A Pet For Lord Darin

by Hollie Hutchins

  “Apparently it is.” Darin nodded uncertainly and looked away, thinking. “We sent them a formal apology for that, for all the good it did us.”

  “For what?”

  “Orin’s death.”

  I snorted. “Like, a letter or a fruit basket or what?”

  “A letter,” Darin said, without irony. “And his body.”

  “Well that was…nice of you.”

  “He disrespected a member of Darin’s household,” Sol-dam said to me. “The Lurasi live by the condictia, a set of rules not unlike the old Hellenic laws of hospitality on Earth. Orin violated them, so Darin was well within his rights to kill him.”

  “Provided he apologizes.”

  Sol-dam shrugged, hands behind his back. “The apology isn’t required, per se, but it’s polite.”

  “It’s polite to…apologize…for killing somebody.”

  “For killing someone who violated a sacred social law? Absolutely. Especially between such prodigious families.”

  I frowned. “And they’re just…totally chill with that.”

  “Hardly. They can’t take any overt action without declaring a personal aversion to the social contract, which wouldn’t do them any favors,” Sol-dam said.

  “But they could do something subvert,” I said. “Like killing you and claiming you violated the…condic-thing, too. Even if you didn’t.”

  “Condictia.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “They could, but I doubt they will. Darin is a very, very big fish. It would not be easy, and hardly safe, to exact vengeance of any kind. The worst I expect they’ll do is dog his couriers at the border, but the couriers are always being dogged, so it won’t much matter.”

  “That’s…good, I guess.”

  “It’s better than bad.”

  “Right,” I said. “So, we shouldn’t be worried about Kolar?”

  “I don’t know. Should we?” said Darin, looking at me with a peculiar interest. He was smiling, or rather almost smiling, and his head was cocked an inch to one side.

  “Well, yeah. He threatened you,” I said. “If you sent Orin’s body back, Kolar almost definitely knows he died here, and why. Wondering what happened to him sounds, to me, like he’s accusing you of violating his hospitality by rejecting his offer, and implying that you’ll die like Orin, or at least threatening basic vengeance.”

  It seemed obvious to me, but maybe it was less obvious to Darin. He smiled and nodded and said, “We’ll keep an eye on him. If you think we should.”

  “I do. I don’t think he can do anything, he seems kind of mousey to me, but you never know.”

  I looked between Darin and Sol-dam, waiting for someone to say something else. Neither of them did.

  I went back to my notecards.

  “A fish, am I?” Darin said, looking at Sol-dam

  Sol-dam laughed. “Earthly colloquialism.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “That you are very large and scary.”

  “Ah. Is that a compliment?”

  “Sure.”

  Darin made an amused heh sound under his breath and smiled to himself. He spent a moment looking at the ground and took a breath. “May I have a moment alone with Tany?”

  Sol-dam looked at me, a question in his eyes. I gave him a small shrug.

  “Of course,” said Sol-dam. “Call if you need me.” He bowed to us both and left.

  Darin and I sat in the chalk-yellow light for a long time, saying nothing. I sifted through my notecards, waiting for him to say something, but all he did was stare. His eyes drifted from me to the window to the ocean, glowing like a mirror under the strangely cloudless sky. The world was all gold and glitter, but he didn’t seem to see it. His eyes were pointed at the water, but he was someplace far beyond it, wading through a tangle of words and thoughts.

  I flipped over the notecard I was holding and didn’t read the word on the other side. I already knew it: hatir, which meant warm in the emotionally approachable way. The light caught the ink and made it spark. It warmed the back of my hand and the side of my face. I blinked slowly, waiting, waiting.

  Darin stood. He paced and sat and stood again abruptly, running his hand along his jaw. He was grinding his teeth, or maybe chewing his tongue.

  “Are you okay?” I said. Maybe I’d said something. This business with Kolar and the Dasyls was the longest conversation we’d ever had. Maybe he didn’t appreciate me jumping forward to tell him what was what. Maybe this was a reprimand, but then, why wait so long to say something? He was agitated, he was always agitated, but this was a different kind of agitation. “Darin?”

