Chapter 25 #2
"Clearly not." I shook my head.
I needed to get more details on this situation from one of the humans. Even though we both had translator chips, the missing pieces of cultural context and my utter lack of knowledge of the history of the last several hundred years were creating a communication barrier.
"Where are we going?" I asked as we continued to wander down the hallway.
He shrugged.
"I was following you," he said. "Where do you want to go?"
What? Didn't he offer to escort me around and treat me?
Did he forget halfway?
I tore my eyes back forward to Legolas.
Apparently, his brains were mainly made up of horns if he thought his escorting me around meant that I needed to be the sole dictator for this adventure.
Or he was a good boy and needed a collar, and his face stuck in a flower.
Given that he studied pollen eating, that likely wasn't too far from the truth.
"No coffee and foot rubs?" I asked.
"Definitely coffee!" He smiled as he gestured at the hallway.
"The mess hall is just up ahead. Though for foot rubs…
the guy that is following us - if you need me to fight him, I will, but if you don't, I'm not sure I can actually give you a foot rub without a fight going down.
He is, as you humans put it, super aggro.
I'll do it if you are actually in danger, but if this is just one of those scenarios where you like seeing guys fight over you… "
He leaned in towards me.
"I'm not that into you," he whispered.
Well that stung.
Even though I wasn’t that into him either, part of me would have loved him to want me. It would have stoked my ego. As long as he wanted me in a respectful leave me alone when I didn’t want him way of course.
"We're good," I replied to Legolas. "You don't need to fight my boyfriend."
The word boyfriend hung in the air.
Another thing I didn’t expect to have coming out of my mouth.
I looked back at Zale.
Having him there made me feel so safe.
Even though his ears were flat against his skull as he stalked behind us, his hands clenching and unclenching as he put his formidable claws on prominent display.
He was grimacing, his lips pulled back and his fangs exposed all the way to the gums. As my eyes flicked down to his mouth, he quickly closed his lips.
Then he gave me a closed lipped smile, his ears flicking back forward.
My fingers tightened around the tablet in my arms as I held his gaze.
A swirl of complex emotions tangled in my throat, and I didn't know what I was doing.
First, I snuck away from him into the bedroom in the morning.
Then I left him there and immediately ran off with the first person to offer something to do.
He only came with us because he woke up and got in the flying car on time.
It was my usual modus operandi.
Running away from intimacy, from connection, from commitment - from the risk of being hurt again.
Even now, I was running away from even basic communication.
I had everything in my power to talk to him now, to work out what we were, where we were going together - and at the first chance, I aggressively flirted with another male and then ran onto his spaceship.
My behavior wasn’t healthy.
It didn’t feel good to do this to another person, to make them question whether or not I wanted them, and here I had done it to both men at the same time.
I didn’t like this part of me at all.
Yet I knew why I did it.
Having men, or in this case, alien men, wrapped around my finger, wanting me, lusting after me, was its own sort of power. It made me feel in control.
"So, the mess hall is just up here," Legolas said, making me realize I had stopped walking.
"One second," I said. "I need to let Zale know I can talk to him."
"That would probably help him chill out," Legolas said. "You should let him know that I'm a cool guy, too."
"Cool guy? This translator chip is really giving me some funny interpretations.
" I grinned at him as I balanced the tablet against my belly.
As my fingers slid over it, I felt fabric.
I flipped the tablet back over. There was a cloth strap slid into the back of the device, held in place with a small tab that rotated to the side when I pushed it.
I pulled the strap out and slung the whole thing around my neck.
That would make it easier to support it and type into it.
"I took another elective on colloquialisms!" Legolas beamed. "You can guarantee I'm amped up to slay if you want to ditch this simp so you can get a taste of what it is like to be knotted."
What the heck did that even mean?
"Yeeeeah, I'm good not ditching him," I said, focusing on typing into the tablet’s on-display keyboard. Once I was done, I turned it to Zale so he could see the screen.
His eyes widened as the song played out, filled with small empty spaces between the notes, breaks that weren't normally there, products of the robotic expression of his language in contrast to the fluid tonality of what his language actually sounded like.
The little figure on the screen wiggled about with the percussive sound.
"You can understand me?" he sang softly.
"Yes, I can understand you now," I typed into the tablet.
He listened and watched it play out on the screen, and then his eyes flicked up to meet mine, holding me with a piercing intensity.
"Why did you leave me this morning?" he asked.
"Ooooooh," Legolas added. "Girl you did not."
If I ever got in contact with the person who taught that colloquialism course, I was going to have some words with her.
I didn't pull my eyes away from Zale.
The peanut gallery didn't deserve any more of my attention right now. The only one I wanted to pay attention to was Zale. He had done so much for me. He meant so much to me.
He deserved my focus.
He deserved my honesty.
I deserved to be honest with myself.
I typed into the translator and held it out.