“It’s a little hot,” she said, as if apologizing, and set something in front of him in a bowl. “I guess we won’t get arrested if we eat dessert first.”
He watched her scrape at the contents of her bowl with a spoon and imitated her warily. Sweetness exploded in his mouth, frozen sugar, smooth as butter. He looked at her over his spoon in surprise. “What is this?”
“Ice cream. Vanilla. I didn’t know what you’d like, but I figured everyone likes vanilla.”
It stood to reason, Tagen supposed, that the people of a world so immersed in foul weather would find a thousand ways to cool themselves. He only wished they had discovered global climate control. He wondered, if he were quick enough, whether Daria would notice if he put a handful of the stuff down the front of his pants.
“I could make you up a sandwich if you’re still hungry,” she offered. “I know ice cream isn’t really very filling. And you should get something to drink. I worried a little when you never came downstairs. It’s easy to get dehydrated in the summer.”
“Please speak slower,” Tagen said wearily. “It is so difficult to follow you.”
“Well, okay, but as long as we’re having language lessons we ought to start with teaching you to implement contractions.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending. “Dehydrated,” he said.
“When your body dries out because you don’t drink enough water,” she said, enunciating very clearly and making Tagen feel slightly torn between amusement at her strict obedience and irritation at being thought blatantly stupid.
“Summer,” he said, swirling his spoon through his iced cream.
“That’s the season it is right now. Okay, so in an Earth year, we have four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. When the Earth moves around the sun it gets closer and further—”
She was moving her hand around her bowl to demonstrate, which made her rather easy to understand, and the concept was perfectly familiar to Tagen, even if he didn’t know the words. He tried to think of it as a vocabulary lesson instead of an insulting reference to his intelligence, and that made the careful, measured way she was speaking a little easier to bear.
“Right now is when the sun is closest to the planet, so it’s summer on this side, and that’s pretty much why it’s so hot and unpleasant for you. Sorry about that. Your guy E’Var picked a hell of time to come to Earth.”
“How long does your summer last? How many days?” he amended quickly. He knew that humans had made a number of different ways in which to measure out time, but his understanding was more or less limited to years, days, and a somewhat shaky grasp of hours.
“In days?” She looked stymied by the request, chewed her lip to think. “About…ninety, I guess. Give or take.”
For one frozen instant, his horror-struck mind tried to convince him that he had heard her say something else. Nine, perhaps, or even nineteen. Nineteen wouldn’t be so bad. He’d been here eighteen days already. He could—
Then a surge of rage erupted out from the very pit of him and his mind was slapped to white silence by the ferocity of his own voice.
“Ninety days of heat?!” he shouted, half-rising as though he meant to jump over the top of the table and grab her by the shoulders. “
Ninety
days?!” The plastic tumbler of iced water in his hand exploded, and Tagen stumbled back, knocking over his chair and trying to shake out the sharp shards imbedded in his palm. Blood and water splashed over his chest, the table, his melting ice cream.
Daria had scrambled up out of her chair and halfway onto the counter, her eyes huge and face pale. Tagen clenched his wounded hand into a fist and made himself right his chair and sit down on it until the urge to go on a destructive rampage faded into something he could control. He wanted to pick up the entire table and throw it through the nearest wall. He wanted to scream until his throat bled. He wanted to goddamn well go home. Fuck Earth and fuck E’Var. Ninety fucking days.
“Do you have a…something for my hand?” he asked quietly.
Daria fled from the room. She was gone a very long time. Tagen could hear her spastic, muffled crying, a short-lived storm of it, speedily restrained amid low, angry-sounding mutters. When she returned to the kitchen, her eyes were dry and only a little red. She was slightly smiling, and she was carrying a little box and a small metal pair of pinchers. She pulled her chair up beside him and took his hand, turning it into the light. She bent over him, carefully removing tiny slivers of plastic from his hand.
Through the bunched-open collar of her loose shirt, Tagen could see the swells of her breasts, the smooth, sleek curves of her body narrowing down into shadows. He looked away, at the small pools of blood and water in his palm.