  He stopped and turned to me. His chest rose and fell with deep, heavy breaths and his eyes…they were big, not wide, big and soft and full of what I could almost call hope. His wings were tall and his tail strong, his scales glowing like stars and old copper, but I’d never seen him look so small, so…human. For lack of a better word.

  “Tany,” he said.

  My heart thrummed in my chest. I swallowed and said, “What?”

  “You are brilliant,” he said at last.

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t say more, not immediately. He stood in a sunny spotlight, his shadow stretching long and tall behind him, looking as uncertain as a grade school kid on their first day in a new town: hesitant, almost afraid, though I couldn’t imagine what he’d be scared of now.

  No, I thought, or a part of me thought, a small voice without much mental pull. But you can guess.

  I could.

  “You…” Darin wet his lips and took three jaunty steps towards me, his body bouncing with an affected confidence. He stood over me for a moment, opened his mouth, closed it, and dropped to his knees, so we were at eye level with one another. His hands covered mine, fingers bending the sharp paper corners of notecards that suddenly weren’t in my hands anymore, but in my lap, on the floor, scattered like snow and blood and sand in the wind.

  “Um,” I said. I didn’t mean to make the noise. Darin nearly jumped out of his skin. “What’s the matter?”

  I found his eyes, and cold lightning ran through me in a straight line. He held the silence for a long time.

  “I am sorry,” he said. The words tumbled out on his exhale. “I am so sorry.”

  “Um,” I said. “I…I don’t understand.”

  “I brought you here,” he said. “I am the reason you were stolen, I…” His whole body shook, and he gasped – crying. He averted his eyes and sucked in a breath through an open mouth. Then his teeth clamped together like he was in pain. His fist clenched, long draconian nails dug into the red fabric. “I was no different from him, once. Alar, and Orin, and Kolar and all the rest. I did not see…”

  He broke off, the words driving themselves into his tongue like nails. He recoiled from them, disgusted and afraid.

  “How could I?” he muttered, mostly to himself.

  “How…” could you what, I thought, but the answer was obvious. I sucked in my lip and watched his face turn orange in the fading light.

  “You…” he sighed and gave his head the slightest shake. “There is nothing I regret more than your pain,” he said. “There is nothing…”

  He steeled himself and looked me square in the eye. His dragon eye was unreadable, but his Sarchan eye, white and milky, was full of pain.

  “I regret only one thing more than the hurt I have caused you,” he said, “and that is the fact that I would not change it because it brought you to me.”

  He took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  I froze.

  I might die here, I thought. Death was as imminent as it had ever been, and being stolen from your home system has a way of putting life into perspective. Something you might hesitate to do, an act that should otherwise take months, if not years, of buildup suddenly becomes the stuff of impulse. It loses its magnitude, its severity, and it becomes just one of a hundred things you do in your life that matter. You skip the pieces your world has taugh
t you to need, and you get right to the heart of it. When your choices have been vaporized, nothing you do matters, so every little thing matters more, because it represents all the agency you have.

  He touched me. He laid his hands on either side of my waist, his claws pricking the skin, but he was gentle. Careful. He looked at me, searching my face. Waiting for any hint that I wanted to pull away, standing ready to accommodate my discomfort, but I wasn’t feeling any. All the reservations I’d ever had about boys and men and hands and lips dissolved into nothing. In a world with no choices there are no stakes. The only things in my world were my body and my will, and this creature in front of me, Larus Darin of Sarchaia, standing tall and strong, breathing slowly, inhaling me and drawing me closer, closer, closer…

  I looked up at him, feeling absurdly brave, and I kissed him.

  This time, his mouth opened. His tongue snaked forward, and so did mine. He slid my sleeves off my shoulders, opening his eyes briefly to see if I’d allow it. When I didn’t stop him, he continued, until both of us were naked as the day we were born.

