The Quarry Master: A Grumpy Alien Boss Romantic Comedy

by Amanda Milo

  I go dead still, polishing rag and a greased wrench in my hand. I gape at the box Bash has in his arms. “You brought me alien balsa!”

  “I brought you Txheebo tree blocks,” Bash more or less agrees. “Here. Take them.” He thrusts the box at me, setting it on the table I’m using as a polishing station.

  With that, he leaves.

  “THANK YOU!” I holler after him. “ARE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE WITH DISPLAYS OF APPRECIATION OR SOMETHING?” I turn and cough into my short arm. “Ouch. I need to work on my bullhorn technique. I think I pulled a throat muscle.”

  “Why’d he give you wood?”

  I glance over and find Mandi. She’s parked in a wagon piled high with clay roof tiles. Her cat alien is leaning against the wagon side by the stairs, arms folded. Unlike her, he only looks mildly curious about Bash’s gift to me.

  Mandi though is openly fascinated.

  “Because,” I tell her. “I used to be a theatre stage carpenter. And designer.”

  “A carpenter?” Mandi repeats carefully, watching me out of the side of her eye like she doesn’t want to offend me if I’m serious.

  “No joke,” I confirm. I shrug my short arm’s shoulder and dig through the box, pinching a piece of wood under my armpit. “When teachers tell their kids they can be anything they want to be, they aren’t kidding around.”

  “Wow. Well that’s cool,” Mandi says.

  I nod. “It’s awesome. But there is a downside.” I wave my short arm. “With one arm basically doing no-weight workouts while the other one pulls double-duty, I look like Popeye without my clothes. Like seriously more information than you wanted to know, but even my boobs look weird because one pectoral gets more of an intensive workout than the other.”

  “Pop… eye?” Mandi questions, completely confused.

  I have to step out of the blacksmith and craft area so we can converse without two tables and a load of craft crap in our way. “You don’t know who Popeye is?”

  “She doesn’t know anyone!” Gracie moans from not far away. “She’s a baby!”

  The feline-looking alien has his attention on his girl but at Gracie’s exclamation, his brows knit. His gaze skims over Mandi like he’s disturbed at her fellow human labeling her as a baby.

  “I mentioned Chip and Dale the other day,” Gracie continues.

  “Like from Rescue Rangers?” I say in wonder.

  “YES!” Gracie shouts, throwing a hand out to me. “Yes, exactly!” In her other hand, she’s clutching a giant bowl of popcorn. With her not being allowed to do more than watch everyone every day, she’s not even trying to hide her popcorn-munching, people-watching habit anymore. Not that she ever has, come to think of it.

  She tips the bowl towards Mandi’s cat. “Want some?” she asks.

  He sends a look up over his shoulder, at Mandi still in the wagon. She nods.

  He accepts the popcorn from Gracie without a word and passes it right up to his girl.

  Mandi rolls her eyes and she’s the one to verbalize the thank you to Gracie, since her cat seems bent on only speaking to her.

  Ooooh, this couple.

  I turn on Mandi. “Back to the important subject: you don’t know who Chip and Dale are?” My face shows exactly how sad I feel for her.

  Gracie guffaws. “She thought I said Chippendales!”

  “You poor kid,” I tell her.

  “Oh, the fun didn’t stop there. When asked what she did for work back home, Carol said that she used to be a naturalist. Mandi heard her say that and goes, ‘You got paid just to be naked?!’” Gracie hugs her stomach like her laughter is going to make her baby pop out, but she manages to wheeze, “And I said, not nudist, you ninny—naturalist. She was a biologist!”

  I move to the wagon, passing her cat to pat Mandi on the knee reassuringly. “She’s never going to let you live these things down.”

  Mandi shoves the bowl of popcorn back down at Gracie’s face a little aggressively, but the twinkle in her eye says the threat is all in fun. When Gracie accepts the popcorn with a queenly nod and starts crunching on it and licking the butter and salt from her fingers, Mandi looks back at me. “So what does a theatre stage carpenter do?” she asks, bringing our topic back around.

