Dating an Alien Pop Star

by Kendra L. Saunders

  It takes a lot of prodding, but Dev finally agrees to go on his date with Kammie, so long as all but one of the bodyguards remains with Griffin. Lillian Gale has promised to help us, because she took such a shining to Kammie. She thinks Griffin sounds like an ‘interesting creature’ and has even booked us for the Bowery Ballroom tomorrow night. I’ve set up a simple website with Griffin’s name as the URL, so we have somewhere to direct people to the livestream of the concert. Lillian will join Griffin on stage at the end and perform one of her songs from the classic Juicy Bed days. She does not know David Bowie.

  And all of this has put Griffin in a much better mood, thankfully, even though he still has no leads on the Bowie thing.

  Griffin and I take his car back to our hotel without really speaking, but once he’s climbed from the car, he turns and offers his hand to me.

  “Suddenly so chivalrous,” I say, trying not to laugh. “Shouldn’t I be the one helping you out of the car, Mister Pop Star?”

  “Ah, shut it.”

  “Awww, that’s more like the Griffin I know. I was worried the alien pod people had abducted you.”

  He pulls me against him. “Are you asking to be abducted, Daisy Kirkwood?”

  “You already abducted me, remember? In SoHo?”

  Griffin presses a kiss to my lips, and I can’t help slipping my arms around his neck. I’m not sure how long we stand there being amorous with each other, but just as it starts to feel like a rom-com come true, a bright flash of light all but blinds me.

  “Mr. Valentino! Mr. Valentino!” someone shouts, and I glance over Griffin’s shoulder to see a group of photographers, cameras drawn and at the ready. With mighty click-click-clicks and lightning-like circles of flashes, I have to blink back stars.

  “How did they find out where you’re staying?” I whisper. “It’s hurting my eyes…”

  Griffin turns toward the photographers, stepping in front of me. “Hello, everyone!” he says, waving one hand. “If you’d like to take my holop—errr, picture, you may do so now.”

  “Mr. Valentino, what do you think about legendary rock musician Robert Zuma calling your music ‘pathetic English vomit’?” someone asks, swooping in with a video camera.

  Griffin steps back a bit, his foot lighting on mine, and I feel his fingers flutter back over me, but he regains his composure and leans toward the reporter. “Did he? Well, I dunno who he is, so what’s it matter?” Griffin says, which just prompts the reporter to wolfishly grin.

  “How is your boyfriend, Devon London?” the man asks, and we endure another painful round of camera flashes.

  “Dev? Dev’s fine,” Griffin says, reaching back again and finding one of my hands. He squeezes my fingers, even while standing up a bit taller and raising his chin for the pictures. “Tomorrow night, I’ll have a concert at the Bowery Ballroom. You may start queuing now if you wish. Lillian Gale will join me onstage at some point, and the whole thing will be filmed. You’ll be able to watch at, errr…” He stops and looks back at me. “Where is it, Daisy?”

  “You’ll be able to stream it on Griffin’s website, which is his name.” I rattle off the URL.

  Griffin turns his attention back to the reporters. “That’s right. I hope all of you will come. It will be the best concert in the universe.” He holds his hands up in the symbol for the Origin Collective.

  “How do you feel about the British prime minister’s sister calling the president a monkey? Are you angry about that?”

  “A monkey?” Griffin says. I realize all at once what’s about to happen, but before I can stop him, he nervously giggles and says, “Well, that’s funny, isn’t it? Nothing to get angry over.” Suddenly, all the reporters are yelling at Griffin, asking him leading questions to get inflammatory answers, so I lean up, hands on either side of him, and bite his earlobe to get his attention. “Let’s go inside,” I say, and he nods.

  “Alright, goodbye!” Griffin says, and his bodyguards take this as a cue to spring to action. They clear a path for us, and we escape into the lobby of our hotel, cameras flashing behind us. “They really love me, don’t they? And to think, I always assumed the people of your planet were idiots,” Griffin says as we head toward the elevator.

  “They were baiting you, Griffin. Oh, God, you shouldn’t have said anything to them about the British prime minister’s sister.”

  “Well, I don’t know her, but she sounds like good fun if she likes monkeys. Those are the cute, furry things, right? I’ve called Dev a balak more times than I can count. One time, he elbowed me hard enough that I dropped a glass of nutritional liquid on my foot.”

  “Griffin.”

  “No, it’s alright, I had it coming. And my foot’s fine.”

  A member of the hotel staff runs for us, cutting across the lobby with such vigor that he slides a few paces as he stops in front of us. “Sir, I’m so terribly sorry. I have no idea how they found out you’re staying here! I called for someone to get rid of them, but there’s nothing we could do…”

  Griffin nods and waves him away. “It’s alright. Nothing we can do now.”

  “Are you… you’re, uh, you’re alright, sir?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. Just make sure that anyone who asks after me knows they can find me at my concert tomorrow night at the Bowery Ballroom.”

  Griffin pulls me into the elevator and steps aside while all the bodyguards pile in after us.

  “There’s going to be some fuss about what you said,” I quietly say.

  “Fuss? What do you mean? About what?”

  “There are still a lot of racism issues in this country.” I close my eyes, wincing. “They wanted you to say something controversial, and you don’t know any better, so you played right into it.”

  “Racism?”

  There’s no easy way to explain the situation to him, but Griffin just presses into me, trapping me against the elevator wall. He whispers something in his language, in a sultry tone. When I eyeball him, he apologizes and switches back to English. “I liked it when you bit my ear,” he whispers. “You should do that again.”

