17 Saleuk
Sam slept so deeply beside me. I monitored her breathing, listening to the subtle cadence when she finally surrendered to rest. I was so thankful that she could find that peace, but I couldn’t. For the life of me, having her bod\y pressed against me, warm and soft and smelling of all the things that drove me crazy, I couldn’t even bring myself to close my eyes. The incessant shudder of my two hearts battling for space in my chest was a thing I was no longer used to and the tempo was almost aggravating.
How could my paetal finally being awake after so many cycles infuriate me? I’d wished for it, but it had come at such a strange and puzzling time.
Turning my head, I stole a deep breath of Sam’s hair just as the eclipse began to fade and faint streams of light started to bleed in from outside. It was another day soon to be filled with a kind of torment I wasn’t trained to handle. Gently, I slid out from under Sam’s head, setting her down on the bundled blankets so I could leave the room without waking her.
The relief of fresh air hit me like a bucket of cold water. I took it in like a cleansing bath and walked down into the lobby where my instruments and tools were still laid out on the table. I knew my people would find us, but if I could get the tracker or the comms working, I could get them there sooner and I needed to get off that moon. If I didn’t, I knew I would say something to Sam that might upset her or scare her off. After all, when Vahko told Innifer about the surge, there was a mess to be had before she even considered making a life with him. I didn’t want that with Sam. Our strange friendship, if that’s what it could be called, was precious in a way to me. I didn’t know many humans I could tolerate let alone humans as engaging as Sam.
It was a foolish reason not to tell her about the surge and about how my body burned for hers.
No, not hers. A surge was not fated like the religious fanatics on Syferion used to think. It was not partial to one person. A surge was simply a physical attraction, but it could not force the emotional bond between two beings. The fact that I’d surged meant only that my reproductive hormones were being restored. That I could breed. Find a mate. Be one of the few that broke away from the long-term effects of the Thinning.
But valerian females were affected as well. It meant the odds of me finding a mate in a valerian were so slim. We all knew that now. It was why my race jumped at the opportunity to study Innifer when she and Vahko surged. Humans were viable mates. Sam was a viable mate.
I shook my head with a hiss and began to work on the comms device. At the very least, it gave my hands something to do.
When I heard Sam’s gentle steps descending the ramp, I looked up from my work to see her lazily walking toward me, her hair in knotted waves against her shoulders. She was combing it with her fingers as she approached and then began dividing the thin strands into three parts that she wove together on one side. Noticing she was pinching the end, her eyes wandering the room in search of something, I knew she needed something to tie off her locks. I swiped one of the rags I’d been using to clean equipment and pulled a loose string from the folds, handing it to her.
“Thank you,” she said, wrapping it around the end of her hair.
Digging around in her bag, she pulled out the chocolate from the day before and nibbled on the corner of it.
“There is more kalaha in my bag,” I said.
She nodded but continued eating her chocolate, breaking some off with her teeth to suck on it.
“Will we be going to get that root stuff you were talking about?”
“Yes.”
I put down my project and turned in my chair to slide my boots on. Realizing what I was doing, Sam put her chocolate away and grabbed her boots as well, sliding them over her small feet.
“So, they’re like potatoes, huh?”
“I’m assuming. But I’ve never eaten your potatoes.”
“They’re starchy roots that taste like nothing, really. They mostly just take whatever flavor you put in them, but I don’t mind bland food. Especially if I’m starving.”
“You’re starving?”
“I’m pretty hungry. I’ve only had a few fruits and some chocolate and water. I’ve been saving my protein bars for an emergency so I only had a bite of one last night. After running through the woods, I think it’s safe to say I’m in a deficit.”
“Well, then we should find some moon potatoes for you,” I said, standing.
Sam smiled at that and walked with me to the entrance.
“I like that. Moon potatoes. I’ll call them that when I tell the world about my discoveries here.”
