my lip as I eye him. “So I’m good?”
Bash’s gaze is locked on mine. “Perfect.”
Tequila shot right to the heart. And maybe a bit further south. “Whew again. Good.” My eyes search his. “But you’ll tell me if I’m not keeping up? I don’t want to be a waste—”
Bash’s brows slam together. “Never. Isla, never think that you are.”
My inner script-reader supplies CUT TO: A VIEW OF ISLA’S HEART TURNING INTO A MARSHMALLOW.
If I were building a set for this scene, I’d make a billion happy lights burst into a beautiful glow as the orchestra played the perfect swelling notes to match the mood.
Impulsively, I leap against his side, making him stagger back in surprise even as he catches me, trying to lean down to see if I’m hurt. When he sees the curve to my lips, he frowns, confused.
“Don’t freak out yet. I’m just so happy with you,” I admit. “Give me a second to show some simple appreciation before you shake me off.”
He rolls his eyes, straightening. He pretends to ignore me, like he isn’t being weirded out that I’m clamped to him. It’s like the guy thinks I’m a strange-ass alien or something. I should be offended!
But he isn’t pushing me away or shoving me aside. So… I’m not offended. Because secretly, I really think Bash might… like me, like me.
Like I like him.
“Umm,” a timid voice calls. “Bash?”
It’s a human woman I don’t know well. I think her name is Charlotte.
“A hob told me to tell you that your timber shipment is going to be delayed…”
I can hear the scowl in Bash’s voice. “Did he say why this would be?”
“He said the Rakhii in your timber crew passed by some humans who were on their way to the quarry and—”
“Teveking hells, don’t tell me. Did I just lose my quarry crew to my timber crew?” He manages to sound both resigned and awestruck at the same time.
Expecting him to blow up, I wrap my arm around him tighter and shove my cheek against his surprisingly clean shirt. Usually by this time of the day, it’s so dusty you can’t tell that it started off white.