I wished Aunt Ann hadn’t told T’raat we were being followed. His eyes stayed locked on the road behind us for hours, watching every move the other cars made. When one of the cars took an exit, he relaxed just a smidge, but only a tiny bit, and only for a second. He then redoubled his watch of the remaining cars. The sun rose to our left, making it harder to see anything more than the light glinting off metal in the distance, but he just squinted against the growing light and stuck to his vigil.
By seven thirty, only two cars remained behind us. I found that odd, as there should have been more cars appearing on the highway by that hour. Something was up, and I asked Aunt Ann about it.
“Yeah, I noticed that, too. My guess is our moles have gotten in touch with the local LEOs and are blockading the roads leading in. They’ve probably devised some story where Timber and I are the spies or some such thing. There are likely warrantsout for all of us, with explicit instructions for the state troopers to leave us for the AARO to apprehend. ‘Armed and dangerous,’ ‘deserters,’ any number of things like that.”
My blood ran cold at the thought. I’d never been in any kind of legal trouble before, and it was ten times worse for T’raat. Ifhegot arrested, he could be taken away and experimented on! Wasn’t that what they did to alien prisoners?
Half of me wanted to ask Aunt Ann for reassurance that they didn’t, but the other half knew my aunt was a pragmatist, and she just might tell me the truth whether I wanted to hear it or not.
T’raat and I held hands as my aunt drove. I looked at his scaled fingers laced with mine, dwarfing my hand. All my horny brain could think of was those fingers inside me, of the way he made me come in the barn. I suddenly wanted to be alone with him, to find some excuse to make the AARO agents disappear so T’raat and I could throw the three-date rule out the window.
I shifted in my seat, pressing my thighs together to try to ease the aching urges I felt.
Unfortunately, T’raat noticed this and, typical to his species, totally misunderstood what I was doing.
“Ann!” He rapped the back of her seat hard. “We need to stop.”
Aunt Ann’s eyes widened, and she looked at him in the rearview mirror. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Leigh needs to urinate.”
Oh. My. God. I wished this could have been a dream, but nope, I was wide awake. “T’raat, I—”
He squeezed my hand and smiled. “It is all right. I will take care of you.”
The car angled towards the shoulder, and I scrambled to get us back on track.
“No! Stop!”
“Iamstopping.”
I grunted with frustration. “No, Aunt Ann, don’t stop! Stop stopping. Please, whatever you do, don’t pull over.”
“Well, it’s this or nothing, honey. There aren’t any rest areas around. Do you think you can hold out for a gas station? I think I saw a sign for one coming up ahead, we could—”
“Please. Please, just keep driving. I don’t have to pee. T’raat’s … mistaken.”
T’raat frowned. “You are displaying pelvic discomfort. We should stop.”
“It’s nothing!”
We swerved a bit as T’raat and I argued over my need to pee—or lack thereof. Timber turned around in her seat and joined the conversation, much to my dismay.
“Is it your period? I know T’raat’s your boyfriend, and this is a touchy subject, but just trust me. If you’ve started, it’s better to just say so. Being embarrassed over that isn’t something that’s going to help us right now.”
“I am not on my period!”
Aunt Ann rubbed her forehead. “Well, if you’re not needing the bathroom for whatever reason, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” I let go of T’raat’s hand and crossed my arms over my chest with a huff, sitting back against the door of the car. Whatever mood I’d been in, he’d killed it with this nonsense. “I’m fine. Just keep driving and drop it.”
T’raat sat back against the other door and mimicked my pose with crossed arms and a scowl of his own.
Timber and my aunt exchanged a glance, and Timber snickered. “I think we just witnessed their first fight.”
For the next hour, neither T’raat nor I budged. The air in the car grew thick with tension, and Timber and Aunt Ann started up a conversation up front about nothing much in particular. I bet they were trying to give T’raat and me a chance to work outour little tiff. The problem with that was twofold: T’raat hadn’t actually done anything really wrong, and I was too damned stubborn to admit that.
After that first hour, the guilt of getting mad at him for a simple misunderstanding started to eat at me. Rather than apologize, though, I just scooted a couple inches in T’raat’s direction. I didn’t relax my arms, didn’t look at him, just moved that little bit.
