The laugh I made afterwards was just as painfully awkward, and I instantly hated everything about myself. What if I was making him uncomfortable with my flirting? I didn't mean to make this weird. Why was I flirting with him in the first place? I could have just pulled my hand back and returned to polite conversation, and no one would be the wiser. Now he was going to know that humans were freaks and would meet a giant leviathan of an alien and immediately think about banging it. If Godzilla were real, there would be somebody out there somewhere thinking about whether or not she could ride that d.
There was a long, long pause.
Oh no, he was probably looking up what I meant by third base.
I held perfectly still. If I pulled my hand out, would that make it more awkward or less? He could move an entire wall; he could easily shove my hand out of his neurofilaments if he wanted to. Heck, he could probably yank me right into them and then... oh... the mental image of that possibility flooded me, sendinganother wave of completely inappropriate heat rushing through me as I thought about being completely surrounded by all those massaging, caressing, filaments, utterly at his mercy.
I was going to need some serious self-care time after this. I clearly hadn't been taking care of my own needs often enough if my mind couldn't handle the idea of first contact without wanting to make it full frontal first contact.
I cleared my throat.
He still hadn't said anything.
"What I need to confess is that I invaded your privacy," he said. "I went to pull publicly available data on you, but it looks like your previous government was inept at data security, and both managed to collect every bit of your information in one place and then left it utterly exposed to the slightest reach. They seemed to care more about spying on their citizens than protecting them. I should have stopped when I realized, but instead I went through all the pictures of your creative art. It was an unacceptable invasion of your privacy, and I apologize."
There was a soft stroke on the back of my hand, like a thumb running over the skin.
"You online stalked me?" I asked, needing more information to process what he was saying. It was an informational whiplash. One second, I was thinking about doing inappropriate things with a giant alien spaceship, the next, he was confessing that he looked up all the details he could find about me. "When did you do that? Right now?"
"No, when you got off the shuttle," he replied.
That was hours ago.
"Did you do that to everyone?" I asked.
"No, just you," he said.
That sent a thrill through me.
Out of all the humans, he became interested in me. If he were human, I would think he had a crush on me, that he was infatuated with me.
But he wasn't human; he was an alien, so I couldn't assume that.
"Why?" I asked.
"Your outfit was magnificent," he said. "First, I tried to find the material online, but when I couldn't find it to buy it, I expanded my query and discovered that you made it. I also discovered that there is far more information about you than one would normally have publicly available online. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had spent an... inappropriate amount of time looking through pictures of you and your creation. It took me a bit to realize that the information was all there because your previous government didn't prioritize data safety. That is where I owe you an apology. I should have realized sooner and stopped looking. It is wrong to trespass on a life laid bare for the world to see, yet I can't deny the wonder of your creative talent pulled me deeper."
He liked my art?
He obviously had good taste.
Even with my pride attempting to be flippant about his compliments, warmth still blossomed in my heart. I felt seen. I loved creating fabrics and crafting them into clothing. I loved wire wrapping rocks and weaving them into jewelry. Creating beautiful things for myself to wear was a core part of my life. I just wished I could do it for a living, but competing with online stores that mass-produced cheap goods and had the money to pay for advertisements to get themselves higher in the rankings just wasn't something I could do. I had my individual commissions, one of which paid for this trip, in fact, but on the whole, my art was just a hobby.
A hobby that made an alien obsessed with learning about me.
Wait, how much had he seen?
"You didn't see my blog, did you?" I said. "Don't tell me you found the blog I wrote as a teenager."
Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it. Now he could go look for it. That blog was a masterclass in angst. I was never able to bring myself to delete it. It held hours and hours of me talking about my inner thoughts, my self-doubt, my anxieties about the world I lived in. I made it private when my brain finally developed more, and I had the ability to look back on those words and feel embarrassed about them, but if there was other stuff about me visible online, maybe what I thought was private wasn't that safe.
"I did," he confessed, and it felt like my skin was going to burn up. "I read all of it."
"That's embarrassing," I said. "You know I'm a different person now. I've grown up since then."
My blog was full of my thoughts about my early dating life. How I would fall for a guy, and immediately he was the one for me, only for me to be crushed when it didn't work out. I was so eager to find someone to love that I would ignore warning signs and red flags and just go for it. Then the guy would pull away, and my anxiety would raise its head and lash out, and the whole thing would fall apart. Even if I did manage to keep my reactions hidden, those relationships still were unable to last. I put every sordid detail online, waxing on and on. When I looked back at it, all I could think about was even though I had grown in maturity, there was a part of me that was that same woman, wanting to give everything in an instant, but not being able to find someone who was ready to take it.
"I thought it was fascinating," he confessed. "Having a log of your psychological development through a period of youth is a beautiful thing. It isn't anything to be ashamed of. If anyoneshould be ashamed, it is me, for having dove into your past thoughts without thought to ask if you wanted me to read them."
