Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 51862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 207(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
The door isn’t locked. Nobody in the village locks their doors. None of us would ever dare steal from one another. When everybody knows everybody, shame is a powerful motivator. The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to lose their good name.
“Will I be meeting your mother and grandmother?”
“My grandmother passed,” I explain. “And my mom went missing a long time ago. She went outside the fence and never came back when I was still really young. We don’t go outside the fences. It’s not safe.”
“I am sorry,” he says. “It is not easy to lose a mother who does not respect boundaries.”
There’s something in his tone that makes me think he’s not talking about my mom right now. I have so much to learn about him.
“Do you have a mom?”
“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She made her choices.”
His tone is dismissive as he stoops toward the door. Zain doesn’t exactly fit in the house, but he also doesn’t not fit in the house. He has to sort of bow down and shift in a diagonal to fit through the door. I have a mental image of trying to get into a doll’s house.
When he sits down at my kitchen table in all his big green and gray scaled glory, he looks entirely out of place. He’s simultaneously terrifying and adorable, especially with the way the kitchen chair makes him lift his knees up higher than a normal-sized human. Again, he’s very much serving dad in a doll house.
I need to feed him. It’s an impulse that rises in me, a domestic urge that’s probably half-instinct, half a lifetime of watching the women around me feed those they love with intense fervor.
“Are you hungry? What do you eat?”
“I am sure any sustenance you have will suit me,” he says. “I spent many years in captivity surviving on what could be caught underground. Slugs and gruel have sustained me longer than I care to admit.”
“I can do better than slugs and gruel!” I exclaim. “I’m sorry you were… imprisoned?”
I remember the conversation on the alien ship. They accused him of being a murderer, which I have to think is probably true given the fact that I myself have seen him commit multiple murders in quick succession. He is a natural killer, but he is also gentle when he needs to be, and he has been nothing but protective to me and our people.
“Pancakes,” I decide. “That’s what I would want if I had been imprisoned.”
“You were, briefly,” he reminds me with a sharp, flashing smile.
“Hardly. I ran away and found you almost immediately. And then…” I blush and decide to reach for my favorite mixing bowl rather than recount out loud what happened next. I became very much not a virgin in his arms upon our very first meeting. We barely knew one another’s names. We still barely know one another.
“And then,” he agrees as I start measuring flour and cracking eggs into a bowl.
“You must be very hungry,” I say, changing the subject as I blush furiously.
“I was starving for many things. You have sated one appetite, and now it seems you are about to satiate another.”
He has a lot of pretty word play for an alien.
“How do you speak our language?”
“Human speech is very basic to our kind,” he says, clearly trying not to talk down to me while still making it quite obvious that he is an elevated being. “And we have all practiced it, knowing that we will have to talk to many of your kind. That is why I seem to have such easy command. We ourselves speak telepathically.”
“There didn’t seem to be much in the way of telepathy going on when you were confronting those other aliens.”
“Oh, there was. A great deal of it. Most of it shrieked. You didn’t miss much, pet.”
The way he calls me pet sends a warm surge of feeling through me. I don’t understand what he means by it, precisely, but I very much like it.
The pan is hot now. It is old and blackened and very well-seasoned. The smell of pancake batter and butter is a settling, comforting, rich scent that makes me feel so much more at home. Even more than I did when I walked in the door.
I guess, aside from Zain, who feels like the best and most exciting and entirely wonderful thing who ever happened to me, everything is very wrong now.
Now, for instance, I know that I can be sucked into the sky when I go outside. There are stories about a paranoid chicken who used to worry about the sky falling. Now I worry about falling into the sky.
Life has been difficult for me sometimes, but I always thought gravity at least would be a constant. Seems not. I thought romantic solitude would be a constant too, but that is also no longer the case.