Love From Above_A Scifi Alien Romance

by Stella Casey

  I dragged on his arm.

  “Come on. They’ll see you.” I frowned. “You could be captured. They’re all out looking for this form. And you said they might even kill you.”

  He finally began to walk with me, and I felt relieved to see that his broken leg was healed — he wasn’t limping at all.

  “I know that,” he said. “I came to get you out.”

  I blinked, feeling completely taken aback. “But… the risk…”

  He shrugged. “It was my fault you were in there in the first place.”

  I studied him for a long moment. Harris would never have gone into that kind of danger for me. He hadn’t been that kind of guy.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said. “They let me go because I said I would contact you, and then tell them where you were.”

  He finally smiled then — impressed. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said, lifting Zoe higher on my hip. “Now, let’s go. Voran’zi promised that she wouldn’t activate the tracker she implanted for six hours. That’s how long you have to get off the planet.”

  He grabbed Zoe’s backpack and we took off through the forest. After some time, I glanced over at him. “You’re going to your ship, I suppose?”

  “Yeah. Here, give me Zoe,” he said, without a smile this time. “I’ll carry her for awhile.”

  My arms felt like they might fall off, so I was glad to let him have her for a few minutes.

  “I’ll help you get to it,” I said, shaking out my aching arms. “You need to leave Earth as soon as possible.”

  “I know,” he said, and gave me a glance that had only hardness in it. “I will.”

  “How far away is it?”

  He shrugged. “Not far. We… I mean… I need a car.”

  “Maybe we can…” I began to make a suggestion, but he cut me off.

  “I can borrow one,” he said, his voice curt. “Let’s just get you and Zoe to a new hotel where you can stay for a while. I’ll make sure the FBI knows that I’ve left the planet, so that they’ll leave you alone. As soon as I’m gone, I’ll contact Voran’zi and let them know I’m not on Earth, so they should leave you alone, too.”

  Oh. Right. I had told him I didn’t want to go with him. And he was hurt. That’s why he was acting this way.

  I needed to tell him that I loved him.

  That I wanted to go with him.

  That I wanted us to be a family.

  But how?

  Just say it, I supposed. But the words didn’t want to come out. I was still afraid of losing him sometime in the future.

  But that was so stupid. I would definitely lose him right now if I didn’t tell him how I felt.

  “Look, Lii’thooou,” I said, biting my lip. “About what you asked me the other night…”

  He gave me a sharp glance.

  “Yeah?”

  “Um, I…”

  Just then, there was the sound of shouting in the woods, and I realized we were much closer to the road than I had thought.

  “Shit. It’s the FBI,” I said, and we broke into a run.

  “There they are,” someone shouted, and there was the sound of people crashing through the forest. Lii’thoou was cursing, and I wondered how he had enough breath to run full out and swear.

  He slowed down and handed Zoe to me. “Hide,” he said, and went bounding back towards our pursuers. I didn’t watch him for more than a second, then turned and ran in the other direction.

  This was hilly terrain, and I searched for a cave — preferably one without an animal living in it — that we could duck into. There was nothing. I strained my ears, trying to tell if anyone was chasing us, but we were making so much noise as I crashed heedlessly through the woods that there was no way of telling if anyone was behind us.

  Finally, I saw a fallen tree. It was enormous, and when it had fallen it had torn up the ground. Its roots were now vertical, making a big place to hide behind, which was better than nothing.

  I clutched Zoe tightly against me and scrambled over its trunk, sliding down to the other side and scraping my arm on the rough bark. The roots were way over my head, and there was dirt hanging from them.

  With a quick check, I looked around and found a gap where we could tuck ourselves in and be hidden from sight. There weren’t any animals hiding inside, because it wasn’t protected enough.

  But all we needed was for no one to see us. I squeezed in and sat down, my legs shaking.

  “Mama?” Zoe said, putting her head against my cheek. “Run fast. Do ‘gain.”

