by Lauren Esker
Gorgeous eyes. Cat's eyes, amber threaded with green and gold and subtle hints of violet ...
She had to tear her gaze away. "No!" she said to his lips—which wasn't any better; this close, she could see how the blue continued all the way inside his mouth, not like grease-paint alien makeup, but a million subtle shades of blue and purple, just like human skin. "No, it'll be light soon, and people will see you. And it's miles to the lake, with houses and farms and roads. I know all you can see from our farm is trees, but it's not all like that."
Rei quirked a brow quizzically. He took her by the shoulders and carefully, but effortlessly, moved her out of the way. She'd been right about how strong he was.
"No!" she protested. "You'll get caught!"
He was fumbling with the door latch. Sarah closed her hand over his, and was arrested once again by the contrast of her small, square pink fingers against his blue ones. She blinked and looked up into those serious, intelligent cat's eyes.
"I'll take you," she sighed.
***
Rei seemed to understand readily enough what she wanted, even when she threw a pile of empty feed sacks into the passenger side of the truck and gestured him down to the floor before putting a couple of the old sacks on top of him. Heck, she hadn't gotten this much comprehension out of her high-school boyfriends even though they both spoke the same language.
He pushed himself up far enough to look out the window as she turned out of the driveway. It was still very early, brightening from night into a cool gray dawn. Sarah didn't blame him for wanting to look around, not that there was much to see out here. But maybe for an alien, a road lined with trees and farms was as exotic as his spaceship seemed to her.
Whenever headlights approached on the farm road, she murmured "Down" and gave him a push below the level of the windows. After the first time, he understood what "Down" meant, ducking and covering up whenever she said it.
Well, he's brighter than most of the dogs in town, she thought, and tried not to laugh.
She avoided the town and cut over to the lake by the back roads. So far she'd encountered few other cars, just the usual handful of farm vehicles or people driving to early jobs in town, but flashing lights on the lake road caught her attention. There was a sheriff's car parked sideways across the road up ahead.
"Oh no, I knew it," she whispered. "There's a police barricade."
She slammed on her brakes. It was light enough now that she could see a deputy in a wide-brimmed hat next to the cop car, smoking a cigarette and looking in her direction. If she turned the truck around and hightailed it out of there, all she'd do was make them suspicious and maybe get in her very first police chase.
"Down, down!" she hissed at Rei, covering him with more feed sacks. "Be quiet. Quiet!"
Although she knew he couldn't understand, the heap of feed sacks was utterly still and silent as Sarah pulled up to the police car and rolled down her window. "What's going on?" she asked with her best and most innocent smile.
"You live around here, ma'am?" the deputy asked. He glanced into the truck, his eyes passing over the cluttered interior without much curiosity.
"Sure. My dad and I have a farm over on the other side of town." Don't look at Rei. Eyes forward, Sarah. You can do this.
A drop of sweat trickled down her back. As a teenager, she'd hated being in trouble with the school authorities. She'd never been arrested. She'd never even smoked pot!
"License and registration, please?"
She dug it out of the glove box, reaching across the heap of feed sacks. Her arm brushed against Rei's shoulder, warm and solid under the camouflage.
"See anything weird last night, Miss Metzger?" the deputy asked as he examined her license.
"Weird like what?" Sarah asked brightly, and then tried not to wince at the realization that the whole town had probably seen Rei's spaceship crash. Indeed, the deputy was giving her a puzzled look now. "We go to bed and get up early out at the farm," she explained. "If anything happened after dark, I wouldn't know about it. Were those stupid town kids causing trouble again?"
After another long look at her, and a second glance into the truck, the deputy asked, "What's your business out at the lake this morning?"
At least she had a decent excuse for this. "I lost my phone out here yesterday. I wanted to look for it."
"How'd you do that?"
"We were boating, and either it fell in the water or got lost on the beach. I wanted to walk around and look for it." Inwardly, she patted herself on the back. For a person who rarely lied, that was a pretty good one if she did say so herself.