  It seems like all the bodyguards are staring directly at me right now, and the music playing in our elevator is just a bit too chipper. I take a deep breath and force a smile for Griffin. “We’ll talk about that later, alright?”

  “You know what we should do?” he whispers against my ear. Tingles run clear through me.

  He’s making it hard to think. “W-what?”

  Griffin traces his fingers down my side, and I shiver. “We should order a bunch of hot dogs from a street vendor and try on the Dior clothes I had sent over this morning,” he says.

  “Oh.” Not what I was expecting. “Okay…”

  “That way, I can choose my stage outfit for tomorrow night. After all, for the rest of time, everyone will look back on this concert! I have to look fabulous.”

  We reach our floor, and the doors to the elevator slide open.

  “Can you show me what this Lillian Gale sounds like?” Griffin asks as we walk into our suite. “Video or something?”

  I pull up a video of her singing at a charity event and hand my phone to Griffin. He stares silently at the screen the whole time, as if he’s memorizing everything he sees. When it’s over, he hands the phone back.

  “I like her,” he proclaims, and then walks away from me. He speaks for a while with two of the bodyguards, in his native language, with a lot of hand gestures included. They seem to be negotiating something, because one speaks rather defensively, and then Griffin’s voice turns stern.

  I receive a text from Kammie that is nothing more than a ‘thumbs-up’ emoticon. Well, at least things are going well for her. I tweet from Griffin’s account, telling everyone the plans for the concert tomorrow night, inviting them to join us. Within seconds, there are excited replies and retweets.

  Wow.

  Griffin returns to me a few minutes later, already tugging his shirt off. “Alright,” he says, “Help me find the perfect
outfit.”

  Rolling my eyes a bit for good measure, I dig around through his bags of clothes. There are so many pieces that I’m a little overwhelmed at first, but after a moment, I gather together a pair of black skinny jeans, a white dress shirt with black piping, and a knee-length black jacket.

  Griffin strips off his pants and tosses them aside, diving right into trying the outfit on. “Hmmm, how do I look?” he asks as he’s adjusting the jacket.

  “You look very nice. Can you move around in it?”

  He tests it out by dancing around a bit, twirling, kicking his legs out, almost knocking a lamp over in the process. “Yes, I think I can move quite well.” He spins one more time, throwing his hands up in the air with a flourish at the end. “Will everyone like it?”

  “Everyone? I don’t know about everyone. I guess it’s never really possible for everyone to like something. Or someone.” I shrug. “But I like it.”

  “I like it, too,” he says, trotting off to inspect the ensemble in the mirror. I follow after him, without quite as much enthusiasm. “I wish they could see me this way, back home.”

  Somehow, I know Griffin means something deeper than wishing his fabulous Earth wardrobe could be seen and worshipped on his planet. “Maybe they’ll see you differently when you win this bet against your dad,” I say, finding his gaze in the reflection of the mirror.

  He stares back at me for a long time, so long that I almost forget everything except for the enchantingly unfamiliar essence of his blue eyes.

  “I don’t want you to forget me,” he whispers, but I never see his lips move.

  “Why would I forget you?”

  Griffin’s eyes turn down and his shoulders droop. “It might not be safe for you to remember.”

  “If you think you’re going to wipe my memory or something, Griffin Valentino, you are very much mistaken. I have no intention of forgetting you, even if you think it’s for my safety. This brain is mine, and I’ll keep all the memories I want to keep.”

  Maybe he smiles, a little, but it could just be a trick of the light. “I can’t ever win an argument with you, can I?”

  “That would be a great big no.”

  He looks away from me, as if debating something, and then says, “At home, we have two words for love. One means… we like something a lot. Maybe a certain taste, color, or feeling. But the other word means that our soul would break, that we would cease to exist, without the being of our affection.”

  “That makes a lot of sense. People would be less confused when I was talking about my inordinate love for spaghetti or chocolate. They’d know I don’t actually want to marry chocolate,” I say. “I mean, sometimes I want to marry chocolate, but that’s usually hormones talking.”

  “The word for love, for powerful and life-altering love, in our language, is waandaa.”

  There are so many things I want to say, but Griffin closes up as palpably as a flower closes its petals, rearranging his collar before walking away from me.

  “Is that why you always called me Wanda?” I ask, trailing after him.

  “When we first met, I sensed your name was Wanda.”

  “Well, what’s your name? Your real name. It can’t really be Griffin Valentino.”

  He hesitates, but then he says, “Griffin Tamanoc Anterysli. My family name is Tamanoc. Anterys is my father, so my father-name is Anterysli.”

  His name sounds foreign and certainly too wordy for me to repeat on command, but somehow, I feel as if I can see him now, in a way I never could before.

  “Your name is really Griffin?”

  “There are animals on our world called griffins. Or rather, there was, a long time ago. Not sure there are any of them left now, but my father named me after them. They’re symbolic of power, so of course he likes them.”

  I cast a half smile in his direction. “That’s cool. We have ancient stories about those, too. I guess our people really are connected, in more ways than we thought.”

  “Well, I always thought it was a little silly. I’m not very powerful at all.” He inspects a shirt before tossing it aside.

  “So, Griffin Tama-what Antler-y… do you, uh, do you still think of me as Wanda?” I whisper.

  Griffin sorts through his pile of errant clothes for a few seconds before glancing over his shoulder at me. “That will always be my name for you.”

  With an unusual degree of authority, I order all the bodyguards to guard the suite from outside our room, make sure Griffin’s stage costume is carefully removed and set aside for tomorrow night, and then abduct my alien to the nearest horizontal surface.

  I’ve only got three days left with him, after all, and you can’t ignore a deadline like that.