Frustrated, he switched over to one of their numerous streaming services and picked the driest documentary he could find—a twelve-part series on the history of minting coins. Five minutes in and they were talking about the secret love affair happening behind closed doors during the making of the penny. He resisted the urge to throw the remote at the screen.
It seemed that he couldn’t win, which was infuriating because this was the first day since Titan had arrived on Earth that Ezra hadn’t seen him around. God bless the weekend. With the consulate closed, he didn’t have to be stuck in a small room with Titan for hours on end, and as far as he could tell, Titan hadn’t left his bedroom all morning. Admittedly, it had been a risk to emerge from hiding, but he’d been going stir-crazy from being locked up away from everybody whenever he wasn’t at work. A guy needed some downtime on the couch with a bag of chips every now and then, and he had to take advantage of this stroke of good luck while he still had it. It wouldn’t be long before Titan was back to his old ways, roaming the mansion in search of him, ready to pounce the second he detected Ezra’s guard was down.
Why couldn’t the Darvrokian government just supply him with his own house? Or, hell, why not his own town? If he was half the hotshot bigwig he claimed to be, surely the government owed it to him. Al claimed to be a nobody and they’d built him amansion.
Stupid alien governments.
Stupid—
Approaching footsteps put an abrupt end to Ezra’s bitter thoughts. In a panic, he tossed the remote onto the coffee table and yanked the blanket over his head, flattening himself as much as he could in the hopes no one would notice the human-shaped lump on the couch.
It wasn’t exactly his brightest plan, but desperate times and all that.
The footsteps came closer and he held his breath, channeling his inner possum.
“Human Ezra?” came Kyle’s perplexed voice. “Is this how you are meant to use the human comfort object known as a ‘blanket’? Your entertainment transmissions have led me to believe otherwise, but I suppose this is not surprising, as they have also led me to believe that dogs are proficient at solving mysteries. However, none of the dogs I have spoken to are interested in mysteries in the least. They only care for the throwing of balls.”
“Oh thank god, it’s only you.” Ezra breathed a sigh of relief and tugged the blanket off his head, his hair ruffling and going all staticky in the process. He smoothed it out, peered up, and found Kyle leaning over the back of the couch and looking down at him with a bemused expression. Ezra hastily pushed himself into a sitting position, the blanket slipping off his shoulders and pooling in his lap. Clearing his throat, he sheepishly asked, “Um… how’s it going, man?”
“It is going well,” Kyle said. “I have been attempting to locate you. I had believed that you would be in your unconsciousness quarters, as that has been your usual location as of late, but you did not answer when I knocked.”
“Sorry, yeah, I came down here to get a change of scenery. What’d you need?”
“I was wondering if you have any desire to become a douchebag with me this afternoon.” He produced a vape pen from his pocket that Ezra had gifted him several months prior, after they’d first smoked together. It had been a fun night. Ezra had been able to sit back and chill, and Kyle had eaten an entire bag of marshmallows dipped in mustard and spent the better part of an hour pondering the question, “What if the colors you perceive are dissimilar to the colors I perceive?”
Kyle had greened out before he’d found the answer, and the next morning Ezra had woken up to find the alien passed out face down on his floor, happily snoring away.
They’d made an occasional habit of repeating the experience ever since.
Kyle twisted the vape alluringly between his fingers and wiggled his eyebrows, which was to say he lifted his eyebrows one at a time, independently of each other. He hadn’t quite nailed the art of the true eyebrow wiggle just yet. “I thought that you might wish to become a douchebag and observe the television program with the competitive baked goods.”
“The Great British Bake Off,” Ezra supplied. He considered the vape pen in Kyle’s hand. Before he’d become the ambassador to an alien race, he’d rarely spent a day sober, but now the thought of getting high made his stomach roil. For perhaps the first time in his entire stoner life, he was too anxious for weed.
“I’m not really feeling it today,” he said apologetically. “Thanks, though. I’ll probably just go to my room, maybe watch TikToks of cute animals, and take a nap.” As he said it, he realized that he was exhausted from all the dwelling he’d been doing, and a nap didn’t sound all that bad.
Kyle frowned.
“You have spent many Earth hours in your room this week, Human Ezra. Is your physical form malfunctioning?”
“No, I’m not sick.” Current nausea notwithstanding.
“Perhaps your brain is malfunctioning, then?” Kyle suggested, tone tinged with worry. “I will share honesty with you, Human Ezra—Secretary of Defense Buttons came to me and expressed concern about your well-being. She stated that your behavior has been quite suspect, and she wished for me to check on you should I be amenable, which of course I am. I do not wish for you to be malfunctioning. You are my friend.”
Not bothering to process the part about his cat, Ezra was touched by Kyle’s worry. He wasn’t sure what to do with it, though. Sure, harboring such a big secret was eating him up from the inside out, but he couldn’t tell him the truth. It wasn’t like he could just open his mouth and say?—
“I had sex with Titan,” he blurted out. “Twice.”
Welp. Never mind.
Clapping ahand over his mouth, he stared at Kyle wide-eyed, waiting for the panic to settle in, but it didn’t come. Instead, every muscle in his body relaxed as a wave of relief washed over him. He hadn’t realized he’d been so tense, but he supposed it shouldn’t be surprising—he’d been messed up over Titan for weeks and hadn’t been able to talk about it. Without an outlet, the stress had been trapped, and it had been eating him up from the inside.
Kyle blinked in surprise. He opened his mouth as if to say something, faltered, and opted instead to just tilt his head questioningly.
Ezra sighed. In for a penny and all that.
“The first time was at Al and Jude’s rehearsal dinner,” he explained. “He came on to me, and I resisted at first, but, well… let’s just say he was persistent and I was weak.”
Kyle listened quietly as Ezra explained how Titan had tormented him all throughout the dinner, and about how one thing had eventually led to another. He talked about his shock and dread when he’d realized Titan was going to be his coworker, and how he’d been seduced that evening in his own bedroom. He told him why he’d been hiding in his room all week, and how he was certain that if he gave so much as an inch to Titan, he’d immediately take advantage and they’d end up rolling around in the sheets all over again. It seemed that once he started talking, he couldn’t stop.
