23. THALIA

“Hmmm. The slightly pink or the slightly salmon.” I contemplated my dress choices. They both smelled like fish food, so that wasn’t a deciding factor. One had text on it that sort of covered the whole thing, while the other had a big fat stamp of text right around where my tits would be.

I glanced longingly at the silvery-blue sacks that had just shipped in. They hadn’t been freed up to be made into stylish sack dresses and wraps.

“I think pink. Salmon is a bit too orangey for my complexion.” No one was going to see it under my cloak, but I’d know.

I proceeded to slice up the salmon-y one to make into wraps for my forearms and ankles. The ankle wraps had worked well, and I was going to trade in my gloves for the mummy look. Plenty of species had five digits on their hands. I wouldn’t stand out.

I contemplated the sharp, strange (yet highly effective) space-scissors that had been hanging from hooks in the kitchen. Ran my hand over my tangled, increasingly matted hair. Would be a quick couple of snips and Ahane and I could be hair twins. But his feather-hair would still look better than my space-waif hack job.

The airlock in the back room hissed.

CLUNK.

The air shifted, and cold slunk into the warmth. Ahane’s heavy boot steps clunked towards where I was in the back of the storage area, since there was no room in the bunkroom.

I didn’t like calling it a bedroom. Made it sound too personal. Intimate. Although things were getting pretty personal.

Ahane, covered in dust and grime and smelling of the ship yards outside, came into the back. He had something clutched in his left hand, but what drew my eye was the stain halfway between his hip and his lower ribs.

“Are you bleeding?” I put my shears down and hurried over.

“It’s nothing.”

25XA had a damn lot of scales to get through and something getting through it wasn’t nothing. “Everything that’s tried to kill you so far and something finally got you and you want to say it’s nothing? What was it?”

He glanced down at himself. “A piece of metal gave way easier than expected.”

“And you stabbed yourself?”

“No. The shuttle stabbed me.”

“Don’t be blaming the shuttle for your butter-thumbs.”

“Thalia, it is nothing.” He tried to brush my hands off him, but I brushed his hands away and tried to get a better look at what had him bleeding. “These things happen digging around in scrap bins, and my scales were not extended.”

“Did the Site Master tell you it was scrap?” My immediate life goals did not include become a nag, but I did not want Ahane getting into debt with the Site Master. The Site Master had made it damn clear everything on this asteroid had a price.

“As I pointed out to the mechanics in the next bay, they can pay someone to take it away, or I can take it away for free.” He frowned slightly. “Although I am not certain exactly what they are doing. The ship in the next bay does not appear to be undergoing repairs, but instead being broken down into component parts. Very precisely too, I might add.”

“There is that huge scrap yard out back. Maybe he buys busted-up ships and parts them out. Or keeps the parts in stock to sell to people coming through. I imagine getting actual deliveries of new parts out this way is impossible.”

“Salvage is a common profession. There are many lost ships. Usually with dead crew inside. That is a speciality type of salvage.”

I grabbed his hand and hauled him into the brightest part of the diner. “Let me get a look at this.”

He sighed in the you are being too dramatic sort of way.

A chunk of one of the thicker scales on his torso was missing, and the gouge was bleeding. The base of the scales were fibrous and tough as hell, and were more similar to Human’s deep fascia tissue instead of fingernails or hair. He had done more than lost a fight with the scrap bin. Had he gotten into it with the Site Master”s mechanics? “You’ve got a piece of metal still in the scale root.”

“Do I?” He tried to twist to get a look.

I shoved him upright. “Yes, you do. Hold still. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Yes?”

Pain tolerance was probably a good thing for a space commando to have. “I will get it out. These little fingers are useful for something.”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself. It may be sharp.”

“You want it to stay in there?”

“No, but I will?—”

I shoved my fingers into the hole. He flinched. I told him, sweetly, “Hold still, big boy.”

“Everyone is big compared to you.” He grunted.

The metal splinter was small enough for him not to notice but big enough for my little fingers to secure and pull out. Blood oozed out of the scale. I tossed the metal bit onto the counter and went to the too-tall sink to wash up.

He checked his side. “Thank you.”

“Just pulling a splinter.”

He loomed over me. “You didn’t hurt yourself?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” He peered lower over my shoulder to get a look at my hands for a single drop of blood.

“Ahane, I’m sure.” I dried my hand on my sack-dress and turned to face him. He needed to go wash that blood off his side (along with the general layer of dust and filth and grime) before we opened and started feeding the may-be-washed-may-not-be-washed masses.

He hadn’t moved an inch, and I nearly shoved my nose into his chest.

Mmm. Cranberries. And grime.

He backed up a step so I could breathe (although being smothered by a cranberry-scented dragon was a good way to go) and offered me what he’d been holding in his left hand.

A… comb? It had been so long since I’d seen a comb, I barely remembered what a comb was. The Greys had stolen some hairbrushes to share. He had given me my own brush. It had had tendrils of blond hair on it.

The comb had been forged from metal, fit nicely into my hand, and the tines were not flat, but carefully rounded as they went from thicker at the base to blunted tips. There were hammer marks in the metal, and swirls where he’d forged each tine.

“You didn’t have to.” I fumbled for something to say. My gut seemed to have taken an emotional punch that knocked all the wind right out of me.

