Chapter 5 Jessa
So, clearly I’d lost my mind.
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how I’d lost it. Either I’d hallucinated a huge red guy with horns bursting into the spa, or he was real and I'd just denialed my way into pretending he was a customer and not an alien.
Whatever the case, he was perched uncomfortably on one of the massage chairs that I’d previously thought were absurdly large, but forced him to wedge his arms out in front of him in order to squeeze his massive body between the wings.
I dragged my stool in front of the chair and started setting up supplies I hadn’t touched in months. It felt good to fall into the familiar rhythm and I felt my disjointed thoughts settling the longer I let myself pretend that everything was normal.
Tovis was just a body building client with an extreme sunburn and affinity for cosplay head gear. I could handle that, certainly wouldn’t be the weirdest pedicure I’d ever given.
I glanced at the huge, black hooves currently soaking in the water bath and my eye twitched. Maybe it was the weirdest pedicure I’d ever given.
“So, anything interesting planned for the rest of your day?” I kept my eyes firmly on his hooves as I pulled, first one then the other out of the water and dried them with a towel. They were heavy, and his legs were so long he had to do a weird sort of half crunch to give me room to work.
“I’m supposed to be on a supply run, but I got separated from the rest of my patrol,” he said. “Once it’s safe, I’ll have to go find them.”
My hands tightened on the damp towel as I set it aside.
Supply run, patrol, safe, all words that treaded too close to the unspoken line in my head.
Reality had hit me hard, and I needed a moment of fake normalcy before I accepted everything that had been thrown at me.
Besides, weird alien quirks aside, it was so nice to have another person to talk to.
I quickly translated his words into something more palatable.
“Oh, shopping, that’s fun.” I nodded jerkily and hesitated as I reached for my usual supplies.
Normally I’d do a quick foot massage, then a cuticle remover, but Tovis didn’t have feet to massage, and while his red skin did meet the tops of his hooves in a cuticle, I wasn’t confident in messing with it.
If I accidently hurt him and he kicked me, my head would probably go flying like a bowling ball.
“Is it okay if I touch your legs?” I asked. “I can do an ankle massage with a nice peppermint oil.”
He was silent for a long moment and I dared a glance up at his face. His head was cocked to the side, his eyes scanning me curiously and I had a strange moment where I pictured him looking down at me from his point of view.
If I was weirded out by meeting an alien and coping by pretending he was just a normal appointment, how was he feeling?
“I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I?” I blurted out. I had sort of just shoved him in the chair and started manhandling his hooves. Delusion was a hell of a drug.
“I’m not uncomfortable,” he said, his shoulders curved toward his face and his back twisted to fit in the too small chair. He was definitely uncomfortable.
“Ankle massage?” I squeaked out again.
He shrugged and did his best to lean back.
“I don’t know what that is, but you can do whatever you want.”
Those were dangerous words to say to someone who had been trapped alone in a spa for six months. My eyes flicked to a bottle of sparkly nail polish on a nearby shelf. His hooves were huge, I could do so much nail art.
“You’ll love it,” I said far more confidently than I felt.
Pouring some oil into my palms, I warmed it up and wrapped my greasy fingers around one of his ankles.
Despite Tovis’ massive size and imposing hooves, his ankles seemed almost dainty in comparison.
They were still almost as big around as my bicep, but I could feel all the bones beneath his skin, as if there wasn’t much muscle or fat protecting them.
Pressing firmly, I circled my hands in opposite directions and smoothed the oil into his skin. His hoof twitched and I stared down at the sharp edge of it, wondering how exactly I planned on completing this manicure. My clippers would be laughable useless against the hard material.
I’d have to use my file, probably several files, to even out the chips and scratches. Letting my hands fall into the soothing rhythm of a massage I catalogued the problem areas and planned my attack.
There was one big chip on his right hoof, right on the edge, and it had jagged edges that made me itch to polish them out. Shallow ridges ran from his cuticle to the scuffed edge of both hooves and I wondered if he’d care if I smoothed them out.