  She smiled at me. Obviously, she had thought it was a game, which was great. Because I’d much rather she think that than be scared and crying.

  I shook my head. “We can’t do it again,” I whispered. “Now we’re going to play hide and seek. We’re hiding. And we don’t want anyone to find us, so we’re going to be very quiet.”

  “Quiet?” she said loudly.

  “Shhh,” I said, putting my finger on her lips. She giggled.

  Oh boy. This wasn’t going to work.

  “You want a nursy?” I said, and she clapped her hands and started to lie back. She hadn’t eaten since her nap during the interrogation, which had been a couple of hours ago.

  If she was nursing, then she was quiet. Plus, she might catch a little nap, which would keep her in a good mood till we got rid of the people chasing us and got settled in a hotel.

  My guts clenched at the thought.

  Was I really going to let Lii’thoou leave?

  He was clearly upset with me, but if he had said the things to me that I had said to him, then I would probably be upset too. What I needed to do was tell him I loved him. Then everything would be okay.

  Wouldn’t it?

  But what about my worries about going into space? And how could I just leave my whole world behind? Callie? My mother?

  Just then I heard footsteps.

  Oh shit. Oh shit.

  Was it Lii, or was it more agents? Had they caught him? Would they do tests on him until he died? And what if they wanted to test me too, the woman who had slept with an alien?

  I held my breath. I couldn’t see anything from my hiding place.

  “Lyss?” someone whispered. There was the sound of more quiet footsteps. “Lyssa.”

  “Here,” I said softly, and soon I saw Lii’thoou’s human face peer into the opening.

  “Good hiding place.”

  “What happened?”

  “I took care of them.”

  I didn’t ask what he had done. I didn’t care. I just wanted Zoe to be safe.

  “Come on. We have to get out of here.”

  Zoe was snoozing. I didn’t shift her, just stood up holding her where she was. I shook my head when he offered to take her.

  “Let’s find someplace safe to talk,” I said, lacing my fingers together in order to keep Zoe from slipping out of my grasp. “I need to tell you something before you go.”

  21

  Lii’thoou

  It was afternoon, and I was standing in a saggy little motel that we had found along the road. I paid with some of the cash Callie had given us and took the two keys the man gave me.

  Alyssa needed to rest and feed Zoe after walking so many hours to find this place. I pushed one of the keys into her hand. “We need to eat.”

  “I’ll get us some food,” Alyssa said, and I nodded.

  Half an hour later, we were in the room and Zoe was sleeping in the middle of the double bed. Alyssa and I were sitting at the tiny round table in the corner of the room. She passed me a take-out container. I opened it, and inside were ten cute little hamburgers.

  “They’re beef sliders. The restaurant across the street had them,” she said, her face nervous, but determined. “I remembered you liked them.”

  I couldn’t speak as the memories of our first night together overwhelmed me. Why was she being doing this?

  “It’s a peace offering,” she explained. I didn’t answer, only stared at her, wonder
ing what she wanted from me. The silence lengthened, and I felt uncomfortable.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” I said, finally finding my voice. If I didn’t say anything, I felt like we might sit there forever. I took a bite of one of the tiny burgers and chewed. “I need to get going.”

  The thought of leaving them made me sick, but my life was at stake. I had to leave. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I needed to escape the humans who were now pursuing me, and the Galactic Police.

  I knew that now I would be an outlaw. But I really didn’t give a shit. What did it matter, if I couldn’t have Alyssa?

  Before, I had wanted to finish my prison sentence and be free. I had wanted to get my life back. To be a normal person again, though I hardly remembered at this point what that was like.

  But now that I had met Alyssa, and fallen in love with her and her sweet little daughter … well, without them, I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t give a shit if I would have to be on the run forever, because nothing mattered without her.

