“Annie set it on fire.” His mouth dropped open, shock rolling off him in a wave. I put my hands up, like that would be enough to ward it off. “She had to! You’d bled all over the inside of the cab, and there was no other way to make sure some hiker or police officer wouldn’t come along, get a whiff of you, fall in love, and track you down to kidnap you. Remember what happened when you came to the mathletes competition with me?”
“Like I could ever forget,” he mumbled uncomfortably. His shock tempered itself into a more customary level of discomfort and discontent. “Why couldn’t I have inherited a nice, normal genetic condition? Annie sets things on fire with her mind. Sam turns into a big terrifying monkey-dude. Something nice and simple, like that, instead of ‘congrats, if someone’s into dudes, they’re into you, whether they want to be or not.’”
“It’s not fair,” I said. This was an old song. I knew which lyrics were mine.
“It’s not!” Artie shoved his laptop aside, turning so that he was facing the wall. I couldn’t read his expressions, but a lifetime of trying to keep them under control meant that sometimes he didn’t want me to see them anyway. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair that I can’t have friends without worrying about making them fall in love with me by mistake, and it’s not fair that Dad didn’t think about whether his kids would be able to control their pheromones before he went and married Mom, and it’s not fair that I never get to know whether—”
He caught himself, but the thought was already fully formed. It escaped despite his best intentions. Whether anyone really likes me, or whether it’s just these stupid pheromones.
I winced and walked over to the bed, sitting carefully on the very edge and facing the wall. Humans get weird when people focus on them during moments of emotional distress, and Artie, despite his biology, is very much culturally human. We all are, these days. We never had a choice in the matter.
“I really like you,” I said softly.
Artie didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know how many times we have to go over this. Your pheromones don’t work on me. I’m too biologically different.”
“You’re a mammal,” he said. “You have hair, you have three bones inside your inner ear, you can—” He caught himself, suddenly radiating embarrassment.
“Lactate, yes; so I’ve been told. Not that it’s ever going to happen. Can you imagine me hanging around with a cuckoo man long enough to get pregnant, even if I wanted children?” I shuddered. “If I want to subject myself to toxic people, I’ll just read the comments on literally any article about female-led comic book properties. It’ll be a fun reminder of why I should never, ever read the comments.”
“Your life is reading the comments.”
“Yes, and the things people think when they don’t know anyone can hear them are even worse than the things they’re willing to write down. Thanks but no thanks.” I took a deep breath, still staring at the dresser. “We’re getting away from the point, Artie. I’m a mammal, maybe, but I’m not a mammal from anywhere around here. You’re a mammal from around here.”
“That’s not what Dad thinks,” Artie said. “He thinks Johrlac aren’t the only ones who figured out a way to move between dimensions.”
“Okay, not from around here, but maybe from the next town over,” I said. “It’s close enough. Lilu are cross-fertile with humans. That means you can’t have traveled far.”
“It’s the cross-fertility that’s the problem,” said Artie.
“I don’t know. I think I like a world with you in it better than I’d like a world without you.”
Silence answered me, broken by the slow, roiling boil of his thoughts, which were too jumbled and fragmentary to let me pull anything specific out of them. Most people are like that, most of the time. Humans don’t walk around narrating their actions to themselves unless they’re trying not to forget a step in some unfamiliar chore; I’ve seen Annie load the dishwasher, wipe down the counters, and make herself a sandwich, all while thinking about nothing but the plot of some anime she’s been watching. Conscious thought and habitual action aren’t always friends.
Finally, Artie said, “I don’t want to have never existed. I just wish parts of this weren’t so hard.”