"Late in the year for boating, with the weather gettin' so cold."
"We were out on the lake looking at the fall colors," Sarah explained. "Me and my dad." Don't call and check. Please don't call and check. "Listen, if the lake's closed right now, I can just go home and try to find my phone some other time. But it's my phone, you know? I don't want to have to buy a new one and change my number everywhere if it's just laying on the beach somewhere."
At this point she almost hoped he told her to leave—her nerves were a wreck—but he looked thoughtful and then handed her license back. "Go ahead. If you find anything else, something funny-looking, bring it to the sheriff's department, okay?"
"What sort of funny-looking?" Sarah asked—innocently, she hoped.
"Weather balloon fell in the lake last night, it looks like. Weather service wants it back, that's all. So if you pick up any pieces of metal or anything else that's not supposed to be there, bring them down to the sheriff's office."
"Okay, will do," she promised, and he waved her through.
As the truck got up to speed on the lake road again, the pile of feed sacks lurched. Sarah reached over, groped for the top of Rei's head through the camouflage, and pushed him down. "Stay," she ordered. "There might be cops on the beach. If we're not alone down there, I'm turning right back around, okay?"
She knew he couldn't understand a word, but he stayed where she'd put him as she bumped down the dirt road to her favorite beachside lookout. It was full daylight now, but the light was flat and gray, a heavy cloud cover shrouding the sky. If it had been like this yesterday, she'd never have come out here, never have met Rei, and missed out on the biggest adventure of her life.
There was no one on the beach, so she parked in her usual place, where the woods gave way to sand but before the sand got soft enough to trap her tires. When she opened her truck door and hopped down, she could see that people had been tramping around. There were boot tracks all over the beach, scuffing the sand where waves hadn't smoothed them away. A boat anchor had left a deep divot on the beach. Importantly, though, they weren't here now.
"It's okay. You can come out." She leaned back into the truck through her door and pulled the topmost feed sack off Rei. He sat up, his hair standing up in tousled tufts. "But we can't stay for long, all right? They might come back. And ... why am I still talking, you don't understand any of this."
Rei was already groping at the inside of the passenger door, trying to figure out how the handle worked. "It's—" she began, but he gave up and came out her door instead, sliding gracefully past her. His body brushed hers, and she was reminded all over again that he was a very sexy man.
For someone who was blue. And an alien.
He looked around, and Sarah tucked her hands into her pockets, watching him. The wind off the lake was bitterly cold, late October with a promise of November, and he was still barefoot. Maybe his people didn't wear shoes?
Just as she was wondering how he could possibly be warm enough in nothing but his rumpled silver coverall and her dad's plaid shirt, he shucked off the shirt, dropping it in the sand. Her surprise turned to shock when he began popping open a seam of sticky tabs down the side of his coverall.
"Wait," she squeaked, but he peeled out of it with a quick, smooth motion, leaving it in the sand like a snake's shed skin.
He wasn't wearing anything under it.
&n
bsp; He was blue all the way down, she thought dazedly. And he had a pattern of gold dots down his back, a double row on either side of his spine, patterned in gentle whorls like the ones on his face.
Rei looked over his shoulder at her and said something incomprehensible. He gave her one of his quick, sweet smiles ... which had a whole new impact on her entire body, coming from a guy who was stark naked.
"Rei! People are going to see you!" Like me, for example!
Ignoring her, he strode forward, muscles rippling smoothly under his blue skin. He seemed to have no self-consciousness at all about being naked. Sarah didn't mean to stare, but she was entranced by his flexing calf muscles, the tight buttocks, the firm curve of his spine—
He strode into the water and now she was getting alarmed.
"The lake bottom drops off really quickly!" she called. "Be careful!" Like he understood a word of that.
When he was thigh-deep, he dove forward, arcing into the water with a splash. Sarah held her breath until his dark head popped up farther out in the lake, bobbing on the gray surface of the water. He dove again and emerged a little way farther along for a breath before going under once more.
