“So, looks like we’re going to need a much bigger bed,” Carl said, waggling his eyebrows. Carl‘s cheek and neck flushed.
“Guess I’ll be moving, huh.”
My kunnarskyn vibrated once more, and I looked down.
“Looks like we’ve been assigned new quarters, and a moving team is already moving things.”
“What? Are they moving my stuff as well? I need to let Kevin know to expect them and what I want sent up!”
“Just what’s in our current quarters,” I replied, amused.
“Ah, okay.”
Alec giggled. “Oh, man, that reminds me, once I finally wrap my own head around this, I need to call my parents. My mom is gonna flip! Two mates! I hope you’re both prepared for her to go nuts planning a wedding.”
“We’ll have to have her and my dad coordinate,” Carl replied. “But we definitely need to make sure they don’t go wild. I’d kind of imagined a small shipboard wedding.”
“Yeah, my mom won’t be happy with that,” Alec answered.
“I’m good, as long as I have the two of you and you’re happy,” I declared, earning me a shy grin from Alec and a shoulder bump from Carl.
Two mates. Definitely a surprise, but if things kept going this smoothly, it’d be a piece of that cake Carl was always talking about, surely.
23
ALEC
Oh. My. God.
Two mates. I couldn’t believe it. And my parents! Dad would probably be just as shocked as Mom, but I decided that if the Mylos said it was so, then he’s agree that it was simply meant to be. He was easy going like that. Mom, on the other hand? She was the wild card, though through it all, her main concern in the end would be how to organize a wedding for three grooms instead of two, and ask me if Floof liked both his new dads.
Well, at least it turns out that I wasn’t perving on two already mated guys who have zero romantic interest in me. They just admitted they’d kind of been crushing on me, just like I had been on them. Now, if I can get myself to stop going into overload over stuff, as I’m sure they’ll get tired of having to calm me down, so my blood pressure goes down. Hopefully, the doc is right, and they can give me better pills to help stave it off.
“So, how much stuff do you have to move?” Carl asked me as we walked to the shuttle bay.
“Just a few books, some clothes, a few keepsakes, and my cat and his stuff. I, uh, was living at home with my parents before coming up here.”
Carl merely nodded as if that hadn’t been a sad state of affairs.
“Cool, that makes things easier.”
“I will send the dining table and chairs back to supply along with the coffee table and my current bed,” Kittinir said. “I know you have the table from your Meemaw, as well as the coffee table, armchair, and sofa, you’ll want to bring.
“And her music center. I’m not leaving that or the records behind. Or my TV. The wall screen thing is cool and all for movie night, but the Brady Bunch and other old shows have got to be watched on a console TV. You’ll just have to find a way to integrate it into the entertainment center and power them both.”
“I’ll send a comm to engineering. They wire for Earth appliances frequently, as many mates come with things like these record players and kitchen mixers, from my understanding. One mate even brought up an entire stove.”
I mentally filed away the information that Carl liked old time stuff, from furniture to TV shows. Our place was going to be granny chic, it sounded like, and I was okay with that as long as there weren’t doilies everywhere or dolls staring at me all over the place.
“You think they’d let me bring up Meemaw’s Chambers stove? Probably not, huh? Open flame, ship in space, and all that. That other stove was probably electric.”
“I will ask. The science lab has open gas flame appliances, with several safety features and fire suppression protocols added.”
Carl looked amazed. “Seriously?”
Kittinir shrugged. “As you say, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Damn. I’d heard how accommodating the Mylos were towards their mates, how honorable they were in all their dealings, and their dedication to justice, equality, and all that, but it had all sounded fairytale-like. As if P.R. was being spun to make them sound like some perfect ideal in order to make more people sign up for their programs and urge our governments to sign more deals with them. As far as I could tell so far, every word I’d heard was true, and somehow, my luck had changed to bring me a happily ever after in my own Mylos story. I had the chance of better health, a job that came with training and which wouldn’t get boring as I’d get moved around every few months to a different leisure activity so I could learn the ropes at the different facilities, and once I was done, I could either keep rotating or choose a single placement. Free food and clothes were mine for the asking, just a quick boop of my watch or tablet so they could track usage for supply chain purposes and to ensure I wasn’t going hog wild.
