CHAPTER TWO | Fiona
Dalk was looking at the Valentine’s Day card I made him like it was a fucking kitten or something. A kitten he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with but that he wanted to keep anyways. Seriously, he was petting the thing.
And... I kind of liked it. He was normally such a stoic, serious, grump of an alien. When those little moments of quiet sensitivity shone through, they almost always left me stunned. It was the same way I’d felt seeing him carve the vakta on Halloween. The way his strong warrior’s hands had put themselves to use at something that required such nuanced, artistic skill. And he’d carved a flower, of all things.
Like the ones in my tattoos.
I probably shouldn’t have made his card special by adding the flower to it. I didn’t want it to give him, or anyone, the wrong idea. To make it seem like I was some weird stalker trying to send him a message in secret code. Especially after I was dumb enough to kiss him at the New Year’s Eve party.
I still can’t believe I did that.
It had been a spontaneous action, completely born out of the moment. It didn’t mean anything. I would have kissed any bloke beside me.
Wouldn’t I have?
I eyed Oxriel, Zoren, and the others, and wondered, had I been standing beside any of them instead of Dalk that night, would it have been one of them I would have hurled myself at?
Somehow I couldn’t quite convince myself I would have.
I’d probably freaked Dalk right the fuck out, too. I just threw myself at him like some drunken dumbass. Only I hadn’t been drunk.
He’d never mentioned it again.
Until now, I supposed.
If you have any other traditions... Any that require a male... I suppose I would not mind obliging you...
God. Poor guy. He’d said it as if he was grudgingly willing to help me pull out a broken tooth or something. Like, if it was absolutely necessary and nobody else was around, then he’d hold his nose and do it. He probably thought human traditions like kissing someone at midnight on January first were colossally culturally important or something.
Maybe that was why he was so fixated on being careful with his card. Because he didn’t want to offend me and my weird human sensibilities.
At least I didn’t think I had offended him by giving it to him. He had thanked me for it, after all.
I am thinking about this way too much.
“Well, since we’re all up, should we go get some food? We can deliver some of the other cards,” Tilly said.
“Yes,” I said, seizing on that idea like it was some kind of escape route out of the sudden messy awkwardness of my own thoughts. Not that my thoughts wouldn’t follow me, of course. But at least Dalk wouldn’t be standing right beside me while I picked them all apart.
Only, after we went back into our cave to retrieve the rest of the cards and came back out, there he was waiting with the other Sea Sand lads. As we all started walking through Gahn Errok’s mountain to the main hall, he fell into quietly surly step beside me.
“You don’t have to keep it, you know,” I said suddenly. “The card.” I noticed that he didn’t have it with him anymore.
“Oh,” he said, a gruff grunt of a sound. “Why? Am I supposed to do something else with it? I have never received a human card before.”
“No, no. Keeping it is fine. I’m just saying you don’t have to. In fact, if you’ve already gotten rid of it, that’s totally fine!”
“I have not gotten rid of it,” he said quietly. We’d fallen a little behind the rest of the group, walking side-by-side through shimmering, sapphire-walled halls. “I have put it in a safe, dry place in the sleeping cave. Somewhere high up where it will not get ruined by a clumsy warrior’s claws. Or damaged by water.” A disdainful sneer entered his voice. “There is far too much water here.”
“What are you, a cat?” I said with a laugh. “I’ll never understand why you Sea Sand guys hate the water so much. It doesn’t seem to bother the Deep Sky men at all.”
“The Deep Sky men do not even have half a brain to share out among them,” Dalk hissed. “They’d probably thank the very sky for pissing on them.”
Now my laugh was louder, drawing looks from Nasrin and some of the other males up ahead.
“Hey!” I said, still chuckling, and losing some of my awkwardness from before. “I like the water too. Does that mean I don’t even have half a brain?”
“That is...” Dalk sighed tensely, then ran rough claws through his long black hair. “That is different.”
“Why?”
“Because you are different.”
“In what way?”
“You are...” His glittering sight stars slid over, watching me from the side before he slammed them forward once again. “You are not purple, for one thing.”
“Good observation,” I said with mock seriousness.
“And you have... other attributes. Human things. And... female things.”
He said female as if the word was something secret and mysterious. Considering how few alien ladies there were on this planet, maybe that was kind of accurate.