We walked down the riverside for a while under the fiery light of our star until we reached a soft patch of dark soil nuzzled up against a wall of mossy mounds. When I started to remove my boots, Sam mimicked me like a toddler copying their bigger brother. Then I rolled up the cuffs of my pants until they sat at the middle of my calf and I started venturing into the soft, muddy patch. I wasn’t surprised when Sam followed. She wasn’t irritated or appalled by the wet clay around her feet and between her toes.
“So?” she said. “What do we do now because this is kind of gross.”
“Well, we get even more dirty.”
I bent forward and slid my hands into the mud, slowly moving them around until I found a thin vine buried beneath the surface. I pulled it out to show her and then followed it until I could feel the fruits of my labor deep in the soil. I gripped it with one hand and hauled it out to reveal a round, palm-sized root dripping with sludge.
“Moon potato,” I said.
Sam chuckled and reached out to take it from me. She tried to clear the mud away, but it was no use.
“How many do you think are here?”
“Start looking,” I said, taking the root and tossing it onto a patch of moss.
Sam was quick to start dipping her hands in the mud in search of more roots. She found one half the size of the first and pulled it out, so fascinated it was like she was finding night gems.
After a while, we’d found three more between us and we were both covered in mud up to our shoulders and knees. But Sam seemed to be enjoying herself.
“I wonder what they’ll taste like,” she said. “We have a lot of roots on Earth. Beets, carrots, radish. It could taste like any of them or none of them.”
“You’ll have to find out.”
“Do you grow these on Sylos, then?”
“Yes. Many of our plants come from Phesah.”
Sam tugged on a particularly thick vine and nearly lost her footing, but her determination bade her to keep trying. I started to move toward her to lend a hand when she suddenly yanked hard and uncovered a root the size of her head. The sudden dislodging of it sent her falling backward into the mud, the root clutched in her hands.
“Holy shit,” she laughed. “I win.”
“You win?”
“Yes. Mine’s the biggest.”
“I wasn’t aware we were competing.”
I held out a hand to her and she took it. Our fingers were covered in mud and my grip nearly gave out, but I caught her elbow before letting her slouch into the mud again.
“We weren’t competing. I was competing,” she clarified. “It’s a problem, I know. Just let me have it.”
Trudging out of the mud, Sam set the large root down with the others we’d found and put her mud-caked hands on her hips with a huff.
“Think that’s enough?”
“I think it’s plenty,” I said.
She paused for a moment, covered from head to toe in the filth of the potato patch. Then her wicked eyes crept toward me and scanned my comparatively clean body.
It was the sly grin that gave her away. She lunged for me and shoved her hands against my chest. There wasn’t much power behind her attack, but instinct forced my reaction. I sidestepped and used her own momentum against her, watching her careen back into the mud.
“Saleuk!” she complained.
Her smile turned to a grimace and she charged out of the mud with handfuls of it.
“Sam,” I warned.
“It’s not fair I got this dirty and you didn’t.”
“It’s not my fault you’re unstable. Look at your tiny feet. How do those even support you?”
She came at me with the mud and smeared one big handful of it down my front. While I was distracted \by that, she shoved the other handful across the side of my face. I stilled, nostrils flared.
“You valerians are very clean, you know,” she said, oblivious to the monster she’d awoken. “I’m a scientist now. I was curious how you’d react to being dirty.”
“You study plants, Sam,” I said flatly.
She shrugged a shoulder, dismissing that remark, and raised her brows at me, waiting. I gave her a long, piercing look, silently giving her a chance to retreat, but she didn’t. She just stood there observing. It wasn’t until I lunged that she let out a shrill scream and turned to flee. But it was much too late for that. I hoisted her up by her waist and carried her kicking and screaming toward the water’s edge. Amid her screams, gentle laughter was like the sweetest music to my ears. The woman was toying with me and I loved it. I loved it too much.
