Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,21

did before.”

“Which was?”

“Selling lemons.”

She scoffs at me. “You’re so full of shit, Krakon.”

We look at the fire for a while. She’s a little bit too close to me. Either her sense of smell is weaker than mine and she can’t smell me from that distance, or she prefers to be able to smell me.

“You want to know how I died?” she asks, not looking at me. “I was looking at a fire like this right before it happened.”

“You didn’t die,” I say. “Or you wouldn’t be talking to me now or looking at this fire.”

“They weren’t allowed to freeze me until I was legally dead.”

“Dead according to ancient technology,” I say.

“Look, Krakon,” she says. “In my mind, I died. This is my second life. You don’t get to decide how I interpret that. So you want to know, or not?”

I shrug. I’m curious, but I won’t tell her that.

“A snake bit me.”

“Like in Adam and Eve?” I ask.

“You know that?”

I nod. “We have a similar story.”

“It wasn’t like Adam and Eve. I was going to go get my boyfriend a beer…”

She trails off saying that. She shakes her head and whispers something to herself.

“Anyway,” she says, “I felt it bite me. I never even really saw it. I figured since it killed me I’d know exactly what it looked like, but I never got a good look at it. My boyfriend saw it, though.”

“At least he avenged your death then.”

“Huh?”

“He killed it, I assume.”

“No...he hid in the tent.”

“He hid?” I stand up. “Didn’t it bite you?”

She starts to cry.

Each time I’ve felt the need to protect her, I’ve known I’ve been walking closer and closer toward something I can’t ever get further away from. Even if I were rescued right now and sold Catherine this instant, I’d always remember her. It wouldn’t be possible to just have her fade from my mind in a year or two. I wouldn’t think of her once a month and say, “Oh, yes, Catherine. I remember her.”

No. She would be there no matter what. My attempts at keeping my distance from her are to try to keep this from getting worse. I’ve done a good job so far, given the circumstances.

But now she needs me in a different way. Not just to keep her alive or safe. To keep her from hurting.

Fuck. Don’t do it.

I take one step closer to her, and then it’s like I’ve crossed an event horizon and her gravity sucks me in.

Her head falls onto my shoulder and my arm wraps around her tiny waist. God, she’s warm. And soft.

“He hid,” she says, sniffing through her nose as tears hit my shoulder. “I was dying on the sand. Screaming in agony, and he hid. You’re a pirate! You’re an absolute piece of shit, Krakon, and you didn’t hesitate to throw that axe right at the alien polar bear! You were running straight at it. Not a second’s hesitation! You just did it.”

I don’t say anything. The excuses about needing money and a new ship race through my mind. Those excuses have very little weight behind them in this moment. I repeat them through my head mostly to keep myself from thinking about why I really did it.

“And do you know what he said to me?” she asks. “The last thing he ever said to me, the last thing I heard before I died, and the last thing that I ever heard on Earth and in my own time?”

“Did he tell you he loved you?” I ask.

It seems cliché, maybe, but maybe it’s the best he could think of in such a situation.

She cries even louder now, burying her face into my chest. I put my hand on the back of her head. The smell of her hair is utterly intoxicating. How can hair smell good? It’s just dead cells.

“It’s been real,” she says, wailing. “That’s what he told me!”

I narrow my eyes. “I don’t understand. Is that from a poem?”

“God, no!” she says, looking up at me. Her eyes are red, and her face is a picture of agony. “It’s like...if you were breaking up with your boyfriend in middle school after four days of dating...even then it would be a lame way to say goodbye!”

“I still don’t quite understand,” I say.

“It’s the worst thing he could have said, Thesus,” she says. “It’s like...my life had really kind of sucked, and when you die everything is supposed to flash before your eyes. Maybe you see everything in a new way