Heat

And she shrieked at the very instant of contact, bucking her hips and kicking so violently that Tagen was startled into letting go. She dropped onto her backside and was scrabbling away from him at once, the hammer raised and blindly swinging until her back struck the side of the sofa. “You leave me alone!” she screamed.

“I am,” he said, baffled.

She stared at him, breathing hard, clutching her hammer in both hands. Tagen kept back until he saw lucidity re-enter her mismatched eyes. She looked at the hammer and then put it down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Tagen picked up the hammer and tucked it into his belt. Then he hunkered down to put his eyes on level with hers and waited for her to look at him.

She avoided his gaze.

One of Tagen’s talons began to tak out the passing time on the wooden floor.

She hunched her shoulders. “Don’t touch me,” she said finally, still staring fixedly at her empty hand.

The urge, however childish, to reach out and poke her was very strong. Tagen restrained himself. There was a fear in her, but it was not for him, and as an officer, he had a duty even to her. “I will not harm you,” he said again. Much as he may be tempted to at times.

She mumbled something.

Tagen cocked his head to one side. “Repeat, please?”

Now she looked at him, her expression helpless and horribly sure. “Yes, you will,” she whispered.

He honestly could not say what he felt more in that moment as he stared back at her: regret for the storm he had brought into her orderly little life, or just profound irritation. However, it was obvious what showed more, because she flinched and looked away.

Tagen closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. “It has been,” he said quietly, “a very long time since last I was called liar to my face.”

She stared at the floor.

“I know that I do not trust you,” he continued. “I suppose that it is reasonable you do not trust me. However, I know one thing in advantage of you. I know that I am not a liar. And I think perhaps you are not, either. So.”

He stood up, and she raised her eyes to look at his knees.

“So,” he said again. “My mission here is certain to be difficult enough without us warring at one another. I shall pretend to believe you when you say you will not attempt to run from me.” He moved to the door, pulling the hammer from his belt, and removed the broken halves of the restraining board from the jamb. He set them next to the pieces of broken furniture from yesterday’s battle, and then turned to face her.

“I can…pretend to believe you when you say you won’t hurt me,” she said. She gave him half a smile. “There,” she said. “Now we’re both liars.”

Gods, that was almost fu

She got up and started gathering the little pile of debris into her arms. “Do me a favor before the grocery guy gets here,” she said. “In the laundry room…er, in the back of the house where you cornered me yesterday?”

“What of it?”

“You’ll find a little basket with some pairs of socks folded up in it. Put some on.” She nodded at his feet, and then went outside.

Tagen followed her out onto the porch and watched her carry her broken pieces of wood over to a standing container nearly as tall as she herself. She began to unload, wedging bits of furniture and board down amidst bulky black sacks. She didn’t even look in the direction of her groundcar.

“I’m starting to think I’m a better liar than you,” she called, without looking up.

Tagen caught the begi

She’d been cleaning in here. He found the ‘basket’ by process of elimination. There simply weren’t that many open containers around, and she had specifically said the socks would be inside the basket. Socks, as it turned out, were fabric footcovers. Most of them were clearly meant for Daria’s small feet, but near the bottom of the basket were some sufficiently sized to cover his own. Tagen put them on, took a few careful steps on the newly-slickened floor, and tried not to feel as ridiculous as he knew he looked.

When he returned to the front room, Daria was waiting by the stairs. “That’s better,” she said, eyeing his feet.

“Is it?”

Her lips curved up at his sour tone. “You only have to wear them until the grocery guy leaves,” she said, and looked up through the ceiling to the floor above. “Feel like giving me a hand in your room?”

She wanted to move her belongings back to their usual places. Including, no doubt, her knives.

‘She really is a better liar than you,’ he thought bitterly. He nodded once and followed her upstairs.

“I know I’ve got another coffee table in here somewhere,” she muttered, and began to prowl her way through the close jumble of cargo. “Just take everything you brought up here yesterday back downstairs. Dump it all in the kitchen for right now. I’ll make sure it gets back where it all belongs.” She started unstacking boxes.

Tagen picked up a jar of something red and held it in both hands, watching her. Everything in his nature was telling him that it was very wrong to allow a female to labor like this. It was menial. She was human, but still…

She glanced his way after a moment or two, and then straightened up and pointed at the many objects piled on the crate at his elbow. “Take everything there,” she began, speaking very slowly and clearly.

