Chapter 2 #3
Even that slight movement made my stomach churn with nausea.
My head pounded with a migraine from hell.
Where had I been last? Oh right, nearly decapitated by one of those giant ostriches from hell.
I glanced around for them, wondering if they were lurking ready to take me out, but I was no longer in that clearing with my escape pod.
A large rock face rose in front of me, and I was half-laying in a crystal-clear pool fed by a small waterfall from the top of the cliff.
Water lapped at my thighs, and I stared in disbelief. How had I gotten here?
Holmes hadn’t been able to tell me much about life on Torin. And the ostrich-things had been what I expected—dinosaur-like creations. But this figure kneeling over me? Intelligent life. Bipedal. Human-like. She nearly took my breath away.
Goldie hadn’t made a sound yet and only watched me with concern. She didn’t seem fearful, but then I couldn’t say I knew how to read her emotions. But her face was expressive. Muscles bunched on her forehead. Her eyes were like liquid blue neon, and her lips were parted with expectation.
I glanced down at my body to see that most of my wounds were covered with different colors of paste—some green and others purple. On a rock nearby sat a pack that wasn’t mine, its contents spilling out—several types of alien plants.
Was she trying to kill me or heal me? Trust me, her voice had said in my dream.
But I started to doubt myself. What if all there were more aliens who all looked just like my dream Goldie.
Which one could I trust? And another part of me wondered why she wasn’t scared of me.
While she was tall and muscular compared to a human woman, I was still larger.
I wasn’t sure what to say. There was no point in talking. We surely couldn’t communicate with each other. Then her hand shifted lower and she placed it right over my heart, so like the gesture in my dream, that I felt an ache in my chest, a longing for the interaction we’d had there.
I licked my lips, tasting blood. I winced. “Fuck, that hurts.”
She made a tsking sound and then lifted a green paste-covered finger to my lips. I flinched away on instinct. Her brow lowered, and her eyes clouded, as if annoyed.
“Don’t give me that look,” I tried to move myself away from her touch again, but my brain couldn’t seem to communicate properly with my muscles. “I don’t know what that shit you’re putting on me is going to do to my body. I’m not from here, you know?”
She gave me a look like I wasn’t telling her anything new. And that made me pause. I had been shocked to see her, but there was a lack of surprise in her body language that made me wonder… did she know what I was?
I gripped her wrist, maybe a little too tightly, and she went very still as she stared at the spot where I held her.
I loosened my grip but tugged slightly to bring her closer to me.
Her breasts touched my chest, and I inhaled sharply, suddenly aware that I was naked.
And maybe, if I wasn’t in too much pain, my dick would have responded to her the way it had in my dream.
“Do you know what I am?” I whispered, mostly to myself as I stared into her neon eyes.
And then she did something that made my heart nearly pound out of my cracked rib cage. She met my gaze directly and nodded. A gesture so human-like that I could barely believe she’d done it.
My breathing turned to panting. What the hell was going on here? “Can you…?” My voice cracked. “Can you understand me?”
She lifted her other hand and tucked her hair behind her left ear. There, behind the pointed elf-like tip, was a small device. She tapped it. And nodded.
My mind whirled as my sluggish brain tried to make sense of this situation. But I couldn’t seem to put the puzzle pieces together, not while my body throbbed with pain. “I don’t…” Then a thought hit me. “Does that translate my words into your language?”
With a nod, her lips stretched into a small smile, and fuck, if that didn’t hit me in the gut. In my dream, I’d loved her. Hadn’t I? “Do you know what I am?”
She opened her mouth, and her tongue twitched, before she spoke in halting syllables. “Hu-min.”
“Holy fuck.” I rubbed my eyes with both hands before collapsing onto the rock at my back.
I stared up into the sky tinged with pink.
The sun’s rays—a different sun than the one that warmed me on Earth—beat down on my skin.
“I died, didn’t I?” I muttered to myself.
“I died in space, and this is some weird afterlife. Wait, no, that wouldn’t make sense.
” I frowned and smacked myself on the forehead.
No way would I be granted an afterlife where I lounged at a waterfall with some sexy alien.
Because that was what she was—sexy. I was attracted to her. Dream me and real me.
My head hurt. My body hurt. My brain, which wasn’t firing on all cylinders since I woke up, seemed to slow down further.
Wait, did Goldie drug me? The sharp heat of pain dulled.
What felt like a warm blanket descended over me, and as my eyes closed, the last thing I saw was Goldie watching me carefully.