“I take it summers are shorter on Jota?” she said, with a false lightness he nevertheless appreciated.
“Much,” he replied sourly. “Ninety days.
Chok
.”
“Well, actually, we’re in the middle of the season, so there’s only about forty or fifty days to go—”
“
Chok-se y vok
!” he amended, closing his eyes.
“—and it’s not usually this hot, not in Oregon. It’s almost never this hot. It…probably won’t stay this bad for much longer.” She finished with her pinchers, dabbed his palm clean, and began to peel and apply small brown bandages. “I have good news for you.”
He doubted that, unless she was about to strip away her coverings and tell him she felt like taking a naked thrash on the cool kitchen tiles for the next forty or fifty days of Earth’s miserable fucking summer. Tagen bared his teeth, covered them again, and finally sighed. “Tell me.”
“I think I may have found a good site. It’s called Deathwatch Northwest, and it’s run by a whole bunch of greasy college guys with wa-aay too much spare time. They keep a record of every single death in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California., and they have search filters for date, state, and cause. It’s going to take a while for me to glean anything useful from them and I’m sure there’s going to be a whole lot of false leads, but it’s something, right?”
“Yes. Something. Thank you, Daria.” He tried to sound more encouraged than he felt, but his eyes had a way of going to the window, where Earth’s sun was staring in at him.
Forty or fifty more days.
‘I cannot do this.’
The thought was bad enough, haunting and utterly without hope, but he was unaware that he had spoken the words aloud until Daria’s hand closed over his. He started violently, but somehow managed not to shake her off. He looked at her. Her eyes were filled with concern, and they were cool eyes. Green and blue and white.
“How can I help?” she asked.
He wanted to answer her. He could feel his entire body on the edge of a tremor from just the effort of not telling her exactly how he wanted her to help. But she was looking at him with such honesty and feeling. He could not stand to watch those eyes fill up with fear. And they would.
Tagen pulled his hand gently free of hers. “You cannot help,” he told her. “I will endure. It is only heat.”
Tagen pushed his chair back from the table and got up. He could smell his sweat thick in the air. He could smell hers, dizzying with the female scent of her.
Only Heat.
He returned to his room and locked the door.
*
Deathwatch Northwest. Dedicated to accurately reporting the casualties of mankind on the Pacific Coastline and beyond. Hoping to go nationwide in five years. How admirable.
Every death, every single one, was listed, along with whatever details were available. Some entries had photos or even video accompaniments if they were newsworthy. Most were just one-liners with name, age, and place and cause of death listed. There was some confusion—deaths listed under the deceased’s place of birth instead of death, and once in a while, the same dead person was listed by more than one volunteer ‘reporter’—but all in all, it was a pretty solid site. Morbid as all hell, but solid.
Fortunately, it came with its own search engine. Unfortunately, ‘massive head trauma’ appeared to be the In thing for folks to die from these days, and it covered everything from car accidents to shootings. Daria sifted through dozens of homicides, suicides, accidents and even one genuine God-smite (Jerry E. Weems, age 54, dead in a corn field in Succotash, Oregon, with a meteorite the size of a golfball smack between his eyes), and finally gave up and printed everything off. She’d sort through it later, with Tagen’s help. If he was in the mood to help. He’d been in kind of a weird mood lately.
Daria found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged it down selfconsciously, not that it was riding high or even that Tagen was in the room at the moment. And not that he was always staring at her when he was in the room. And not (even she would admit this) that it was particularly unpleasant when he did stare at her. Startling, yes. Unnerving, sometimes. But not entirely unpleasant.
She picked up her printed pages and headed out to find him, crossing her mental fingers that he would be moderately cheerful.
He wasn’t in the living room and the TV was off, but when she switched it on, Law & Order was playing, proving he’d been here last. Daria stood at the bottom of the stairs, tapping the rolled-up printouts into her palm. He’d taken to hiding out during what he called the ‘worst hours’, which were for him anytime between 10 and 4, and she was loathe to interrupt him. He didn’t look like he was sleeping well these days.
