Heat

There was an empty glass and a plate of chicken bones in the sink. All the chicken bones, by the look of it. The man got up for a midnight snack and ate eight pieces of chicken. She shook the bones out into the garbage and made a sour mental note to scratch cold chicken salad off the menu that night. Regular pasta salad would have to do.

She was scrubbing the dishes clean in the sink when Grendel padded across the tiles and peered accusingly into his food bowl. He yowled irritably when he saw it was still empty, and Daria let the soapy dishes go in the washwater and went to fetch him some chow. Somehow the cat food had gotten put back on the top shelf, and she had to really work to reach it down. She just got her hands to close on a tin when a dark movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention. She glanced around and there was Tagen. She wasn’t as sure about the direction of his gaze this time, but it definitely took a split-second before it was on her face.

She frowned at him and pulled Grendel’s breakfast open. “What?”

He looked marginally surprised by her cautious tone. “May I not be here while you prepare food?”

“Well…sure. Just…sit down or something.” She bent down to get Grendel’s food dish and this time, she shot a glance behind her and sure enough, he was looking right at her ass.

‘Okay, slow down,’ she told herself, as that first flare of unreasonable alarm spiked up through her. ‘You keep forgetting the dude’s not human. It’s only natural to look at an alien’s ass.’

She hadn’t been looking at his.

‘No, but you were sure staring at his face plenty yesterday. And his hands, and his feet. So chill. He’s probably never seen an ass like yours before.’

That had a bizarre humor to it that not even Daria could shrug off entirely. Her ass, the wonder of the universe. She emptied Grendel’s breakfast into his bowl and bent back over to place it before her mewling animal. This time, she really bent. Straight legs, all the way over, ass out, everything. She peeked at Tagen in the reflective face of the dishwasher and saw him lean back slightly.

When she straightened up and turned around, he was perfectly poker-faced. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat, folding his clawed hands patiently before him. After a second or two, he tried on a smile.

It u

“I am not in a position to be selective,” he replied, which was a refreshing sort of answer. Dan had always been an unbelievably picky eater.

She rinsed out the glass and began to dry it. “I could whip up some eggs or some pancakes if you want,” she said. “How hungry are you?” She leaned out to one side to place the glass back in her cupboard. In the window above the sink, she saw him tip his head a little, his gaze aimed at the front of her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She got her arms back down in a hurry and busied herself with the remaining plate.

“It is a difficult question to answer,” he said after a pause. “I do not know how to compare hungry. My English is serviceable in many respects, but I am coming to understand better its limitations. The use of the TV is a help to me.”

Daria stacked the clean plate in the cupboard and emptied the sink. She washed it out, watching him discretely in the window and listening to him pick through his words in his careful, measured way. For no reason at all, and certainly not with any conscious thought, she feigned a yawn and a stretch, arching her back and reaching for the ceiling, letting her breasts push out the front of her t-shirt in two distinct handfuls.

Tagen’s voice slowed and stopped. After a moment, he began again, but not in the same vein. “May I ask a question, Daria Cleavon? I suspect it will make you uncomfortable.”

She looked at him, instinctively stepping back and crossing her arms over her chest. “What?” she said warily.

He averted his eyes, searching the walls around him as though for a hidden script. At last he looked at her again, visibly steeled against her. “What is the function of breasts?” he asked.

She couldn’t quite process that right away. It was as though he had asked what fingers were for. “Well, they…Some people think…” She trailed off and stared at him, blinking.

He waited, watching her intently. His eyes, those piercing hawk-like eyes, never wavered.

It was an anatomy lesson. Well, what did she think? Of course he wasn’t really checking her out. He was an alien. Or she was, or whatever.

“Mostly, they’re for nursing babies,” she said. “I mean, that’s the big-picture reason for having them. But they’re also a, um, attractive part of the female body for a lot of people.” She could feel herself blushing, but Tagen merely nodded. “It’s not polite to talk about people’s breasts,” she finished, and started pulling mixing bowls and pans out of their places.

“I do not know the words ‘nursing babies’.” He pronounced this oddly: nur seen bay bees. After a moment, during which she did not answer, he said, “Babies is more than one? More than one…bab?”

“Baby,” she corrected. “A little human. A…you know, a baby.”

“Ah. Offspring. Yes.” He waited. “And what is nur seen?”

