Page 5 of Topping Off the Alien

“You’re not fine. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Don’t—” he starts, but I keep coming anyway.

He pushes himself up out of the chair to meet me and gets about three-quarters of the way to standing before he wobbles.

I grab his hand on instinct, and the zing goes through me like I’ve grabbed a live wire, except it doesn’t hurt. For a second, the whole room sharpens, every color cranked up a notch, and I can feel his pulse in my palm like it’s my own.

“Whoa, what is that?”

He’s staring at our hands. “That,” he says quietly, “is what I was referring to.”

I look up at him. There’s a faint glow coming from under his collar.

Without thinking, I reach out with my free hand and move the fabric aside.

On his left pec, over his heart, there’s a constellation, a scatter of marks like stars. They’re all glowing, a pale light under the skin, pulsing slow and uneven.

“That’s beautiful,” I say before my mouth clears it with my brain.

He pulls the fabric back over it, and that’s when I realize how cold his hand is in mine.

“Shit, you’re freezing. We should call someone.”

“No.” It comes out fast, and there’s alarm in it. “Please, don’t call anyone.”

“Why not?”

“I’m the ranking officer of this vessel, and my crew is already frightened. I cannot afford for them to see this.” He swallows. “I’m just depleted.”

“Depleted?”

“The energy. I’ve been living on rations for… some time. This mission has run far longer than intended. There has been no one to… My reserves are diminishing. That’s all.”

“Do you want to lie down or something?”

“Warmth will help. It slows the loss. I’ll take a bath. And you should go.”

“Uh, no. I’m not leaving you like that.”

He looks down at me like I’m a pest, and I jut out my chin. “You can’t even stand, let alone take a bath. Come on.”

“Weston, this is not necessary.”

“Yeah, well. Humor me.”

He protests once more, and I ignore it, so he finally stops spending his remaining strength on refusing. I get his arm across my shoulders, and we make our way through a door off the main room, one careful step at a time. He’s heavy with muscle and cold all through, and the zing where we touch has settled to a low hum.

The bathroom is huge. The centerpiece is a hot tub sunk into the floor, dark stone, sized for six. I leave Solverian leaning against the sink.

“Wait here,” I say, as if he’s going anywhere.

I find the controls on the tub, a smooth panel of shapes I don’t recognize, and poke at them until water starts pouring. The room goes warm and humid in a few seconds. I test it with my hand, satisfied with the temperature, and turn around.

Whatever I was about to say dies in my throat: Solverian is standing where I left him, braced back against the sink, fully naked.

He must have worked the suit off while I was messing with the panel, some hidden seam or clasp, because there’s no way I missed that much undressing otherwise. Now it’s pooled behind him and he’s just. There. All seven feet of him.

I turn away fast, but not before I catch the details. He’s built to intimidate a battlefield: his width, the long planes of his stomach, muscle laid over muscle, all of it in that same faint green. And because my eyes are traitors, my gaze drops.