Chapter 6 #4
“I did think your face was strange at first,” I admit, moving the stone carefully around the edges of the pelvic bone.
“Very flat, and your features are small. But I do not think it is strange any longer. I enjoy the differences…though I am not quite used to the fact that you have no tail.” The horns I do not notice so much, but the lack of tail is noticeable and strange to me.
Stay-see goes still.
I worry I have offended her. “I am sure it does not affect your balance or your ability to sit,” I tell her. “I did not mean it to be—”
“It’s fine,” she says softly, interrupting me.
“I just…you sounded like yourself for a minute there.” She waves a hand in the air.
“Listen to me. Of course you sound like yourself. I only meant…that was one of the things we always joked about,” Stay-see says.
“Me not having a tail. Do you remember that?”
I shake my head. “I wish I did.”
She looks sad, but manages a brave smile.
Her eyes are shiny again, and I hate that I have disappointed her.
I must think of some way to make her happy again.
I work furiously on the plate, sending bone dust and chips into the air.
Silence falls between us, and I want to hear her speak more. I want her smiles.
So I ask, “Will you tell me what it was like when we resonated?”
Stay-see looks surprised at my request. “You want me to tell you what it was like?”
I nod. “Perhaps it will help me remember to hear about it.” I press my hand to my chest, feeling the low thrum of my khui as it sings to her nearness. “This remembers you, even if I do not.”
“All right,” she murmurs. “I’m not much of a storyteller, though. I’m better at cooking.”
“You can cook for me,” I say eagerly. “I would love to eat what you make.”
Her smile broadens. “Maybe tomorrow. I need dishes first.” She gently retrieves her braid from Pacy’s grasping hands and tilts her head, thinking. “Our resonance. All right. What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I tell her. “Spare no detail.” I want to experience it through her words since I cannot remember it.
“All right.” Stay-see presses her fingers to her mouth, thinking. “Well, I think it happened when I woke up out of the tube.”
“Tube?”
She absently pulls a tuft of fur from Pacy’s hand and hands him a bone.
He immediately begins to gnaw on it. Her smile widens, and she looks over at me.
“I should explain. When we first arrived, some of the girls were awake, and some of us were asleep in the wall of the ship. In stasis. It was like we were asleep, but unable to wake. The aliens were keeping us stored like…” She gestures at the bone Pacy is drooling on.
“Like you keep the bones here. Waiting to be useful.”
People were being treated like this? I frown to myself. “Go on.”
“When Georgie and the others were rescued, they freed us from our sleep. One by one, we were pulled free from the wall and woken up. We didn’t have much to wear, so each person was given a fur cloak to wrap around them.
I don’t remember who I saw when I first woke up, but I know it wasn’t you. ” Her smile is indulgent.
“Why not?”
“You told me you were guarding the entrance. You were so excited and worried that all of the girls were going to resonate and there wouldn’t be a mate for you.
And then Vektal sent you away to dispose of the trackers we had in our arms.” She rubs her upper arm in memory.
“You were to dump them into a metlak cave, and you told me you resented every step of the journey.”
I do not know what the trackers are that she speaks of, but the story she tells me is intriguing. “I did not wish to do my chief’s bidding?”
“I don’t think that was the part you had a problem with,” Stay-see tells me, a smile on her face.
“You were afraid you’d come back and all of the females would already be mated and you’d miss out.
Someone was resonating, and Vektal had resonated to Georgie, and that only left ten women for the rest of the hunters.
You told me you raced as fast as you could to finish your task and returned back to the hunting party because you wanted to be there just in case any of the females resonated to you. ”
“Any females…not you?” I frown at this thought. “I was not immediately drawn to you?”
“Oh, I doubt it.” She tucks a strand of her mane behind one small, round ear. “I believe I spent most of those early days hiding under as many furs as I could wear and weeping copiously.” Her brows go down, and she looks unhappy with herself. “Jeez, I guess I cry a lot.”
“You were scared,” I say, feeling the need to defend her. “I understand this.”
The look she sends my way is pleased. “We were all scared. Some of us just handled it better than others. I was one of the blubbery weepers instead of one of the strong ones. I’m fine with that.