  “The last one I was working on was the set for Swan Lake. Before that, I was making the giant presents for The Nutcracker. The director wanted them to spin so we had to design a…” I wave my hand to wave that all away. “But that’s not important. The takeaway is that a one-armed person can do just about anything, and creating stages was my love.”

  “What was your favorite one to work on?” Mandi asks.

  “Favorite was War Horse. Most plays are set in a city or inside houses. So it’s all about designing rooms and stairs and cityscapes. But in War Horse, you’re traveling from a quiet pasture to a stable full of horses to a farm with a killer goose. Then an auction and then you hop continents where you need to make the audience feel like they’re watching everything happen from a foxhole. It was different. It was a challenge. It rocked.”

  “You could still do it,” Gracie says thoughtfully, and also like she’s warming to an idea. “You need to sit down and have a good chat with Callie.”

  “Pilates-girl, yeah. I have a love-hate relationship with her.”

  Gracie grins. “She does some ballet. She’s training a dancing troupe. You guys could easily put something on if you wanted to.”

  “Really?” I ask, stunned.

  “Heyyyy,” Laura calls. “If you could work together fast, you could put something on for the big fall feast this place is about to have. It’s the tradition here to celebrate when they harvest.”

  “I’ve heard about it,” I confirm. “But I gotta confess that the first time I heard that the aliens hold a great big harvest, I was afraid for my organs, not crop collection.”

  “Ha! It’s not creepy like that at all. There’s only the biggest agricultural community you’ve ever seen like a stone’s throw away from the old quarry.”

  “I got to see it,” I exclaim happily. “Sort of.” From a distance, but still. “Bash showed me last night.”

  “Bash showed you? Last night?” Gracie breathes, eyes wide.

  “He took me on a tour.”

  “HUMANS!” Bash hollers, and everyone jumps.

  Everyone except the nearby hobs, who must have nerves of steel or Bash made them entirely deaf long ago.

  “Yeah,” I whisper absently, “And I like your plan for putting on a show during the holiday.” My eyes are glued to Bash.

  I’d swear he glances at me before he shouts to everyone in the quarry. “It is expected that a severe storm will hit us overnight. If we receive the predicted amount of rainfall, we will be unable to traverse the quarry until it has a day or two to drain. Consider the next three days a surprise vacation.”

  There’s some cheering. But I’ve gone numb, instantly crushed that I won’t be seeing Bash at all for three whole days. This sucks.

  Behind him, the sky is growing ominously dark. Whereas it was fully daylight a moment ago, the weather is taking a fast turn.

  Sort of like my mood.

  With a crack of thunder, rain begins to pour out of the sky.

  Someone calls Bash’s name, and he turns to holler a response. Humans duck and cringe under the skywater pelting down on us like bullets—until hobs stretch out their wings for us to take shelter under.

  Rather than take cover with everyone else under the kind aliens, I need to take care of my balsa. Huddling over my box of wood, I take it into the blacksmith stall to keep it dry. When I set it down, I figure I can go back to polishing tools, but Bash appears and takes me carefully by the elbow with his clawtips.

  “You need to return to the human preserve,” he says.

  “What? Why?”

  Bash points outside. “With the ferocity of this storm, half the quarry could flood. It should be fine here, we’re situated on the high end, but I won’t risk you. You’re leaving. Careful thou
gh; the rock is slick.”

  The rain is pouring out there, sluicing down the quarry floor like the other end is one big bathtub drain.

  “Okay,” I tell him sadly. “Guess this is goodbye for a while.”

  His nod is brief.

  Considering that my dismissal, I head out.

  Bash catches me by my elbow once more, tugging me back under the overhang’s protection.

  I search his face. “Yeah?”

  He stares down at me for a beat before he looks outside and shouts, “Jonohkada, come this way!”

  Jonoh looks nervous until he sees me at Bash’s side. His hair slicked flat to his skull, rain pounding off of his broad shoulders, the hob moves right for me and pops his wings open. “I’ll walk you back,” he offers.

  “Thanks, Jonoh,” I mean to murmur but have to shout to be heard over the deluge.