My fingers smoothed up his ankle to the bottom on his strangely shaped calf and he let out a grunt, and then a quiet moan. Startled, I looked up and found him staring down at me, his mouth hanging open and a blissed out expression on his face.
A giggle burst out of me, and I dug my fingers in a little harder.
“Good?”
“Very good.” His body melted into the chair like butter in the sun and I bit back a grin as I moved to his other leg.
“It’s been awhile since I did this,” I said, absently filling the silence the way I used to before everything changed.
“This was your work?” he sounded awed and a little confused and I shrugged.
“This, waxing, facials, a little of everything really.”
“Your mother band must have been very strong to have such luxuries.” His voice came out a little dazed and I risked another peek at his face and saw that his eyes had gone half lidded like the massage had sucked all the strength out of his body.
I wanted to ask what a mother band was, but I was afraid his answer would be a little too alien to fit into the narrative I was building so I ignored his comment.
“How many friends were you shopping with?” I asked instead.
“Hmm?” His voice was lazy as he replied. “Shopping? The supply patrols are always five males. Me, Tine, Kalhu, Dargo and Gigi.”
My hands stuttered to a stop on his leg.
“Gigi?” Even doing my best to pretend that this was no different than any pedicure I’d ever given, I couldn’t ignore the strangely human name. Human, if he was talking about someone’s grandma or a small poodle.
“Idjiij, everyone calls him Gigi because of Naomi.”
“Naomi?” My voice was strained and his hoof twitched again as my hands tightened reflexively around his tendons.
Naomi was one hundred percent a human name.
Penny, Naomi, despite my need to take a break from learning anything else today, I was hoarding every little detail about the other women like gold.
Just hearing their names made me feel less alone.
“Carn’s mate.” Some of the slurred laziness left his tone.
“There are other mated females at our camp, as well.” He said it gently, as if easing me into the reality that there were other humans, other women somewhere beyond the air-conditioned prison I lived in.
He’d already mentioned the other women, mated to turochs of all things.
But somehow I’d brushed past the information without letting it really hit me.
Not just humans, women, with names. Real people. My chest clenched with emotion.
For six months I’d told myself none of this was real, nothing had changed, I’d just been working a really long cleaning shift and one day my coworkers would come in the door like nothing had happened. But even I wasn’t so delusional I’d believed my own comforting lies.
It was only at night, when I was too tired to clean or reorganize to distract myself that I huddled under my single blanket and cried over the thought of being utterly alone on this planet.
“How many again?” I rasped out, trying and failing to ease my death grip on his oily ankle.
“Five females. Kes and Amy met other humans, males. But they weren’t friendly.”
Five women, alive, somewhere out there. I could hear it over and over again, and it still blew my mind.
A shaky sob escaped me and I wiped the sudden stream of tears off my face with my forearm.
“Jessalyn.” Tovis pulled his leg away and curled himself down until we were face to face, and gently cupped my jaw with one of his big hands.
“I can take you to them. They live in our camp, with their mates. We keep them safe and happy. You could come and live with us, everyone would welcome you.”
Part of me wanted to leap at the opportunity he was giving me. I could see people again, talk to someone other than myself, feel safe. But a bigger part of me recoiled from the thought of walking out the door of the spa for the first time in months.
This was my haven, my bubble of security in a world that had changed too much and too quickly for me to process. Out there, reality was unavoidable. Tovis said there were five other human women at his camp, but he’d also said they were mated.
Mated not married. Which meant those women were in relationships with aliens. It was too much for me to handle right now. I needed to ease into things, process, accept it in my head before I confronted it in person.
The idea of it made my head spin. His camp would not be like the world I’d been missing. It would be new and strange in terrifying and unexpected ways.
Maybe I was just a coward, or I’d been alone so long I couldn’t handle interacting with real people.
My head already felt too full, fuzzy with competing thoughts.
