Al was on his feet before the sentence was all the way out of Jude’s mouth. “Of course! I will make you one,” he said confidently.
“Nope,” Ezra said with equal confidence as he, too, climbed to his feet. “No you won’t, you will burn the house down. I got this.”
Al frowned slightly as Ezra began preparing ingredients. Jude noticed, and put his hand on Al’s shoulder, the effect considerably more impactful than when Ezra had done so earlier, although some of the emotions were muted due to the marijuana, which Al did not enjoy.
“I felt desire to cook for you,” Al admitted, his lower lip protruding into a pout of its own accord.
Jude appeared to be suppressing a grin.
“The microwave still doesn’t work from when you tried to warm up a fork because you didn’t like how cold it felt on your fingers,” Jude reminded him.
Al scowled, and this time Jude couldn’t help his small chuckle. He glanced at Ezra, whose back was turned, and leaned in to quickly kiss Al’s pouting lip. “Maybe you can’t cook,” he whispered, “but at least you’re pretty.”
Underneath the marijuana, Al felt the panic spiral flip-flop around inside of him.
“At least I am pretty,” he echoed. But what would happen when he was not?
* * *
A few hours later, after the earth’s singular sun had gone down, Al lay in bed next to Jude, wearing nothing but his lanyard and a pair of “boxer shorts.” They had been made from a soft, patterned fabric that depicted ridiculous green faces with large black eyes and small mouths, which Al had come to understand was the way humans envisioned all alien life to look like. Jude had quite enthusiastically purchased the boxer shorts for him despite his insistence that he’d only ever encountered one species, located in a neighboring solar system, that resembled these “little green men.”
Jude had found that quite humorous.
And while Al did not enjoy how erroneous a depiction of intergalactic life the pattern provided, he did enjoy making Jude happy, and wore the boxer shorts as often as Jude allowed.
In any case, in those few hours since the earth’s singular sun had gone down, the effects of the marijuana on his mental faculties had faded, causing his insecurities to be at full force once again. The feelings were giving him the impulse to behave more affectionately toward Jude than usual, as though something in his mind had become convinced that their bond, although that of True Mates, was somehow tenuous. He was not feeling enjoyment nor reassurance about Ezra’s words about how uncertainty was an inevitable part of relationships. In fact, he was not feeling enjoyment about very much at all.
Al made a grumpy noise of discontentment and snuggled in closer to Jude, burying his face in the crook of his neck. Jude, for his part, was playing the colorful shapes game he called tetanus, or something similar.
“You okay, bud?” Jude asked with a raised eyebrow, peering down at where Al was trying to make as much physical contact as he could without climbing on top of Jude and lying over him like a blanket.
Al sighed heavily. “Can we cease watching the plastic surgery entertainment show in the future? I think it causes me to feel negative emotions.”
Al’s voice was muffled against Jude’s skin, but he still seemed to hear him. He paused his tetanus game, set his phone to the side, and nudged Al until he got the hint and allowed Jude to shift them into a side-by-side position.
Jude searched Al’s face with a thoughtful frown. “What kind of negative emotions?”
Al considered his answer. He did not feel desire to explain his insecurities to Jude. Counterintuitively, the prospect of doing so caused the feelings of insecurity to increase. Was this a common occurrence between mates? Or was this a feeling that was unique to human beings specifically, and Al had simply been spending too much time in their presence and was picking up bad habits? That was not out of the realm of possibility. The other day, Al had accidentally used the stupid, nonspecific phrase “in a few” when referring to when he was intending to return from the engineering building on the university campus. Perhaps it was simply that humans were bad influences.
“Al?” Jude bumped their bare knees together gently but with purpose underneath the thin blanket draped across them. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Unconsciously, Al reached out and threaded his fingers through Jude’s hair, as he did often. He felt love for Jude’s hair almost to the same degree that he felt love for Jude. It was part of Jude’s beauty, but that did not mean that if he no longer had his hair that he would no longer feel the same love toward him. Perhaps he could use that to explain himself. Humans did feel enjoyment in using excessive metaphors.
“Your hair is a favorite thing of mine, but if you did not have it, I would not feel differently about you,” Al said. He then looked at Jude expectantly.
A crease formed between Jude’s brows, and he said, “Um. Thanks? Glad to hear it, but what does that have to do with your ‘negative emotions’?” The crease deepened as his hand flew up to his head. “I’m not losing hair, right?”
His fingers brushed against Al’s, and Al let out a shuddering breath at the contact. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the intensity of their connection, and it boggled him to think it would only become stronger after the Elders joined them as one during their official bonding ceremony.
“Do not feel worry, Jude. Your hair continues to be above average. I was simply attempting to use a metaphor to explain my thoughts, but metaphor is not a skill of mine, so perhaps I will attempt directness. You feel attraction toward me, correct?”
“Kind of hard not to,” Jude said with an awkward chuckle. He raked his eyes over the parts of Al’s body that he could see with them lying so close together, and Al’s heart constricted nervously.
He hesitated, then stated even more directly than he had before, “It is difficult for you to not feel attraction toward me because I created my human appearance based on what you found desirable, but I feel concern that perhaps you have forgotten that this is not my true form.”
Jude blinked multiple times in rapid succession, as though this hadn’t been where he had been expecting the conversation to go. He rubbed the nape of his neck and avoided Al’s gaze. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “It just hasn’t come up since that first night, you know?” He trailed off and Al allowed the silence to linger. Humans did not do well with silence, so predictably, only a very short increment of time passed before Jude forced himself to look at Al and asked, “Is that what you’re having these negative emotions about? Insecurity that I think your real form is…” He couldn’t seem to find the correct adjective, but Al understood.
“I do not fault you for your feelings of attraction to this body,” Al told him softly, “but you must remember that I cannot be this way forever.”
