And it was terror, a truer and rawer form than he had ever seen in the eyes of slaves. It was not merely that she had never known a Jotan. Something was wrong with her, something rooted down deep in her soul and bleeding out slow poison. Something had happened to her that was every bit as bad as being removed from her Earth and enslaved. He didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to tell him, but the truth of it was there and she lived with him despite it. One could not help but admire that.
The male on the tee-vee had abandoned his female and stumbled across two others. They were only talking now, but in that sly-eyed, smoldering way that Tagen strongly suspected would lead to mating very soon. And sure enough, one of the females was undressing. He had been watching this program for half an hour now, and he still had no idea what it was supposed to be about.
‘And now I want to fuck,’ Tagen thought with an inward growl. He switched off the tee-vee and stood up, gathering his damp towel to head upstairs. He was naked and he did not much care. One never knew. Daria might emerge from her room unexpectedly and be overcome with arousal at the sight of him. Or curiosity. Hell, he’d settle for her being overwhelmed with boredom. Humans didn’t seem to need any more reason to mate than Jotan did, and Tagen knew he was a fair-looking male. Probably even by human standards, if the males he saw on the mating programs represented the highest criteria.
She did not emerge.
Tagen waited outside her door in the dark for several minutes, unreasonably irritated with her. Any other time of the day or night, if he’d been unclad and trying to hide it, she’d have found a way to stumble across him and then run screaming from the room to clean her cupboards. Naturally, now that he was of half a mind to be discovered, she was soundly sleeping.
For the best, really. Even by Jotan standards, lurking naked outside a female’s bedroom was a little too aggressive to be properly thought of as flirting. He’d thrown that sly-eyed human male out of this house for far less. Gods, he was turning into a hypocrite as well as a liar. He needed to go to bed. Perhaps it would be cooler in the morning.
Tagen opened Daria’s bedroom door.
In the dark, he could just make out the greenish blobs of the cat’s eyes catching light. It unwrapped itself from the bed and came toward him, miawing. Tagen bent and rubbed its head to shut it up, and it moved past him and out the door, no doubt to visit its food dish and see if a dinner had magically appeared since last it looked. Tagen closed the door behind it, his gaze resting on the bed where Daria lay.
If she opened her eyes right now and saw him standing naked in her doorway, she would burst his eardrums screaming and she’d be right to do so. If this were Jota and she a proper female, she could have him convicted of intended rape on this alone and he would spend the next twenty years imprisoned for it.
This wasn’t Jota. Tagen took a step forward.
‘Stop,’ he told himself suddenly, and his inner voice was neither shocked nor angry, only firm. He stopped, listening to Daria’s even, heavy breaths. His mind’s voice spoke again, calmly, ‘What do you really mean to do when you reach her? Honestly. What?’
There was no answer. There could not be. There was nothing he could do in honor to an insensate female and there was no chance she’d wake receptive to him.
Tagen turned around and slipped back out and down the hall to his own room. He hung the towel out the window to dry and sat on the edge of his lumpy bed. Daria. He had been close enough to taste her sweat in the air.
Dammit.
Tagen fell onto his back, splayed to the night. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
Gods, it was hot.
*
It was past seven when the morning light managed to pry Daria out of sleep. She was drowsily surprised by this. Grendel had a hard time going this long without breakfast, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of him. She groped for him in his usual spot by her hip and didn’t find him.
Bewildered, she sat up and really looked for him. He wasn’t in the bed. He wasn’t over pawing at the door. He wasn’t here.
He had come to bed with her last night, hadn’t he? Sometimes he preferred the sofa downstairs, and since the alien had come along, Grendel had shunned her once or twice to hang out with him, but no, she was positive he’d followed her to bed.
Daria got up, gathered some clean clothes, and took herself a quick shower. When she went downstairs, Tagen was there on the sofa with Grendel on his lap. The orange tabby opened his eyes a slit when Daria came to hover at the edge of the living room, but that was all. Tagen’s hand was rubbing tiny circles slowly down from his neck to the base of his tail, and the cat was too overcome with pleasure even to purr anymore.
Tagen was looking at her, too, and with considerably more intensity than the cat.
“Were you in my room last night?” Daria blurted. She’d meant to ask if he’d had breakfast. Oh well.
“Yes,” said Tagen, after a short hesitation. He didn’t look horribly ashamed of himself, either.
“Why?” she asked.
His gaze went back to the television.
“That’s not an answer,” she said warningly.
He glanced her way and then turned his eyes on Grendel. He scratched lightly at the cat’s ears and Grendel’s head drooped until his nose bumped Tagen’s knee. “I wanted to look at you,” he said.
She scowled at him. “Well, don’t do it again. I’m not going to run away and you don’t need to keep double-checking. If I want you in my room, I’ll leave the door open. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.”
“Hm.” He returned his attention to the television screen.
She leaned in just enough to see the picture and groaned as she saw the familiar herky-jerky camera moves and cop scenes of Law & Order. “It’s seven in the morning! Why are they playing this crap already?”
Tagen frowned slightly. He lifted one bare foot and set it down casually on the coffee table, curling his talons possessively around the remote control.
“And you,” she said. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me you really need to watch it all damn day? As a language lesson?”
“Yes.”
She snorted.
His frown deepened and he turned his golden gaze back on her. “I think,” he said slowly, “you do not realize how difficult English is to learn.” He pronounced it strangely, the N-sound merely a glottal before the second syllable: n-Glish. “So many words have the same meaning. So many words sound the same, or nearly so, and yet mean very different things.” He took a claw from Grendel’s massage and raised it, a badly-cast professor emphasizing the day’s lesson. “Diff-icult,” he said. “Diff-erent. Mean, a definition. Mean, to be unkind.” There was a particular stress on that last word and his eyes sharpened. Then he turned back to the television and continued stroking down Grendel’s back.
“I see your point,” Daria said. She folded her arms across her chest, still a little stung by his stress of the word ‘unkind’. “What I don’t understand is why you watch Law & Order all the time instead of, for example, Sesame Street or some other show that’s actually designed to help people learn.”
Tagen’s jaw ticced. “I like this show.”
“I could get you a Spanish to English dictionary,” she offered.
His brow furrowed and he glanced at her. “Spanish?”
“That other language you speak. Er, hola.”
His face smoothed out with comprehension. “Panyol,” he said. “What is a dictionary?”
“A book of words. Rather,” she amended (his expression told her plainly that all books had words), “A book with Spanish…Panyol words and then how to say them in English.”