“Gigi?”Even doing my best to pretend that this was no different than any pedicure I’d ever given, I couldn’t ignore the strangely human name.Human, if he was talking about someone’s grandma or a small poodle.
“Idjiij, everyone calls him Gigi because of Naomi.”
“Naomi?”My voice was strained and his hoof twitched again as my hands tightened reflexively around his tendons.Naomi was one hundred percent a human name.Penny, Naomi, despite my need to take a break from learning anything else today, I was hoarding every little detail about the other women like gold.Just hearing their names made me feel less alone.
“Carn’s mate.”Some of the slurred laziness left his tone.“There are other mated females at our camp, as well.”He said it gently, as if easing me into the reality that there were other humans, other women somewhere beyond the air-conditioned prison I lived in.He’d already mentioned the other women, mated to turochs of all things.But somehow I’d brushed past the information without letting it really hit me.
Not just humans, women, with names.Real people.My chest clenched with emotion.
For six months I’d told myself none of this was real, nothing had changed, I’d just been working a really long cleaning shift and one day my coworkers would come in the door like nothing had happened.But even I wasn’t so delusional I’d believed my own comforting lies.
It was only at night, when I was too tired to clean or reorganize to distract myself that I huddled under my single blanket and cried over the thought of being utterly alone on this planet.
“How many again?”I rasped out, trying and failing to ease my death grip on his oily ankle.
“Five females.Kes and Amy met other humans, males.But they weren’t friendly.”
Five women, alive, somewhere out there.I could hear it over and over again, and it still blew my mind.
A shaky sob escaped me and I wiped the sudden stream of tears off my face with my forearm.
“Jessalyn.”Tovis pulled his leg away and curled himself down until we were face to face, and gently cupped my jaw with one of his big hands.
“I can take you to them.They live in our camp, with their mates.We keep them safe and happy.You could come and live with us, everyone would welcome you.”
Part of me wanted to leap at the opportunity he was giving me.I could see people again, talk to someone other than myself, feel safe.But a bigger part of me recoiled from the thought of walking out the door of the spa for the first time in months.
This was my haven, my bubble of security in a world that had changed too much and too quickly for me to process.Out there, reality was unavoidable.Tovis said there were five other human women at his camp, but he’d also said they were mated.
Mated not married.Which meant those women were in relationships with aliens.It was too much for me to handle right now.I needed to ease into things, process, accept it in my head before I confronted it in person.
The idea of it made my head spin.His camp would not be like the world I’d been missing.It would be new and strange in terrifying and unexpected ways.
Maybe I was just a coward, or I’d been alone so long I couldn’t handle interacting with real people.My head already felt too full, fuzzy with competing thoughts.I knew Tovis had repeated the same thing a few times, I kept asking the same questions, convinced I’d imagined his answers, half convinced I’d made him up as a new and more extreme way to distract myself.
“How big is your camp?”I asked.
He sat back, giving me some space and I quickly grabbed a file to keep my hands busy.Keeping my eyes on my work, I started smoothing out the rough spots on his hooves.
“Almost a hundred turoch males, and two sytos.”
I wanted to ask what that meant, but I also wasn’t ready to know.Turochs were the good guys, sytos were the enemy according to the note he’d given me.But there were sytos at their camp?
“We have plenty of supplies, water, weapons.It is a good camp.”
I’m sure it was great, but it was chock full of aliens.Aliens that thought they needed weapons, which meant the outside really was as scary as I’d thought it was.
I couldn’t do it.I couldn’t leave the spa and the sense of security it gave me.My hands were working on autopilot, filing the edge of one of his hooves, smooth the chips and rough edges with a comforting scraping sound as my thoughts spun with all the information he’d given me.
“I have food and water here.I’m safe here,” I finally said.
“You are welcome with us, but I won’t make you come with me,” he said easily, like his casual offer hadn’t just blown up everything I’d worked so hard to ignore.
“These other women,” I finally said, wanting so desperately to see friendly faces but too scared to take the leap.“They could come visit me.Women love spas, I could do their nails, talk.It’d be like a party.”
Would they even want to meet me?They were apparently ‘mated’ to aliens.If their men were anything like Tovis, then they were living very different lives than I was.Tovis seemed nice, but he wasn’t human, not even slightly.What had these women experienced that made them willing to date aliens?
I doubted they’d had the option of living in an air conditioned spa with endless amounts of protein bars to feed them.They’d probably been out there, barely surviving, scavenging for food like it was the Walking Dead.