He clenched his jaw to keep from baring his teeth at her, and said, “Thank you. I understand.” He gathered everything he could hold into his arms and went stiffly downstairs.

She was human. He’d seen hundreds of humans recovered from every sort of base labor, from mines, from refineries, from processing pits. The only special consideration a female received was that she might be forced to do her labor in a sex-house. And that was deplorable, of course, but it was not shocking. What in the hell had made Tagen hesitate to watch his human moving her cargo?

Because she wasn’t a slave. She was still her own person, or she would be, if Tagen weren’t here.

Tagen began to wonder uncomfortably if he was seeing her more as a female than as a human just because she wasn’t the sort of human he was used to dealing with. There was a complication he didn’t need, particularly with the temperature as high as it had been. He made several trips up and down the stairs, grimly determined not to examine that too closely.

“Oh, and look! Dan’s clothes.”

Tagen paused in the act of collecting dishes and looked at her. Her voice had started out exclamatory but had slipped down into something wistful and sad. She was looking into a box now, her expression difficult to read. He could see folds of fabric beneath her hands, but she didn’t seem to be searching through them, merely holding them.

The sense of her as female grew even stronger, for all that she looked so alien to his eyes, and he was loathe to interrupt her, or even to be here as her witness. Her hand crept up and lay along the left plane of her cheek. She stared into the box, and the single eye that Tagen could see was unfocused.

Tagen forced his gaze down to the dishes scattered atop the crates. He added another one to the stack in his arms.

“I hate this room,” Daria said.

He said nothing.

She picked up the box of folded fabric and put it on his bed. “If there’s anything in there that fits you, you’re welcome to it,” she said. She bent, picked up the low table that had been beneath that box, and carried it away without another word.

Tagen did not watch her go, but once she had vanished down the stairwell, he straightened and looked after her. Some dark emotion sat like a stone in his stomach and would not be moved. So short a time ago, he had sat comfortably in her kitchen and thought he knew what it felt like to have a slave. Now he realized that he was brutally close to making one. There was something very wrong with his human, and his presence here alone was only making it worse.

He should leave. He doubted, unreasonably but intensely, that the human would report his arrival here to anyone. He should leave now and find himself another. If he stayed, there was a very good chance that his time here would end with her mind broken.

Tagen picked up another dish. And then another.

There were no guarantees in life. Earth was hot and its terrain was rough. A single human in a house in the middle of nowhere was the very best that Tagen could have hoped for. He’d never find another so perfect to his needs. Lindaria Cleavon would just have to endure.

He wasn’t going anywhere.

*

Daria arranged the coffee table in front of the sofa and tried not to think too hard about how it made her feel to see it again. She still remembered Dan bringing it home. Garage sale. Two bucks and could she believe it? Yes, she could, actually. It had been such an ugly little thing, beat up and badly-painted, with a loose leg. But Dan had insisted it would be perfect in her living room, it just needed a little love.

He sanded it for three days. Once with the machine, and the other two days by hand, sitting in the grass under the summer sun and stroking long and slow as the shadows lengthened. She’d thought he looked so sexy, flecked with sawdust and muscles rippling, all his attention on his work. And he was right, once it was properly stained and had a few coats of varnish, it was a thing of beauty. Pure beauty. It was the first thing she’d taken upstairs, the thing that hurt the most to have to sit and see every day when it finally sank in all the way that he wasn’t coming home.

But the living room looked better with a coffee table in it, and at least now her alien would have something to put his feet on while he was wearing Dan’s clothes and watching Dan’s favorite show.

Maybe she was wrong about the whole alien-angle. Maybe she’d really died and then gone to Hell. She didn’t think she’d been a very bad person in life, but she hadn’t done too much church-going, and so now she was in Hell and instead of being disemboweled by pitchforks for all eternity, she was being forced to watch a complete stranger slowly usurp the void Dan had left in her life.

It wasn’t that it hurt so much just to think of Tagen in Dan’s old sweats. What hurt was the fact that it didn’t hurt. For six years, she’d been living with all his stuff in his old study, shut away where she didn’t have to look at it because she knew it would be too painful to bear. Now she had another man living in there, and the ugliest thing about it was that somehow, somewhen, somewhere, she’d gotten over it anyway and hadn’t even noticed.