Fuck, I should be more scared than I am, but I’ve let my guard down.
I help as best I can with the repairs, but I feel like I’m more in the way than anything—I’m not exactly what I would call handy, let alone with alien tools. After picking up the debris that was lightenough for me to lift, I give up and sit on a crate near the dripping wall of red flowers.
For the first time since I’ve been here, I inspect the plant.
The vines remind me a bit of ivy. Their climbing roots grab at any texture in the wall, and some more established parts of the plants seem to have worn away the shine on the metal beneath.
They’re vaguely hibiscus-like, but the petals come to sharper points and the stamens look a bit more threatening than anything back on Earth. The liquid that drips from its center is so like the cum that dripped from Mekkra’s dick that I wonder if it feels the same, my hand hovers absentmindedly to touch it.
A rough, clawed hand grips my wrist and brings my wandering fingers to a halt.
“Do you wish to die?” he asks, shocked.
“What!” I yelp, snatching my hand back to my chest.
“I assume that was your plan, since touching the poison of the nawleigh flower will kill you,” he says plainly. Like it’s completely normal to keep deadly, poison-dripping flowers in your dining room.
“What the fuck?” I yell, realizing the danger his decor choices have put me in. “Why would you have these here if they could kill someone?” I back up as far away as I can get from the plant. “And why wouldn’t you tell me not to touch them when I got here?”
His expression flattens.
“I was surprised,” he mutters.
Oh, yeah, by me…jilling off before he even opened the damn pod.
“Fine.” I cross my arms over my chest, the strange fabric of the gown bunching awkwardly as Ido. “But this seems like important information.” My hands gesture wildly at the deadly threat to my life.
“I…” He stops, letting his fang gnaw a little on his lip. “After I killed Gessik, my brother, I wanted a sure way to end everything if I lost too much of myself. I couldn’t trust my madness to do it with a weapon, but I knew that if I grew these here…”
“Within the infant rind of this small flower. Poison hath residence and medicine power,” I say under my breath, letting the reality of his plans for these plants sink in.
“What was that?”
“Romeo and Juliet—I had a big Baz Luhrman phase,” I say as if he would understand what either of those references were. “Hey, we’re not going to get to that point, okay?”
Mekkra balks and stares at me.
“You don’t know how bad things can be in my mind, but being close to you…I already feel different.”
“Different?”
“Like the darkness in my mind is dissipating.” The frantic energy drains from his posture, leaving him standing still—clear-eyed, almost startled by the calm.
“But you barely know me,” I whisper.
“You’re right. So, tell me about yourself then.”
There’s a softness to the request I don’t think I’ve heard before. It must put me at ease, because I don’t even pretend that I don’t know where to start.
I’ve been waiting for years for someone to ask me that question. I’d thought that the hundreds of aliens who ogled my goods might have asked me that—if anything, just out of politeness—but they hadn’t.
While I was grinding in my bubble, I would think about all the things I would tell them.
“I always wanted a horse but have never had the time or money to take care of one. As a child, I’d imagine our fat Labrador was a noble steed. I’d been saving to get a damn horse since my first week at the Brass Ass, the very first time I stripped. That's the only time I’ve had nearly enough money to even toy with the idea.”
“Did you get the horse thing?”
I can see him trying to understand the herd animal his translator chip is showing him. The question is so earnest I almost want to lie.
