“You got your kiss,” I say, clearing my throat into my fist to clear the desire from my warbling tone. “So I guess I’ll have to wait for our next fight to continue unraveling you.”
He makes a small, choked sound in the back of his throat and takes a step away from me. I don’t have any trouble seeing what the effect of my words are on his body. His pants are tented around the crotch. I try to cage my smile with little effect. I look away instead, grateful that he can’t see my mirrored response.
“You speak as if you have forgotten your own prize or no longer want it.”
“I do want it.”
“Then you speak as if you do not intend to win.”
I look away, but he slides his finger under my chin, just as he’s done so many other times. “On the coming solar, you will come here to train with the warriors after your second meal. You will join the group led by Ka’Okkari.”
Shock. “I’m joining a group? Training with the other warriors?”
“Hexa. You have sufficient foundation, but you need refinement, control, and an introduction to our hunting formations and our weapons. I will join you after your training to provide you with additional instruction.”
“You will?”
He growls, “As Okkari I am not accustomed to repeating myself. If you demand this of me again, then I will punish you.”
I swallow. “Punish how?”
He gives me a scorching look and all thoughts of rebellion die. Being punished by him is suddenly all I want in this world. I bite my bottom lip. Even without irises, I can see how he focuses on it, mouth parting in response.
“During your training, of course.”
“Of course,” I say quickly, and then I follow him out into the cold.
He walks me to Re’Okkari’s home and waits for me until I step inside. I pretend I’m not disappointed that he doesn’t follow, almost forgetting for a second that Kuana’s still here, dutifully cleaning the same spot she’s probably already cleaned a dozen times.
“Thank you, Okkari,” I tell him before the doors glide shut. “For including me, even after everything.”
“You are welcome, Kiki.”
I nod, searching for something else to say. Some way to keep him here. “It was a really good date.”
“I am pleased.”
“And I will have your name, Okkari. Eventually.”
“Do not make me wait. I wish to hear it on your tongue,” he says, breath forming clouds in the cold. “And I do not wish to wait long.”
14
Kiki
He’s a crueler trainer than Jaxal, but he’s a good one — even I can admit that. He pushes me hard — but not too hard — and it hurts — but not enough to stop me from training with him the next solar and the next solar and the next.
My whole body is sore and achy but the stinging pain doesn’t last. I start to firm up. To remember what it was like to do hard work every day. To go beyond that and push myself, using new weapons and machines and stances and techniques I’ve never seen before, honing new muscles that I never even knew I possessed.
Kuana tries to gently coerce me into letting her repair the tear in my okami, but I’m obstinate and fuss over it myself until two males enter our space carrying four huge metal pails between them. Steam whicks off of their glimmering surfaces and I’m transfixed by the sight, as I am every time. Kuana directs them to a deep basin built into the ground by the kitchen area and even though I try to get Kuana to wash first, she’s possibly as stubborn as I am and refuses.
I sink into the hot water, letting my aches and pains become one with it. I close my eyes. It’s been sixteen solars. Sixteen solars living with aliens and already it’s hard for me to remember any other life.
“Xhea?” She asks, hesitation in her tone. Even though I asked her not to call me Xhea, I don’t hate that she does. What I hate is her reticence to ask. It’s been a too many solars living together now for her to still be afraid of me. For me to still be a bitch to her. I’m no better than Kuaku. Except Kuaku was only being an ass hole to me and I’m already an ass hole. Now I’m being an ass hole to Kuana and she’s nothing but nice. I’m worse than Kuaku by three and Kuana is paying the price.
“Yes?” I try to say it nice and even look over my shoulder at her while my hands continue scrubbing at my skin in efficient strokes.
Naturally, she’s in the kitchen busy scrubbing something that is undoubtedly already clean since cleaning is all she’s done since she arrived. It makes me wonder what she did before. I want to ask her, but I…I’ve never asked her anything personal before.
“I would be pleased to lend you my assistance.”
“In the bath?” I balk, “I’m okay, thanks.”
Her forehead sizzles yellow — a color I know by now is something like shame. And the only reason I know that is because she’s perpetually yellow in the face around me. “I would offer assistance only to help you since you seem to have strained many muscles these past solars training with the xub’Okkari. That is all.”
Stars. She’s got a point. “I’ve got it. All good.”
She turns back to the clean surface and takes her rag to it again while I finish up, wondering what mama would think if she could hear me and see me now. Wouldn’t know a kind word if it slapped you, she’d say. And she’d be absolutely right.
I finish quickly and let Kuana do the same. She finishes combing through her hair — an act that takes her about two seconds — and while I continue working madly to detangle the smallest lock of my hair, she goes back to cleaning that same imaginary mess again.
I laugh humorlessly and actually slap my palm to my face. “Kuana,” I snap, harsher than I mean to.
She straightens like I’ve stuck her with a pin and meets my gaze in the mirror I’m seated in front of. It’s a well-polished piece of black stone, very unlike the silver mirrors we use back home. Because of that, the color of my hair and skin blend in with it and my hair floats around my head now like a mane with a will and mind of its own — a thicket impossible to get all the way through…without help.
