“Useful,” Tagen grunted. His gaze crept back to the screen. “But I cannot read Panyol. I can only speak it. So I will watch your shows. It helps me to understand proper usage. I may as well enjoy a show I watch for such a purpose.”
“Yeah, but you’re always telling me I talk too fast.” She waved at the TV. “Are you telling me they slow down and repeat themselves when you ask them to?”
“No.” He kept his eyes on the screen. “Neither do you.”
Ouch. “Have you eaten?” Daria asked after a moment.
“Last night.”
Presumably after he’d stuck his nose in her room. She steeled herself for dirty dishes in the kitchen. “Do you want something now?”
“Please.”
Daria turned and started down the hall, then paused and looked back, meaning to ask if he had a preference. The question stuttered apart unspoken. Tagen brought his eyes up inquiringly to hers, but up was definitely the operative word.
More than anything else right then, more even than the persistent anxiety of having an alien in the house at all, Daria was confused. Had he just been checking her out? It wasn’t the sort of thing she could just ask. She turned around again, somewhat stiltedly, and made herself go to the kitchen.
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 unnerved her. She returned to washing the dishes. “What do you feel like eating?” she asked.
“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.”