  “Well,” she said, twisting her hands together in what seemed to be an anxious gesture. I looked up from my third beef slider and examined her. She seemed more uncomfortable than me, which seemed hard to believe. What could she be worried about?

  “Um, Lii? Would it be too much trouble for you to change into your true form?”

  “What? Why?” I frowned, popping the last bite of my slider into my mouth.

  “I just want to talk to the true you when I say this.”

  “Fine,” I said, not knowing what she could possibly have to tell me that would require my true form. Maybe she was experiencing nostalgia for the good old days of hanging out with an alien.

  I pulled off my shirt, closed my eyes, and shifted — feeling the usual sense of relief when I resumed my own body. When I opened my eyes again and looked at Alyssa, I saw interest, excitement, and some other expression on her face that I couldn’t decipher.

  “Okay,” I said, with a shrug of my shoulders. “This is the real me. What do you want to say?”

  “Well, as you know, you offered to take me and Zoe with you when you left Earth, and I declined, because both my father and my husband died rather tragically and left me. And I’m self-aware enough to know that I’m fairly traumatized by that.”

  I frowned, wondering where she was going with this. “It’s okay,” I said, though my jaw tightened. “Really. I understand. I wouldn’t go with me either. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t understand anything.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me, then?” I said, watching as she stood up and began to pace.

  “I’m trying to explain that I didn’t want to go with you because I believed that you would die tragically too, and leave me and Zoe in the middle of space with no clue how to survive.”

  “And I understand that,” I said, feeling kind of angry. Why was she rubbing my nose in this? “Why are you telling me this, Alyssa? It’s kind of like giving me a paper cut and pouring lemon juice on it.”

  She gave me a half-smile at the reference to one of the Earth movies she had shown me, but I didn’t return it. I was tired of her messing around with my feelings. “I need to go,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “No, wait,” she said, putting her hand on my middle forearm. “Then, when I was on that spaceship, they said that they were going to erase my memories, Lii.”

  “What?”

  “They were going to reset everything, put my life back the way it was before I met you.”

  “Why didn’t you take it?” I said, angry about that now, too. “They probably would have given you a million dollars. And maybe a nicer house.”

  She flapped her hands and shook her head. “What? No. It was a hundred million. But that doesn’t matter,” she said, giving me a disapproving look.

  A hundred million? And she hadn’t taken it?

  “It does matter,” I said, putting a pair of hands on her shoulders and one pair on her waist and making her look at me. “Why would you turn that down? Are you crazy?

  “You could have been set for life. You’re going to go back and tell them you’ll take it. Then I’ll know that you and Zoe will be okay. Taken care of.”

  “No,” she said, shaking my hands off. “Listen to me. When she offered me that, I knew…” She stopped again.

  “Knew what, Lyss?” I could hear that my voice was impatient. “Just spit it out already.”

  “I knew that I could never take it,” she said, gazing up into my eyes.

  “Why not?” I said, suddenly afraid to hope. But the look in her eye…

  “Because it meant that I would forget you.”

  “So?” I held my breath.

  “So … I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let them erase you.”

  “Why not?” I said, and it came out barely louder than a whisper.

  “Because…” She searched my eyes. “Because I love you. And I want to come with you. As crazy as that may be.”

  I drew in a breath, my chest tight. “Are you serious?”

  She nodded, her eyes filled with tears. “You’re a good person, Lii. You’re strong and smart and kind. You care about Zoe, and you’re so good with her. I don’t know why I love you so much. But I do.”

  She wiped the tears away. “And I’ll be honest, I’m scared. But yes. I’m completely serious.”

  I pulled her to me, holding her tightly with all six arms. “I love you, too, Lyss. And I’m scared, because I’m afraid that I won’t be able to protect you the way I should.”

  She pulled back a bit and gazed up at me, putting her hand on my cheek. “It’s not your job to protect me, Lii’thoou,” she said, and I felt shocked at the idea. “If we’re going to be together, you have to give up the notion that you have to be my protector. All I want you to do is love me. That’s all I need.”