“Hexa, my Xhea. I am here.”
“We both know you’re not cleaning anything.”
She sets down the gamma radiator and the wipe she’s been using and turns to face me fully. “Nox,” she sighs, “I am not.”
“Well stop it then.”
“What else would you have me do?”
“Come help me with my hair.” If there was ever a point at which I wanted all aliens to suffer, it’s time to backtrack now, because she is suffering and in the greatest feat of irony the universe has ever delivered me, I’m suffering too because of it.
Brilliant white and blue flutter across her forehead and down the center of her nose. She trills, “I am pleased to do this for you. Do you need help with combing it?”
“Yes…hexa,” I say and her face lights up even more, bringing heat to my own. I should give her more tasks and more regularly. I’m responsible for her. “And braiding it.”
“Braid? I do not know this word.”
“It’s fine then, I…” I’m just about to tell her I’ve got it when the colors in her face change again, shifting back to that grotesque and tormented yellow. I catch my own tongue — something I’ve never been very skilled at before — and offer her a weird smile of my own. “I’ll teach you. I know my hair is very different from yours but it would be a huge help to have someone help me braid it…”
Surprise. “I would be honored to learn.” She bows deeply and I feel myself flush all over again.
“Oh quit it, would you? Just come over here. None of that bowing crap.”
A smile still on her face, Kuana takes a pillow and plops it down beside me and together we comb through my hair and separate the mass into smaller chunks. I show her the movements with my fingers and am not surprised at all that she makes a quick study of it. With just a few practice braids that she afterwards undoes, she’s already better at it than I am.
I s
igh, relaxed in ways I haven’t been in so long. I’m warm and dry and the soothing touch of her fingers against my scalp, pulling ever so gently as she makes box braids appear one after the other, is enough to make me forget that I’m living with aliens — or maybe even, to help me realize just how nice living with aliens can be.
“Xhea?” She says softly.
“Hexa?”
Behind me, I can feel her cool breath on my neck when she exhales just a little. “Is it acceptable for me to ask you a question?”
In the mirror’s gaze, I stare into hers, watching as her alien eyes blink. I tell her something I should have told her solars ago, the day that we met. A small crack of truth in the veneer of my hate, paper thin yet capable of unraveling the entirety of it. “You are my equal. You don’t ever have to ask.”
“It’s just that…you don’t often seem like you want to talk to me.”
I cringe outwardly and even though it feels strange — alien in itself — I take her hand. It’s dry and rough in places I don’t expect for someone so delicate and soft. She works hard. Even in the little time I’ve known her, I’ve seen the evidence of that. “I know and I’m sorry. But I also know that you’ve seen the report from the Okkari about me and the human colony. A bad Voraxian hurt me very badly and I thought you were all like that. I know that’s not true now, I just…I need your patience.”
She bows to me slightly and her ridges flare blue again in pleasure. I turn to face forward and when she picks back up her braiding, she surprises me. “Who did these braids for you on your home colony?”
I smile and this time the expression comes to me effortlessly. “My mother.”
I take in a breath and with my eyes closed I’m back there, on the colony. Sand swirls softly around my ankles. My head tilts to the side onto mama’s thigh. I’d fall asleep if she wasn’t tugging on my hair something fierce. But every time she calls me brave, I’m reminded that I am and don’t cry.
I could stop there, but I don’t. Urged on by something I can’t give name to because I don’t understand it myself, I let her in. I tell her, “It was hot on our colony so a lot of the time, she’d braid my hair outside. It would take so much of the solar, but I was never bored. Jaxal would come by and we would play stones, or Miar…I mean, the Rakukanna would show me one of her newest inventions. At just two or three rotations old, I remember she once showed me this trap she built for sand rats. We were hungry, even back then, and later managed to even catch one but…we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t kill it. So we let it go.” I exhale and with her fingers on my scalp, pulling and teasing out the knots, I’m a child once again, safe sitting in between my mother’s knees where nothing can hurt me.
“You miss this moon colony,” she says and it’s not a question, it’s a fact.
“Hexa, I do.”
“Will you…return?”
Vocabulary fails me, which is a bit sad since I only know the one so far, but I’m trying. All I can do is try.
I’m not sure what to say — not because I don’t know, but because I can’t decide what to tell her. I can’t tell her that I was hurt there once and that the memory of Bo’Raku haunts me and I never want to see the colony again because of it — not because it didn’t happen, but because it would be a lie.
The truth is that I don’t want to go back because when I was sparring with a warrior called Tra’Okkari the solar before, we ended up deadlocked — neither of us gaining any ground until eventually Ka’Okkari came by and broke us up. I’ll be pleased to have you watching my back on the first hunt of the season, Tra’Okkari said to me. I’d been too speechless to answer, but when he signaled me in a warrior’s greeting — both arms crossed over his chest at the wrists — I’d been proud.
The truth is that I don’t want to go back because on the colony, I lived in fear of the day they’d come back. But here, there is no fear because here, I am powerful.
“I don’t think I will.”
“You are pleased to be with us in the village?”
I swallow hard. “Hexa. I think so.”