  He pulled me gently to the floor, the fire spitting and crackling across the room. I remembered the graphics in Sol-dam’s lab, the anatomy of the aliens and how startlingly close it was to ours.

  And I looked down and verified it for myself.

  I couldn’t look at it for long, though. Darin abandoned my lips and dipped down to my throat, drawing his tongue across the pulsing vein, along the sharp edges of my collarbone. He tore away my shirt and moved down, and I felt his penis brushing against my inner thighs, and I realized as I was seized by a sudden, almost violent, throbbing that I had no idea what he expected to happen next.

  I froze for a fraction of a second, and Darin stopped. He hovered over me, hands braced against the carpet, silver hair falling around me like a veil – wings stretched wide, blotting out the candy-orange sky.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Nothing. I just…um.” Words wicked off the edges of my brain like water on wax. I floundered, grabbing at them, trying to piece together a sentence, but now my whole body was aflame. “How does it work with you?”

  “With me,” he said, squinting. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, sex,” I said. “It might be different for humans.”

  “You’re right.” He leaned down, pressing his chest against my breasts, and smiled. “So what would a human do?”

  “…Are you really asking?”

  “I am.”

  I blinked at him, fighting the rising urge to squirm and moan as he breathed, his whole body moving with each inhale, hairpin changes that took his dick a millimeter closer to me.

  “Where do you think you need to put…uh…” Fuck, I didn’t actually know the word for this. I couldn’t think of a decent way to describe it beyond “little friend” and I sure as hell wasn’t going to say that, so I just pointed.

  “Here,” he said, and I felt his finger probing my vagina, drawing small circles in the air just above it. I shuddered like I had the fever to end all fevers.

  “Yeah,” I said breathily, and his smile widened.

  “Would a human kiss you again?”

  “Yes.”

  His lips brushed mine, soft as a summer breeze, gentle and cool. They opened and closed and rose and fell, once, twice, growing stronger every time, more desperate, or maybe deliberate is the better word. His scaled hand rose to my chest and squeezed my boob, pinching my nipple between his thumb and forefinger. I gasped and my whole body went rigid, a spasm that turned my bones to slag.

  “Would a human do that?” Darin whispered.

  A human could fucking try, I thought, but all I could do was nod and pull him closer.

  “What else?” he said.

  “…Higher,” I said.

  The hand at my vagina rose, drawn slowly across my skin. He found the nub before I realized it and gave it an experimental press. I moaned, and he pressed harder, moving his hand in steady circles and pressing his lips down over mine.

  “Like this?”

  “Yes.” It was more a gasp than a word.

  He pressed harder – a little too hard, and I pulled back from him.

  “Not like that,” I said.

  “Softer?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded and adjusted accordingly. His movements were smooth, deliberate, if a bit slow. He was testing the waters, I think, watching my face, waiting for me to tell him to make another change. “What would a human do next?”

  I reached up and touched his throat, pulling him down to kiss me. His hands rose and reached under my back, and then he was pulling us both up, and as my knees found the carpet, soft and warm, he slipped inside of me.

  Oh.

  “Like that?” he said.

  I didn’t answer, but felt my hips start to move of their own accord, obeying a carnal instinct I had no name for, only colors: red like fire, red like the sun at dusk, red like blood and wine and the feel of a scream in the back of your throat. White, cold white, a sting like rubbing alcohol in a wound and the taste of salt as I kissed him at the lips, the throat, the chest, as he lifted me higher, moving forward and back beneath me, hands at my waist, holding me close. He kissed the valley between my breasts, pressed his nose into my hair and drank in the smell of me. His wings wrapped around us like a cocoon.

  Fun fact: the reason some women find it so hard to orgasm during vaginal sex is because their clitoris is too far away from their vagina, so the entry/exit method doesn’t do anything for them because the part that matters isn’t being stimulated. Mine, God bless, is close. Close enough for Darin’s gyrations to press against it every time, and keep me twitching beneath him, writhing as the orgasm went on and on and on and on. It took him another ten seconds to finish after I did. I wondered if all Sarchan males came slow like that, or if Darin was, as in many things, an anomaly. For the sake of the female Sarchan population, I hoped it was the former.

