Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
brUX
Cantina food is keffing awful, but I don’t mind it. The brew is cold, the company better than anything I could have hoped for.
Melody tells me all about arriving here, and how she’d been given a farm for all of a month before she had a small nervous breakdown. “I didn’t like feeling so responsible for the animals. I wouldn’t mind working on the farming equipment, but the animals made me anxious. I worried about them constantly. So I’m subletting my farm out to a friend. She runs things and takes care of it all and just sends me a percentage. I live in town and work here, scrapping.”
“Why scrapping still?”
Her smile is bright. “There’s something so satisfying about repurposing discarded things into stuff my people can use. Like a toaster. I made one last month for a friend and I have three more people asking for one because they miss having one in their kitchens.”
“What’s a toaster?”
She puts her hands out, indicating a small box. “It’s a square with a slot on top, and when you drop a piece of bread in, it cooks it quickly. Toasts it, if you will. Every human kitchen has one, but no one seems to have one here.”
I drain the rest of my brew. “That’s because we’re not big on bread.” I’ve seen it here on Risda, and tried it at a snack booth on a space station. It was…not great.
“Right! But there’s lots of small things like a toaster that my people here want, but don’t know how to go about getting. To me, it’s simple. You need a way to turn it off and on, and you need a heating element that gets hot enough quickly to toast the sides of the bread, and for it to turn off as quickly. The box outside of it is to protect you from getting burned. I know I can bend some heat-safe metal into a decent square, and I know there are some components that you guys discard that can be easily wired to conduct heat. It’s not a perfect solution but it works.”
I’m impressed at her cleverness. I’m even more impressed that she would rather collect scrap and make things for her people than live on one of the farms that Lord va’Rin has provided to the humans. I’ve seen some of the homesteads. The dwellings themselves are small, but compared to some of the housing in the slums, they’re a paradise. “You could charge a lot for these things.”
“I could, but I don’t,” she tells me cheerfully. “It’s more important that I make people a little bit happier with their situation, and make a few friends. When I’m not scrapping, I’m usually helping people with repairs. There’s a couple of custodians that are trained in a lot of the tech we’re given, but some of the women don’t like anything to do with aliens. If I come over and poke at their gadgets, they feel better. Sometimes I show up with the guy that’s going to fix it, just so I can reassure the human that the custodian is truly just there to tackle a problem, not hurt them.”
I nod, silent. Melody is smiling and talkative, but I know not all the humans are like her. Some are deeply traumatized.
“Besides,” Melody continues, “I don’t like being alone on a farm. It’s too quiet for me. I need noise around. I need others around.”
And she reaches across the table and brushes her fingers against mine.
I don’t know what to do with that small touch. I stare down at her hand rubbing against mine. Her fingers look so very slender against my larger, gray-blue ones. Her nails are shorn and inelegant, her fingertips callused from her work, but she couldn’t be more enchanting to me. I’m fascinated by the fact that she’s both cheerful and utterly blatant, both fragile and determined. She’s not letting her fate get the best of her.
She’s taking the scraps of it and making it into something new, just like she does with the discards around her. No wonder she’s so fiercely proud of her work.
Tentatively, I touch her pinky with my smallest finger.
Melody gives me a warm smile and grazes her pinky against mine again. The small touch sends a tingle up my spine and makes my balls tighten. “I’ve had a really nice time,” she says. “Thank you for letting me take you out. It’s been so lovely to see you again after five years. I hadn’t dared hope that we’d run into each other again.”
“What now?” I ask, highly, highly aware that her fingers are still touching mine.
“Wellllllll….” Melody’s gaze drops to our hands, barely touching. “Do you want to go fast or slow? Your choice.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Slow,” she says, then pauses. Her fingertips skim over the back of my hand, caressing lightly. “If we go slow, I kiss your cheek and we part right here. Then you can decide if you want to contact me again or not. I’ve made it clear how I feel. After tonight, I’ll leave it in your hands.”
My breath feels as if it’s escaping my body. “And fast?”
Her eyes are dark with promise. “We go back to my room and I let you make me come, and then I ride you until we’re both sweaty. We collapse after fucking like animals all night, take a quick shower, and then we do it all again.”
Kef me.
Even so, I hesitate. I want this woman…but the power dynamic between us is too flawed. I’ll never not think she’s climbing into bed with me simply out of gratitude. I’m an ugly male. I have no worth. I’m an ex-convict. I’m all the things she should be avoiding now that she’s free and happy.
“I can tell what you’re thinking,” Melody says, her voice relaxed. “And no, you’re not taking advantage of me. Just like last time, I wanted to touch you. Us getting together before was a celebration of my escaping my old master. Even if I didn’t make it back to Earth, I knew whatever was in my future had to be better than my past. So we fucked, and I’m not upset about it. And I would love to do it again. Would love to touch you again.”
The tip of her pinky strokes over mine.
