“I will not pressure you on this. I was… not able to call for an extraction.” He took a deep breath and reached forward, gently rubbing her arm. “It is a holiday, no? Why not let us focus on that. We can wait a bit longer for this conversation. You can think about it.”
She just stared at him.
“Maelic, I—”
The sharp sound of the timer going off had her moving toward the kitchen. She turned it off, slipped on some oven mitts, and pulled the cookies out.
Maelic’s antennae flicked with interest. She snorted.
“I’m guessing you’ve never had a cookie?”
“I have not. If it is like your other foods, I would be very excited to try one.”
She laughed for real this time and began to put them onto a cooling rack.
“We have to let them cool for a minute and then decorate them.”
“You humans really are obsessed with your decorations.”
“Oh, we definitely are. But for this, we use a sweet frosting to kind of paint the cookies.”
Maelic looked intrigued.
It took a bit to show him how to use the piping bag, but there they were—in the kitchen, decorating cookies like everything was perfectly normal.
As if he hadn’t just dropped the mate bond bomb on her. As if she wasn’t somehow the soulmate to an alien.
Delaney added the finishing touches to her Santa cookie with a pleased smile.
“That is interesting,” Maelic said.
“This one is Santa.” She chuckled and took a bite of his head.
Maelic blinked, a little horrified. She giggled at the reaction.
“Should we actually watch a Christmas movie then? Maybe that would help you get the whole holiday spirit thing.”
She plated up some cookies and poured a couple glasses of milk.
The lights on the tree were off. She hadn’t even bothered to put them back on after the whole… incident. Didn’t want to risk sending Maelic into another pheromone-fueled episode, though part of her wouldn’t have minded a repeat performance.
But the ambiance was still nice. The room smelled like vanilla and sugar, like every Christmas before this one.
She flushed thinking about what they’d done in this room only hours ago. Bound to a tree by Christmas lights while an alien went to town on her probably wasn’t in any of Grandma’s holiday decorating guides.
The atmosphere was completely different now. Not just from this year—from every year before.
She cleared her throat and turned on the TV to some cheesy Christmas romance about a princess switching places with a baker who could be twins with the said princess.
Maelic sat next to her and they watched the movie, eating their cookies and sipping milk. It was relaxing.
He edged closer as the movie went on, his hand wrapping around her shoulders like it belonged there. Her body relaxed into the touch.
Maybe it did.
The leads were already falling for each other and it had been, what, two days? She wanted to roll her eyes at how unrealistic it was.
Then she remembered she’d let an alien eat her out within twenty-four hours of meeting him.