  He pulled out of me and I felt a warm explosion between my legs. The scientist in me wondered if we had enough post-zygotic barriers in place to prevent a pregnancy, like the incompatibility of human eggs and Sarchan sperm, but the thought was gone as soon as it came, like leaves on rushing water, loose paper in a hurricane. A question for another day.

  His wings rose and fell as he breathed. Firelight bled between them, orange stripes warring with shadows on one side of Darin’s face. He was breathing heavily. We both were.

  “Like that?” I said.

  He grinned. “Like that.”

  ***

  Outside, the darkness deepened. Swarming clouds swallowed the sky and all its stars, and the ocean was a thin silver line encircling a bottomless black pit. I stared at it, Darin’s grey arm draped over me, running his thumb up and down the jut of my breastbone. We lay on the carpet by the window, lying beneath a blanket Lenada had brought in. She’d given me a peculiar look, one of those baseline angry Sarchan expressions I couldn’t read, and left with an upturned nose. If Darin noticed, he didn’t say anything, but she’d been gone awhile and I felt absurdly embarrassed.

  “I hope this is obvious,” he said, “but that was amazing.”

  I laughed. For all his emotionally bankrupt alien friends, Darin was…funny. He was sweet, intimidating, intelligent.

  The last thought struck a chord of discomfort. My stomach shrank in on itself and I swallowed. Intelligent. He knew I was, I’d proven that by now. If it was still in question, he wouldn’t have slept with me. He certainly wouldn’t have asked me what I wanted him to do.

  “Yeah, it was,” I said. “How is Sol-dam’s search going?”

  It wasn’t the question I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t get myself to talk about the weather. Darin nodded slowly, thinking to himself. “Well, I think. We have found a man – or rather, Sol-dam has known a man for some time – who has long believed in…” He took a breath. “Extra-terrestrial intelligence. Whether he will stand for us is another question, but he is a goo
d start.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. Sol-dam has made a point not to say, in case someone is listening.”

  “Like the Dasyls.”

  “Maybe. Or any number of other organized families who trade in creatures. If we can prove you are alive in more ways than one, they’ll be out an industry.”

  Didn’t stop us, but I guess the Sarchan pride could be more than enough to spur them to humanitarian action. Even though their pride is what caused this crisis of ethics in the first place.

  “But he will find someone,” Darin added. “He will.” It didn’t sound like he enjoyed the thought.

  “…That’s good.”

  “Hmm.”

  He had a thousand different thoughts he could have been lost in just then, but I wondered if he was thinking about me, and what it would mean when I finally went home. I hadn’t thought about Earth in months, I’d made a point to avoid it. I talked with Sol-dam, sure, but only in theory, the way you might talk about Middle Earth or Tatooine. Earth and everyone on it existed mostly in the abstract. It seemed a distant dream now, make-believe, my memories a kaleidoscope fragmentation of color and sound and vague sensations. When one began, another would barrel into it and cut it short, a scrapbook-montage of my whole life, set to the doleful bellowing of an Irish funeral song. The very thought of home had become, ironically, almost alien.

  But now, a pang of homesickness rang through me like a struck bell. I felt nauseas, and a thick wad of air and cotton formed in the back of my throat. I swallowed hard against it and stared straight forward. Darin’s hand had gone still above my chest. The silence stretched and pulled between us like taffy.

  “You,” he whispered at last, “are the greatest gift I could have ever received.”

  From somebody else, under any other circumstances, that might have been sweet – but I felt my stomach turn red and turned abruptly away from him, rising from the floor and walking to the window.

  “What is wrong?” he said, sitting up. His wings scraped against the bookcases, carving thin silver lines into the dark paint.

  I crossed my arms and stared at the ocean, saying nothing. You could see it from everywhere in this place, grey watery tongues lapping at the alabaster shores with the silence of the grave.