“It’s that easy for you?” I ask her, still incredulous. “You just see me again after five years and decide you want me in your bed? You don’t have any doubts about who I am? Anything?”
This time, she takes my hand. “I’ve had five years to settle into my skin and get comfortable here on Risda. I’ve come to terms that I’m never going back to Earth. I’ve embraced my new life here. And I’ve thought about that night between us over and over again for the last five years.”
“I’ve tried not to think about it at all.” Because every time I do, I’m filled with shame and remorse. Like I touched something—someone—I had no right touching.
She strokes my knuckles, and her fingers look miniscule against my hand. “After you left me here, I tried dating other people. I thought I’d move forward and forget the past, but there are some things I don’t want to forget. One of them is you. No one I dated compared to you. Now that you’re back here, I don’t see the point in wasting time.”
“You’re painting an image of me in your mind that I can’t possibly live up to. I’m not some heroic savior. Anyone would have done what I did.”
Melody just gives me a wry look, her fingertips continuing to trace circles on my hand. “Do you know how many people I saw come through that scrap yard on a regular basis? Day in and day out, people looked at me, looked at how I was being treated, and turned away. I wasn’t a person to them. I didn’t matter. I was someone else’s problem. You were the only one that looked at me and saw a person.”
She’s not listening to me. “You don’t know who I am, what I’ve done?—”
“Is the thought of being with me so awful?” she asks suddenly. “Because you’re determined to somehow convince me that you’re a horrible person unworthy of affection.”
“You deserve better?—”
Melody thumps my hand, hard, and gives me an annoyed look. “I’ll decide what I deserve , thank you.”
My ears get hot. That was the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just?—”
“You’ve told me everything before. You’re a former criminal. You work construction jobs. Your family name is shit. Is there anything else I should know? Do you torture small animals in your downtime?”
I scowl. “No.”
“Ever owned or plan on owning another person?”
“Other than you? No.” The image of her as the collar came off of her is seared into my mind. The hope and yearning mixed with the terror on her face, the red marks and grooves on her neck from the painful collar…I remember all of it. I know some mesakkah think nothing of owning a human, but I could never.
“Murdering? Raping? Murdering and raping? Robbing the elderly?”
I scowl. “None of that, and you’ve made your point. Fine then. I would like to go home with you. I’d be crazy not to.”
The smile she flashes at me is brilliant. “You would, and we both know you’re not crazy.”
I should be excited, but something about our interaction isn’t sitting well with me. She’s beautiful, and I’m attracted to her. Why do I have such a problem with this? She’s offering me sex, nothing more. We can fuck and get it out of our systems and then I can go on with my life and she can go on with hers. It means nothing. I’ve had partners for a night in the past. This shouldn’t be any different. I tell myself this over and over as we exit the booth and leave the cantina.
Melody grabs my hand and leads me across the street, toward the large boarding house. A few humans glance at us as she pulls me along after her, but no one pays any attention.
She pauses at the side door to the boarding house, leaning against it. She gives me a bright, flirty smile that makes my heart ache and tilts her head back to gaze up at me. “Kiss me.”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
I get flustered, my tail prickling along with the fine hairs on my neck. “Right here in the street?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
We barely know each other, I want to say, but we’ve moved past that, haven’t we? We’re heading to her room to have sex. A kiss is nothing, even if it’s not something my people normally practice. Melody tilts her head further back as I step forward, and I curl my fingers along her jaw, angling her face as I hunch down to press my mouth to hers. It’s awkward but her mouth is warm and sweet and so good. Her arms go around my neck and she kisses me with enthusiasm, her lips parting under mine, and her tongue darts out to touch my lips.
I jerk back in surprise.
She chuckles. “Was that bad?”
“No. I…no. Just surprised me. That’s all.” I press my mouth to hers again just to prove to her that kissing her is not a problem. If I could just relax, I could enjoy the wet slide of her tongue against mine. I could enjoy the soft press of her body to my larger one.
I could ignore the fact that this still feels like gratitude, because we’re still two strangers, and that’s the part I keep getting hung up on.
I pull away from her. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Melody flinches, her arms retreating back to her sides, only to cross them protectively over her chest. “Oh.”
“This…this doesn’t feel right. You, me, any of this.” I shake my head. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not offering myself again,” she says, her tone bitter. “I can only fling myself at a man so many times before it hurts my feelings.”
“I never meant to hurt your feelings,” I tell her. “I should have never let it get this far. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She turns and goes inside, all but slamming the door shut behind her. I stand outside, head down, wondering if I made a mistake. But if I ask her what my favorite food is, she won’t know. If I ask her what I’m allergic to, she won’t know. She doesn’t know anything about me, except that I saved her that one time.
Seems like we need more of a reason to fuck. Maybe I’ll regret this, but for now, I can’t do it. It still feels like I’m taking advantage of her in a vulnerable moment.
I just…can’t.