“Dangerous fun,” Khy said. “I ended up mated thanks to this party.”
Anna threw an elbow into his side. “You had your chance to get away.”
“Did I? Because as I recall, someone-”
He was going to remind her of how she had asked to remain friends after his Ssensyenya ended because she couldn’t bear to be apart from him, and then handcuffed him to her bed and declared she was taking him as her mate, but she elbowed him again, harder this time. He hissed, touching the spot. He loved it when she got physical, and she knew that. Sometimes she called him a pervert, but sometimes she did it deliberately to turn him on when she was in the mood. He loved her, his little endless challenge.
“I’m Maggie, and this is Ro. We work in Enquiries,” Maggie introduced them, and they all shook hands. Khy noticed when she spotted Anna’s ring, turning it up to the light. Anna had been wearing it long enough now that he didn’t puff up every time it was mentioned, but he still liked to know people noticed. “Oh, you’re married? Congratulations.”
Anna smiled and pulled her hand back, turning the ring on her finger, which she did sometimes when she was nervous or, he suspected, when she was feeling particularly in love with him. “Thank you.”
“I remember all that stuff that happened last year… I just wanted to say you really made a difference for us.” Maggie took the Balin’s hand, and Khy realised what she was trying to say. They were a couple too.
The attention Khy and Anna had received from the press and from hate groups after their relationship was made public by some paparazzi had been… bad. It had soured their new and delicate relationship. Anna had suffered, he knew, and he was just glad those days were over. It had been Anna’s idea to make it a movement and post selfies of them kissing on social media to show they were not ashamed. This couple must have seen them. If they worked at DETI, they couldn’t have missed the protesters that had set up camp across the road.
“We weren’t trying to make a big statement…” Anna said, uncomfortable with the praise.
“Oh no, I know, but… I just wanted to say thanks,” Maggie said, holding a hand up to show she meant no offence.
“Well, you’re welcome, I guess.” Anna laughed, “You’ve made a difference for us by throwing this party. It’s kind of sentimental to be back.”
“Maybe we’ll even remember it this time.” Khy knew that even if this couple had seen him and Anna leave together last year, and knew they were together now, they probably didn’t know the extent to which they couldn’t remember that night. The complete memory blank was the result of mixing his ishti with whatever they had been drinking at the party. Ishti centred the mind in the present. He used to carry a flask to keep himself from thinking too much about what he had lost on Teiss, but he found he didn’t need it anymore now he had Anna. When combined with human alcohol, it resulted in complete memory black outs, as they’d proven.
“We definitely won’t drink as much,” Anna said, to him or to Maggie he didn’t know.
“I left my flask at home.”
Anna smiled at him. “We’ve got this.” She held up her fist, and Khy bumped it. They were a team on a mission.
“The refreshments are that way if you change your mind,” Maggie said, pointing.
Anna laughed. “Thanks.” She glanced at Khy. “I’m sure a little wouldn’t hurt.”
He should have seen this coming. It was rude to refuse a host’s offerings after all and Anna, as much as she’d talked about staying sober, didn’t turn down free alcohol. The night they’d met hadn’t gone as planned, but by all accounts they’d had fun. As long as they didn’t drink any ishti, they could have a drink or two. She pulled him away to the refreshment table.
“Let’s just try not to be caught on camera this time,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this party going as disastrously as their first one, but even so. He had learned his lesson. Their relationship wasn’t a secret, they were married after all, but he could do without the attention that came with photographs of them hitting the internet.
Anna just laughed and pulled him after her. The table was covered with plates and bowls of snacks, and Anna helped herself, eating straight from the serving dishes until she found something she wanted more of and filled a plate.
Khy looked around, trying to work out where they had found the stupid accessories they had been photographed in the year before: the Santa hat, the tinsel, and the bauble-shaped glasses.
He could remember that day. He could remember walking a last round of the building at the end of his shift, and finding the new hire still at her desk in the press office. He’d been introduced to her and assigned to giving her a tour of the building and setting up her security access, and he’d thought she was pretty but there’d been nothing to warn him he was looking at his mate. He’d thought she was funny, and appreciated that she wasn’t as short as other human women so he didn’t have to hunch down to hear her. They’d made each other smile that day, so when he found her later, he didn’t see the harm in suggesting she join him at the office party. She was new, it would be a good opportunity for her to meet people. He’d only meant to be kind.
Fast-forward to waking up the next morning with the worst headache of his life, nauseous, and with undeniable evidence that he’d not only mounted his first human, but he’d done it more than once with a woman who’d only arrived at the office the day before. Cue the worst two weeks of his life on Earth. She’d yelled, lied, ran, tricked him, discredited him at work, and cost him near a thousand dollars all while making them the target of anti-Teissian hate groups. But there had been good moments too, and they’d grown into days, until the good outweighed the bad and he wanted her for himself, this woman who never stopped fighting. No Teissian woman had ever fought him as hard as Anna had, no one had reached down to pull him up by his feathers, forcing him to stand up and look around and act, to do something and be something, instead of drifting from day to day, only concerned with forgetting what he had lost.