  “Isla,” Bash says from behind me.

  I toss a glance back at him.

  His tail crooks, and instantly I leave Jonoh’s side to cross to Bash as if he called me.

  I think his tail actually did. His gaze searches mine. “What will you do tomorrow if you cannot be here?”

  I shrug unhappily. “Guess I’ll sit around the compound twiddling my thumbs. Yay for vacation.”

  Bash’s ears are low, his eyes are serious, and I’d swear he wants to touch me. His hand hovers at my face. He doesn’t make contact though. Instead, he orders, “Spend it with me.”

  CHAPTER 20

  BASH

  (Crying Counter: Exemplary)

  I wonder if I am lonely. I must be. Rakhii come from large families, and I’ve perfected the art form of avoiding mine. Thus something like this was bound to happen. Perhaps it’s what I deserve: I’m bonding to an alien.

  But although I’m aware that I’m dangerously attached to this female, it doesn’t mean that I’ll be laying my hearts at her feet. Nay, I won’t be offering up all the yearning and loyalty in my organs for a second woman to stomp. Never again. Never again, Bubashuu, do you hear me?

  I growl at myself.

  From nowhere, Isla declares, “Okay, you keep doing that. Why?”

  When I say nothing, she is not deterred. And she has more to say. Of course she does.

  I spent half the trek to my abandoned canyon marveling that I invited her to stay with me. I wondered just what I expected us to do if the weather continued to flood us. (Oh, I had plenty of ideas. Plenty. But I told myself to stop thinking with my idiot-pipe and start using the grey matter between my horns.) My concern also lay in the safety of our rendezvous spot. Particularly in my cave, if the water level gets terribly high, it has to be evacuated.

  But thankfully, the rains had stopped by the time Isla stepped out of the door at the humans’ compound this morning. And as we began walking, I couldn’t get the idea of her in my home out of my head. She will be in the place where everyone formerly worked, where we harvested rock until we hit soil belts on all sides, it shouldn’t feel strange to have an employee there—but now the whole of the place is mine, and I haven’t failed to consider that I’ve never invited anyone to my home.

  Not until now.

  Not until Isla.

  “I’m Stands with One Fist, and you're obviously Growls a Lot.” She flicks a meaningful glance up at me from the corner of her eye. “Or your Lakota name can be Silent Glare. It’d be very you.”

  Without more than a reproachful snort at her for breaking the silence—again—I slow my pace next to her, letting her stay abreast of me for the sake of her non-Rakhii legs. And by that, I mean short. “I'm beginning to get used to the fact that I can essentially speak the same language as a human, yet have absolutely no understanding of what she says. It should be maddening.”

  “But it isn’t? That’s good.”

  “I suppose. Let us say that I find that some part of me more than mildly enjoys her. How twisted.”

  “Downright wild,” Isla agrees. I think. “Hey, do you know what I just realized?”

  “I couldn’t guess. Yet somehow I suspect you have every intention of sharing another of your alien thoughts with me.”

  She reaches up and boldly flicks the ribbed underside of my horn. “It’s cute how you keep referring to me as an alien. But here’s my revelation, ready?”

  “I’m riveted.” We’re nearing the entrance to my den.

  “You’re an RRF sufferer: you have resting Rakhii face. You poor guy. All this time your scowl has really been a smile.”

  I force myself not to rear back when she pokes me in the lip, but all my muscles tremble to do it as her flesh forces mine to rise in a facsimile of a smile.

  “See? This is what it would feel like if you smi—”

  I catch her hand in my mouth.

  “AHHHH!!!!” she shrieks—followed by the swiftest pregnant pause—then she’s whooping with laughter. “Whew! I thought you’d finally snapped and you were gonna eat me there for a second.”

  “I’ve calculated it would take me more than one of your seconds to eat you,” I tell her.

  She pauses, blinking. “Wait, you’ve contemplated eating me in a nom-nom-crunch way or a dirty-awesome way?” She frowns, something vaguely dangerous entering her expression—an interesting look on a human. “Or are you insinuating that I’m fat?”

  ...What?