  I let out a shaky breath, suddenly feeling like I might lose it. “I can do that.” She gave me a blinding smile. “But you know,” I said, thinking of our first real date. “All this convincing was completely unnecessary.”

  “Really,” she said, waiting for it, her face getting a mischievous look on it as she sensed that there was a punchline.

  “Yeah,” I said, with a tiny shrug. “You had me at beef sliders.”

  Alyssa

  The plan was to run for his ship and take off. We would immediately jump to faster than light speed, which would make it impossible for them to chase us. Then we would hide in a corner of the galaxy where no one ever went, but was not filled with criminals either. Lii’thoou knew of some star cluster…

  What was it called? Cargo? Carmen? Camargo! That was it!

  He said it was outside of the Galactic Police Force’s jurisdiction, so we wouldn’t have to worry about being chased. We could live there for as long as we liked.

  Lii had changed back to human form and given the man who rented us the room our last two hundred dollars to buy a car that had been sitting in the parking lot behind the motel. And two hundred dollars was a lot more than it was worth, believe me.

  When Lii’thoou had asked him about it, the man had said that someone had abandoned it, and I understood why. There was barely enough rust to hold the thing together. Zoe and I were sitting in the back, and I was truly worried we might fall through the floor.

  “I need to call Callie and my mom,” I said to Lii’thoou for the fourth time. “I can’t leave the planet and not let them know. They’ll think that I died or went missing.”

  “The FBI will be able to track even that new cell that Callie got for you. They know the area that you’re in, and they’ll be monitoring all calls, I would guess.”

  “Okay, what if I used a pay phone? Some places still have them. Would that be safe?”

  “Why don’t you write her a letter? That would be safe,” he suggested, and I pressed my lips together in frustration.

  “That’s not quite the same. And neither of
them would believe I wrote it. They’ll think you kidnapped me.”

  That made his eyebrows draw together.

  “Fine,” he said, braking rather suddenly and pulling over into a parking lot that had a phone booth in the corner. “But make it quick. Everyone is looking for us, Lyssa.”

  I nodded and got out of the car, fishing in my purse for coins. I dropped a handful of quarters into the phone and dialed my mom. I only talked to her briefly, telling her that Zoe and I were taking a vacation for a few weeks, and and that she shouldn’t worry if she couldn’t reach me.

  I didn’t know what to do about my mother at all. Lii had suggested that if we found a safe place, that we could contact her then and maybe bring her to us. It was a crazy idea, but I wasn’t willing to tell her about Lii’thoou and me over the phone, and I also wasn’t willing to fake my death — not yet.

  So I would ask Callie to cover for me until we could figure something out. And I hoped desperately that we could eventually bring my mother to us, even if the idea seemed totally nuts at the moment. The thought of never seeing my mother again was too much for me to contemplate with everything else that was going on.

  When I was done my call to my mother, I quickly punched in Callie’s number— after looking it up on the paper where I had written some of the phone numbers I might need.

  Who has phone numbers memorized anymore? The phone remembers them all.

  “Hello?”

  “Cal,” I said. “It’s me. Please, listen. I don’t have much time.”

  “Lyss? What’s going on? Are you all right? Is Zoe all right? Where are you? Why haven’t you called me?”

  She would have probably gone on, but I interrupted her. “Callie, Callie … I’m fine,” I said. “Remember Lii’thoou?”

  “Yes. Of course. The guy you ran away with.”

  “Well, I’m going away with him. Far away. I won’t be back for a long time. Maybe never.”

  “No, Alyssa, no. Don’t do this.” Callie sounded a little hysterical.

  “I’m going, Cal. And I really shouldn’t be calling you, but I had to say goodbye. I’m happy. Everything is wonderful. He loves me, and he loves Zoe. Please believe me.”

  “Lyssa, please. Don’t do this.” She was crying.