Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance (7 page)

Damn. I sank back where I sat and allowed my head to drop, because he was right. What a right sorry ass I was — I hadn’t even bothered to thank him for going through the considerable trouble of finding me, fishing me out of the busted pod, and nursing me back to health. This stranger, who owed me nothing, had taken care of me out of the kindness of his heart, and there I was, making demands.

“Well, fuck,” I said, in English, and Calder quirked a brow at me. I sighed, and switched back to my broken and formal Qeteshi. “Of course, you are right, Calder. I am sorry — can you forgive me for being so terribly rude?”

One side of his mouth hooked up in a grin, even as he turned his attention back to the table. He grunted his response, and slid an animal carcass onto the end of a pronged fork, and held it over the fire.

“Thank you,” I went on. “Sincerely. Thank you for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

I began to look around the room for the first time, and I saw that it was sparsely decorated, but warm and comfortable. The bedding in which I sat was luxurious by any standards, handmade, and very comfortable. The furniture — a bed, a table and stools, a trunk — were carved out of fine wood, with intricate woodwork detailing, and the dwelling itself was all constructed by hand. It was the beginning of something beautiful, but it was not quite beautiful yet: it was still too raw. The wood wanted polishing, and the entire place needed something of a feminine touch. Some color, perhaps, some texture.

The smell of roasting meat began to fill the air, and I breathed in deeply through my nose. My stomach began to rumble, and I realized I couldn’t recall when I last had eaten. Calder removed the meat from the fire, slapped it down onto the wooden tabletop, and cut the creature in half after primly relieving it of its head. He put one half on a plate and handed it to me, along with an empty bowl. The ceramics were beautiful, intricately designed and expertly crafted, cast in deep purple clay and fired into a gradient of blue and red.

“What am I to do with the empty bowl?” I asked, perplexed.

“Spit the bones into it,” he said, and sat down on one of the stools even as he began to worry the meat off the bone.

I blinked, and tore a leg off, chewing at it absently and pretending that it was chicken. But it did not taste like chicken. In fact, it didn’t taste like any meat I’d ever had before. It was sweet and moist; it was delicious, if a little strange.

“What is it?” I inquired, and he said a word I did not recognize. I gave a slight shrug of my shoulders, and figured that it didn’t altogether matter what it was, as long as it wouldn’t kill me. And in that moment, I was hungry enough to eat it regardless.

I tried to talk to him as we ate, but my head ached, and he seemed suddenly cagey with me.

“So, Calder,” I began, like we were on a blind date, “what do you do?”

“This,” he said absently, his face a blank slate, utterly unreadable. “I hunt during the day. I kill and eat what I hunt. I carve furniture and collect fruits and vegetables. At night, I eat and I sleep. And that is my life.”

“Surely there must be more to it than that,” I pressed. “You didn’t always live on the outskirts of town, did you?”

“No.”

“So, what brought you out here originally?”

“Our leader died, and I lost my gods,” he said plainly, rising to his feet and coming over to the bed to snatch away my bowl of bones. “I left my people, and now I live here alone. May I answer any more of your questions?”

I shook my head, and scooted down low in the bed, tugging the blankets up to my chin. Calder disappeared out briefly into the Winternight, and returned again, the bowls empty. He set the bowls aside, and came to linger strangely by the side of the bed.

“We will sleep now,” he said.

“All right.”

“And I must sleep in the bed with you,” he went on. “There is nowhere else, and the night freezes.”

“Fine,” I consented. As though I should have any say in whether or not Calder Fev’rosk slept in his own bed.

“Very good, then,” he grumbled, and climbed between the blankets. He was a huge and hulking creature, and even though I could tell that he was clinging to his side of the bed, our bodies touched beneath the furs. He still wore his drawstring linen pants, but a thin piece of fabric is all that separated our flesh.

He shifted strangely on the down mattress next to me, trying to do his best to get comfortable and not touch me. I tried to show him the same courtesy, but the bed was constricting, and the result was that we both were stiff and irritable and would not sleep a wink if made to remain in the positions we were in.

“Calder,” I said at length. “Calder, this is silly.”