People have different strengths, you know?
Mine isn’t bravery.” As I watch, she picks up our son and pulls him close to her, hugging him.
“I think I’m a better mom than I am a warrior.
I’m definitely more of a nurturer than a fighter. ”
“I see no problem with that.”
“Good,” she says with a chuckle. “Because I don’t think I can change.
Georgie, though, she’s strong. And brave.
Liz, too. And Kira. They were our leaders when the rest of us didn’t know what was going on.
” She shrugs her shoulders and presses a kiss to Pacy’s forehead, even as he wriggles out of her grasp, reaching for the bones he was playing with.
She lets him crawl out of her lap and looks over at me, her expression full of warmth and affection.
“At any rate, I was busy hiding from everyone. You were all very scary-looking to me. Between the horns and tails, the glowing eyes and the blue skin, you all looked very fierce. Anyone that tried to talk to me, I hid behind Kira and waited for them to go away.” She raises her brows at me. “Not very brave, I admit.”
I still see no fault in this. I try to imagine myself in her place, full of fear and surrounded by strangers. I think she is very brave, no matter her thoughts.
“You caught up with our group just as we made it back to the tribal cave. You walked up with this big dead animal slung over your shoulder like some sort of caveman and dropped it at Vektal’s feet, looking all proud of yourself.
You looked over at the girls like we should be impressed by your skills. ”
“And were you?”
“I don’t know if impressed is the right word. I do remember it made Ariana cry because she’d never seen a whole dead animal before then.”
I do not know which one is Air-ee-yawn-uh. “What did you think?”
Her eyes light up. “I remember thinking that you were clearly trying to impress the girls, and if that was your way to do it, you were failing.”
I grin at that. “What should I have done to impress you?”
“Bring me a fur coat.” She chuckles. “Or hot soup. In the world that I come from, the meat we eat is all pre-packaged and in nice, tidy little containers. You don’t have to kill the animal to have dinner. You just pull out a package of meat and cook it up.”
I try to imagine this and fail. “I…do not understand.”
“I know.” Stay-see sounds amused. “I have told you about it a dozen times and you have never understood it. It’s something you have to see to believe, I think. At any rate, that animal—it was a dvisti—brought us together.”
“It did?”
Her smile grows broader, more delighted, and my body reacts to her pleasure.
She looks so happy in this moment that it makes me ache with need.
I want her this happy all the time. “Yes,” she says, continuing her story.
“So there you were with this big kill you were proud of, and all of us humans had just arrived at the cave. Everyone was rushing out to meet us, and it was very overwhelming. I remember people trying to welcome us and steer us toward the fire, but we humans were scared, so we wanted to stick together. Someone parked us near the fire and told you to bring the kill so we could roast it. I remember you were very upset at the thought of all that good raw meat being burned.”
I grunt acknowledgment. Even now, I still have a hard time understanding why humans wish to burn their meat before they eat it.
When I first realized it, I thought Harrec was teasing me.
It turns out that while some of the humans eat their meat fresh, most prefer to scald it until the blood is burned away…
along with all the flavor. I suppress a shudder.
“That look on your face,” Stay-see says with a giggle. “That was the exact expression you wore. You’re no good at hiding your feelings, Pashov. Never have been.”
I rub my jaw, feeling a bit foolish. “I do not understand why you wish to eat it burned. I am sure it is fine.”
Her smile grows broader, and my khui begins to sing low in my chest at the sight of her delight. When she is happy like this, her eyes shine and her round face grows wide with her smile. Did I think humans had odd faces? Stay-see’s is lovely in the firelight, for all its strangeness.
“You brought the dvisti over,” she continues, her voice low and smooth and almost hypnotic.
“And you started to carve it up right in front of us. I think you told me later on that you meant to pick out the best parts for the humans to impress us, but we thought you were being mean by butchering it right in our faces. I was sitting nearest to you, and you opened the thing’s mouth and…
” She makes a slashing gesture with her hand.
“Wham, you cut the tongue out of it. Then you turned around and offered it to me.”