But finding the bad guy seemed more important than Tagen’s nap. Hesitantly, she moved upstairs and down the hall to hover outside Tagen’s door. She waited there for a stifling stretch of time, but even pressing her ear to the door betrayed no sounds of life on the other side. She didn’t want to just barge in on him, not when things were already so strained between them. On the other hand, she didn’t want to stand out here for the rest of the day, either. After a while, feeling faintly ridiculous, she knocked.
Behind her, the bathroom door opened and Tagen emerged, frowning his ‘Can I help you?’ frown. He wore exactly one towel and nothing else and he was beaded liberally with moisture. ‘Wore’ was perhaps a generous word. ‘Draped’ would be more accurate. He was holding it on with one hand, and it hung alarmingly low on his left hip.
Daria found a spot on the ceiling to stare at. “I brought you the first bunch of dead people,” she said loudly. “All head trauma cases, although it looks like lots of them actually have other injuries in addition to the head stuff. The search engine’s pretty good, but it doesn’t have a lot of advanced options.”
“What are you looking at?”
Daria risked a glance. He was searching the same spot on the ceiling she had been fixed on, and he couldn’t have looked more bewildered. Or wet.
“Nothing,” she said. “Look, I’ll come back when you have more clothes on.”
Tagen looked down at his towel and then glanced up through the black curtain of his hair. Something in his stoic expression—God knew what—made her blush.
“Here,” she said, thrusting her pages at him.
He didn’t take them. “I do not read N’Glish,” he said patiently. “If you will wait, I will dress and join you downstairs.”
“Okay.” She shuffled back a few steps to allow him to move past her and into his room. He brushed at the door as he went through, but it didn’t close. It struck the locking plate and then slowly and silently swung back open.
Daria backed up toward the stairs, biting at her lip. Then, hardly able to believe she was doing it, she crept forward and peeked into his room.
He hadn’t lost the towel yet. Not entirely, anyway. He was using it to briskly dry his hair and it completely covered his head and nothing else.
He was lean and he was muscular. He was fit in a way that never came from deliberate sculpting at a gym. He was a soldier, he’d seen combat, and the scars that proved it somehow enhanced his perfection instead of detracting from it. It solidified his reality, firmly removing him and his amazing body from movie-star fantasy and putting him back in her house. Back within reach.
She’d never seen a body like that in real life. She didn’t think people had bodies like that in real life, not without heavy chemical interference. Broad chest, ripped abs, bulging biceps, powerful thighs, athletic and rippling muscles, and a butt you could bounce a quarter off of. She could see the shadowy indication of his essential maleness. If he turned just a little, she would be able to see it all.
Daria ducked back into the hall, one hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her breathing, dead-certain that he could hear it. Hell, he could probably hear her heart pounding.
‘Remember,’ she thought faintly, ‘It’s perfectly natural to check out an alien’s ass. You said so yourself. It doesn’t make you in the least bit weird.’
She leaned over and looked again.
He draped the towel over the back of a chair and crossed down the side of the bed to the boxes where his clothes were kept. He reached and then he paused, and Daria yanked herself back into the hall, her pulse now roaring in her ears, convinced he had seen her in the reflection of the window. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t come and close the door or call her a pervert, or anything.
‘Close enough!’ she told herself shrilly. ‘Just get out of here before he does catch you!’
Good idea. Daria eased forward and peeked.
He was stepping into his uniform pants, completely oblivious to her. They fastened down the side with about a billion catches invisible to Daria’s eye. As he aligned them, she found herself staring at his broad shoulders, at his arms bunching while he tugged and tightened, at his hair falling long over his face.
This was the man who had been checking her out every day for a week.
No, strike that. This was the alien who had been studying her for a week. There was a difference.
Tagen picked up his shirt, a kind of tank-top-ish thing in brilliant white, and snapped it out. His entire torso kind of rolled as he pulled it on. It was like watching the tide come in. His body, starkly defined beneath that concealing fabric, instantly became even sexier.
Hang on, since when was the alien invader keeping her prisoner in her own home
ever
sexy?