Last night, she had assumed he couldn't swim. Apparently the problem had only been that no one was an especially good swimmer after an emergency crash landing on an alien planet. He swam with the same grace and physical confidence that was evident in every move he made.
Sarah watched for another couple of minutes to make sure he was going to be okay. He was treading water now, far out on the lake, and she remembered all too well how cold the water was. But he seemed to be fine, so she started searching the beach and the edge of the woods for any sign of the things she'd lost.
She couldn't find her telescope, or the camp chair either. The wave had probably dragged them both out into the lake. They'd resurface in front of some vacation cabin's boathouse with the November storms hit. She did find a few twisted pieces of metal and plastic washed into the edge of the trees. She wasn't entirely sure if they came from Rei's ship or if they were just flotsam, but she put them in the truck bed just in case.
And amazingly, wonder of wonders, she found her phone, buried in damp leaves and sand near the base of the tree she'd managed to hang onto. Thank you, patron saint of cell phones! She tried powering it on, and was unsurprised when nothing happened. If you dropped your phone in the toilet, you were supposed to put it in a jar of rice to draw out the moisture, right? She decided to try that when she got home. But cell phone, yay! Good news for once.
Rei splashed suddenly out of the waves in the shallow water near the shore. Sarah looked over, only to be smacked in the eyeballs, not to mention the reptilian hindbrain, by a naked and strapping specimen of blue humanity striding out of the water.
... well, limping, actually. With his clothes off, she could see that his left knee was bruised and swollen. There was also a dark slash across his abdomen, probably where all the blood on his coverall had come from. He looked way better than yesterday, but that was a lot of damage his body was trying to repair.
He dropped a gray plastic case, about the size of a briefcase, in the sand at the water's edge, and turned immediately to dive back in. Sarah slogged through wet, heavy sand down the shoreline and picked up the case. "Do you want me to put this in the truck?" she called after him, but he was already back out in the lake again, visible only as a dark, bobbing spot against the gray waves.
The case was heavier than it looked. Toolbox? Luggage? She might have tried to open it if she could figure out how, but since she couldn't, she put it in the truck bed. By that time Rei had returned to deposit what looked like part of an instrument panel above the reach of the waves. He came back several more times, dropping off pieces of junk made of metal or rugged plastic, trailing wires from their ragged edges. Sarah ferried them all to the truck.
On the last trip he collapsed to his knees in the sand. Sarah hurried down the beach, shrugging out of her denim jacket, and threw it around his shoulders. She wished she had brought the warmer sheepskin.
Rei nodded in acknowledgement and, perhaps, thanks. His teeth were chattering, and he sat in the sand for a minute, head bowed, while Sarah carried the latest piece of junk to the truck.
As she was stowing it under a feed sack in the truck bed, she heard the drone of an engine. There was a motorboat out on the lake, angling toward them across the gray water.
"Whoa, gotta go!" She ran down the beach and tugged on Rei's arm. Seeming to understand her urgency, he stumbled to his feet. Sarah grabbed his clothes and opened the truck door for him when he fumbled with the handle.
The motorboat was close enough now that she could see people in it, including one standing up. And they were looking this way. Cops? Curious residents? She didn't want to be caught by either one, especially with a naked alien in her truck.
"Down!" she told Rei, tossing a feed sack at him, and revved the truck. As she jolted into the trees, she glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw the motorboat closing on the shore.
Well, now she'd really find out if it was possible to identify a truck from its tire tracks. She hoped no one had been able to get her license plate. It was bad enough they'd seen the truck. Luckily, beat-up old Ford farm trucks weren't exactly rare around here.
Rather than going through the police barricade again, she took a back way she doubted if the sheriff's department had bothered to block off, since it went through the Mullers' cow pasture, utilized a couple of old logging roads, and came out behind the Dairy Queen downtown. There were advantages to living in the same small town for her whole life. Just to be on the safe side, she took a roundabout way back to the farm.