“When the baby is first born, its mother makes milk to feed it. From her breasts,” she added as Tagen’s eye went to the refrigerator.

He rocked back and stared at her. “Do you really?” he asked. He made it sound like she’d told him a mother could produce pink champagne from one boob and working parts for a radio from the other.

“Well, what do your females do?” she asked. “I assume you do have females.”

“Of course we have,” he said, looking astonished. “But they do not nur seen. Nothing I know of nur seens apart from a very few small animals.”

“It’s nurses, Tagen. Babies nurse. The act is called nursing. Nurse, nurses plural, nursed past tense, nursing verb.”

He processed this for a few seconds, his eyes shut, and then looked at her and said, “Jotan young do not nurse,” and raised an eyebrow at her.

She nodded, and said, “What do they eat when they’re first born, then?”

“Everything,” he said, with a thin smile. “It must be soft, that is all. In the past, I suppose, females would chew the…the baby’s food first. Now there is food sold especially for them.”

“Well, we have milk sold especially for our babies, too, but a lot of mothers prefer to nurse anyway.” She was out of the danger zone for this conversation and her curiosity was piqued, so as she began to mix pancake batter, she said, “So your females don’t have breasts?”

“No.”

“What do they have?”

He cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“How can you tell each other apart if they don’t have breasts?”

“Ah.” He sat back in his chair as Daria began pouring pancakes onto the hot griddle. “Much the same way you humans do, I think. Females are smaller. Slimmer. And we can smell the difference, understand.”

“Smell…? Seriously?”

“Oh yes.”

There was a sincerity in his voice that made Daria wonder, just for an uneasy instant, if he could smell her, too. She didn’t ask. A thought occurred to her, though, and she turned all the way around to say, “But you’re a man, right? Or are you?”

He seemed dramatically taken aback, and for a second or two, insulted. Then he looked down at his chest, glanced at hers, and relaxed slightly. “Yes,” he said. “I am male.” He muttered something in his language, and then added, “I suppose I should have anticipated that.”

Daria brought him the first two pancakes on a plate, along with some syrup and a fork. He grasped the utensil with an air of uncertainty, but did not ask for instruction. He ate slowly, as one doing it for the first time. His expression was mildly bewildered.

“Is it okay?” she asked.

“It is…sweet.” He looked up at her, his brow beetling. “Everything you eat is so sweet.”

She’d never thought about, but now that he mentioned it, it was true. “Not everything,” she argued vaguely. “The soup I gave you that first day was minestrone. That’s salty, not sweet. And you don’t have to have syrup, you know.”

“I like sweet,” he said, considering his plate. “I am just not accustomed to it in such abundance.” He finished his pancake and she came to give him two more. “Will you not eat?”

“In a bit. I might as well finish cooking first.” She hadn’t made very much batter. Enough for four more pancakes, maybe. Two more for him, and two for her.

“Hm.”

It was a darkly judicial sound, and Daria glanced around, suddenly defensive. “What?”

“I said nothing.”

She put the hand that held the spatula on her hip and glared at him. “Spit it out, spaceman.”

“You will cook,” he said, avoiding her eyes as he meticulously used his fork to separate his pancakes into geometric shapes. “Then you will clean.” He flicked his gaze around the counters briefly. “Everything,” he said.

That stung. That stung hard. “I will not,” she said.

He ate his breakfast and didn’t answer.

She cooked the last four pancakes, tight-lipped and strangely shaken.

“I don’t have to stop right now and clean everything,” she a

Batter from the side of the mixing bowl was dripping slowly down to the countertop. The griddle was just sitting there with grease congealing on its surface as it cooled.

Tagen was watching her, his face expressionless.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” she told him. “You don’t have to be crazy just to like it neat.”

He ate another pancake and said nothing.

The spatula was lying on the stovetop, facedown in a little pool of brown butter and soggy pancake crust. Just lying there.

“Go to hell,” Daria snapped, and shoved her chair back. She went to clean up the stove.

She heard him sigh. She didn’t hear him leave, but he was gone when she turned around.

*

Kane’s hand fell on her out of darkness, shaking reality back into her and shattering her dreams—dreams of a home she could no longer easily remember when she was awake. These days, Kane pretty much ate up all her waking thoughts. Raven struggled into a sitting position, wincing as pain flared through her pelvis so completely that she couldn’t tell what hurt from what just sympathized with what hurt.