I knew Tovis had repeated the same thing a few times, I kept asking the same questions, convinced I’d imagined his answers, half convinced I’d made him up as a new and more extreme way to distract myself.
“How big is your camp?” I asked.
He sat back, giving me some space and I quickly grabbed a file to keep my hands busy. Keeping my eyes on my work, I started smoothing out the rough spots on his hooves.
“Almost a hundred turoch males, and two sytos.”
I wanted to ask what that meant, but I also wasn’t ready to know. Turochs were the good guys, sytos were the enemy according to the note he’d given me. But there were sytos at their camp?
“We have plenty of supplies, water, weapons. It is a good camp.”
I’m sure it was great, but it was chock full of aliens. Aliens that thought they needed weapons, which meant the outside really was as scary as I’d thought it was.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave the spa and the sense of security it gave me. My hands were working on autopilot, filing the edge of one of his hooves, smooth the chips and rough edges with a comforting scraping sound as my thoughts spun with all the information he’d given me.
“I have food and water here. I’m safe here,” I finally said.
“You are welcome with us, but I won’t make you come with me,” he said easily, like his casual offer hadn’t just blown up everything I’d worked so hard to ignore.
“These other women,” I finally said, wanting so desperately to see friendly faces but too scared to take the leap. “They could come visit me. Women love spas, I could do their nails, talk. It’d be like a party.”
Would they even want to meet me? They were apparently ‘mated’ to aliens. If their men were anything like Tovis, then they were living very different lives than I was. Tovis seemed nice, but he wasn’t human, not even slightly. What had these women experienced that made them willing to date aliens?
I doubted they’d had the option of living in an air conditioned spa with endless amounts of protein bars to feed them. They’d probably been out there, barely surviving, scavenging for food like it was the Walking Dead.
Suddenly, I felt unspeakably spoiled.
Did I really think getting their nails done was a priority? They were probably concerned with food and medical supplies, not waxing and lash extensions.
Tovis cocked his head to the side and peered down at me, his inhuman ears tilting forward and flashing the pink skin inside.
“They are always happy to find more humans. I will deliver your offer.”
“Thank you.” I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling my heart pounding against my ribs at the thought of seeing people again. “Tell them they’re welcome any time.”
He waved my words away.
“You have been alone here? The whole time?”
I started to nod and then hesitated. Tovis seemed really nice, but common sense said I shouldn’t admit to being totally alone. Then again, we were alone right now, there was nothing stopping him from hurting me if he wanted to.
“Yes, I’ve been alone.” A shaky laugh escaped me as I wiped the dust off his hooves and reached for a sparkly polish. “I was starting to think I was the last person left on Earth.”
“What is that?”
His words made me pause, the brush hovering over the mouth of the bottle.
“Oh,” I stared down at it. Tiny flecks of gold and silver shimmer winked at me from the clear base. “I should have asked if you were okay with this. It’s nail polish, humans use it to decorate our fingers and toenails. See?”
I lifted one of my hands, displaying my own perfect, teal nails. I hadn’t had a chipped manicure in months. I literally had all the time in the world to keep up on it. He reached down and gently grabbed my hand, tilting my fingers back and forth consideringly.
“You want to do this to my hooves?”
My face burned at his befuddled tone. Some guys did their nails, but he wasn’t even human and I’d jumped straight to the sparkly stuff.
“I won’t if you don’t want me to. It’s just pretty.”
He flashed me a grin and leaned back as comfortably as he could in the too small chair.
“I’m pretty already, but I don’t mind being prettier.”
A surprised laugh burst out of me, and I bit my lip struggling to keep my hand steady as I applied the polish.
The task required barely any focus, there was so much real estate on his giant hooves, I didn’t even have to try to stay in the lines, and by the time I was done with both hooves, the once full bottle was nearly empty.
Tovis inspected his now glittering hooves with amusement.
“No one in camp will know what to think,” he mused with a smirk.