We reached the water and Sam somehow twisted around in my grip like a squirming fish. The moment I threw her into the river, she’d managed to hook her arms around my neck and I went flying in after her. Both of us went under and when I emerged, she was thrashing and wiping mud and water from her eyes. But the look of joyous victory on her face was worth the struggle.
The water wasn’t deep. Standing, it reached a bit higher than my hips. For Sam, it was deeper, but she stood just fine.
“I’m starting to think I’m going to be wet until someone rescues us off this rock,” she commented.
“It’s very likely,” I said, sliding my shirt off my shoulders. Partly because I didn’t like the feeling of being hugged by wet fabric, but also because I knew by the way Sam’s heart beat that it drove her crazy.
It was my own cocky attitude that wanted to drive her crazy. I could tell by her silence that it had worked and when I turned to look at her and saw her forcing her eyes elsewhere, I couldn’t help but smirk.
Except I was distracted by how her clothes cinched tightly to her body. And beneath her shirt there was nothing. Her nipples peaked under the thin fabric and instantly I felt my cock swell beneath the water. When Sam looked up at me, I quickly locked eyes with her and she forced a nervous smile, crossing her arms over her breasts.
“We should rinse the potatoes, yeah?” she said, wading toward the shore.
I watched her climb out of the water toward the roots we’d gathered. She took a couple in her hands and brought them to the river. I was doing everything I could in the meantime to will my cock into submission before I got out of the water. When Sam brought another few potatoes and rinsed them, she seemed suspicious.
“You coming out?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, strategically waiting for her to pick up the cleaned roots and turn around.
Quickly, I stood from the water and gathered the remaining bounty in my soaked shirt, imagining the most vile things I could think of as I trailed behind her. Maje stew. Hairless corpselts. War wounds. Dirty flight panels. By the time we reached our building, my cock had wilted beneath the unpleasant images I drew up in my head and I walked inside.
Sam was already cutting into one of the small roots with the tiniest knife I’d ever seen. The look of awe on her face when sparse amounts of purple juice wept out of the rough, black skin was priceless. She cut a small triangle of the root’s meat out of it and held it up to look at the deep, purple-blue hues.
“I’ve never seen a more gorgeous moon potato,” she said.
“You’ve never seen a moon potato.”
“So, how do we eat them?”
“Usually steamed, but nothing here will light on fire for us to boil water.”
“Can they be eaten raw?”
“Yes. They’re not nearly as tasty though.”
Before I knew it, Sam was biting into one of the potatoes, chewing it quizzically. I watched her brows bob and furrow as she judged the flavor and then she smiled.
“They’re more like moon apples,” she said. “Bland, fibrous moon apples. Do you know what this means?” She attempted to cut into her bitten root with her tiny, dull blade and I moved to intervene, pulling my hilt from the thigh holster on the table. “This means I made a discovery and I field-tested it. Well, you showed me a discovery and now I can record my findings. That is if I don’t die in my sleep because these things somehow cause a fatal reaction, which would be my luck.”
I ejected the buzzing, blue blade from its hilt and made quick work of slicing up the root. Then I cut the next one so there were enough slices to feed us both for the day.
“I wonder how many calories are in these. You know, steamed and served with steak, these would be like beats, but without the dirt flavor.”
She took a slice and crunched into it, going over all her ideas in her head. I enjoyed watching her think and analyze. A year prior, she was too anxious to do anything like that. She was too anxious to be curious, but clearly curiosity was a large part of her.
Taking a slice of the root, I bit into it and skimmed over my projects to distract me from Sam’s unusual appeal. Stars above, it was killing me. The sooner I got off that rock, the faster I could get my head on straight and resolve my surge problem.
I hated referring to it as a problem, but it was sending my brain all kinds of signals I didn’t know how to deal with. Not with someone who likely didn’t feel the same. Someone from a different world.
“I’m going to record some of my observations while they’re fresh,” Sam said, taking a few more slices of the root and heading for her room.