“What is?” he asked, resting stiffly on his side.

“You can touch me,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“I’d just as soon not,” he grumbled.

I sat up next to him, letting a pocket of cool air between the blankets. He hissed his protest. “Am I really so awful as all that?”

“I’ve no interest in reassuring you that I do not find you repugnant, so please, can we just sleep?” He didn’t even bother to turn over and look at me. The nerve of this guy.

“Fine,” I spat, and laid down again. But I wasn’t going to be all strange and uncomfortable just because my bedfellow was an asshole. So I got comfortable with my head on my arm, my knees up at my chest in the fetal position, and decided he could lay on his bed however he pleased. He could touch me or not at his leisure. And if he thought I was so awful that he did not wish to make any physical contact with me, so much the better. More room for me.

I tossed and turned a bit, making a point to brush my leg against his leg, my shoulder against his shoulder, just so I could feel him stiffen where he lay next to me. But eventually, even with all of the tension that existed between us, I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

I admit, I did not completely understand what it was that made my heart feel as though it were being torn asunder. I wanted desperately to touch her; I could not touch her, for she burned me utterly. Her entitlement put me off; her wide, warm, trusting eyes drew me back in again. She was weak and required my aid; she was strong and fiery as a cast iron stove and needed nothing of me save for a map and a set of warm clothes.

The Qulari are not required to be celibate while they serve their gods; indeed, we are encouraged to take husbands and wives, to engage in the act of creation in honor of the great pantheon that watches over us. But I spent most of my young adult life never turning an eye toward the fairer sex. When we saw them begin to die off, they were coupled up quickly, and I was left without a Qet companion. And then the Europax came…

Bah, none had ever turned my head. No female had the capacity to occupy my thoughts, and it suited me fine to remain a bachelor. Never needing to amend my behavior to suit someone else, never having to worry about the rearing of a babe. I was carefree. And I liked it that way.

Did I not?

Lorelei Vauss was asleep, curled tightly into a ball, and her bare bottom pressed against my leg. For my part, I lay staring at the shadows dancing on the ceiling, cast there by the dying embers from the fire at the front of the room. My fingertips recalled the feeling of her flesh, and I wondered if she would feel different now, warmed as she was beneath the blankets. I was consumed by thoughts of what it would mean to touch her, of what it would feel like to relax and let our limbs tangle up together. I wonder if her skin tasted sweet, or like musk and salt. I wondered if the flower of her sex was wet like water weeds.

I threw myself over onto my side and tried to get away from her, and eventually I was able to fall asleep for a time. But I drifted in and out of slumber on the heels of ill-fated dreams until I finally awoke, sweating, with the furs piled double atop me. Lorelei was swinging her feet over the edge of the bed, her back to me as she stretched her arms high over her head.

I stirred, and drew her attention. “Good morning,” she said, her hands going self-consciously to her breasts in order to preserve what little of her modesty remained. I grumbled my own salutation in begrudging reply. “I have to, um…” she stood and pressed her knees together, a universal signal for a need for relief.

“The privy room is at the back,” I said, and gestured vaguely in that direction. She bounded off with a shouted note of thanks, and I rose as well to squelch out what remained of the embers. The day was already beginning to warm, and the room had grown hot in the rising light.

I threw open the windows to let the fresh air in and fetched a few items of clothing from the trunk I kept at the foot of my bed. When she emerged again from the privy room, she kept herself hidden behind the bulk of the wooden bedframe.

“I have garments for you there,” I said, gesturing to the folded fabric. “But you may wish to wash yourself.”

“Yes, please,” she said, her tone one of total insistence.

“Very well,” I conceded, not looking at her. “Follow me.” I snatched up the clothes I’d set aside for her, as well as a basket that contained a brick of soap and some natural moisturizer, and set out the front door of the dwelling.

When she did not immediately follow close at my heels, I stopped and turned my head just enough to register her in my periphery. “Is something the matter?” I demanded.

“I am not used to all this…nudity,” she said, her voice shaky. “I’m a little uncomfortable.”

“I will not look at you,” I said. “You have my word.”