Now he was married. Now he was chief. Now his people were about to secure land for themselves that they could settle in the old ways, or as close as they could get. The Volon would live on because of what he was doing, and he was only doing it because of her.
She didn’t need to know that though. He knew she distanced herself from his work as chief because she didn’t think a human should get involved. She was his mate, the chief’s mate, but she let him meet with his people alone. She was always kind and friendly to them, but she didn’t attend meetings with him or advise him. She listened when he wanted to talk, but she always said he would know better than her what to do.
Anna brought his thoughts back to the present by nudging a cup against his arm, trying to make him take it.
He looked at it and sighed, accepting it. “Are we really doing this?”
She tapped her cup against his and grinned. “Bottoms up.” She tipped the cup back, but Khy saw that she didn’t drain it. More than half was left when she lowered it again, so apparently they weren’t going that crazy tonight. He smiled and followed her lead, tasting the punch. It was spicy and sweet and the alcohol burned his throat a little, but the Volon rarely mixed their drinks, so this human practice of masking alcohol under mixers still struck him as cute more than anything.
He helped himself to a fistful of peanuts coated with something crunchy.
For the next hour or so, Volon and other security guards came to make small talk. The Volon all had some minor tribe matter to discuss, and he did his best to put them off for now. He was at a party, he was with his mate. In a week’s time, they would be traveling to Arizona to see about the establishment of a Volon tribe on some new land out there. He had enough on his plate, as the humans said.
Seeing his fellow security guards was different. He had dropped to part-time since mating Anna. He only really stayed on to retain his security access to the building. Being chief gave him enough to do, but she still worked later than she should and skipped lunch by
simply forgetting. She needed him to drag her away from her desk at five pm, and bring her lunch and make her eat it. She rolled her eyes, but he knew her. He had responsibilities as a mate too.
He’d been friends with a lot of the guards when he worked full-time, and he hadn’t seen some of them in weeks or even months if they worked different shifts. Lee and Tol were famous in the building because they were the ones most often on the check-in desk. Ronaldos worked the desk in the evening. Apart from them, there were a dozen more officers who patrolled the building and monitored the security footage, and planned and implemented new policy and technology. The security of the building and its employees was of the highest priority, being a government building with public tensions rising around Teissian immigration. The group that had protested his relationship with Anna was not the only one who had a problem with Teissians or the humans who helped them, but the security team had to pretend that there were no threats and everyone was safe as houses. Their presence was to be felt but not seen.
After going part-time, Khy had a lot of catching up to do with the people he had missed. He was full of questions about this plan or that patrol, and he showed off Anna’s wedding ring at every opportunity. He asked about holiday plans, and told his friends about Anna’s family joining them for Christmas, and their upcoming trip to Arizona. He almost missed living in the dorms, but he wouldn’t trade his life with Anna for anything.
They drank more punch. They didn’t drink a lot, and it was pretty weak, but he and Anna were both laughing louder than usual, and more often. When they found themselves alone for a minute, Anna pulled him to her, almost pulling him over.
“Hello, handsome stranger,” she giggled. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Anna, what-?”
“I can see you work in Security,” she continued, walking her fingers up his vest. “I just arrived today. Care to show me around?”
He pressed his palm to her forehead, smiling at her antics. “Are you having flashbacks?”
She batted his hand away and rolled her eyes. “No… We’re recreating the night we met, aren’t we? We can’t remember what really happened, so why not make some new memories?”
“By pretending we don’t know each other? We’re already married, so if this is some game to escape me…”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Anna propped her hands on her hips. “I haven’t tried to escape you in months.”
“Wrong. You hid in the restrooms at Starbucks-”
“I was not hiding, there was a line, you-”
“And then there was the time I told you to come to me and you ran away.”
Anna paused. “When was that?”
“Last month. We were going to have sex and you were on the other side of the bed and I said-”
“Oh my god, that was a game! Because you love chasing me, you lunatic!” She bumped her hip against him, smiling at the memory.
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Well, what about the time you asked me to get you a tea from the cafe and when I got back you’d left and taken a cab and you didn’t get home for an hour?”
She pursed her lips, almost looking guilty. “Okay, but you were really being crazy that day. And I had to buy your Christmas present!”
He’d been angry when she got home. He’d pulled her clothes off to look for signs of other males, while snarling that she was his, his mate, and she was not to go anywhere without him. She’d snapped back that she wasn’t his property and she could do what she wanted, and then they’d fucked on the kitchen table. He liked fights like that. Had there been a shopping bag?
“I told you, I don’t need a Christmas present,” he reminded her.
“No one needs a Christmas present, and no one who says that really means it. As if I could let Christmas come and go and not get you anything.”
He sighed. “When will you start listening to me?”
She smiled at him. “Maybe when I go deaf with old age, but I can’t promise anything.”
He gave her arm a squeeze, letting her feel the points of his claws. “Devil-woman.”