  I recognize a topic pratfall when I see one, even if I don’t know how we arrived here. “I did not insinuate any such thing.”

  “Hmm. Hey, wow your quarry really held onto the water, didn’t it?” She indicates the mid-quarry line, where the rock is dark, still dampened from the floodwaters that sat soaking it all night.

  “As soon as the sun came up, it burned a great deal of it away. You can see it gathered more near my cave’s entrance.”

  When we near it, I show her the temporary lake that surrounds my home.

  “Wow,” Isla comments with no small amount of awe. “That is a lot of water.”

  The quarry walls tower three Rakhii high, and the water sits at about halfway up towards the farthest end. What Isla said is true: there is an abundance of water. Which is not an entirely unwelcome thing. “It will allow us to harvest a good amount of clay once it dries some.”

  Cloaking the entrance of my home, the waterfall in front of my door is pounding—deafening and powerful and swollen with rainwater, which it empties into the ephemeral waterhole beyond us. Thankfully, there is still a fair enough gap that we can step behind them without passing through the active spray. I lead Isla past the curtain of the falls and open the door to my cave, gesturing her inside.

  I wasn’t certain how I’d feel if Isla entered my space.

  The eruption of more bumps across my tongue tells me that I enjoy having her to myself too much. Thus my first order of business once I step in behind her involves me applying a generous amount of anti-bonding spray to my person.

  Although the spray isn’t truly anti-bonding. It simply prevents the more dangerous effects. Like holding the female of interest captive until she agrees to commit herself to the male solely and forever.

  I prepare a meal with her help, which mostly involves her never-ending commentary on the strangeness of the vegetables here, how free from arachnid webs my cave’s ceiling is (I demonstrate how I keep it web-free by blowing fire along the speleothems, killing any insects that could be hiding behind stalactites. It thrills her and surprisingly, it amuses me). And she even exclaims over the design of my sink.

  “Whoa, this is so amazing and weird!”

  I lower my tailblades from where I was about to rinse them. “Do not tell me your people have not managed to create basins that supply automated water. Dear Creator.”

  Isla gives me what she likely believes is an objurgating glare.

  On her, it’s simply moonringed cute.

  “Of course humans have sinks. They just fill from the top instead.”

  My sink’s jet bubbles from the bottom corner, turning forceful once water fills the basin and covers it. I
nstead of pressurized water being shot down from the top of the sink as she describes, the jet shoots up like a fountain. The depth of the sink (no easy thing for a human half the size of a Rakhii to reach, we soon find) keeps the water from escaping and creating a mess. I set my hands in the pool and stream’s path and scrub and rinse. The jet calms down as I let my foot off the lever, allowing the sink to empty. “This is upside-down from what I’m used to,” she shares absently.

  I snort. “That’s fitting.”

  “Are you picking on Earthens again?”

  “Only your society. Not you.”

  She’s quiet a moment after that. But this is Isla: it is merely one a moment. “How do you spray food particles off of your dishes?”

  “Food flakes off when you give it a good burn,” I tell her, implying her question is the height of ridiculousness… then I trail off, my gaze dropping to her mouth that cannot produce charcoal-inducing fire. “Huh,” I finally say.

  Although Isla and I have been working closely for some time, I haven’t seen the variety of ways she compensates for the side of her body that doesn’t have a full arm. It isn’t until she offers to help prepare our dinner that I learn she struggles with tight-lidded jars, slippery packaging, and canned foodstuffs.

  “I can use a can opener,” she explains. “It just takes me more time than the average person, but sometimes that’s the story of one-armed life right there.”

  “How do you open a can?” I ask.

  She motions for me to hand her the can’s opener, and I do.

  She proceeds to sit on the floor and brace the can between her feet, and she uses the blades of the opener like teeth, punching around the entire rim of the can until the lid can be pulled free.

  “You are very resourceful,” I marvel.

  She smiles at me. “You should watch me paint my nails. It’ll blow your mind.”

  We enjoy a simple but decent meal. When I see her struggling to cut her meat, I want to help, but I also don’t want to offend her. Not one to shy away from anything though, I tell her exactly that.