"I hope you got what you needed," she told Rei. He'd poked his head up enough to look out, peering with curiosity at bits of outlying Sidonie as it sped past them. "And try not to be seen, okay? We don't have very many blue people around here."
She knew he couldn't understand, but at the sound of her voice, he glanced at her and flashed her a brief grin.
6
___
T HE FIRST SIGHT THAT greeted Sarah when she turned into the farm driveway was her dad, leaning on a cane and loading items off the front porch into a wheelbarrow. He waved to her. Sarah waved back and pulled around behind the barn. At least Rei had the sense to stay low.
"That was my dad," she said as Rei looked up at her from his seat on the floor. "I'm going to distract him while you unload the—oh, what the hell, you can't understand me anyway." She tapped her fingers on her knee for a moment, and then pointed into the back of the truck, at the recovered debris from his ship, then at the top of the barn. "Dad goes in the barn sometimes, but he can't climb the ladder. Do you understand? Up." She mimed climbing a ladder, pointed into the back of the truck and at the loft again.
Rei nodded. Sarah hoped that meant yes. Maybe it just meant I don't understand. He slipped her jacket off his shoulders, where it had been inadequately teetering on the edge of falling off anyway, and held it out to her.
The jacket was damp with lake water, but the rain that had threatened all morning had finally begun to fall, so she was bound to get wet anyway. She left Rei with a final whispered, useless caution to stay out of sight, and went to see what her dad was up to.
"Hey, glad you're here, punkin. Give me a hand with this." He was dragging a dirty plastic tarp by one wadded-up end, tottering on the cane.
Sarah decided it wasn't worth scolding him for using just the one cane—he was supposed to use two, one in each hand, to avoid twisting or tweaking his back—and instead helped him cover the wheelbarrow. Large pieces of metal and plastic jutted out of its bed, making her think of the spaceship junk they'd retrieved from the lake. "Is this for the hydroelectric project?"
"Yeah, spent the morning at the mill, figuring out how to run the lines. Where were you at today, kiddo?"
"I lost my phone at the lake last night. I went back to look for it."
"Find it?"
"Yep. It
got wet, though. I'll need to see if it's okay when it dries out."
Gary grunted as he tucked in the edge of the tarp. "Heard on the radio this mornin' there was some kind of plane crash or something out there last night. Prob'ly some townie with a pilot's license, flying around after dark like an idiot. You see anything like that?"
"No, it must have happened after I left," she said quickly. "I did see some cops out there this morning and I wondered why."
Her belly squirmed with guilt. She hated lying to her dad. But what could she tell him: I found an alien and I'm hiding him in the barn?
"Damn fools," her father scoffed. "Give any young hothead a license these days. Damn lucky they didn't get anybody else killed along with their own fool self. Now where's the—ah—"
He reached for his second cane, leaning on the porch, and started toward the barn with a fast, stiff stride that Sarah had trouble keeping up with. After the tractor had rolled on him and crushed his back and hips, the doctors had said he'd never walk again, but they hadn't counted on hardheaded Metzger determination.
Right now Sarah wished he wasn't moving quite so fast. "Dad? Are you going to the barn? Can I get something for you? I—uh, I was going that way anyhow."
"Just need the toolbox out of the truck. You wanna start rolling the wheelbarrow out to the mill, I'd sure appreciate it."
The truck. Oh no. Some people might believe her if she said the stuff in the truck bed was trash she'd picked up at the lake, but her dad, with his mechanical aptitude, would be instantly fascinated—and he'd know in a moment that it wasn't anything at all like Earth technology.
"Dad—wait—"
Too late: he'd already rounded the corner of the barn. Sarah let out her breath in a relieved sigh when she saw the truck bed was already empty except for some straw and feed sacks. Rei had been fast.
"Now how many times did I tell you, sugar," her dad began in an exasperated tone, just as Sarah noticed the side door to the barn standing open.