She trills and exhales, her fingers working quickly now. So pleasant, the sensation, I give up on my own braid and just…sit. “Xhivey. This is good to hear. Some were worried that you would not wish to remain with us.”
“Some? What does that mean?”
Her fingers don’t pause, but keep moving surely. I wonder if she can feel the sudden tension in my neck and back — or if she can even read my emotions at all given that I don’t have the colors in my face that she does. “Hexa. When collecting supplies over the past solars, I have been approached by many of the females, curious about you and your humans in general. Some of them expressed concern that you are living in a separate residence as this is not common for Xiveri mates.”
“Comets on a cracker. What did you say?”
“I explained to them that this is not your culture.”
“And what did they say?”
“Most understood as everyone has read the guide provided by Svera, the advisor.” She keeps braiding in silence, as if that’s not an entirely unfinished sentence.
I scooch an inch to the left so I can see her in the mirror more clearly. “And?”
“Verax,” she says that untranslatable word again, which means that she needs further explanation.
I huff. “You said most. Most is not all. So what did the others say that didn’t understand?”
“My Xhea, it is not important what a few think…”
“Of course it is. What did they say?”
She waits, then confesses. “They think you shame him.”
I inhale as if struck. That’s not what I expected. I expected all manner of foul thing to come out of their mouths about me — a foreign female who’s taken their leader for herself, who tried to run and caused the death of a warrior, who trains with the xub’Okkari and thinks she’s one herself. I glance away from the reflective surface and focus on that stupid spot in the kitchen that Kuana cleaned to death. At this point, I don’t really feel like looking at myself.
“And what did you say?”
“I said that they were wrong and that any business that affects your relationship with the Okkari is between the two of you alone.”
“Thank you, but you know they’re not wrong.” I groan. “And that sucks.”
“Sucks? How can something suck if it is only what was said? A sentence has no mouth.”
I chuckle inadvertently, rolling my eyes and nudging her with my elbow, like we’re old friends. “That’s obviously not what I meant. It’s just a human expression. I’m just embarrassed — not even on my own behalf, but for the Okkari and he hasn’t even done anything wrong.”
She doesn’t answer right away which just makes me feel worse. “It is not known for us, to have Xiveri mates separated, or to have our Xhea try to run away… But neither is a warrior Xhea who fights her Okkari or who trains with the xub’Okkari. You are new for us. There will always be those who doubt.”
“But they shouldn’t doubt him. He didn’t do anything wrong. I just…need time to figure this all out. This is new for me too.”
“The Okkari knows this. I’m sure.”
That doesn’t make me feel better. “He doesn’t.” I finger one of the braids she made, hanging down near my breasts, which are exposed. It’s a perfect braid, evenly weighted, not a frayed strand. Just as perfect as my mom would have done. Maybe even better, though she’d tut at that. Scowling down at me with her hands on her hips, towel perpetually hanging from the apron at her waist — not that she cooks. It’s where she carries her army of hair supplies. “Kiki, that is a sloppy braid. If only you could braid as well as you could hit.”
“Then you must make him. You are our warrior Xhea.”
I don’t feel like it. I shake my head.
Kuana pauses again, this time with a slight jerk, like she’s restraining herself from saying something more.
“What is it, Kuana?”
“May I offer a
suggestion?”
“Please,” I grumble, only half sarcastically.
Luckily, she doesn’t seem to notice. “It is important for the Xhea to honor her tribe. You honor the tribe, you honor the Okkari.”
“How do I honor the tribe?”
She gives me a small smile. “You are our warrior Xhea. I leave this up to you, for anything I could suggest would be inferior, I’m sure.”
She finishes the last braid and heats water on my instruction. We dip the ends of my hair into the hot water, sealing them, and she gushes over me. “Beautiful.”
“What’s beautiful is your work. My mom was always chastising me because I could never braid as well as she could. I think you might even make her jealous with what you’ve done.” I shake out my hair, letting the weight of the braids and their tight roots remind me of her and home and a happy childhood. “Thank you, Kuana. For everything.”
Deep blue again, against her bright green skin, the color looks alarming, but I’m getting used to it. In fact, it’s only when her colors are truly startling that I even notice the color of her skin anymore. I wonder if she notices mine anymore either.
She opens her mouth to answer, but as does, there’s a knock on our door. A knock. And that can only mean one thing. Only one person here knocks while the rest hail on my or Kuana’s personal communicator and then just enter.
Kuana quickly throws a pelt over my shoulders, one that drops all the way to my calves. She fixes it with a stone clasp and I amble awkwardly beneath it, heading to the door.
“Come in,” I shout, but when nothing happens, I press my palm to the vein reader and the door whooshes open.
Air blasts into the space so cold I have to close my eyes against it. Even in the pelt I’ve donned, I can feel the icy sting against my feet and shins, whooshing up to touch my core. My lips pulse and heat and, like I do every time, I try to ignore it and can’t. Seeing him, knowing that we’ve been so close these past solars when we’ve been sparring — but haven’t touched — makes me restless. More restless than ever. Each solar is worse than the last.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 16
