“Wait.” Tagen held out the shaver, defeated and disgusted by his helplessness. He supposed there was not much wisdom in giving her something that could cut, but the blades were small and so was she. It would take no little effort for her to do him any real damage. “Show me. Please.”
Daria hesitated, but did take the shaver. “It’s not really that complicated,” she said, picking up the canister he had been forced to disregard. “But I guess there’s a certain amount of familiarity that comes into play. Sit down so I can reach.”
Tagen lowered himself onto the side of the shower’s short wall and tipped his head back, offering his jaw to her.
She pressed a button on the top of the canister and filled her palm with clear, blue gel. This she rubbed into a lather and used it to paint his lower face. “Just relax,” she murmured, and drew the shaver down his cheek. She rinsed the blades in the sink and came back to him, smiling. “I never thought aliens would need to shave,” she said.
What an odd thing to think.
“Why not?” he asked, clenching his jaw to keep it still.
“I don’t know,” she said, rolling one shoulder. “I guess it’s because it seems like such a human thing to do.”
“You think humans alone have hair?”
“Well…sort of.” She finished one half of his face and moved around to the other side of him to continue. “We have…stories, I guess you’d say, about aliens. Made-up ones, you know, or at least, they’re supposed to be. So everyone knows what an alien is supposed to look like, even though no one really believes in them. And they’re supposed to be little, grey, hairless guys with huge heads and no noses.” She laughed. “You don’t look much like one.”
Sounded like a So-Quaal drone to him, but he refrained from saying so. Contact with a Jotan was enough of an adjustment for her. He did not need to further complicate her reality.
“What does E’Var look like?” she asked.
“I do not know.”
She finished with the shaver and handed him a small towel, disbelief etched all across her face. “You don’t know? How do you expect to find him then?”
“I expect,” Tagen said dryly, “that he will be the only other Jotan on Earth.”
She blinked, comically surprised, and then eased into a smile. “Yeah. Obviously. That would make sense all right.”
Tagen cleaned the foam from his face, stroked the smoothness of his jaw experimentally, and smiled. He felt so much better, less threadbare and lost.
“So that’s what you are, huh? A…Jotan?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your planet’s name?”
He regarded her closely, and said, “Jota,” in a tone that was half-question.
She looked faintly insulted. “Like I’m supposed to know that? Hey, I’m a human, but the planet’s name is not Hum.”
“I know.” He stood up. “I always thought that very strange. And when you do not call your planet Earth, you call it Terra, Tor, Chikyuu, Di, Aard, Jord. You call yourself human, but you are also menneske, essere umano, jiyuujin, homid, homo sapiens, ningen, and many more. It can be very confusing.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on to my congressman.”
Tagen didn’t know the word, but it sounded like sarcasm. He changed the subject. “I do not expect this, but I must ask. Do you have any…” Vocabulary stopped him. He bent and took his soiled uniform and held it up before her questioningly.
She stared at the clothes, her expression running through many degrees of ‘no’.
“I might,” she said.
So much for his ability to read human expression.
“In the meantime, I can wash these for you,” she added, reaching out for them. “Gosh, I hope they don’t shrink.”
Tagen removed his holsters and guns, and gave the rest of the uniform into her hands. The sight of his weapons halted her muttering examination of his clothes and when she looked up again, she was pale and subdued.
“Let me look around and see if Dan left anything you can wear. You’re kind of huge, so…” She rolled her shoulder in that curiously evocative gesture, suggesting the fates alone would provide.
He mimicked it, and she smiled faintly.
“If nothing else, I can order something. But of course, I’ll need to be able to open the door when the UPS guy comes.”
She had lapsed back into babble and the clarifying effects of the cool shower had faded. Tagen tried to lock his jaws against a yawn, but the human noticed.
“Sorry,” she said. “You’re exhausted. I’ll take care of these. You go to bed. And don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”
He chose to believe her. Whether motivated by trust or weariness, he nodded and moved past her and into the hall. He went into the room of holding, still crammed full of crates and swimming with disturbed dust. She had transformed the large seating place into a bed, and it looked almost long enough to allow him to fully sprawl.
Tagen shut the door and pulled the towel free of his waist. He slung his gunbelt over the back of an unused chair piled tall with crates and sat down on the bed. It was very soft and lumpy, but the bedding was light and cool and clean. He lay back and stretched, feeling every muscle groaning in protest, before rolling onto his side.
He was asleep almost at once.
Chapter Eight
Tagen opened his eyes before his ears had finished processing the quiet rustling sounds that had wakened him. The first thing he saw was the mess—crates and dust and junk spread over every flat surface like sauce over dry bread. He could not look at it without thinking of the exhausting effort it would take to try and put the place in order and even after a full night’s sleep, he was still too tired for that.
Next, he saw the human. She was over by the door, gathering objects from among those he’d deemed too dangerous to leave in her reach yesterday. Judging from the space she’d cleared already, this was not her first trip.
Tagen sat up, holding the bedsheet at his hip, and watched her. She was nibbling at her lip, every muscle straining with the effort of being so quiet. If she were collecting the knives from the box in which they now rested, he would be concerned by this level of stealth. However, she was taking tins and jars of food. He supposed he was safe enough, although she’d proved to have a wicked aim with far lighter fare.
She glanced his way as she finished stacking things in the crook of her arm, and promptly uttered a shriek and dropped everything.
Tagen started to get up as she dropped to her knees, then remembered he was naked beneath the sheet and settled back down.
“Sorry,” she said, scooping food hurriedly into the improvised basket of her shirtfront. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I was just trying to put my house back together.”
She was nervous and talking fast. Every word but the first had been a near-meaningless babble of sound. “Slowly,” Tagen said, frowning. “Please.”
But she did not repeat herself. Instead, she went on with a whole new babble. “I’ve got your clothes out of the dryer now and it doesn’t look like they shrunk any, so I’ll bring those right up. Sorry.” She backed up and fled, banging the door shut behind her.
Tagen swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned forward, rubbing at his face. He still felt drugged by exhaustion, for all that the Earth’s sun was well-risen. He blamed the heat, which was already cemented into the air and tickling sweat out of his pores. The heat…gods, would it never end?