“Got it,” I said. “It’s OK for me to like water without it saying anything about my intelligence because I’m a human with boobs.”
“What are boobz?”
Of course, that lovely little word had come out in English. There weren’t always equivalents in the Sea Sand language to colloquial human phrases.
Do I really want to go down this road?
Did I really want to start explaining what breasts were to a hulking, grumpy, seven-foot-tall alien warrior covered in weapons who I was pretty sure I was already on the verge of sexually harassing?
But then again... he asked. And he was the one bringing up my female things in the first place!
“They’re breasts, Dalk.”
Dalk’s next movements were so exaggerated and disastrously comical that I could have been looking at a cartoon animation of him. His big head swung to the side so he could gape at me, his sight stars doing a hilariously obvious sweep from my face down to my chest and then back up again.
Unfortunately, his feet had never faltered during this whole debacle, and the result was that he didn’t see an outcropping of blue stone directly ahead. He walked into it with his sight stars still fastened to my face.
“Oh, shit! Are you alright?” I asked, instantly stopping as Dalk jumped back from the wall and glared at it.
“Of course I am,” he hissed. “No respectable Sea Sand male could be injured by a rock, no matter how poorly placed.” His tail thwapped the stone floor in irritation. “Who in all the strides of the Sea Sands would put a boulder in the middle of a walking path like this? You see?” He brandished an accusatory claw at the blue rock, as if that proved some vital argument. “Not a half a brain among them. And half is probably generous!”
“I don’t think a Deep Sky male put this boulder here,” I said gently, trying not to laugh. Now that I knew he wasn’t hurt, it really was hard to hold back the giggles rising in my throat. “I’m pretty sure it’s just part of the mountain. And it isn’t in the middle of the walking path, it’s well off to the side...”
“Mere details,” he muttered, swinging his hand violently as if to slice right through my words. “I still stand by what I said. The Deep Sky men are fools and I will never count myself among them.”
“But we kind of are among them, aren’t we?” I probed as we resumed walking. “I mean, we’re here. We’re in this mountain. In their territory.”
“That does not mean I have to like it.”
He said it with such bitterness that I was actually quite taken aback. He was definitely one of the grouchier males in our group, but even so, I very rarely heard him speak with such vehement venom.
“Do you miss it? The Sea Sands.”
He was silent for a moment, no sound in the hall but the clicking of his claws and the scuffing of my boots on the stone. Our friends were now so far ahead and around a curve in the hall that I could no longer see them.
“Yes,” he finally growled. “But not the settlement. Gahn Fallo’s lands. That is where I was born. Territory I have devoted my entire life to protecting. The red cliffs and plains, the hills with their axrekal bushes and rindla flowers...”
“You told me once that you didn’t like flowers much before.”
“Yes. Well.” He paused and adjusted a heavy leather strap with multiple knives at his hips before continuing. “There is a saying in the Sea Sands. That you do not know the warmth of the wind until you no longer feel it blowing.”
“You never know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” I supplied softly.
“Precisely.”
I really was an idiot. When he’d carved that flower into his vakta on Halloween, he’d glanced at the ink on my arms and I’d kind of thought...
I’d thought it maybe had something to do with me. That at the very least he’d maybe gotten inspo from my tattoos or something.
God help me, I moaned internally. Am I a narcissist? The dude is so homesick he even misses the flowers he used to hate and I somehow managed to turn it into something about me.
And then I had kissed him. When he most definitely didn’t want it.
“I’m sorry, Dalk,” I said suddenly, my cheeks and eyes so hot I could barely see. “About the New Year’s Eve thing. I never should have kissed you.”
“What?”
Dalk had lapsed into silence, seeming to be mostly lost in his own thoughts during the pause in our conversation. But at my words his gaze cut back to me like a knife.
“It was a mistake,” I said quickly. “I’m really sorry. That won’t happen again.”
Jesus Christ on a cracker. I wanted to melt into the fucking floor. Instead, I just kept on walking. Dalk stalked beside me in furious silence, and when I dared a glance his way, I found his dark brows heavy over his eyes as he stared straight ahead, tension bunched along his shoulders and tail. Some raw, unnamed emotion poured off of him in poisonous waves that made me want to run and hide.
Bloody hell, I thought miserably as we finally caught up to the others and strode into the vast, open hall. I have really fucked this up.