Ah. Right. Ezra had forgotten that, albeit for wildly different reasons, he wasn’t the only one who was going to struggle having Titan around.
“Yeah, I know about it,” Ezra said quietly. “The two of you… you’re not exactly best friends, right?”
Al’s eyes flashed orange. “This would be what you humans refer to as an understatement. My brother and I have feelings that are complicated toward one another, but his arrival would not have made me feel as many upsets as it did had my father bothered to inform me of these proposed living arrangements sooner. He only thought to contact me about it this morning.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t given much warning either,” Ezra said, thinking about the ambush from earlier. “Apparently he’s going to work with me?”
Al scoffed. “I feel apologies for you.”
It was so unlike Al to be catty that it would have been funny had Ezra not known just how much of a dickwad Titan could be, and once that realization set in, his guilt increased tenfold. Al still didn’t know what had happened between him and Titan, and Ezra had a feeling that if he were to find out, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. Ezra had never seen Al truly angry, but if certain unsavory details were to come to light, that was likely to change.
“I won’t let him be a jerk to you,” he promised lamely, dodging the truth.
Al shot him a look. “If you believe this possible, then you do not know my brother very well.”
Ezra felt his cheeks warm. He knew Titan pretty intimately, down to what he sounded like when he got off, but again, he didn’t think Al needed to know that. Not yet. Not while he was already in a state of anguish about Titan’s arrival.
At least that was what Ezra told himself as the guilt began eating him alive from the inside out.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad?” Ezra wasn’t sure whether he was trying to convince Al or himself. “You two haven’t seen each other for a while, right? I mean, apart from at the wedding. Maybe he’s changed.”
Al stopped twisting the gummy worm and gazed forlornly into its gelatinous depths instead. “When I was slightly older than the age of my offspring,” he said after a long while of silence, “Titan informed me that my parents had secret plans to feed me to Sand Dwellers if I did not do whatever he said, because he was the better child. I believed this, and he used my feelings of fear to get me to do his chores for him for many, many moons until one of my sisters informed me that he was telling me a lie.”
Ezra sucked air in through his teeth. “Yikes.”
“Yikes indeed.” Al turned toward Ezra. “How has Titan behaved around you, Ezra? I feel hope that he has not been cruel to you, at least.”
Ezra flashed back to Titan sucking a bruise into his skin and unconsciously rubbed his neck. “Uh… no, not cruel. That’s… not the word I would use.”
Al nodded sagely. “He just causes you to feel annoyance, then. I do not feel surprise. Titan causes many people to feel annoyance.”
Ezra thought about Titan’s thumb on his lips in the conference room only a few hours earlier.
“Yeah, he’s really annoying,” he said, and if Al noticed the squeak in his voice, he didn’t say anything.
Al let out a big sigh, then smiled sadly at Ezra.
“You are a good friend,” he told him. “I feel appreciation to have your support. Perhaps he will not stay with us long. Perhaps he will do very bad at his job and we will be able to send him back to my planet forever, where he will be punished for his incompetence with a lifetime of menial government tasks. Or possibly what you humans would likely refer to as ‘space bees.’”
Al looked wistful at the prospect.
Ezra felt like he deserved to be ripped apart in a Medieval torture device. “Yeah, maybe.”
Al brightened at that and cast the gummy worm aside. “Do you feel desire for dinner?” he asked. “Your words have caused me to feel improved, so I will go to assist Jude with feeding the offspring. You may accompany me.”
“I ate a late lunch,” Ezra continued to lie, because apparently he was the worst human being on the planet. “I’ll just grab a sandwich later or something.”
Al shrugged his acceptance and waved goodbye to Ezra, then crawled out of their secret space and was gone. Ezra sat there for another good thirty minutes or so until the darkness swallowed him entirely, then crawled out and followed Al inside.
No one was around when he entered, although he did distantly hear Al and Jude playing with the kids. Praying he could make it to his room without being spotted, he made a beeline toward the stairs, taking them two at a time, and scurried down the long, long—Jesus, why was it so long?—hallway to his bedroom.
Home free and triumphant, Ezra threw the door open, hurried inside, and all but slammed it shut behind him. He’d done it. He was safe! Now he could spend the night brainstorming ways to minimize his contact with Titan, and?—
“I was wondering when you would arrive home.”
Ezra spun around so fast he nearly toppled over.
There, on his bed, was Titan, shirt already peeled off and eyes blazing the color of flame.