“For the record, I haven’t said I don’t need a Christmas present. I would like a Christmas present from you.”
“Is my life-long loyalty and protection not enough?”
“I can’t unwrap that.”
“You can unwrap this,” he said, pulling her hand to brush against his zipper again.
Anna laughed, her cheeks pinked from either the alcohol or their conversation. “Maybe if you put a bow on it, but it will have to be a big bow.”
“Of course it will have to be big, to fit my-”
Anna drowned him out with a groan, putting her head in her hands. “I walked straight into that, didn’t I?”
“You did,” he laughed. “But don’t worry, I have taken your subtle hints, and bought you something to satisfy your hunger for material goods.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist, leaning into him. “Thank you, baby.”
“We have discussed you calling me that-”
“Oh, sorry, it was sweetheart, wasn’t it? Sweetie? Muffin? Sugar pie? Cuddle Monkey? Love nugget?”
He flinched. The last one was new. “You terrify me.”
“Terrify you with love, my little…” She took his face in his hands, considering him. “Love lizard.”
“I’ll have you know, calling a Teissian a lizard is considered highly offensive.”
“Alright, my little… minty candy cane. Sprig of holly. Mistletoe. Mistletoe! That’s what you are. Mostly green, some white. And it’s seasonal.”
Khy put his hand down on the top of her head as if holding her in place, a move he knew she hated. “Very well, my little sausage, my peach, my little skin puppet, soft flesh stick with hair on top.”
She did her best to look coolly unimpressed, pushing his hand off her, sniffing in disdain. “You’ve made your point.”
“Have I? I can go on.”
“No, thank you.”
He took her back under his arm and pressed a kiss to her temple. “You’re my beautiful flesh stick.”
“Keep calling me that, and you’re going to need to worry about your other flesh stick.”
Khy grunted. “Noted.” He drained his glass. “Do you still want to play your game where we pretend we’ve never met?” He smiled at her to let her know he was offering. It could be fun, to come at this woman as if for the first time, to tell her how beautiful he found her, and how much he would like to get to know her because he had the oddest feeling they could spend the rest of their lives together.
She studied him for a moment, then said, “No, I think I’m okay, actually.” She reached up and fluffed the feathers in his crest, smiling softly. “I’m finding it hard to imagine life without you just now.”
Touched, he whispered a hiss, and tugged her in to kiss her. She softened his heart a little more every day, and now he was totally hers. He might be worried, if he didn’t know she needed him just as much. She wouldn’t have married him if she didn’t. He understood that better now than he had the day he’d proposed, or even the day of their wedding. When Anna didn’t want to do something, she kicked and screamed and threatened and wriggled away, but when they were alone together, there were soft moments when she was quiet and still. She stroked his feathers and mapped the ttsustanda markings on his arm with her fingertips. More than once he had felt her watching him in his sleep, or pulling the covers up over him. Some days she would throw herself down on the sofa beside him and simply ask “What are we watching?” and if she was working and he didn’t check on her for more than six hours, she always realised. Food wasn’t worth remembering, but she missed him in her day.
And yet, she never stopped arguing, never stopped challenging him, never bored him. This human woman was the perfect Volon mate.
The recorded singer sang to her lover about Christmas, and Anna curled her hands around his ribs as they kissed. When he dipped his tongue into her mouth, she was ready, pressing against
him.
Had it been like this last year? Had their first kiss been like this? He didn’t think it could have been. It wouldn’t have had this love inside it. They’d been drunk, they would have been messy and, on his part at least, nervous, uncertain about kissing and humans. But at the same time, it must have been something like this, because they had ended up in his bed together, and now they were married. Maybe in some small way, their kisses had always been like this.
Yes, kissing her now under the same circumstances, he could definitely see how he would want to take this woman home.
When he pulled gently away, he watched her lick her lips, and they shared a smile. She was infuriating, and she was perfect.
He wanted to tell her so. “You’re dangerous, woman. I think I’m being seduced all over again.”
She laughed. “You say that like it was my fault.”
“It must have been. I would never have pursued a human.”
“Well, I guess we’ll never know,” she said, and the way she turned away from him told him she knew exactly who had made the first move back then. “Let’s get a picture by the tree.”
He huffed. “What is it with you and pictures?”
“Hello? PR?”
“Ah, of course.”
“Maybe I can humorously crop your head out or something. I can make it into a Christmas card.”
“Give me your Gadjit and I can miss you out entirely.”
And that was exactly what they did. Standing in front of the tree, grabbing Anna’s Gadjit off each other, she first took a picture of herself leaning against Khy’s chest, only his shoulders in frame. Khy snatched it out of her hands and grinned into the camera as he held it at arms’ length, Anna visible from the eyes up at his side.
Khy shook with laughter. “I’m making this my profile picture. I wonder if there’s a short girlfriend support group.”
“I am not short! I am tall for a woman,” Anna cried indignantly.
“So sad,” Khy said, shaking his head and ignoring her as he sent himself the photo.
An Office Alien Christmas Collection (Office Aliens Book 5) Page 19