His posture shifted and his tail swished once along the floor.

Emotions knotted up in the base of my throat. “Thank you.”

“I hope it is functional.” He dipped lower. “I am not familiar with their use.”

“It looks perfect,” I whispered.

Ahane closed his hand over mine. “Then why are you shaking?”

“I’m overwhelmed.” I squeezed the word out of my throat.

“By what?” His eyes searched my face.

A big old swamp of emotions? All of the emotions? A huge knot of emotions? “Your kindness.”

His scales shifted to swirls of rich burgundy. “No one would agree that I am kind.”

“They don’t have to. I think so. But don’t worry, I won’t tell them.” A bittersweet rush tugged at my lips as I smiled.

He squeezed my hand gently and caressed my temple with the claw tips of his other. “It’s such a small thing.”

“Those are the most important things,” I whispered. “Because they’re easy to overlook.”

His claw tips pulled me towards him, very softly, almost like he didn’t mean to, as his scales deepened to the same color as dark rubies and velvet. The very tips glinted golden sunset. He bent further.

“You’re still trembling.” He was so close his breath brushed my lips. It felt silky and electric at the same time.

“It’s not you.” Except it was him. It was entirely him.

“I think,” he whispered very softly at the same time his entire body was coiled and tense and there was an air of daring the hummed in the air, “we should kiss.”

We should not kiss. We should never kiss again. We have kissed enough and we both like it too much and we should NOT keep kissing. “I agree.”

He drew me closer with a sort of trembling hesitation and I closed the last millimeter of distance before I made myself a liar.

Kissing him hit so hard in the feels I almost gasped. Emotions poured out from behind my mental dams and ripped across the raw landscape in my soul. I threw my arms around his neck so it didn’t sweep me away. When our lips parted and our tongues met, the rush dragged me under for long, disorienting seconds.

I crested long enough to be aware of his tongue against mine, more serpentine and narrow than I was used to, rougher, stronger. His taste was faint wine, his mouth not as soft—he was not Human. Nor were the talon-tipped hands holding me. His grip was how a Human would hold a bird of spun glass.

I moved one of my hands to his throat, the tiny swirls of scales that spiraled along the strong muscles of his neck and wrapped around the thick blood vessels. I fought the urge to run my hand lower over his traps and shoulders, because that would just lead to his chest, then his abs, then his hip groove, then his cock… although maybe a brief detour to the thighs and ass…couldn’t let his lower body think it was second class.

We pulled apart at the same time. Sensations came back slowly. The weight of his presence, his warmth, his scent, the way I felt stretched tight over a terrified, spiraling core, the difference between the texture of the fine scales of his throat versus the thicker plate-like scales down his spine, and then the softness of his tail coiled around my ankle.

My heart throbbed against my ribs.

At least Ahane was as confused as I was.

Was it possible he and I were… mates? He had said that the cosmos had a way of tossing mates together. But he didn’t have a trinket, so had I called him to me somehow when I’d been trapped down below? Was it a great big cosmic conspiracy?

Or maybe my Human brain was doing what Human brains did. Stockholm Syndrome was real. Trauma bonding was real. Misattribution of arousal was real. Fake memories were real.

The Greys had engineered themselves to be collective, but they were too one dimensional. They wanted a touch of what Humanity had: our need for companionship, our instinctual desire to be part of a group, our loyalty to our group even to death. They’d engineered all that into themselves, of course, except they’d ripped the soul out.

I translated it as soul, but there was no real word for it—just a feeling He had impressed on me that had given me nightmares and made me vomit uncontrollably.

I’d been rewired and duct taped and patched. How did I know the thrill of Ahane wasn’t because he was made of gemstones and said my name and had a voice and touching him wasn’t like touching a clammy chicken that had been sitting on the counter too long?

Ahane drew his tongue along my throat.

I shoved back.

Shoving him was more or less the same as shoving a warm boulder.

He broke the full-body contact, but his tail remained around my leg and his one claw behind my back. “Apologies. You taste like fine salt and I—I will be quiet now.”

“Salt?” I was grateful for the spell being broken so I could quietly go scream in a corner of my mind and have a full emotional breakdown.

“Fine salt,” he said again, his tone softening into something that was going to make me break down right there. “Earth does not have gourmet salts?”

As far as I knew, salt was salt, and salt tasted like salt. “Maybe? If so, I’ve never had it. Telling someone they’re salty isn’t a compliment, though.”

“I meant it as one. You taste like fine, rare salts. You smell like rare salts too.”

I smelled like salt? Might have needed a bath then, because that sounded like sweat. But if he liked it… I thought the floor cleaner smelled great, and he thought it smelled unpleasant.

“Pure,” he added. Then, he said something in High Dialect that probably was pure, but pure if angels and heavenly bells had whispered it right into my brain.

Good thing he was holding me, because I swooned.

“Thalia?”

“Say that again,” I said softly. Maybe I moaned it. I think I moaned.

He obliged.

Made my knees weak and my thighs quivery.

Probably because I was not pure. I was 100% Grade A toxic waste straight from the Grey processing plant. But I wanted to be whatever he thought I was.

He released me completely and backed up. “I am going to wash.”

Was that a promise in his voice? Or was that a I’m going out for a bit, get yourself cleaned up?