I nod slowly. “The tongue is most delicious.”
She makes a face. “At any rate, you were holding this big, drippy, bloody tongue out to me, and I thought it was some sort of weird come-on.”
“A come-on?” I am not familiar with the human term.
“Like you were flirting with me in a gross sort of guy way.”
With a dvisti tongue? When her cheeks turn redder, I realize what she means.
Tongue. Ah. I think of the other night, when I buried my tongue in her cunt.
Nothing has tasted good since. My mouth waters even now, thinking of it.
I want to taste her again, soon. I must be patient, though. “I would not do such a thing.”
“I know that now. You were just being polite. And I didn’t know what to do, so we just kind of stared at each other for several minutes.
Then your expression changed. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with you until I felt it, too.
” Her hands press to her breast, and my khui thrums even louder in my chest. “We were resonating. It was the weirdest and most beautiful moment in my life.”
I feel an ache in my throat. “What was it like?” I can feel the low, soft song of the khui in my chest, but it does not feel how I imagined resonance would.
I have been told that it is all-consuming and maddening in its intensity.
This is just pleasantness, like Stay-see’s smiles or when Pacy giggles.
It makes me feel good, that is all. I like it, but I wonder what the other side of it is like…
the hunger. I am sad I have no memories of this.
I want them, as much as I want memories of Stay-see and Pacy.
Her eyes close, and her face is even more beautiful.
“It is like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
You feel this…thunder in your chest. It comes up out of nowhere and just builds and builds, and it’s so strong that you feel a bit like your entire body is quaking with the force of it.
And as you look at your mate, the world seems to narrow in on just the two of you.
It’s like nothing else exists but you and the person you are resonating to.
And there’s this…” Her cheeks grow red. “Um, well, there’s an overwhelming feeling of desire.
You instantly need that person, and you want to mate. ”
She opens her eyes, but her gaze won’t meet mine. She is shy about this.
“Tell me more,” I ask her. I am full of yearning. I want to know what she experienced. What I experienced. I hate that I cannot remember this. It is the moment every hunter dreams of, and mine is gone from my mind completely.
Stay-see licks her lips, and I am fascinated by the flick of her pink tongue against her mouth. “Well…I don’t know if I can go into too much detail on that. Not comfortably.” She presses the back of one hand to her flushed cheek. “I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course.” I am disappointed, but I understand. Stay-see is not ready to speak of mating to me, despite the fact that we have mated in the past. I am sad. She still thinks of me as a stranger. I must get us past this. “So then we made a cave together?”
She shakes her head, and the amusement returns to her face. “Oh, not right away. I was pretty terrified of what was happening. I made you wait.”
“You did?” I am surprised.
Stay-see gives a solemn nod. “A whole day.”
I am startled. A day?
She laughs, pleasure making her eyes sparkle.
“Right? I didn’t hold out for long. It was…
inevitable, I guess. It felt very right to me, though.
I never second-guessed a single moment. You took me aside and talked to me, just talked, like we had all the time in the world, and I thought you were the sweetest blue-skinned, horned alien I’d ever met. So I jumped you.”
It is this I wish to remember, more than the initial feeling of resonance. I want to know what it was like to see the fire in Stay-see’s eyes when she looked at me. I want to know what it felt like to touch her that first time.
She shrugs to herself, continuing, “After that moment, we were pretty inseparable. I’m sure some of it is the resonance, but…
” She spreads her hands. “We just kind of got along really well. You were so funny and sweet and protective, and I loved being with you. I don’t think we’ve been apart since we resonated, except for a few extended hunting trips you had to go on.
” Her lower lip quivers. “I think that’s why I took your…
injury hard. I lost my mate and my best friend at the same time. ”
I absorb her words. She still feels like she has lost me. It is going to take more than a conversation to convince her that I am the same person. “I will get my memories back,” I vow to her. “Just give me time.”
She nods. “It’s just hard.”
“I am trying.”
Her expression grows soft, and she reaches over to touch my bone-dust-covered hand. “I know. I’m trying, too. But I am going to try harder. I promise.”