This seemed to do the trick, and in a moment’s time we were headed off toward the freshwater pond I used for all of my washing. The day was bright and clear, the pond was cast in shadow. I gestured toward it, holding the basket out to her so that she could pluck the soap out of it as she passed me. She did, and mumbled her thanks.

I heard the tall grass rustle as she passed through it, heard the water sing upon her entrance. “You can look at me now,” she said, and I did.

She had submerged herself fully, her black hair heavy with the water, and had begun to lather herself with the soap I’d given her. She was stunning — a water nymph like from the stories of our pantheon. “What?” she urged. I’d been staring.

“Nothing,” I said quickly, and turned away.

“You might as well make conversation with me,” she insisted, “since we did just spend the night in the same bed together.”

I harrumphed my displeasure, but obliged her all the same. “I was thinking only that you remind me of a nymph or a siren,” I said, and felt ridiculous immediately thereafter. “Never mind. The notion is absurd.”

“No, no,” she called out to me, shifting slightly in the water as she washed herself. “There are such stories in human mythology as well. The sirens call to sailors, and seduce them into drowning.”

“That seems a fitting end for someone who spends their life on the water.” She laughed, and the sound was like music. “Why is that funny?” I asked.

“Are you afraid of water, Calder?”

“I am not. So long as I can touch the bottom.”

She smiled at me. I didn’t know that I was smiling back until she said, “You are very handsome when you smile. You have dimples, did you know that?” I frowned.

“Have you finished yet?” I asked. “I hunger, and there are fresh berries and oats waiting for us at the dwelling.”

“Not yet,” she said and began to lather her hair with the soap. “You should get in with me,” she said, and quickly amended her statement. “I mean, if this is your usual bathing time.”

“It is.”

“I do not mind.”

“I shall be fine, thank you.”

“Not if we’re sharing a bed again tonight,” she insisted. I wondered, suddenly, if I stank. Surely not when I bathed only yesterday. I turned my nose toward one shoulder and sniffed. No, I smelled fine. Did I not?

Grumbling and suddenly self-conscious, I set the basket down and untied the drawstring that held my linen pants up on my hips. “Avert your eyes,” I commanded, and she did. When I was satisfied that she was not looking at me, I let the pants puddle at my feet, and sloshed quickly through the water, accidentally splashing her like a small tidal wave as I moved.

“I would use the soap when you have finished with it,” I said, giving her a deliberate scowl. She held it out to me, all sudsy and frothed, and I took it, careful not to let it sink to the bottom of the pond. She disappeared under the cover of the water for a moment and when she emerged again, her hair was free of the soap she’d used to clean it. “May I ask you something?” she sputtered as she wiped the water away from her face.

“If you must.”

“What made you leave Larandi?” She wiped her hair out of her face and floated slightly toward me as I made my best attempt to discretely lather my body with the bar of soap. “And, furthermore, how did you come to be without a mate?”

“These are very personal questions.”

“I realize that,” she said, floating around me in a circle. She was submerged up to her chin, but I was only submerged up to my ribcage. I peered curiously down at her as she slithered through the water like a sea snake. “You are under no obligation to answer them, I only wondered—”

“I was a man of the gods,” I said by way of explanation. “Mating was not terribly high on my list of priorities. Then, when our leader passed, I gave up the Qulari priesthood, and left my people.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice no louder than a whisper. “About your leader, I mean.”

“Thank you.”

“Is his death why you left?”

“Her death,” I corrected. “And yes, in part.” I cocked my arm back and threw the soap gently to land. It plopped to the ground near to where I’d set down the basket. “When we lost Ramari Ro’quare, I lost my path to the gods. My people asked me to step up and lead them when she passed, but I could not.”

“Why?” she pressed. “Why couldn’t you lead?”

I scowled and waded toward the shoreline, climbing out of the water, modesty be damned. “Enough of this chatter,” I said, picking up the soap and the basket, and grabbing my pants. “You dry yourself, and I shall make us some breakfast.”

I left her there, floating in the water, with a stack of clothes folded neatly on the shoreline.